Below is the transcription of an interview I conducted with Nick Willis, director of recent short film Speak For Herself. The film was created as part of the BBC Arts New Creatives talent development scheme, and can be watched here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0chtfnx
Callum: Welcome to Sit Down with a Screenwriter. Today I’m joined by Nick Willis, a 21-year-old director whose debut film Speak For Herself recently came out. Thanks for joining me Nick. Could you talk a bit about your background and where this creative process all began?
Nick: I think film is always something I’ve been interested in. I was always creative – I did art at GCSE and A-level, and then did Art Foundation, which was designed towards production design for film and TV. In 2020, just before I started my course, I saw the BBC New Creatives talent development scheme run by BBC Arts and the Arts Council. They were commissioning young film creatives between 16 and 30 to create short films, so people like me with little experience could have the opportunity.
Callum: So just talk to us a little bit about that selection process. After you pitch the idea and have commissioning, did you get to pick your own actors or was it something that you were assigned, and where was it filmed?
Nick: The opportunity was passed to me through the Gulbenkian Theatre, which is based at the University of Kent in Canterbury. I’d done various theatre productions there growing up. At the point at which I was commissioned, at the end of August 2020, the Gulbenkian then became my production partner. When it came to things like crew selection and casting, it was very much led by me and my producer, Emma, who I’ve worked with before in the theatre. It was filmed during the pandemic, which made it quite difficult in terms of crew numbers and sorting accommodation, so it involved juggling between what we wanted and what was allowed with the guidelines. Although I was commissioned in August, the script itself wasn’t actually greenlit until December, so our pre-production process was quite tight in the New Year because we then filmed at the beginning of March in 2021. So it’s quite a tight turn around to find crew, but they were all people that we had found or had some contacts with.
Callum: I really liked the red-yellow colour scheme in the film’s palette. I interpreted these colours to be evocative of plastic and superficiality, which I suppose embodies the film’s critique of social media. It’s those primary colours – à la McDonalds or rhubarb sweets – that are appealing, but only give short-term pleasure and are minimal in substance. They’re synonymous with plastic and being fake, just like social media. On the protagonist Mia’s jumper I saw red-yellow triangular patterns. I read the triangle as symbolising rigid entrapment, especially in contrast to a more open shape like a circle or square. Yellow is also meant to mean ‘happy’ and ‘sunshine’, but it’s far from that. Could you talk a bit about the symbolism behind the aesthetics and visual quality of the film?
Nick: Yeah, there there’s some really great points there. Going into the film I knew my weakness would be that I’d never written a script before, whereas my strength was the visual and design aspect, so I had a clear vision of the aesthetic from early on. What you were saying about the red and yellow are right. Because of the nature of the film being near-futuristic, that sort of Black Mirror-esque style that is not too sci-fi, but slightly removed from where we are currently, I wanted something unique. There’s a duplicitous nature to these colours. Red is seen as angry and alarming, and Mia is running out of time in the film, so the red was to build that tension. But then again, it’s a romantic colour. Similarly, yellow is a happy colour, but when there’s too much of it, it becomes sickening, and has obvious connotations with warning signs. So there’s a lot of duality in the colours. We shot at the University of Kent campus in Canterbury which was useful because the buildings are new and futuristic, like a lot of UK campuses. Because you’re not working with a massive budget, the more you can do to improve production quality, such as with colour schemes of clothes and background, the better. Having a cohesive colour palette helps production quality that bit more.
Callum: That’s an interesting point about the colour binaries. So red – obviously anger and foreboding, but also love – she clearly loves her father, who she’s working really hard to support. The situation where she is told she needs a very specific amount of money for rent, then has an advert immediately after advertising a prize for the exact amount – I guess it’s hyperbole to show how ludicrous and tailored adverts are now, that we’re bombarded with specific adverts based on our data and preferences.
You talked about this futuristic Black Mirror-esque style. Sci-fi set thousands of years in the future is so unrealistic to a contemporary audience as it’s so far off our lives; it’s purely an escapism. But these films set in the near-future, which incorporate elements of the real, are more tangible. It’s a slight tweak of reality. The film deals with the unification and division caused by social media, and why it is a problem. How important do you think these modes of media are to be didactic and to convey constructive ideological messages?
Nick: Yeah, it’s important. With the film, I didn’t want to set it too far in the future for exactly those reasons. I wanted it to be set close enough that people could kind of relate. We might not currently have that sort of technology, but those sorts of things are not far off and may be the norm one day. I also didn’t want to make something that was entirely dark and depressing. From the beginning, Mia is stuck in her morals of wanting to abstain from social media, and begrudgingly uses technology, whereas everyone else is in a kind of bubble. So, it relates to that idea of sticking to the convictions of your morals within the sort of noise that happens online – there’s lots of different opinions so it can be hard to decipher who’s right, and what’s real of fake. The debates around technology and media are always changing, and it’s hard to get messages about them out without using technology. And then there’s this twist at the end of the film to counteract the message about social media.
Callum: That’s it, I think the ending really draws on how there’s a gravitational pull towards social media, even when people don’t know it’s bad for them. It’s got an addictive quality, just how previous generations had smoking, we have social media and phones. There’s this movement, it’s called dopamine detox, where people abstain from technology and screens to reset their concentration levels. We also hear emotive language in the film, such as ‘swarms’ of people on social media, and this juxtaposition of noise being ‘data’ or ‘dangerous’. Companies will substitute morals to get data off people – we’re hearing about AI hearing what you say in private and tailoring adverts towards that.
You did an interview with BBC Radio Kent last September. The host mentioned the sort of Orwellian Big Brother-Esque themes, which I thought were really interesting. Obviously, the film does allude to surveillance at times. I really like the shot during the speech scene where we see grainy CCTV footage from the top-corner of the room. This whole idea about surveillance, I suppose that’s not just a phone issue. That’s a wider issue with technology in general, do you think that is that something the film was trying to allude to?
Nick: Yeah 100%. At the core of the film, it’s about privacy and how difficult it is to be private in this digital world. And it’s funny you mentioned that shot where it’s from the perspective of a CCTV camera. When I was in discussion with my DP, we ended up shooting with a lens that rapidly zooms in and out slightly during the opening scene, to also give that impression of a CCTV camera and foreground the motif of surveillance. For the shot taken at the top-corner of the room, it wasn’t until we were editing when the colourist said that we should put a grainy filter on that shot, and then we realised that it worked well. So, some of that is planned symbolism, and other parts are spontaneous during the process. I guess Mia’s journey in the film sees her question her morals, and how far will she go until she sacrifices them.
Callum: Could you talk to us a little bit about your VR project that you’ve been doing?
Nick: So, I’m training in production design and art direction for film and TV at University of Arts London, and one of the projects that we did was VR-related. We recreated that experience of going out of the wardrobe and into the snowy forest in ‘The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe’. We used new technology, such as Unreal Engine, which was primarily made as a games engine, but it is actually being used more and more in film.
Callum: In the history of film aesthetics, we had photographs in the 1800s, then in the early 20th Century we had silent films, then synchronous sound in the 1920s, then colour films. It’s not a linear chain, where one keeps replacing the other, because 3D has gone out of fashion, and with recent films such as Oppenheimer, it seems that there’s a resurgence in black-and-white. In a 2008 book on film aesthetics, it said that the end of this sequence is normal film as we know it. On that basis, do you think the next chapter of this book should be VR – is VR the future of film?
Nick: It’s an interesting one. I think we’re a long way off. VR can make you feel sick if you are in it for too long. In filmmaking now, directors use VR to get a feel for a location without actually having to visit, so I think there’s a place for those technologies in the future. Although cinema has gone down with streaming, the idea of consuming film and television will stay, so maybe those kinds of technologies will be used to enhance the experience in that way.
Callum: What’s interesting about VR is that it isn’t like other media forms where we view the screen as a passive viewer, but we are in control of our perspective. It’s like with silent discos – they do happen but they’re not mainstream. Everyone who attends one has their own individual sense of spectatorship, like VR films.
So to wrap up, what’s next for you? Are there any projects you’re currently working on?
Nick: Yeah, I’m working on a on a few things, so I’m currently creating an animated short film. It’s a bit of a different ball game. I have started a potential feature script where I would like to actually turn Speak For Herself into a feature-length film, but that’s a bit of a long game, that’ll be a long way down the line. And then I’m continuing working in design and finishing my degree in London as well.
Callum: OK. Well, it’s been it’s great, and the fact you got commissioned in 2020, the same year we both left sixth-form, is incredible. It’s interesting to get an insight not just from people that want to review films and talk about them, but from someone who’s actually created one themselves and has that driving force. Thanks very much for your time, and all the best for it in the future. Hopefully we’ll see it in a full-length film one day.
Nick: I hope so, thank you so much for having me, it’s been really fun.
For those interested in learning more about short film, see the BBC Arts New Creatives website: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07fvnmq
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