An interview with Joe Lawlor and Christine Malloy, directors of Helen
Writhing on the couch across the table from me a small girl lets out an outrageous yawn. So much for my riveting interview technique. She’s clearly had a busy couple of days being carted around Edinburgh helping to present her parent’s new film. Mum and Dad, known to everyone else as Joe Lawlor and Christine Malloy, are at the Edinburgh Film Festival with their first feature film, Helen.
Following the pair’s series of award winning short films (called Civic Life) that started with Who Killed Brown Owl, Helen is an ambitious step up on many levels. It makes the most of a sparse idea creating a deeply thoughtful debut. It’s also a feature film made for peanuts from regional funding body money which has had marked implications on the film. Thematically it has similarities with the Frank Guerin film A Summer Day, where a French town reacts to the sudden death of a popular teenager.
The title character Helen (played by newcomer Annie Townsend) is an orphan about to turn 18 who takes part in a murder re-enactment. In the expected narrative style she takes the chance to be someone else a little too far. Donning the garish yellow jacket of the missing girl she starts to inhabit aspects of the other life as she contemplates her own.
Curiously though Helen has this sense of being set everywhere and yet nowhere at the same time. You can hear several Irish accents in there as well as a few regional English ones too. This, of course, was born of necessity; a by-product of the immense difficulties of raising the cash for a film. When asked where the film is actually set Lawlor explains “I guess it must be the UK because in Ireland you wouldn’t get that many English voices. But you would get that many Irish voices if it were a UK film. There are at least one, two or three Irish people. There are Estonians and Polish people and so forth. The predominant voice is a UK one. So it’s somewhere in the UK.” As the funding came from different bodies around the UK so too did the amateur cast. “It was almost whoever turns up and wants to be involved”.
Given the directors’ approach to working with an amateur cast, this presented problems with the few professional actors involved. Malloy explained: “That was just the bind. We can’t have some people using lots and lots of technique and then something like Annie in the same scene. It wouldn’t be the same film. It’s got to all come to the same level. Normally you would have non-professional actors trying to rise up to the level of the professional actor. We had the opposite struggle. We wanted the few professionals to be more amateur and not to use their technique.”
After making the nine short films in the Civic Life series, Lawlor and Malloy were desperate to make a feature film. So when one revenue stream for a feature fell through at the last minute the pair ended up being presented with a proposal for yet another short. “Which was a bit of a nightmare in the background for us because we’re working on a feature and somebody wants to give us money for a short” – says Malloy. So they figured – why not combine the two. “…we asked the team if we give you a short can the short be a companion piece to the feature. So can we use the money to both make the short and the feature. You get your standalone short. But we can shoot the short when we’re making the feature and we can then utilise the footage, do more than one take in our feature and also use some of the money to spend more time in the park. So fair play to them they got behind that, they said yes they were very happy with that”.
The short film in question, Joy – a companion piece to Helen, went on to have a life of its own on the film festival circuit earlier in 2008 where it won the Prix UIP Rotterdam at the Rotterdam Film Festival. Joy follows the actual reconstruction for which Helen is the stand-in for. But this isn’t the kind of forlorn appeal that might appear on Crimewatch. It’s a glorious swoosh around a park to this lush soundscape. Beautifully, different groups adapt to the re-enactment accordingly, with some participating and others defiantly standing around simply watching the camera. For an adjunct to a main project it’s remarkable.
The ethereal quality of Helen is embellished by several long silent takes. But if anything these scenes aren’t long enough! One in particular gazing upon the aftermath of some bloody incident in a park breaks up what puts one in mind of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris – that glorious ponder around a lake at the start. In discussion with the directors it was revealed that the cuts were budgetary in nature. As Malloy detailed: “The idea of a long single shot was born out of the economics. But it a way it suited our aesthetic as well. And a lot of the things we wanted to explore. How you might make a very cinematic short film.” Lawlor then got down to the practicalities. “…the shoot target was about six minutes a day. So three minutes-three minutes, or four and two, or one and give, whatever you want to do, but six minutes each day.” The directors’ experience of making the Civic Life films encouraged shooting long takes to make the most of their footage in often chaotic situations.
Although this approach seems to curtail the dreamy quality of some scenes it definitely delivers dividends in others. One wordless moment consolidates the relationship further between Helen and the dead girl’s parents when she visits for dinner. As Lawlor outlined: “The dinner table scene. We thought that would be three and half minutes long. Actually it’s closer to five and a half, six minutes long. A long scene.” Originally written with dialogue the pressures of hitting that daily shoot target were upped when changes were made on the hoof. “So we decided later on when the three of them are on the couch in slow motion. We’re thinking that the dialogue is bullshit. All we need is them to say nothing. A family portrait. Better decision, better scene. We spent all the time getting that scene right. Because no matter how simple it is it’s never simple.”
Lastly, when asked how a couple divide duties as film directors the answer is a mixture of the familiar and the unexpected. Their method involves inspirational walks around North London’s Epping Forest and, more bizarrely, taking cues from Dolly the Sheep. The first successfully cloned mammal, it took the scientists who created her many attempts. As Lawlor explains: “It’s a bit like, in the news, Dolly the Sheep, I think it was number 215 or whatever it was. Dolly number 26 must have looked pretty disgusting.” But the end result worked, as does Helen.
Regrettably Helen didn’t win the Michael Powell Award at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2008. For more information about the film visit the Desperate Optimists website at www.desperateoptimists.com
