A documentary film I made recently, The First Movie, won the Prix Italia. Wim Wenders sent an email which said, “I loved it.” When I showed it at the prestigious Telluride Film Festival last month, nearly 1000 people turned up to see it, and many were in tears. How did all this happen? I’m not sure that I know. But, looking back, I can see a chain of decisions about the making of the film and the impulses behind it. Don’t all artworks have such a chain?
The first link was, perhaps, watching Dennis Hopper’s great film The Last Movie, which is about a Hollywood film crew intruding in the lives of South Americans. When I interviewed Hopper, I told him that I loved that the film-makers in his film are like a circus coming to town. He replied, “Me too.” A few years later, I took the Edinburgh Film Festival to Sarajevo, during that city’s appalling siege, and noticed that, at a time of war, the people there were desperate to see movies. To get a bit of real life back. The third link happened, perhaps, when I drove to India from Scotland in my old campervan, and was entranced by Kurdish Iran and Turkey.
Then I had a drink (drink is the WD40 of the creative chain) with a friend, Gill Parry, who’d just been in Kurdish Iraq. We raved about the people we met. Gill is a film producer and, so, asked if I’d like to make a film about Kurdistan. I said yes. Then I started doing ambitious but child-like film festivals with Tilda Swinton, which tried to re-enchant movie going. For a decade or more I’d been making a mental list of the great world films for kids. Now we started to show them.
Movies, kids, war. The first five links in the chain gave me the key elements of The First Movie. So Gill and I went to Iraq. I decided to film in one tiny, gorgeous village, Goptapa. We made a little amateur cinema there (pictured right) and showed some of my favourite movies – The Singing Ringing Tree, a brilliant Iranian film called The Boot, Palle Alone in the World, ET and The Red Balloon. The kids had never before seen a movie on the big screen and so flocked and cheered and did something like the hokey-kokey. Then I gave the kids small cameras and asked them to film their lives. They did so with alacrity. We were amazed.
As we didn’t bring a cinematographer to Iraq, I filmed The First Movie myself. I had to decide how to capture the kids and the village and the screenings in images. I decided not to move the camera. I decided to use not a single reverse angle. I watched Charles Laughton’s great film Night of the Hunter. I decided that because, in my own childhood, cinemas felt almost like churches and that, for me, movies are a kind of religion, I would use sacred music, and wouldn’t try to be irreverent. Rather, since the kids and the place were so wonderful, I’d try to be reverent.
And so we filmed, in 40-degree heat and dust storms, and amid scorpions. Looking back I realise that other links, other thoughts, other decisions, contributed much. As I wanted to make something dreamlike, I brought a book of René Magritte pictures and nicked some visual ideas from them. And I nicked ideas from Jean Cocteau films too.
But, although creative decisions matter, chance matters more. Chance pulled out all the stops on The First Movie. The kids we happened to find were alert, curious, funny and visually aware. They played with the cameras and made them their own. The result is a co-directed film, a relay where I pass the baton on to them. Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys talks about passing the parcel. I think we might have passed the parcel of cinephilia, a love of movies, to these young Kurdish Iraqis. The great Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene said: “We tell stories not for revenge, but to find our place in the world.” The kids in our film now have to tell stories.
- The First Movie is showing at Picturehouse Cinemas in October
Watch The First Movie trailer:
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