Interview with Jon S. Baird: Director of Filth

With Filth arrived in all its dirty, disgusting glory on DVD and Blu-ray, I caught up with Scottish director Jon S. Baird whose only previous feature film credit as director was the little seen biopic Cass. I asked Baird about what inspired him to make an adaptation of the Irvine Welsh novel, what it was like working with James McAvoy and if there is a possibility of a sequel. With Baird recently announced to be taking over from Danny Boyle on directing new TV series Babylon, I also picked his brains on what details he could spill on future episodes.

When did you first read Filth and when did you decide to adapt it?

I read it the day it came out in 1998 and I loved it straight away. I wasn’t working in the film industry but then I met Irvine ten years later and I’d since read it four or five times. I just pitched him straight away. I said I’d love to do it, are you interested? We got talking and then he was hopefully impressed with the pitch I had and it went from there. I was just infatuated by the main character.

How important was Irvine Welsh to getting the movie made?

He was there to give support with his name and stuff. He wasn’t hands on but he was very supportive and particularly when the film came out in terms of publicising it, he was great. He’s a very close friend now so he was always there as a confidant as well.

This is probably the most ever producers on one film… was it hard to get funding… even once you got this cast?

Yeah it was tough to get funding. We were grateful to all the guys who put the finance in. A lot of the producers who are credited on the film, I haven’t even met before. We’re grateful to them because it was a very tricky one to get off the ground.

Why did you decide to dial back Bruce’s physical disintegration from what happens in the book?

I just didn’t think that was as interesting as the psychological deterioration. I wouldn’t be interested in going to the cinema to see somebody’s balls flaking off or haemorrhoids and stuff you know? I just wasn’t interested in that and that’s purely what it was. I just thought people aren’t interested or it would just be a wee bit too much for them. I think it’s much more interesting as a psychological thing.

How did you lighten the tone of the film from the very dark book?

There’s a lot of different tricks that you can use when you’re manipulating an audience. Performance obviously is one and humour is one and use of music. You don’t necessarily have to like someone but you have to want to follow their journey and I think that humour probably is one of the best ways. I think McAvoy just gets the balance right.

How much direction did McAvoy need?

Once he was cast he was fantastic. It was just before he was cast, we had doubts about whether he was the right guy. We rehearsed a lot but he’s a fantastic actor and a clever guy so he found it very quickly.

How did you feel about adapting the book? Were any scenes sacred? Was there anything you were intent on changing?

The two scenes that were absolutely sacred never made the film. I shot them both and they’re both on the DVD extras. One was Angus the dog and the other was the airport scene and they both made the extras on the DVD but never made the film. They were the ones that I thought were totally sacred, big set pieces. It just shows that sometimes you think it’s sacred then you put your film together and they don’t fit in there. With the tape worm it was just a case of personifying that with Dr Rossi and making it more accessible so you’re not heavily using the CGI or anything.

I think this is a rare example of a film adaptation that is better than the source novel. Were you inspired by any other adaptations when making Filth?

A very good question. I don’t know if I was inspired by any other adaptations. I think I just loved the book so much that I knew it really, really well and I just knew what I wanted to do with it. I don’t think there was anything I was inspired by. Irvine actually said to me when he first saw the film, he said “I think it’s better than the book” and that was a very humbling thing to hear from him.

Not even Danny Boyle’s adaptation of Trainspotting?

You know something, I hadn’t even read Trainspotting by the time I started writing Filth. I read Trainspotting after I wrote the script of Filth so I hadn’t read the book. So I wasn’t sure of the adaptation and what the tone had been of the book compared to the film.

Irvine Welsh has written a sort-of-sequel to Filth called Crime that follows Jamie Bell’s character Ray Lennox. What is the likelihood of you tackling an adaptation of that in the future?

Yeah I think there’s a good chance of that yeah.

Do you know when it might happen?

No mate, I really don’t know. Not soon anyway but I think in the future it will.

What can you tell us about Babylon?

Well it’s exciting because it’s working with Danny Boyle. It’s a drama with comedy as opposed to comedy-drama I think. It’s a character driven piece and a very high level of casting and production value and written by the guys who did Peep Show. So I’m doing the first three episodes and starting to shoot them next month. The pilot is on Sunday (Feb 9th 2014) at 9pm so I’m just looking forward to that. 

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Steven Knight Interview: Working with Tom Hardy on Locke

This was an interview I conducted for Filmoria with Steven Knight, the writer and director of Locke starring Tom Hardy. It was published in 2014 when Locke was being released on DVD and Blu-ray, but as Filmoria now longer exists, I am republishing it here.

Locke follows a pretty ordinary character as he travels down a motorway one night.  How hard was it to fund this film?

Well funnily enough, it wasn’t a problem. I’d just made a film with IM Global and I had the idea for this odd little way of making a film. I had a meeting with Tom Hardy about a different project and then told him that I was shooting an almost theatrical experience on screen. He was all for it. So I wrote it with him in mind. So then we approached IM Global with two things; very low budget and Tom Hardy. They liked the script and they just said ‘yes’. But I think the main thing is that it was very low budget and so it’s a very small gamble. I had the meeting with Tom in late October and we were shooting in early February so it all happened very quickly.

It seems to me that everything about Locke is a producers worst nightmare... a main character who is a pretty ordinary guy... a construction manager who cheats on his wife. No one in the film is in any danger, it has one setting, one character... did you think to yourself that you had to have a star to get this film made?

Yeah but not just a star, you need a really good actor. I always think that whoever is on the screen, people are looking at Tom anyway. It was great to get him to play the part. A lot of these decisions were not deliberately perverse but not what you’d normally do. The whole thing I set up as everyone can have a holiday from what they normally do and it will be fun. So we shot the whole thing from beginning to end. Every time I said ‘action’, we shot the whole thing, then took a break then shot the whole thing again which I then edited together. In terms of selling it, I think I wrote a paragraph about what is was about to IM Global and they said ‘fine’. 

But my thought was, I’m pretty sure that people are intelligent enough to come to a cinema and sit and look at the experience of an ordinary person and find the drama within it. Rather than have the imagination put on the screen for them with special effects and everything. One of the best comments I got from this was people saying that they forgot that they hadn’t seen the other characters because they’d invented those characters for themselves. And I think that’s a more old fashioned way of telling the story with people picturing things in their head. The whole thing was ‘would it be enough to do this?’ and we had no idea if it would be or not until we took it to Venice and the response was so amazing. It was almost like in every way doing the opposite of how you would normally make a film.

One of the most striking things to me was that you chose to have your main character Locke having a cold... was that in the script?

I’d love to say that it was a metaphor for something really important but Tom had a cold when he turned up on the first day of shooting. The normal response is make up on the nose, medication to dry him up and all that. Rather than do that, we thought it would be possible to have your marriage break up and have a cold at the same time and why not? So the medicine you see him taking is the medicine he is really taking.

I heard that Tom was reading off cue cards for the entire shoot. What was the thinking behind that?

Well because I wanted to shoot everything in one go and not do takes. I wanted to see if we could do it without constantly going back and doing it again because I think when you do that, you get something totally different from if you’re just doing it and knowing that you’re going to do it again tomorrow and it might be different. It would have been impossible for him to learn 90 minutes of dialogue. So we put autocue in two places on the low loader in front of him. We had it running in the rear view mirror so that he could look at the rear view mirror and see the script as well. Tom wanted it to be word for word. He didn’t want to improvise at all so what you see including the dot dot dot and the pauses is him following the script. I said at the beginning, ‘if you want to go off and improvise  in the conversation that that’s fine’ but he said he didn’t want to. Retrospectively he was right because it would have been chaos if he’d have done that. Because the other actors had the script on paper in a conference room where they were holed up. Tom had the script in front of him so the conversations he had were pretty much word for word which was great.

So you ran through the whole film each time without cutting and doing extra takes... how much directing did that allow you to do on location?

What we did is we spent five days with all of the actors including Tom sat around a table and reading the script over and over again. Any issues of character and motivation and all of that was dealt with in that room so that when we went out on the road, the only direction I ever gave  to any of them was ‘less, less, less, less’. Ivan is a character who controls things. He normally calms people down so he doesn’t ever get emotional. At least don’t get emotional on the phone, the sound of the voice. One of the great opportunities that you get with this sort of thing is that you can have someone talking very calmly on the phone while tears are running down their face. What you’re seeing is truth and what you’re hearing is not and it makes you know that you’re seeing into someone’s soul basically.

So you had three cameras all running at the same time for each run through of the script but I felt like I saw hundreds of camera angles in the film. Am I wrong? 

No you’re absolutely right. What we did is we set up three cameras and we started rolling. Every 28 minutes, we had to pull over to change the memory cards in the cameras. So we’d pull over into a lay-by and it would be like a pit stop in Formula One. Everyone knew what they had to do, they’d change the memory cards but also take the opportunity to change the lens and the angle. So in fact we had three different set ups within each pass at the film and then obviously we did 16 versions of the film. So in every take we had lots of options.

So where were you during filming... in the comfy hotel with the voice actors or out on the road with Tom?

I would love to have been in the hotel conference room but I wasn’t. I was on the back of a very cold and wet low loader, on a piece of canvas facing the car. The car was strapped to the low loader. I had contact with the conference room and the actors and contact with Tom. I would say action and we’d set off and that was it.

Were you watching monitors or just looking at Tom in the car?

I had a monitor with the three different camera angles on it but also looking at Tom. Mostly when you’re in that situation, once you know the set up you don’t need to keep looking at the monitor so it’s more looking at the performance in the car.

You’re working on Peaky Blinders and have a variety of upcoming film projects. How are you finding working in both TV and film?

I do see them as different things. My day job is writing and doing commissions and all of that. And then if there’s an idea I feel I can direct then I do that. TV is not something I thought I’d do but Peaky Blinders is the story of my Dad’s uncles and it’s a story I’ve wanted to tell for 20 years. I don’t think it could be told as a film. Well it could but it would be shorter whereas with telly, the way it’s going at the moment, you get a lot more opportunity and a lot more time and you get great actors wanting to play the parts. It just felt that that family saga was better suited to TV. TV’s great, as a writer it’s fantastic because you are pretty much in charge of that whole thing.

You have many upcoming projects... are you itching to get back in the directing chair?

I’m probably going to direct something in the middle of next year which is again going to be quite an odd way of shooting something. It doesn’t sound particularly entertaining but it’s about the last days of someone’s life who has Alzheimer’s. That sounds terribly depressing. But in the same way that ‘man who works in concrete drives down a motorway’ (laughs). I’ve got a plan to make it very almost like science fiction.

And you’re writing that as well? Will you only ever direct things that you write? 

Yeah absolutely. I can’t imagine even begin directing someone else’s thing.

Will you work with Tom Hardy again?

Yes I’m sure I will. We’re doing a project together already. I would imagine you will hear more about that quite soon. I’m not being mysterious on purpose. They like to announce these things in their own ways.

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Oscar Nominations AND WINNERS 2016

Here's the full list of Oscar nominees for 2016. The ceremony will be held on February 28th and is going to be hosted by Chris Rock.

Song

Earned It - 50 Shades of Grey
Manta Ray - Racing Extinction
Simple Song #3 - Youth
Til It Happens to You - The Hunting
Writing's on the Wall - Spectre WINNER

Cinematography

Carol
The Hateful Eight
Mad Max Fury Road
The Revenant WINNER
Sicario

Documentary Feature

Amy WINNER
Cartel Land
The Look of Silence
What Happened, Miss Simone?
Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom

Costume

Carol
Cinderella
The Danish Girl
Mad Max Fury Road WINNER
The Revenant

Sound Editing

Mad Max Fury Road WINNER
The Martian
The Revenant
Sicario
Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Sound Mixing

Bridge of Spies
The Martian
The Revenant
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Mad Max Fury Road WINNER

Make Up and Hair

Mad Max Fury Road WINNER
The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared
The Revenant

Animated

Anomalisa
Boy and the World
Inside Out WINNER
Shaun the Sheep
When Marnie Was There

Best Supporting Actor

Christian Bale - The Big Short
Tom Hardy - The Revenant
Mark Rufflao - Spotlight
Mark Rylance - Bridge Of Spies WINNER
Sylvester Stallone - Creed

Best Supporting Actress

Jennifer Lawrence - Joy
Rooney Mara - Carol
Rachel McAdams - Spotlight
Alicia Vikander - The Danish Girl WINNER
Kate Winslet - Steve Jobs

Visual Effects

Ex Machina WINNER
Mad Max Fury Road
The Martian
The Revenant
Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Film Editing

The Big Short
Mad Max Fury Road WINNER
The Revenant
Spotlight
Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Production Design

Bridge of Spies
The Danish Girl
Mad Max Fury Road WINNER
The Martian
The Revenant

Adapted Screenplay

The Big Short WINNER
Brooklyn
Carol
The Martian
Room

Original Screenplay

Bridge of Spies
Ex Machina
Inside Out
Spotlight WINNER
Straight Outta Compton

Original Score

Bridge of Spies
Carol
The Hateful Eight WINNER
Sicario
Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Best Foreign Language

Embrace of the Serpent
Mustang
Son of Saul WINNER
Theeb
A War

Director

Adam McKay - The Big Short
George Miller - Mad Max Fury Road
Alejandro Inarritu - The Revenant WINNER
Lenny Abrahamson - Room
Tom McCarthy - Spotlight

Actress

Cate Blanchett - Carol
Brie Larson - Room WINNER
Jennifer Lawrence - Joy
Charlotte Rampling - 45 Years
Saoirse Ronan - Brooklyn

Actor

Bryan Cranston - Trumbo
Matt Damon - The Martian
Leonardo DiCaprio - The Revenant WINNER
Michael Fassbender - Steve Jobs
Eddie Redmayne - The Danish Girl

Best Picture

The Big Short
Bridge of Spies
Brooklyn
Mad Max Fury Road
The Martian
The Revenant
Room
Spotlight WINNER

The Hateful Eight Review

In the middle of a blizzard, eight men and one female prisoner hole up in a cabin on a mountain to wait for the snowstorm to pass. Bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) is transporting prisoner Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to Red Rock when he picks up Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) and Red Rock’s incoming new sheriff Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins). Arriving at Minnie’s Haberdashery, they meet four other men, some of which may or not be working with Daisy to help her escape.

Tarantino clearly doesn't give a flying f**k if you don't like the language in his movies. Most of his characters are pretty nasty bastards, so they're going to talk like bastards. Don't see The Hateful Eight if you aren’t prepared to hear a screenplay full of b***hes and n****rs as every character dispenses with politeness and splashes racist and misogynist abuse up the walls, like Tarantino splashes brains.

Therefore, fans of Tarantino will undoubtedly love this. It's talky, it's chronology gets twisted, it's divided into six titled chapters, has opening credits written in big garish yellow letters and its full of sadistic characters just itching to draw buckets of blood from each other. Respect must go to The Walking Dead's Greg Nicotero for providing the brains and bloodshed.

The Hateful Eight has six great performances, and despite spending most of the film being defiant in the face of frequent beatings, it is Jennifer Jason Leigh who is undoubtedly the standout when she finally gets let off the chain (literally). Samuel L. Jackson gets the best monologues, but Tim Roth and Walter Goggins share the big laughs that Leigh hasn't already walked off with.

The Hateful Eight's ace up its sleeve is not its late-in-the-game Channing Tatum appearance but its post-civil war setting. It's characters are all torn apart by the recent history of America's internal struggle. That's what makes what goes down in Minnie's Haberdashery so strangely topical, even with its period setting. The Hateful Eight are divided by politics, race, gender and who holds the guns and who doesn’t.The cabin is full of resentments and suspicion that still spill onto the streets of America every day.

It’s not just the 70mm widescreen that gives the characters space to develop and get a turn at grandstanding. It’s also the three hour running time. Deliberately paced, wonderfully scored by Ennio Morricone and packed with suspense and surprise, The Hateful Eight is Tarantino both staging a bit of a Reservoir Dogs reunion and therefore back to his roots, and also a showcase for how far he’s come as a filmmaker. See it for its range of colourful characters, even if the script sometimes sounds a little like it's been written by a teenager who’s just discovered some very nasty words.

Before The Hateful Eight: A Quentin Tarantino Retrospective