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Your two upcoming films Black Sun and The Kingdom of
Shadows - in a few words, what are they going to be about?
These
two films are totally unique, not your usual cinematic experience. They
will dance across the screen like dreams, fragments of stories and
characters will emerge but there is no plot in the conventional sense,
each viewer will have a personal experience and interpretation of the
films.
Black Sun is about a woman who has always lived in a role of service to the men in
her life. One day she has had enough, she leaves home and starts walking.
As she walks the sun sets and she wanders in the dark, and as she wanders
all the suppressed thoughts and feelings bubble to the surface and consume
her.
The Kingdom of
Shadows
blends fragments of dreams with the biblical myths of Adam and Eve and
Cain and Abel. It's about a search for paradise and it's an attempt to
heal the wounds of our ancestors which are carried down from one
generation to the next.
Let's
start with Black Sun: You're planning to have most of the film take
place in pitch black darkness - why, and how limiting or challenging do
you expect that to be for you as filmmakers?
Black
Sun
is the first in a series of films in which we are planning to explore
humankind's relationship to darkness. Most modern humans don't have the
same relationship to darkness that our ancestors did, the electric light
has eliminated the shadows and with it we have been cut off from this
great source of inspiration and power. When plunged into darkness our
hearing becomes more acute, our other senses are activated, and our inner
visions come to life too. We want to experiment with this as a cinema
experience. The cinema is a place where people come together to experience
collective visions in a dark room, we find this interesting, like how our
ancestors would gather at night around a fire and tell stories.
Black
Sun will rely heavily on its sound design - so what do you have in
store for us on that front, and how do you actually "direct"
sound design? Sound
design has been incredibly important for every film we have made. Most
modern films sound the same, there is a sort of standard that all films
operate in at the moment. We don't find this very interesting, what
excites us is using sound in a much more expressionist way, like music, to
create feelings and unconscious connections rather than to hand-feed
information to the audience. We direct sound design in the same way you
direct the other elements of a film. When we write scripts, we often have
notes and descriptions of what is happening with the various elements of
sound (foley, atmosphere, music, etc.) and how they might interact with
the image, but it all comes together through the process, through
experimentation and seeing what happens along the way.
You say The Kingdom of
Shadows is
inspired by dreams and early silent cinema - care to explain?
We
have been writing down our dreams daily for the past couple of years, out
of this several films have grown, in fact all the films we have planned
for the next few years have at least some sequences based on dreams. For
us dreams are like gifts, they speak from a place beyond the intellect and
rational mind, there is a truth in them that resonates with power. We
write them down, plant them like seeds in our notebooks and eventually
they grow into films.
Silent
cinema existed primarily beyond language, it was a visual medium that
existed in a realm one step beyond reality. We shot our film Savage
Witches silently, adding all the voice and sound design in
post-production, we've only worked like this a couple of times so far but
we have found it a really liberating process. It enables a different way
of working with performers, focusing on the movement of bodies in a space
rather than words. We are not interested in recreating reality, we are
excited by cinema as an artifice that can bring to life the invisible
world inside us!
The Kingdom of
Shadows reworks the biblical myths of Adam and Eve and Cain
and Abel - so what will your re-interpretation be like, and how close do
plan to you remain to your source material?
There
will be thin threads tying us to the source, not that there is technically
a single source we can know of as the Bible exists in several forms and
has been rewritten from other sources many times. We have been strongly
inspired by the gnostic writings as well so it's certainly not going to be
an orthodox retelling. For us the interest lies in the idea that the
actions of our ancestors are carried down from generation to generation
and that when these actions cause a psychological block they need to be
healed in some way. The film is also about the idea of Paradise, which we
see not as a place to get to but as a state of being or a level of
consciousness that can be experienced through creativity, making art and
spiritual practices.
You would like to see Black Sun and The Kingdom of
Shadows be shown as companion pieces - so in what
way do they complement one another? Well,
they are separate films and could be shown separately but we feel they
would create a fuller experience when played together. Black Sun is
about a descent, it's about a crisis and an unravelling, whereas The Kingdom of
Shadows
is about healing and a journey towards unity. Black
Sun strips away the images while The Kingdom of
Shadows
is rich
with them. Maybe after the darkness the images of The Kingdom Of
Shadows will be like revelations.
As far as I know,
you're currently still in the process of raising funds for Black Sun
and The Kingdom of
Shadows - so do talk about your campaign for a
bit?
Yes,
we still have a small amount we need to raise. We are nearly there but we
need help to make these films happen, we need people who love strange and
visionary cinema to help us spread the word and if they can, to sponsor
the films.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/black-sun-the-kingdom-of-shadows/x/12411630#/
We
have launched a crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo and have lots of great
perks for sponsors, from DVDs of our previous films to posters and
soundtracks. The most unique perk is that we will make films of people's
dreams. These will be short personal interpretations of descriptions that
people send us of their dreams. We are very excited about this actually,
we have been working with our dreams for a while and have developed a
certain language and approach derived from them, but it'd be interesting
to see how we respond to other people's dreams, a material that is such an
uncensored personal expression.
Also
we really wanted to give every sponsor something special to express our
deep gratitude for believing in us and supporting our films, so we are
making very unusual personalised cine-poem thank you videos for every
single person who sponsors. You can view them here:
https://vimeo.com/album/3610248
Once the budget's in place, what's the schedule?
And any idea when and where the films might be released onto the general
public yet? The
plan is to shoot throughout the autumn and then we'll be spending the
first half of 2016 working on the edit, sound and music with a festival
release beginning late 2016. Some sponsors will be getting early online
premieres and DVDs of the films, this is a great perk for those who can't
wait to see them!
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Any future projects beyond Black Sun
and The Kingdom of
Shadows? We
have lots planned, there are some more films in the series about darkness.
There is also our ongoing home movie project, the first film of this,
which is Splendor Solis, just premiered this September at the
Cambridge Film Festival, so we'll be working on the follow on films from
that. We always have more than one project in the works, things that go
from smaller, more experimental works to bigger, much more scripted films.
There are so many possibilities in cinema and we have so many ideas
between us, we always keep busy!
Your/your movies'
website, Facebook, IndieGoGo, whatever else?
Our
website: www.theundergroundfilmstudio.co.uk
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/TheUndergroundFilmStudio
IndieGoGo:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/black-sun-the-kingdom-of-shadows/x/12411630#/
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/ExplorerFawcett
Thanks
for the interview!
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