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Director's Statement:
What the hell is this film about? It’s a question I’ve often asked myself. 1928 and a man who has been raised all is life to believe he has a debilitating bone condition discovers, completely by chance, that it’s all a fiction. A lie. Munchhausen by proxy. Every structure he ever knew and every idea he had about himself is annihilated, he becomes an unmarked sheet of paper. And in this emptiness he sets about writing his own rules, drafting himself afresh. He becomes the leader in a local fishermen’s dispute with the government and somehow persuades them to found their own country and fight to the bitter end. Is he thinking clearly for the first time in his life, unfettered? Or is he gripped by a mania? And how does that logic or that mania get transmitted to a whole group of people? The surreality of a revolution or an uprising. The logical mania, the suspension of disbelief that makes a whole group of people, despite the odds, decide to put up barricades and fight come what may. Donovan Slacks’ personal revolution leads to a political one, with one driving the other. It might be called a pessimistic ending, but it’s also uplifting, because for a brief period he and they have really lived, they created their own rules. So what the hell is this film actually about? There are plenty of clichés to offer. Overcoming your limitations. Beating the odds. Finding your own voice – the film moves from a 1920s-style silent movie into the harsh reality of a ‘talkie’ at the turning point in the film, at the discovery of the lie and the new space for truth. People tell me it’s about something – which is a good sign. I hope there’s enough in it for everyone in some way. For me personally, Donovan Slacks became a metaphor for a film director – the sense of trying to break free, of daring to try something when all signs seem to argue against it; the impossibility of leading a group of people into a ludicrous venture that somehow seems to make sense; the surreal excitement and weirdness that brings with it, the communal feeling. How that fits in with the ending, I don’t know. Maybe the sense that even though the odds are stacked against succeeding, against even just making a half-decent film, for a brief moment we did the best we could and overcame self-doubt and the naysayers. The filmmaking process is the film. And who knows who might be inspired into making something bigger and better? It is always better to have filmed that not to film. |