The Best Guide for the B14 Area

Local film-maker Scott Johnston

Interview by Swanshurst School students Hayley Woodcroft, Marieke Weijers-Mcgovern and Faiza Rehan

Scott Johnston is a local film director who produces short films. He has recently been shortlisted by Birmingham Fierce Festival and has had work shown at The Ikon Gallery and 7 Inch Cinema. At fifteen his first super8 camera costing a mere £40 started a hobby which soon opened the door to a career in film directing.

His influences not only include filmmakers but also a wide range of sources including books, music, photography, comic books, paintings, theatre, as well as cinema.

Who and what have been your influences when making your short films?

I think I'm influenced by a lot of things, but certainly not just other filmmakers - I think it's much healthier (and more creative!) to take ideas from as many sources as possible: books, music, photography, comic books, painting, theatre, as well as cinema. All of the arts have a place where they overlap with another medium, so it's important to be open to the way that they feed into each other. So for myself, some influences on my own shorts films include filmmakers such as Guy Maddin, David Lynch, Luis Bunuel and Michel Gondry, cult television shows such as The Prisoner and The Avengers, as well as artists and illustrators like Magritte and Dali, Moebius and Jodorowsky, and writers like Poe, Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison.

Why is film important to you?

I'm not sure! I have always liked the process of making images, whether photographs or cartoons or films. It a similair thing to a writer starting with a blank piece of paper, and coming up with a story/some images to tell others, but using graphics, pictures and visual forms to convey those ideas. Live action film is a bit different, in that you can often be starting with something that already exists: images of the world. Even if you are creating sets, costumes, characters, etc, you will be using reality a lot in your film. I like mixing reality with imagination, adding interesting things to what is already there, and a film camera will record whatever you point it at as though it were reality! That can be a very interesting and powerful thing, and probably the main difference between film and some of the other visual arts: it captures time and reality as it is happening.

What is the best thing about making your own films?

Athough I have had some funding to make work, that has been mainly in the last few years and I have been making films for over fifteen years! Obviously I must really love doing it, as I have always self-funded the work I've done and never really expected to ‘earn a living' out of it. At the moment, I am freelance as a photographer/designer/camera operator/editor, and these are all skills that I developed mainly through my own film making and exploration, rather than film school etc. This way of working gives me a LOT of freedom in what I choose to make my own films about, and ask any filmmaker (who isn't dead set on a media carreer/working in television/dreams of being the next big discovery by Hollywood) and they will probably agree that freedom of expression is one of the main attractions of making very low-budget films. Especially today, when there are so many more ways to get your film seen by others. It's incredibly important to have something to say in film, as there is so much more output today than in the past, and access to filmmaking tools is a lot wider, so to explore and let your imagination go crazy is the best way to find out if you actually have something to say!

Do you think it is important to film people and things that are important to you and the people around you?

It is and it isn't. Most of  my own short films, the ones I like to make, have a strong element of imagination and surrealism to them - one of my main sources of inspiration for films is dreams, my own and other people's! But I have also tried out more ‘realistic' approaches as well, including documenting real events. I do find documentary interesting, and would like to explore different approaches to reality in my own films, but as far as telling stories which are strictly based in realism, that's not really what get's me going! I'm probably less interested in the surface of people's lives than I am in what's going on underneath, the deeper, sometimes invisible things which affect us. On the other hand, from a photographic point of view I'm very interested in the world around me, and am always compelled to make images about it.

How did you get started in film? How would you go from a level to where you are now?

It's a bit of a cliché, but I did start getting interested in film when I got my first Super8 camera: a friend who was a film nut sold it to me when I was about 15 (I had to pay him £40 over six weeks from my paper round wages!) I started watching a lot of films on video around then, and making little film experiments with animation and eventually roped in some friends to make vampire and zombie films! I studied photography at A-Level, and at that time my films started becoming more personal, and more abstract. Influences from books and music helped me to use film to tell stories without dialogue or characters, more of a poetic approach. In the last few years I have started mixing the two, making conventional dramatic short films as well as experimental.

So really, my own approach was to just do it! My studying photography has helped me a lot, because I generally shoot my own films, but the main thing for me has been to constantly be planning to shoot films, whether someone wants to fund me or not, and try and find a way of doing it! The more resourceful you can become, the better the chance that you will inspire others to come on board your crazy projects, and eventually people might start to recognise how persistant you are and give you some opportunities to advance your filmmaking.

As far as studying film and film school, I've considered that option quite often and am doing so again at the moment! I think it can be a fantastic way to learn, and actually make films which is what it's all about! But for myself, at a certain point I got lucky and a few short-film jobs came my way, which led to other work and opportunities, so I have been learning a lot from actually working in the industry. People in the film-world are very often generous about their own knowledge and skills, so you can learn a hell of a lot from that environment if you can find a way in. I can't speak about television being that way, as I don't have that much experience in it!

What is the hardest thing about film making time management or generating new ideas?

This is an easy one for me - and I guarantee that most film makers would agree: there never seems to be enough time. All I can say is, whether you are making a short film with a budget, or with friends and a crew of volunteers, it's important to have someone who is production managing, who can keep an eye on the schedule and at least try and help eveyone stick to it! As a director, you just need that person to let you know every now and again what the situation is, as you will be very busy with lots of other stuff! A good example of this to look at is Terry Gilliam, who directed Brazil and Time Bandits and 12 Monkeys and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen - which went horribly over schedule and budget, and which he was blamed for and his carreer suffered quite a bit because of the reputation he gained. But the people who were really to blame were the producers/line producers, who kept lots of things from him and allowed the production to get out of hand. A director needs to manage his own time and energy on a film shoot, and he really needs someone else with their eye on the bigger picture!

What was the idea behind the latest short film you made?

I have been working with the band Pram for about five years, initially as a vj for their live shows which involved three screens of projections, with about an hour of video footage for each screen - a mixture of things we had shot ourselves and clips from old films/animations etc. The song Beluga was written about two years ago, and I originally put together a live video using footage from the 1960's tv show The Avengers, as well as some animation bits from the Brothers Quay and experimental films by people like Maya Deren. When the song was featured on their new LP released last year, the record company commissioned a video for a song of the band's choice (they're quite a cult band, so no-one was expecting a top ten hit!) - they chose Beluga, and I set about using some of the visual ideas from the existing live-projection-video which I had made, and creating an entirely original film inspired by it. So, the main idea of  film comes from a specific episode of The Avengers, where the character drives to a mansion and gets trapped in a circular room with endless corridors - we adapted this to a smaller scale, and incorporated the circular projection balls which we have been using at the live gigs.

The other main idea was to have a masked character, which I will explain below.....

What was the thinking behind the masked figure?

The band pretty much always appear masked in their publicity photos/videos : this is so that the individual members of the band are not emphasised, they remain quite anonymous, and the music then speaks for itself. We carried this over in to the video, with one of the band members working with a mask-performance artist to develop a style of acting for the video, quite similair to silent-movie acting.

The other influence in the video is a french horror film from the 1950s, called Eyes Without A Face, an incredibly spooky and beautiful film with the main character wearing a mask to disguise her disfigured face - the last shots in the video are a direct copy of the ones in that film!

The great advantage with using masks is that you can really focus the attention of the audience on different things going on - usually, we look to the characters face for a sign of how they are feeling, and therefore, give us an idea of how we might feel.

Do you think realism is important in films?

It's a big question, but it really comes down to how you approach ‘realism' within a certain story: an example could be say Ken Loach, who often uses non-actors in his films to give the characters added realism, but compare that approach to say Pan's Labyrinth, which was basically a realistic story about the horror of the Spanish Civil War, but which had a fairytale, fantasy element to it that made the horror of the soldier's actions much more effective - the contrast between the two different styles made each of them stronger.

What kind of impact did you want it to have on your viewer?

I suppose I wanted it to work both as a music video, and as a separate short film - and that it didn't matter if the viewer understood all the references to other films/tv shows, that if they did that was a bonus for them and not a neccesity! I think we wanted to make something that was a bit mysterious, dreamlike, and wasn't a conventional video or story even. Not everything is explained or obvious in the plot, and hopefully that means the viewer might be intrigued enough to watch it again! That's the kind of film I'm especially into, anyway.

What kind of projects are you involved in at the moment and where are they taking you next?

Because I also produced Beluga, I now have to promote it and try and get it into a film festival or two. That can be quite a lot of work in itself! Apart from more live shows in Europe with the band, I am currently finishing a commission for Midlands Arts Centre, where I am editing three films out of hours of archive film from the MAC, which three different musicians are then playing live music along to at a special screening . I recently applied for short film finding from Screen West Midlands for a short film I'm writing called The Uncanny, a  more documentary style film about real-life unusual or spooky events in people's lives - I got through to the pitching stage, but was then informed I hadn't been succesful; and I have been shortlisted by Birmingham Fierce Festival with my performance installation called The Divine Edgar: it is a multi sensory live show, where the individual audience member is led through a blacked-out room that sounds and feels like a churchyard, approaches a large coffin, and is then invited to get inside! Once inside, they put on headphones, and in the pitch black they suddenly hear the sounds of a coffin being buried....and a film magically appears in front of them, a short horror film based on Edgar Allan Poe's stories of being buried alive.

You can watch a video and please vote for it here! http://www.myfiercefestival.co.uk/

Having interviewed Scott we have found out the motivations behind his work. A large focus of his work relies on his own freedom to produce films inspired by his dreams, imagination and other people's too. As we have seen from well-known directors such as Coen Brother's and David Lynch (one of Scott's influences) that directors are happier to create films where they feel free to explore and express their own ideas, rather than sticking to a strict conventional method of direction.

With Scott now focusing on more live shows in Europe with the band Pram, producing a special screening for the Midlands Art Centre using hours of archive film and having been shortlisted by Birmingham Fierce Festival for ‘The Divine Edgar', Scott is now well on his way to finding that his hard work has paid off as people begin recognising this talent.

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