On the eve of the world premiere at the London Film Festival of his debut fiction feature Kelly + Victor – a raw and intimate romantic drama with a dark side, set in an evocatively captured contemporary Liverpool – Indy Datta interviews writer-director Kieran Evans.
On the genesis of Kelly + Victor
I came into film during the early days of acid house. I was studying fine art, and acid house had just sort of crash-landed, and in that kind of great way that the e culture made happen, you try something different, so I picked up a film camera and found myself enjoying that much more, so I became an art school dropout, and moved to London with the idea of making films rather than becoming an artist.
Why “American”? Well, there’s nothing more American than owning property. It’s the American Dream, houses for sale Dayton, Ohio some land surrounded by a fence. Built, as in all the best haunted house stories, on an Indian burial ground. And American Horror Story, series one, is all about decades of murder on a slice of prime West Coast real estate.
I think it’s one of the most original and intriguing TV series in recent years, and one that’s come out of nowhere with a whole new way of representing the horror genre on television.
Here’s the thing: TV doesn’t like anthologies any more. The days of The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits and Alfred Hitchcock Presents… are all over. So what do you do if you love those short, creepy stories about creeps who come to bad ends, and you work in television, and you’re coming off one of the biggest surprise hits of recent years*? You make an anthology show but disguise it as a soapy serial.
Anthologies, however, have to have some sort of a theme. Rod Serling made his shows all about paranoia and characters who discover the world isn’t as it seems. Hitchcock’s series was largely defined by its pitch black sarcasm.
The very American theme of American Horror Story, S1, is the horror of childbirth.
Among the many things for which Tim Burton can be held responsible is the fact that I am writing for this website. His second feature, Beetle Juice (1988) was the one that, more than any other, ignited my interest in film. I’m not suggesting it’s the greatest film ever made (that would be Tremors, clearly), but it was among the most imaginative and unusual I had seen up to that point in my life. It introduced me to the idea that filmmakers could take a melange of influences and craft something new and personal from them, and sent me out into the street thinking: I want more like that. (It also introduced me to Winona Ryder, something else for which I remain grateful.)
As regular readers of Europe’s Best Website may remember, this time last year I attended the San Sebastian Film Festival and had such a great time that I vowed to go back every year until death. Well, so far, so good. For the truly curious, pictures and a tweet-by-tweet account of the entire festival can be found here and here respectively, but let’s keep this blog post mostly about film. Here, then, are some notes on the ten best films I saw at San Sebastian this year (out of a total of 35). Note that a) I would have included The Imposter on this list if I hadn’t already seen it at Edinburgh and b) I deemed retrospective films ineligible for the top ten, otherwise Franju’s Judex would have been on the list too.
That title seems emblematic of film noir. In so many noirs the city is a malevolent presence, a place that seems both to warp and to be warped by the tortured psyche of the protagonist. If you had to send a telegram summarising the message of most film noir, the curt, four word missive: Hell Is a City, would be a pretty good way to get the job done cheaply.
But a part of what makes this film interesting are the other, non-noir traditions it draws upon. It’s British but it’s a markedly different work than the films I discussed in my MostlyFilm article on Brit Noir, back in March. Significantly, the three films I looked at then are set in London and the South. By contrast, Hell Is a City is set in Manchester. That shift north also brings with it a shift from a heightened reality to an emphasis on veracity. And along with that comes a more serious attempt to more authentically depict the lives of the British working-class.
The first table-read of ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’ goes as well as expected.
The Ponds throw themselves off a building, and appear alive in a familiar graveyard. For some reason.
Amy Pond: “Why always here?”
The Doctor: “Does it matter?”
—
Alright, I’m through with playing nice.
Here at Europe’s Best Website, our journey talking about Doctor Who began at a fortuitous moment – the Russell T. Davies era had wheezed its last and every fanboi’s wish had somehow come true; Steven Flippin’ Moffat had taken over as Executive Producer! In a genre far more inured to disappointment and mediocrity, here was an aligning of planets that just didn’t seem real – the writer of some of NuWho’s best-regarded moments being handed the reins of the BBC’s flagship show, to bend to his considerable will.
We tracked the first two of Moffat’s series; celebrated the highs, tutted at the lows, and ended last year with the hope that, having got a few issues with self-importance out of his system, the newly low-key Doctor could return to being quirky and fun and serious and clever and scary and exciting i.e why we still love it, 49 years after it began.
But, no.
If you happened to see Moffat being presented with a Special Achievement Award at this year’s BAFTA’s (where it was abundantly clear that if he were in fact made out of delicious chocolate, the entire audience was going home hungry), or touched upon his now-infamous ‘The Tweeter’ presence (Sample tweet: “Thanks for saying nice things about me! If you said a bad thing about me, I’m calling the police!”), you could be forgiven for pondering quite how much of his not-inconsiderable talent is in thrall to his not-inconsiderable ego.
Three months after the announcement of Moffat taking over Doctor Who, it was announced that he would also be acting as Co-Executive Producer and sometime writer on the BBC’s new version of Sherlock, in which the classic Victorian detective would be reincarnated for our times as a boring, bug-eyed bell-end. Cleverly, each broadcast of the second series seemed to hit the airwaves with a new and rediffusable form of Holmes’ beloved cocaine, such was the rapture that greeted the three episodes of arch, incoherent filler – indeed, discussing on the internet how Sherlock survived his final plunge became one of this year’s most short-lived sensations, up there with ‘caring about sport’, and that Korean man who thinks he’s a horse.
Perhaps it’s unfair to suggest that Moffat could be spreading himself too thin – I do not, after all, know the man and the demands of his work-life in the slightest – but since the first five episodes of Series 7 represent the weakest gruel since the show came back in 2005, am I mad to ask for fewer damn ‘tease-words’ about next year’s Sherlock, and more of the juice that made Series 5 such a pleasure?
So, let the half-hearted, whey-faced griping begin!
Liberal Arts is a pleasant middle-youth indie angstfest, which sings the praises of an English degree while gently mocking those who can’t move on from their college years.
Josh Radnor, also the film’s writer and director, plays Jesse, who returns to his alma mater for the retirement of one of his favourite professors (Richard Jenkins). Over the weekend he meets new student Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen); the two strike up a correspondence, which leads to a romance. Jesse is at a point where he’s slightly disappointed with his life – he’s just split up with his girlfriend, and is stuck in an unfulfilling job in university admissions (one senses he would prefer to be an inspirational lecturer). He hides from his disappointments behind books and poetry. Meeting with the professors who inspired him ignites his nostalgia for university, and a desire to relive those years – as he puts it, “The only time in your life when you can say you’re a poet without someone punching you in the face.”
Hooray, they let me do Mostly Pop again! I warn you – I like not a single song this month. Don’t blame me. If you want a nicer Mostly Pop, I advise you to go out there and make some great music – really you only have yourself to blame.
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