Fusing Images Of Memory
An Interview with Nichola Bruce,
Director of I Could Read The Sky
based on a novel by Timothy O'GradyHard Times: Nichola, I saw your film - your first feature film - in the "International Forum" department of the Berlin Film Festival this afternoon, and I think everybody in the audience was as impressed and moved as I was. What made you create this beautiful film - this work of art which is also a very personal piece of social history, an account of the fate of Irish immigrants who came to England, and a chronicle of life in isolation in a big industrial city? How did the project begin?
Nichola Bruce: It began many years ago - I was travelling backwards and forwards to Ireland, and I was visiting family and friends then, and I began to travel with a photographer, Steve Pyke - or who became a photographer as a result. He was watching me filming. I always carry a camera with me. I do only humble bits, little things I see, but I am just a compulsive collector of moving images. After a period of many years he evolved this incredible collection of photographs that was commissioned as a photographic book, and the publishers were looking for a foreword for the book to create a context, a sense of what the pictures were about.
And Timothy O'Grady appeared on the horizon, a remarkable talent that listened to the stories behind the photographs; he listened to everybody's stories, my stories, the stories of men in the pubs and of women, wherever he went he was always listening and absorbing. He travelled back to Ireland with Steve on many occasions to, I suppose, find the connections that meant a great deal to him and his past.
Ultimately what evolved was this remarkable novel - many people's true stories that became the story of one man's life. I was then helping them. They had a wonderful novel and an incredible collection of pictures, and it was no longer a photographic book with a foreword. This strange beast was sitting on the kitchen table, and they were having some problem to put it together, and I tried to help them to find a way through that, and as I was going through the material I suddenly realised that here was a film. I wrote the script in the spring, and in the autumn this book was published. John Berger wrote the foreword to the book in the end.
HT: So the screenplay was actually your work?
NB: I wrote the script myself, but I kept it very true to the book. Originally the idea was to write it with Tim, but in a sense he did not need to, because he had done the book and I knew the material incredibly well. I just went through it and wrote it and he read the script.
From that point it took off. We all closely worked together. He and Steve contributed a great deal to the film. (In the film they are seen sitting at the table with the author Patrick McCabe, with Stephen Rae and Danny Morrison). They sat at the table with the author Patrick McCabe, with Stephen Rae and Danny Morrison. So it was what I call an organic way of creating, and it was about seeking something very deeply in ourselves, but we had different ways of expressing it. As photographer, writer and for me, as filmmaker, having a very particular language to say it in.
HT: The sound track, these superb pieces of celtic music, seem also very much part of the specific language of the film. Was it somehow included in this 'organic creation'?
NB: Yes, what followed on from there was, of course, the music. The life of this story seems to keep going because Iarla Ó Lionáird came on to do the music. He is now releasing a whole soundtrack through Virgin Records and Real World Label. So that is very exciting.
The music came to the film in many ways through Steve and Tim to develop performances with the book. They have been doing installations of this book all over the world. They showed the photographs in the centre of Dublin, in the Photographic Gallery: huge blow-ups of the images, and Tim would read from the book. And musicians would come along and contribute. Iarla first got involved by singing in between passages Tim was reading as images, photographs, were projected behind him. So many of the musicians who are in the film also came through this process of everyone just having something to say about the subject which mostly deals with emigration, disconnectedness, loss of people as you go through life and also finding things that, if you like, create redemption like music and humour. In the book humour is very strong.
My film is - well, when it was premiered in Galway, the audience laughed and cried, but I think the humour is very intrinsically Irish, and many of the jokes probably go over the heads of people in other parts of the world.
HT: I think it happens quite often with those more subtle elements of humour that they presuppose a very particular understanding, a kind of insider knowledge, sometimes even based on local or regional specifics, so that they may - more than other elements - be lost to a wider audience. But I also think, that there is really, as it was remarked in the audience after the presentation of your film today, a pervading sadness throughout the film which dominates the atmosphere.
NB: I think there is a pervasive sense of loss, particularly with this generation of the late fifties when it was very hard in England for those Irish immigrants, when nobody really cared about what happened to you when you were working. You burnt your energy in your youth and were consumed by the roads, by the buildings. The end of that is when the body starts to fail and the energy starts to go. There still is very little support for appreciating how difficult such a life can be.
HT: You have talked about the common effort and the pool of talents and contributions that led to this achievement, but, nevertheless, you are the director and I presume that your role is really crucial for the result we have seen here, for this outstanding film. That is why I would like to know something about your development as an artist and maybe about your previous experiences before you started to work on this first feature film of yours.
NB: I worked with a partner on building sites for a year in order to finance one of my first films, so I suppose there is a connection in this film about this kind of work and building sites and the like that goes back to those very early days. I did not do really tough manual labour; I used to shift the scaffolding round a bit, and I used to do a lot of painting. They always used to say if you can piss you can paint. It was the lowest job in a kind of hierarchy. But I was the only girl in that environment. That was an interesting education.
My desire to make films has always been connected with different areas I like to explore which is music and writing and drawing and dealing with seeing, remembering and all those activities that are more like dreaming. I pull those together in a voice, if you like, or a vision - something I struggled with from a very early stage.
The difficulty with most humans, as we all know, is that we have all these abilities and we fire off in different directions, like fireworks. And most of us are multi-disciplined. Most of us have many creative ways of expressing ourselves. So I was very lucky that there was filmmaking, something I hung on to. But the problem is sometimes that I have to work from the middle out. That is something that is hardly conducive to normal financing because an idea often evolves and you build up around it. If it is a particular visual idea it is hard to explain what is going to happen. It is like a painting. I can only make it.
But that is very difficult with film. It is only now, with the lower costs of digital technology, that I have that freedom. I think there are so many people that have films inside them which they haven't got the chance to do, and now there is no excuse, you just have to do it.
HT: Mentioning these 'many people' who might have the talent to make a film - I remember that you said something similar answering the questions of the audience after the film, that a lot of people could develop their talent to be creative in filmmaking and that video gives them a particular opportunity - certainly not to replace the role of an outstanding artist but to get actively involved and to contribute which seems to me a democratic approach to the process of filmmaking. Is that the way you see it?
NB: Yes, I mean it gives them a voice. There are so many people who write script after script and they are not able to realize their ideas because they are caught up in a structure that is relying on almost subjective views of whether your work is acceptable or not. The important thing really is to bypass that and stay true to yourself and have your own voice and then let people see it.
That could end up in a fantastic film culture and a very rich one. I mean I love big films, small films, it's a very stimulating medium to work in, and I think it has so many different voices, and all of those have a right to exist. But I also think that we are on the verge of getting a much more democratic access to filming, perhaps in the same way that we can all go and take cassettes or CDs of our music. Maybe not all of it will be brilliant, but there will be some very great voices coming through. Many people only talk about all the shit they have then to deal with. I find that a rather sad comment on the fact that we have a technological revolution that could aid the creativity of many people.
HT: I think I have digressed from what I had begun to ask you, that is about the way you took as a filmmaker.
NB: My first films were very very simple. My very first film was called Excuses, and it was all about the series of failures I made when making a film and all the little attempts of making films, and in the end I tied them all together and called them Excuses.
HT: The title appears to me as typical after having heard your modest way of talking about your film now and in your answers to the audience this afternoon...
NB: I still apologize all the time. Maybe that is part of my nature.
HT: So how did you continue after Excuses?
NB: I then went on with my collegue, we went on to make short drama films on bits of paper, shooting images with a camera on a triped pointing down on the ground with bits of paper round them. Eventually I made many documentaries.
HT: But certainly you could not finance them all yourself
NB: All my early experimental works were very much self-financed or financed by finding bits of money from various grant bodies. We called ourselves 'Muscle Films', and we had a subsidiary company called 'Kruddart' which really was a nickname for 'rubbish', and we used to pour out filmmaking ventures by doing graphics. We just worked very hard at chances to find bits of money, and eventually I managed to start making documentaries.
I moved away from working with my collegue, started to work on my own and went into documentary filmmaking. I made a film called The Dramatic Art of Steven Berkoff, I did a documentary on the artist Rachel Whiteread, a film entitled The Monument about the Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, which I directed for the BBC.
But prior to that, with co-directing, I had already done a piece narrated by Laurie Anderson. I had a good apprenticeship, if you like. I was still making short dramas, and it took me a long time to find the confidence to put together a feature film.
HT: So now we have come back to I Could Read the Sky. Did you apply for a grant in this case?
NB: I did. I went to the British Film Institute with my producer, Janine Marmot. I showed them this treatment, and she took it to Ben Gibson. I think he was interested and he wanted another meeting. Basically I sort of steamrollered in my anxiety that this would slip away. I came with a script, then I came with 400 drawings. I was so full of ideas and so much wanted this time to make a picture that I was spilling out with energy. It was an incredible opportunity for me. Then the Irish Film Board, the Arts Council (lottery funding), Gemini Films, Real World, all came on board.
HT: "Steamrollering", "spilling out with energy" - these are the images in which you see yourself trying to realise the film, to get it off the ground. When I think of the film itself seeing it in the cinema as a member of the audience, I would not spontaneously associate it with these phrases. It appeared to me as a rather quiet film, a very poetical film, based on memories which are cinematically transmitted in rather a lyrical mood.
NB: Having that kind of lyricism in the words to work with meant that I really sought a lyricism in the visual language. I tried to take apart memories in looking how we really truly remember. If you think of somebody close to you, you can be sitting in a room, and in your mind you can have euphoric memory and painful memory, and it always comes in a fragmented way, and somehow you composite the past, you try to dredge up elements of your past life until it is in place and then you can run with it.
That is very much something I tried to find in the film. I tried to deal with memory not only as an experience of looking back to the past but also with asking the question: how is it constructed visually, how do we truly see this inner world. We know we do not see the world with straight edges as with 35mm, we know we have a soft-edged vision, we know that if we are looking at somebody opposite us, we compile their face from many eye movements. People like Picasso represented it very well in painting. I wanted to do that in filmmaking in a way that you could make it true and accessible but lay open people's ideas a bit more how to deal with representing the past. It was no longer a theatrical representation like having a flashback in which the whole scene comes back to you as if it happened at the moment.
I intentionally used digital technology to distance us from the present. I wanted to film organised main performance in 35 mm, because for me the aesthetic of it is so clear and beautiful that that would be my "now". But apart from that I had this huge collection of archive - my own memory - which was in many different formats. Digital film is slightly degraded in the sense that it is not as good to the eye as 35mm. We have not really found a way of dealing with the fact that it brings almost too much into focus. Its clarity sometimes can be too extreme. So I used the technology that was available to me to make a low budget film, and I treated it, so that it made sense in the narrative frame.
HT: Editing in a very specific and personal way seems to be crucial for you to represent memories and at the same time gain this impressive aesthetic quality. What is very typical in your film is certainly this overlapping of moving images, all these dissolves and mixes, avoiding almost completely the clear cut which is predominant in contemporary feature film as well as in TV documentaries and the like nowadays.
NB: Again, if you think about memory or dreaming or thinking, clear cuts don't exist in the mind unless it is a closed door. You can close a door in the way that you close your eyes and open them again. That is the way it can be edited. But in my opinion editing can become quite alienated to our true way of seeing. So what I am trying to do is reinstate stream of thinking and allow one image to leave another one alone and so move and make it more fluid by passing through images and ideas. It was intentional, and I was trying to find a poetry for this man's life.
HT: Would 'poetic' be the word to characterize your basic approach? Or do you use any other term as a basic concept?
NB: I call it fusionistic, because I fuse everything together. I don't know of any other word to call it really. No one is really dealing with it, and it is very hard and I struggle to describe it. For me to find words to describe what I do is often something I can only reach after having done it many times, and finally I understand what it is I have done.
HT: We have so far been talking about composing and constructing and maybe exploring and emphasising the way our memory works and the subject perceives it, but at the same time I think, there is so much recognizable reality in your film, I mean what we usually conceive of as more or less objective reality, life out there as seen by more than one person - and this perhaps even more intensively than in a so-called naturalistic film. I am thinking of some of the human figures in your film, Irish people one has met somewhere, the language they use, or let's say the ruin of an old cottage in a valley in Ireland, a graveyard, stone walls in Ireland and brick walls in London, work on a building site in England, a radio reportage of a Gaelic football game and all that. It all seems so authentic and real.
NB: Well, I talked about all the complexity, but I also understand the strength of simplicity, I understand the strength of performance, and I need a directness and an honesty and the way of performance that Dermot gave. That is what my work is. It seems as if there are two foreign worlds here, but I think they come together. I like the fact that it is really hard and uncompromising, and I put that together with memory. I mean this man is alone in his room, and many of us are alone in rooms, and we bring the world to us, through the walls. It actually comes out of our heads, but we people a room with our past. We constantly recycle moments that we can never download, can never rid ourselves of, because we hang on to them, that is what we are. This man is alone in the room, and he is considering some of his life. I think that is something we all do.
HT: These memories additionally reflect the two sides of his life, the fate of the Irish immigrant in an urban English environment.
NB: Yes, and what happens in the book is that the old man goes through things he can do and things he can't do. I think those are two very important passages because what he can do is about knowing himself, is about knowing the world he has come from in Ireland, is about having strength in what he has learned. And, in fact, all those things he knows and can do and through which he has power have no more relevance in the world that he goes into. The things he can't do are all about things that don't work for him like not being able to wear a watch, not being able to wear collars in comfort, not being able to talk with men who wear collars.
HT: These passages obviously seemed so central that a phrase from them appears in the title of the book and the film: "I could read the sky." Did you find most of the words spoken in your film more or less in the book?
NB: I followed the book. I have great respect for texts. I don't think one should acquire a story, if it has a great strength, and take it off on one's own tangents. If there is something in there that is a good truth then you should stay with it. I respected Tim's material totally. It is his writing, it is his words. All I did was to adapt it. All I did was to find a visual voice for a different way of telling a story.
HT: I have only seen the film, but it seems so complete in itself, I mean, even if it is a faithful adaptation, as you say, it seems to me an independent work of art in itself.
NB: But they are the words of the people he listened to and the way he put them together as a story. I had to be close to that.
HT: Talking about the words - you have a very special way of setting the dialogues in their relation to the present and the past. The words are often spoken by the old man at the level of the "now", but they are actually dialogues of the past, repeated in his thoughts, conversations he had with PJ or with Maggie, his wife. How were these dialogues done when you shot the film? Did he actually have these conversations with his partners?
NB: No, Dermot never met any of the other actors to work with. I wanted him to work in isolation because I thought this was what the story was about. Also it was the only practical way to do it because we had such a short time to shoot. I wrote the script in the way that he just had to leave gaps.
But in fact what we did with that scene when he meets his wife - his wife was on set, his true wife, Dermot Healy's real wife Helen. She came to see him and by some fortune she was there on the day when we had to do that scene. She stood by the camera and she read the other lines back to him. So his pacing was there and his tenderness was there. It was perfect. Up to that point the other lines were always spoken by a lovely lad from Northern Ireland working as a chippie, a carpenter, on set. He helped Dermot through the rhythms of the other scenes.
This was Dermot Healy's first major screen appearance. Up to this point he had only done a very brief scene with Neil Jordan in Butcher Boy where he is sitting on a hospital bed. But he knows his way around language, and he had done a lot of Beckett on stage in his home town Sligo. It was waiting to happen really. He is a very great writer, and I don't know what got into his head or into any of our heads to get together to do this. He did not need to do anything like this as a well-known writer. He has written these wonderful books like Bend for Home, Goat Song and Sudden Times .
HT: It was probably not too easy for you and your producer to get the money for the film without having gained the reputation as a director of feature films as yet, we mentioned that already; but it seems even more amazing that you attracted all these famous people like Dermot Healy or an actor like Stephen Rae. He has been in films by Neil Jordan that were very successful and were shown internationally. They must have had a lot of confidence in you from the outset, must have believed in your film.
NB: They must have (laughing). I don't know. I don't know why people get attracted to an idea. There are many reasons. Incredible musicians worked on this film as well. As you say, there were all these remarkable people like Denis Cahill and Martin Hayes, Liam O'Maonla, Sinead O'Connor. We had incredible pieces of music, they are all classics in their own right. The contributions to this project make it really rich, a very rich pudding.
HT: But who was responsible for this?
NB: It went partly by word of mouth. But I had also worked with some of them. I worked at Real World for a year which is Peter Gabriel's creative base near Bath in England. With many others, I helped put together a visual department to complement the music side - working on CD-ROMs, music films and so on - it was here I met Iarla Ó Lionáird who finally put the soundtrack in place.
So some of it has come from long-standing connections from way back. Tim knew Stephen Rae, and Stephen Rae knew Tim's writing. Dermot Healy is the godfather of the book, if you like, his photograph had appeared in it, and his writing, I think, was a source of inspiration to Tim. The connections are threaded through all these projects, it is impossible to explain why this particular collaboration with everybody worked.
HT: Anyway, they have proved right with their confidence, since this very impressive film has been the result. At the Berlinale here the film was treated as a kind of what is called in German a "Geheimtip", that is a hot tip passed on secretly by word of mouth, "geheim" meaning "secret". The word "Geheimtip" was actually used in a TV spot referring to your film.
NB: Well, we had a great production team. Somehow it worked really well. The shoot in Ireland was a dream. The shoot in London was great. Everybody put in 100 percent. Janine, the main producer, had to organise the money and everything bit by bit. She worked closely with Nicholas O'Neill, the co-producer. There was great support from the Irish Film Board and so on. Everybody contributed.
HT: So you regard it as an example of a successful act of collaboration, a kind of community project, as it were.
NB: Yes. I totally believe in collaboration. I mean I worked with two separate cameramen, I had a crew in Ireland and a crew in the UK, and this was all to do with the negotiations about the money which was very well done by the producers.
HT: Were all the Irish shots, landscape and everything, shot during that short period?
NB: We did spend a week or so in Ireland shooting but some of the shots in the film are from my own archive. The clouds, for instance, at the end of the film came from my archive. They had been shot one day out of a window with my tiny home movie camera.
HT: It is a great ending with these clouds. I mean it might have been a cliche, that kind of image, often heavily charged with symbolism as an outlook towards a Beyond or something, but here it is a convincing kind of painting, quiet, tender, perhaps serene.
NB: For me there are a lot of references to painting; in a film painting with light, if you like, and I was trying to get near that. You can see the influence of Blake in there or of El Greco, and as I said, Picasso. You won't actually see Picasso's images in my film, it is more the knowledge of the way of seeing which informed me. In many ways painting is ahead of the ways in which we currently treat filmmaking. That is to say people are doing great things with film now but we don't often get to see them on a big screen.
HT: Painting - that is part of your background as an artist too, is it?
NB: Yes, I paint and draw all the time and my sister paints. My sister is the true painter. She helped me with a lot of the drawings preceding the film, for instance.
HT: There seems to have evolved a certain tradition in English films - in low budget and experimental films at least - which is strongly influenced by painting. I am thinking of Derek Jarman first of all who started as a painter before he turned to filmmaking.
NB: Derek Jarman is undeniably an influence. Seamus McGarvey who shot my 35mm in London, for instance, first started shooting with Derek using super eight. Derek was one of those filmmakers who supported people around him. There are a number of talents that have come out as a result of, if you like, his givingness as a filmmaker.
HT: The last famous question in an interview like this is usually about the next project which a filmmaker is engaged on.
NB: Well, I am filming all the time. Even here in Berlin I have been doing it, I have been trapped in reflections of the Potsdamer Platz, I had to film for a couple of mornings for myself, my archive. Since finishing this film I Could Read the Sky - I finished it in July - I shot two short films which I can't afford to edit yet, but I will do. I have a feature film I am going to shoot entirely digitally in the autumn which is called "Headland" based on the work of a performance group who created that title. These are the things I kind of compulsively have to do. But I have a project that is in development with Film Four Laboratory now. It is a futuristic journey - road movie through the neural network of a teenage runaway, and it is an investigation into a mind, it is actually about travelling through a mind, and it is about Rites of Passage evolving into a point where you almost don't know whether to come back from a certain state of consciousness or not.
HT: Is it based on male or female experience?
NB: Female this time because it is very autobiographical.
HT: I look forward to seeing it and I wish you success and a fruitful and exciting time to work on it. Thank you for the interview.
Interviewer: Jürgen Enkemann