Some very short clips about the Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts weekend can now be found on the Financial Times website.
Now here’s a thing…why do artists make art? Aware as I am that I lead a privileged life where I am fortunate to meet interesting people and absorb whatever it is that makes them tick I want to share with you here some accumulating thoughts I have had over the last few weeks.
A couple of weeks after Chris Morphet and I went to see Geoff Ridgen’s talk at the APT studios in Deptford we returned for the Open Studio day. This is an annual event where all the artists who work there put up their art in their studio space and anyone can go and look for free. They also sell their work, which is a cheaper way to buy, if you are in the market, because gallery fees etc are not added on. It was a beautiful day and Chris and I had a great time talking to John Mclean, Mali Morris and others. The art on view was pretty fantastic and it led me to think about these artists and what motivated them to explore their work with such scientific dedication. In all of the painting and sculpture on show you could see varying degrees of discovery, blind alleys, re-visiting of a central idea and probably points where the whole thing had come to a standstill while the artist had to re-group and begin again. There are certainly a few artists working at APT who have got their work to a point where they seem to be surfing an area of technical complexity, intellectuality and originality that will keep them going for years. The work of these artists seems to provide the viewer with endless opportunities of different experiences all played out through the particular universe of their work. I came away from APT thinking that there is no “success” or ”failure”, just a higher level of endeavour for these artists. Making the work is both a compulsion and a journey.
Two weeks later and I’m sitting in front of Martin Scorsese interviewing him for our Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative films. This is something of a moment for me as I spent most of the seventies as a young film student watching his films over and over again trying to figure out how he had done it. Undaunted by sitting in front of one of my heroes (again) we chatted for about an hour. Marty (if I may be so bold) touched on many things about his past career but we spent much of the discussion talking about making movies and his approach to film directing. A couple of things I will never forget, one was when he quoted Orson Wells who once said you can teach the mechanics of making a movie to anyone in about four hours, cameras, lenses, tracks, dollies etc but its all meaningless unless you have something to say. So a lesson for all you young film makers out there planning the endless Steadicam shot; just stop to think about WHY? you are getting the toy out in the first place.
Scorsese works with a pretty tight team of collaborators, Thelma Schoonmaker, his editor, Tom Fleischman, his sound mixer, Robbie Robertson ex of The Band, who Scorsese met while making one of the best rock movies of all time, The Last Waltz still advises on music. These people, and many more, have all been around him for years. Scorsese is most definitely the author of his films but he relies on the skills of these collaborators and craftsmen to get the movie finished. He described working with Fleischman for weeks searching for the exactly the right “silences” for each different room atmosphere in “Shutter Island”. Scorsese revels in the thousands of minute details that make up his films and the decisions or choices he has to make in order to get them close to the movie that is running in parallel in his head. At one point he used the world “euphoria” when it all comes together, but there are also times when after all the planning and setting up, he is surrounded by hundreds of technicians waiting for him to say "Action" the scene before him dissolves into something he can’t believe; at times like these he and his trusty collaborators have to work hard to bring the movie back to life in the way that he imagined it.
As he has got older and more experienced Scorsese has found ways of “guarding” his “energy”, presumably stripping away things in his life that get in the way of the act of making (including talking to people like me). Having said that his office displays all the evidence of a normal guy: photographs of family and drawings by young children.
Just like the artists at APT I am struck by Scorsese’s compulsion to create, even though it must involve raising thousands of bucks, having to deal with unsympathetic studios and a overcoming a lot of practical obsticals. Making movies for Scorsese is almost a spiritual (a word he used) need.
It appears that sound engineers seem to be working less and less in the TV industry. Anyone who has watched TV next to my mum knows that being able to actually hear what is being said during a TV programme is important. During an episode of The Sopranos she once asked if a slick suited man who had just killed someone next to Newark Airport had said, after a solemn pause, "butter bean". If my mother had really considered the context of the utterance she would surely have come to the realisation that the more likely candidate was "Badda-bing" (say it out loud in an Italian American accent). 
Every country has its Skegness. Just 4 hours by car from "Bs As" (as the trendy Buenos Aires seems to be called now), past Fray Bentos and just south of Bovril is a little town called Nogoya. Proudfoot had gone there to make a documentary about a film maker who had chosen the town as a location because of its unique qualities, namely inertia and a tendency towards bad weather. As we met people from the town and visited their houses, characters and stories seemed to unfold before our very eyes. Our film maker had found a rich source of inspiration. Old crumbling houses with silver spoons hung from the walls, and well-used rifles left on mantle pieces each projected a new scene or shot onto our film makers internal cinema screen. Nogoya, like Skegness, is not a town likely to be on page one of its country's holiday brochure, but, again like Skegness, you learn more about the culture and psychology of a nation going to places away from the global spotlight than their better looking, glitzier cousins down the road.
I imagine that lo-fi indie rock, post-punk, and doom metal probably aren’t the first things that spring to mind when you think of Butlins, but for a couple of weekends a year the seaside holiday resort becomes a Mecca for alternative music fans when it plays host to All Tomorrow’s Parties music festival.
This weekend at All Tomorrow’s Parties: The Fans Strike back in Minehead, Somerset, it struck me (ahem) that this apparent mish-mash of cultures actually makes a lot of sense. Although most of the largely young, trendy middle class crowd would no doubt turn their noses up at spending their summer holidays at a British coastal holiday camp, ATP offers some pretty appealing advantages over other festivals. While the accommodation may have been "basic", the addition of a roof, bed, heating, hot water, cooker, fridge, kettle and tv is certainly a step up from traditional festival slumming, and there wasn’t even a glimpse of any sludgy brown stuff in any of the three indoor venues with their clean, flushing toilets.
But it seemed to me that a large part of the appeal of ATP was the “quaint” little Butlins touches. There was something quite refreshing about seeing pretty girls in vintage floral dresses and skinny boys in tight jeans totally immersing themselves in playing on 2p machines, visiting the waterpark, playing bingo or (in my case) stuffing their faces at the all-you-can eat Pizza Hut buffet. What Butlins essentially offers is the chance for everyone to act like a big kid and have some good, clean, simple fun. And regardless of your age, class or taste in music, no one can turn their noses up at a round of ten-pin bowling or a ride on the waltzers. Plus I’m sure I saw Beirut munching down on what looked suspiciously like a battered sausage. It’s not every weekend you can say that.
On a grey, damp London morning it is cheering to hear the news that Sotheby's have sold the Blue Diamond (our Blue Diamond) for a record price - almost $10 million. A friend in the auctioneering game tells me that diamonds always do well in a recession - it's something to do with them being easy to transport. They are probably a good way to tie up large amounts of cash in a very small object, too.
I'm trying to write a script at the moment. With each word it gets harder and harder. Just to finish one episode takes a lot more work than I expected. The trouble is, I'm trying to think of a twist and twists, by definition, aren't very easy. Someone suggested the 'non-twist' twist strategy the other day so I gave that a bash and it was even more difficult than just having a twist. I watched The Sixth Sense, The Crying Game, The Others, Old Boy, The Usual Suspects, The Empire Strikes Back, in an attempt to gain inspiration at the altar of 'Great Film Twists' ........until last night when it came to me. I finished my 30 pages with a great, simple twist no one would expect. When I read through the warm, freshly printed pages I realised it was just the rest that was crap.
As all our friends know we all use our bikes to get to work. From our vantage point above the junction of Clerkenwell Road and St John Street we can clearly see that the number of cyclists in London is continuing to rise. That must be good news for the city but it is terrifying to see how many people fly across the junction when the lights are red, scattering pedestrians as they go. It is one thing for 'professionals' such as couriers to do it - their life expectancy is short anyway - but most commuters seem to treat each bike journey as if it were a suicide mission. The ghost bike that appeared outside Proudfoot HQ a month or so ago is a tribute to a cyclist that died at this spot. She was apparently drinking a cappucino when she was hit. You would hope that such a powerful reminder of our fragility would act as a warning to other cyclists; I can't imagine a more pathetic waste of life than to be killed on the way to work. I think the unofficial, underground ghost bike campaign should be given a much higher profile. It is probably breaking one of Camden's thousands of byelaws but the council have allowed it to stay put so far. But now this strangely beautiful object is gradually being trashed. Several hefty blows have bent the wheels, someone has tried to take the tyres off and at least one person, presumably smashed after a big Smithfield night out, has tried to steal it. Crazy and slightly sad days.
All this talk of 'fixies' has reminded me about the fixer we hired on a recent shoot. Nearly every time we film abroad (and sometimes even in Britain) we hire a 'fixer' to help us. Usually they recommend hotels, drive us to locations, know where we can get food that won't have us crapping through the eye of a needle, advise us on picturesque places to film, make sure we are safe, translate, entertain us with stories, help us carry equipment, tell us about local culture, knock on our doors when we sleep through our alarm and generally make sure we hit the ground running when we arrive in a strange place. In other words, they do a lot and they are very important.
