Flickchart Addicts Anonymous

This post originally appeared on The ViewLondon Blog (affectionately known as The Blog No-one Reads) back in August, 2009.

Damn you, the internets! As a result of spending an awful lot of time on Twitter (currently following 863 people, which is maybe a few too many), I discovered a website called Flickchart (www.flickchart.com) that has quickly become my new internet obsession. Unfortunately it's also addictive as hell and has become a massive time-suck. Argh. 

The concept is simplicity itself – the site puts up a choice of two movies and asks you to pick the one you think is the best. After a few minutes you have a top 20, but if you've only been offered mediocre or rubbish films by that point, your top 20 might include, say, Big Momma's House, simply because you thought it was better than Big Momma's House 2, so you keep going until your Top 20 includes films you can actually be proud of. Similarly, my current number one film is Magnolia, simply because I haven't yet had to rank it against my actual number one film, Vertigo (currently at number 2). 

As of the time of writing, I have now ranked 4638 films and my list contains 1949 movies. The site also helpfully informs me that I have spent 139 days, 18 hours and 30 minutes watching movies. However, the fascinating thing about the site (apart from the despair-inducing moments where you have to choose between two much-loved favourites, e.g. Fight Club vs Goodfellas) is that you discover all sorts of films that you didn't realise you loved as much as you actually do. In my case, that's Superman: The Movie, High Plains Drifter and When Harry Met Sally. 

My other favourite thing to do is to rank as many films as possible over The Dark Knight (not because I don't like The Dark Knight – I do – but because I don't think it deserves Best Film Ever status). Anyway, it was recently knocked off the number one spot on Best Movies Of All Time list and I'd like to think I had a small part in that... Oh, and a word of warning: signing up to the site requires patience, as it's officially still in beta-testing mode and it can take up to 10 days or so for the invite to arrive. Savour those ten days, because once you're in, you can kiss your free time goodbye.

Interview with Bertrand Tavernier - Cine Lumiere, 17th March, 2011

This interview originally appeared on ViewLondon (RIP).

What attracted you the project and how did it come about?

The producer showed me the short story and what attracted me was I saw the roots of a wonderful romantic and complex love story. Not only between one man and a woman but with a woman and four men. And I felt that each of the men could be completely different. Each one of them was complex, a different way of loving her and she was – I saw in her the roots of a passionate young woman who is trying to survive, trying to learn how to keep her pride, her dignity, her freedom, trying to educate herself at at time when women had no rights. And I thought that all those themes were very relevant today and there was a modern way of filming that, not filming that as if it was something historical, but as if it was something, now, that was happening in front of the camera. So that was very important, the feeling of being contemporary with those characters.

You mentioned that you felt the themes were relevant today – can you elaborate on that?

I think that a lot of period films have a way of looking at history as if it was historical, but there was a time when what was happening was not historical, it was just the present. It became historical years later and I don't want to film when it became historical. So my film is not about the period, it's not about the Rennaissance. It's a period which the audience knows very little about. It's about a moment of history as it is felt, perceived, seen, by a young girl who understands only twenty per cent of that. So that way I can incorporate the ignorance of the public today in the screenplay and I can have the audience discovering these things at the same time as the heroine. In fact, one of my great influences – it will be surprising for you – was Hitchcock. Because Hitchcock made a rule of never being ahead of his characters, never knowing more than his characters. I mean, when Cary Grant is confronted in North By Northwest, we never know more than Cary Grant.

Although, in Vertigo, we know more than James Stewart's character...

No. That one, no. But not in Psycho, not in Strangers on a Train, not in Rear Window. In Rear Window we know exactly what James Stewart is feeling. And I think it's totally different from what most of the people were doing in similar films, where because of the intrigue, to increase the suspense, they always want to show something that the characters are not knowing in order to increase the tension, but Hitchcock tried to have the same tension without that and this is something that I decided to apply, especially in the period film. Never be ahead of the audience.

Gaspard was telling me that you didn't use blocking in the fight scenes. Can you talk me through how you directed the battle scenes without using blocking?

I remember a wonderful discussion I had with Raoul Walsh, one of the directors I admire most in the world. Somebody was asking how he shot the action scenes in Objective Burma, in The Naked and the Dead and he said that he never rehearsed them. He gave instruction to the actors and immediately filmed them. If nothing was good, well. But if there was anything good, usually at the beginning, the first 30 seconds, well, we use that and we start, after... So, like that, actors are never repeating the scene. Nothing becomes mechanical. Everything is looking fresh, you can incorporate accident. And I did all the war scenes that way. And all the battles. We knew, of course, more or less the staging but we never rehearsed and we shot the first rehearsal. And that was adventurous but I had a wonderful camera operator, an American, Chris Squires. Great! He was ready to work without marks, without knowing where the people would stop. He would suddenly run in the mud to get Gregoire falling from his horse and that was giving life, a wonderful life, a sense of urgency to this battle. We had a few rules: no doubles, long takes, no CGI. Everything has to be found on the set and not in the lab. I'll always remember the discussion I had with [British director] Michael Powell. He said, when he was telling me, 'The special effects, we are creating them on the set. The Red Shoes – everything was created on the set, nothing was done in the lab. It was a tremendous pressure but it was more exciting and we were controlling everything. And it was forcing everybody to be inventive.' And that's a good way. And anyway, we decided that from the beginning and that was a rule, so I told the actors, 'I will do long takes, so you'd better learn how to ride, to fight and to fall' and they did. They learned in two months and they didn't want it to look ridiculous, so they behaved extremely bravely. That was great. And so, a wonderful director, Joe Dante, after seeing the film, sent me an email and said, 'Bertrand, the battle scene was stunning – it was like Chimes at Midnight with longer takes!' So he said, 'Your film expresses such a love of cinema that we all have to be thankful for it'. That was wonderful.

Speaking as an audience member, I much prefer to see a swordfight in one take, with the actors fighting, rather than multiple cuts and fast editing.

I hate that way! I was raised on the swordfights of Scaramouche, where you see that it's Mel Ferrer and Stewart Granger – except one or two moments – but mostly, you see them and you see – you get the feeling of danger, the feeling of anger. I understand nothing in some of the battle scenes of today. I don't have any more emotion. I mean, let's say the stunt work, the explosions take over any filming of where the characters are, what they are feeling, if they are lost, far away, close to each other. And everybody in America was saying, 'Thank you for giving us at last a scene where we follow the lead, we know where they are'. I mean, I've grown up loving films where the directors incorporated the topography, the sense of place, in the emotion of the film. In the westerns of Anthony Mann, you knew where James Stewart was in the rocks and you knew where the guy he was fighting against was. And you knew that he had to cross one hundred yards and the space was important and the rocks were important and the shots were lasting enough to give you that importance.

Do you have a favourite scene in the film?

Most of the scenes between Lambert and Melanie, I think. And the last scene between Gregoire and Melanie when he brings the letter. I was moved to tears by the acting by both of the actors in that scene. But I love the battle scene – I'm very proud of the battle scene. And I love what Philippe Sarde, the music, mostly percussion and very strange sound effects on it, very modern, with some moments with, I think a baroque instrument. Suddenly in the middle of the battle it sounds a bit like free jazz! And I think the work of the American camera operator, Chris Squires, who I discovered during In the Electric Mist was absolutely stunning. Great operator, wonderful guy.

Tell me about the casting process. How did you come to cast Gaspard, Melanie, Lambert and Gregoire?

Gaspard and Gregoire were immediately cast when I was writing the screenplay or when I had just finished the screenplay. I never saw any other actors – I had them in mind and I thought they could be terrific. Melanie, we did some tests and she happened to be the best and to me, to have all the colours of the character from a kind of playful teenager, to a flirting schoolgirl, to a passionate lover, to the aristocrat, very condescending and class conscious, to a very frail young girl or the wounded woman. I mean, she had all those colours - and very different colours – and sometimes in the same shot. For me, she is a director's dream, Melanie. And Lambert, when I met him, rather late, I was angry at myself not to have immediately gone to him, because I thought he was – he was my producer's idea and I should have had this idea, because after five minutes of discussion with him, I knew that he was Chabannes. He had the stature, the grace, the beauty, the emotion. He was a splendid horseman – he was the only one of the cast who knew how to ride. He knew perfectly how to ride.

I thought he was amazing in Of Gods and Men.

I think he became with the age. He was a very good actor. And I've seen him on stage and he has that professional training where he's good in a play by Racine, by Marievault(?) but he can be wonderful in Stephen Sondheim, in Little Night Music, he will be wonderful. And that makes him one of the best choices for a period film, because he has no problem with the language, no problem with the costume, no problem with anything which is physical. And with the age – when he was young he was nearly too beautiful, too handsome. Now there is something deeper in him, he has learned how to hide his emotions. When he was young he was sometimes over-expressive with his emotions, now he can have it, it reveals more subtlety. I would say, very selfishly, but I think he's even better in my film than in Of Gods and Men.

What was it about Gaspard that made you cast him?

Gaspard, I saw that he had the stature and the charm. And there was also – I knew he could be the macho warrior, I mean the killer that Guise was. You don't have to show him fighting all the time just to give you this idea. I mean immediately, if he says, 'I'm going to kill you', you know that you are in danger with Gaspard. It's something that some actors cannot give. And I knew that I could get something out of him which has not been revealed. I don't know how I knew that, but I knew that he had something nearly feminine, which was allowing me to make his character – which was the most simplistic in the short story – to make him more complex, to give him some sincerity. I always told him, 'When you say to Melanie, 'I love you', the audience must believe you. You must be sincere. Even if after – I don't want to know if you aren't totally sincere, if you only want to fuck her, but oh, maybe in one month later you are not feeling the same way, but in the moment you must be...' - I was always thinking what [theatre director] Peter Brook said of Shakespeare, he said, 'When the characters speak in Shakespeare, the moment they are speaking, for Shakespeare, they are right. Even when they're the worst scoundrels, even when Macbeth is trying to explain why he did what he did, but during the moment he says it, you are with him'. And I said to Gaspard, 'We must be like that with you.' Even if at the end, in the last scene, Marie must overcome you, she must be the one who has the most dignity, the most pride. But Gaspard was terrific and I always remember when my granddaughter, Olivia, was ten, she came on the set, she looked at him and she said, 'Papou, he looks like Errol Flynn!' So she grew up on films like Robin Hood, like Sea Hawk, like Captain Blood and she absolutely is in love with Errol Flynn. So I said to Gaspard, 'This is the biggest compliment you can have from her'. And she immediately saw that the way – when she came one day to the mixing and she saw the scene where the people are putting the cross on them and she immediately said – she's between ten and eleven – and she immediately said, 'But it's like what they did to the Jews during the war'. She immediately connected. It proved that you educate the children that way, they can suddenly learn something in the image that some adults do not. She immediately said, 'It's like the round-up, they are doing the same thing', so she saw that as something very modern.

END

Five Films That Slipped Through The Net

Turns out I was doing Hidden Gems columns 22 years ago. This is a feature I wrote for Total Film back in 1998. 

1) Retroactive (directed by Louis Morneau)

Who's In It? No Stars, Just Talent. Unless you count James Belushi and Frank Whaley.

What's It All About? Police psychologist Karen Warren (Kylie Travis) hitches a ride in the desert with -whoops!- Dangerous Psychopath Frank Lloyd (Belushi). When Lloyd shoots his unfaithful wife (DTV Superstar Shannon Whirry, keeping her clothes on for once), Karen flees in terror, only to run straight into a reclusive scientist's time-travel experiment and find herself back in Frank's car, with everyone still alive...

In a Nutshell: A perfect fusion of Groundhog Day and violent suspense-thriller, Retroactive grabs hold of its wacky premise with both hands and wrings maximum mileage out of it, as Karen's continual attempts to alter the events of the first half-hour spiral increasingly out of control.

Best bit: Playing "Spot M. Emmet Walsh". 

2) Waiting For Guffman (directed by Christopher Guest)

Who's In It? Christopher Guest (Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnell), Catherine O'Hara, Indie Queen Parker Posey.

What's It All About? Small-town impresario Corky McQueen (Guest) attempts to put on a show with the hopelessly inept local citizens, all in the hopes of impressing the eponymous Guffman - a New York theatre critic rumoured to be attending the opening night.

In a Nutshell: This is the Spinal Tap of Amateur Dramatics - a hilarious, if you will, mockumentary, much of it improvised by the actors themselves, and allowing for some to-camera 'interviews' with the characters which will have you laughing out loud.

Best Bit: The stage-struck locals earnestly explaining what they hope the show will do for their 'careers'. 

3) Lawn Dogs (directed by John Duigan (Sirens, The Year My Voice Broke))

Who's In It? Sam Rockwell (A Box of Moonlight), Mischa Barton (that rare breed - an appealing child actress), Kathleen Quinlan

What's It All About? Rockwell's Trent is an underachiever - a Lawn Dog who makes his living mowing lawns in a rich neighbourhood. He is befriended by Barton's Devon - a ten year old girl whose near-death from a heart-condition has left her with a horrible scar and parents who are too frightened to let her live a child's life.

In a Nutshell: This did, in fact have a cinema release, albeit one best categorised as "blink-and-you'll-miss-it". It's worth seeking out, however, as it's both quirky and touching, with a fairy-tale ending that makes you reassess what has gone before.

Best Bit: Devon explaining to Trent that her heart now goes 'Dee-dee-dum, dee-dee-dum'. 

4) Trigger Happy (directed by Larry Bishop)

Who's In It? Everybody: Richard Dreyfuss, Jeff Goldblum, Gabriel Byrne, Ellen Barkin, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan, Gregory Hines, even Burt Reynolds (pre-Boogie Nights comeback).

What's It All About? In an unnamed city and an unspecified decade with distinct 1940s overtones, Big Time Gangster Vic (Dreyfuss) is released from jail to find chaos reigning among his supposedly care-taking underlings: Byrne's "Brass Balls" Ben London fancies himself as the new boss and Goldblum's Mickey Holliday has been busy taking a bit too much care of Vic's wife (Barkin). Naturally, Vic is somewhat less than amused...

In a Nutshell: A real oddity - surely destined for cult status. There are several pleasures here, from the ensemble acting and oddball script, to the dreamlike atmosphere provided by the sets and lighting.

Best Bit: Byrne, clearly having way too much fun, yelling "I'm 'Brass Balls' Ben London and I'm inde-fucking-structible!" in his climactic scene. 

5) The Pall-bearer (directed by Matt Reeves)

Who's In It? David Schwimmer, Gwynneth Paltrow, Michael Rapaport, Barbara Hershey

What's It All About? Twenty-something slacker Tom Thompson (Schwimmer) is asked to give a eulogy for someone he can't remember from High School, even though the boy's glamourous and vampish mother (Hershey) insists he was her son's best friend.

In a Nutshell: Under-rated comedy which suffered from the Ross-from-Friends backlash on its initial release. Regardless of how annoying he is in Friends, Schwimmer is genuinely funny here, in a sort of slightly-tweaked Graduate for the 1990s.

Best Bit: The scenes with Schwimmer's mum, sure to hit home among Twentysomethings-Still-Living-With-Parents. 

Interview with Ben Wheatley, director of High-Rise (Feb 18th, 2016)

The following interview originally appeared on Wow247 (RIP).

Interview with Ben Wheatley

Standard opening question, but how did the project come about? I know [producer Jeremy Thomas] had been wanting to make it for a very long time...

Well, I didn't know he was involved in it to start. After A Field in England, we were just looking at lots of different stuff - we had projects that we were going to do and we'd been pushing them forward and seeing if we could get traction on them. And it seems to me that the way that things work is that you have like lots of projects and then suddenly something becomes really popular within the kind of financier circles and it just suddenly shoots forward...or not, you know. 

So we'd been working on all the stuff that we knew and it had been fine - because we're always looking a couple of years ahead at stuff as well, because if you don't then you end up with a gap. So I was just at home going through the bookcase and thinking what hasn't been made and who's got the rights and it's usually a thankless task, because anything that's anything is tied up and I know that the studios have started buying - they don't buy books anymore, they buy authors, so they'll buy the whole back catalogue from the family of the author. And I think they're even getting bigger now where they'll scoop up whole genres and there'll be big job lots of books that will be taken. 

And so I saw High-Rise and I thought, 'That's weird that it's never been made' and I called my agent and said who's got it and he said 'Oh, Jeremy Thomas has got it.' And Jeremy Thomas' son worked in the same agency, like two desks across. So it's just bizarre, within two or three days I was in the offices at Hanway and RPC and talking to Jeremy. And he'd randomly seen Sightseers like the week before, so if that hadn't happened, if the timing had been slightly different. none of it would have come together. And he was coming to the end of the cycle of development that he'd been in for the last version of it, so I talked to him about it and he was interested. 

And then what we did was that the idea that we had for it, that Amy and I had, was that we wanted to make it a period piece and to go back to the book. And she said she's not a big fan of writing scripts and being paid for them up front and because by that point we knew there'd been a lot of development done, we didn't want to be the people who just turned up and said. 'Can we do this book and can we get paid to have a go at doing it?; so she wrote a spec script and the deal was that we'd go back to Jeremy with the script and if he liked it then we'd make it and be paid for it and if he didn't like it then that was it, we would just walk away, you know, no harm, no foul. And that's basically what happened and that script was what we made, pretty much. 

You said you were scanning the bookcases, so presumably you had a copy of the book, you'd read the book at some point? So had it always been a favourite?

Yeah, I mean it was a book that I'd read as a kid that I'd really liked that fitted in with those kinds of books that you read when you're sixteen or seventeen that are kind of that harder edge of esoterica stuff or they're entry-level books because the radiation from them is so strong that you know about them. I mean, I seem to always have known about that book and Crash, in the same way as I knew what Fear and Loathing was and what Naked Lunch was way before I'd read a Burroughs book or a Hunter S. Thompson book, so I kind of read it at the time and Crash was a similar experience of like reading it and going [sharp intake of breath], of finding it really alien but exciting and then perverse, but in a way of looking at the modern world and representing it to you that gave you insight into how things are that other fiction didn't seem to do. 

But then coming back to as a forty year-old, it was more that I re-read it and kind of went, 'Well, it feels like I've been reading Ballard since I was sixteen but just not with his name on it, it seems to he that it's sunk so deep into society and into culture in a way that probably explains why not that many adaptations have been done because it's all around us. And it was interesting even on Twitter, when when we announced what we were doing, people going, 'Oh, it's Judge Dredd', you know, but it is Judge Dredd, it is Blockmania, it goes back to those '70s comics and they're all influenced by Ballard. Or even Snowpiercer – people are going, 'Oh, it's Snowpiercer' – yeah, but Snowpiercer IS High-Rise, those are the ideas that have been put, and that's the thing about Ballard, his ideas are so strong, they just keep cutting through.

 The film's set in a kind of heightened version of the '70s, maybe, but I felt that it could just as easily have been Cameron's voice at the end instead of Thatcher's. What do you feel High-Rise has to say about today?

Well, there's a few things there. I believe that, the world, there's a cyclical historical kind of loop that we're in, we're either in the '70s or '80s most of the time and we have been since the war. It's either we're all fucked or it's everyone's making loads of money and no-one wants to think about it and then it's all fucked again. It just goes backwards and forwards like that. And so what does High-Rise have to say about today, it's kind of irrelevant, it's now. And then it's also like, why do you make a period film or why do you make a sci-fi film? They're not about the future and they're not about the past, they're about now, they always are, all films are about this moment otherwise they don't have any connection, there's no traction on them for the audience. And unless you get end up in the world of really meta postmodern filmmaking, where everything's a reference back to cinema, and most films that are talking about this moment should be. 

I always used to like talking about the Romero movies, like Dawn Of The Dead is not about zombies, is it? It's not as simple as just about zombies. And that's the other thing about picking a book that's a period book but there's also projecting into the future, it's kind of difficult to go wrong with that. I always wonder why they remake movies that are set in the future, because they are already in the future – it's a bit bizarre, isn't it? 

High-Rise was always thought of as one of those books that was kind of unfilmable. What were the main challenges that you faced in adapting that particular book but Ballard in general for the screen?

This was a first time Amy Jump, who wrote it, and I have experienced a book adaptation. So there's a lot of issues with it. I can't speak to how hard the adaptation of it was, because I didn't write it, luckily. 

Were you not involved in any capacity? Not even bouncing ideas off each other?

No, no. Which is interesting, because this is part of what the image of the director is. And it's not necessarily the person - specifically my relationship with Amy, which is our own thing, but there's a kind of a cliché that the director walks around the room tearing pages out of the book, going 'This goes here, this goes here, make it work'. And that is kind of true for some things, I mean, I think that Hitchcock's stuff where they would write a treatment and then get some writer to knock it out, they are the authors of those pieces, but the way that we work is different so she writes it and I don't have anything to do with that and then I read it and I get some points of clarity on it. And then I'll shoot it. And then she comes into the edit and we re-organise it in the edit, or not, depending on how well I've shot it. And then that's the creative partnership, so it's not – you know, the person who's directing and editing has a lot of power but the person who writes and edits has almost equal power, I think in that. So that's why the critics are different on the end of High-Rise, with the director and writer credits being a shared card rather than a separate hierarchy kind of thing. But it's different strokes for different folks in all these things of how films are put together. I mean, Free Fire [Wheatley's new film] is different again, because I wrote the original draft and then she's re-written it, so it's not quite the same process, you know?

So in terms of the challenges, the form is so different, a book is so fucking different from a film and it's like a film is literal, absolutely literal, all the time, you see everything all the time, there's hardly anything you can't see, it's really hard to hide stuff away, whereas the book can get away with all sorts of things – the writer is like a man with a torch in a dark room who's just showing you things and your brain is kind of putting them together into a picture, but when the book contradicts that picture you're not that surprised about it, but with film, when you're literally watching something and then you have a problem with it, then that's a totally different thing. Obviously it's a time-based medium versus the book which you can flip backwards and forwards and you don't feel that the book has failed if you have to flip back a few pages, you just think you haven't read it properly. And I think that's different. And also that book, specifically High-Rise doesn't have much dialogue in it, so she mainly had to dig the dialogue out of like the reported speech of the book and other sources that she brought to it, so I think that was hard. But the main difficulty was wrangling that many characters and still trying to be true to the book while reducing some of the characters down and some of the plot lines down so it didn't run five hours or whatever. It's those decisions that were the complicated things. 

How difficult is it to strike the right balance between horror and comedy in your films and how do you know when it's working?

I guess when I laugh...

But that's just you laughing. How does that work for everyone else?

Because I'm the universal person, it's empathy and humanity, isn't it? You want to assume that people are like because you wouldn't want to get into making films if you were some totally, socially outcast, not understanding anything about how humanity works and you had to do it. You know, films often take a risk to the more general audience, a bit. But I think a lot of filmmaking is taste and I kind of trust my own taste and trust Amy's taste, and when we watch stuff and we enjoy it then we figure that's job done, you know. There's lots of people might disagree with that, but that's their business. If they don't like it, that's just whatever. There's lots of things I don't like, but I don't get to complain about it, you know? 

I think if you're making a film that needs to gather an audience of old people and young people and people from China and people from Stockholm and people from all over the world, then it's a very different kind of filmmaking and not necessarily a bad one, a very challenging one I'd imagine, but it's not necessarily what we do, at the moment. 

People get that balance wrong though, all the time. How do you know you're on the right track with it?

I don't know - it's just a sense of humour, isn't it? It's a personal thing. I am like I am all the time with people, I know what's funny sometimes, sometimes I'm appalling, I get it wrong, but in the film you've got a chance not to make such a bad balls of it. 

I spoke to Elisabeth Moss about High-Rise around LFF time and her main memory of the shoot was just you giggling at pretty much everything...

Yeah, I mean how could you not, in the middle of all that? It was brilliant, having loads and loads of people in costume and really big actors doing really crazy stuff. Just seeing her smoking a cigarette all day long while being pregnant made me laugh a lot. 

You mentioned loads of really great actors. You've assembled an absolutely fantastic cast. What qualities were you looking for in the four main characters?

There wasn't any real question of who we were going to get to get for Lang – we wanted Hiddleston, because there's lots of different levels to Tom. On one level he's kind of like a matinee idol, as far as we've got, he's like a British film star. He's tall and good-looking and stoic and strong and straightforward. You know. So on that level, as a performer he has a certain cachet and a meaning. But then on the other side of it he's Tom as a person, he's very intelligent, but he's measured, so he controls himself really, really well, which is a trait that is important for Lang, so you can see Tom's thinking - really quick, but he thinks about what he says and he doesn't ever put a foot wrong and it's really brilliant, and when you see him at Q&As and stuff, he's just amazing. 

So that side of it, I knew from watching interviews with him that he would be really good at that and he felt close to Lang, in a way, that he could project his personality into that Langian space. But then you can see it, almost in the petulance and anger and humour of the Loki performance, that it's all there and then there's the realism and subtlety of the Joanna Hogg pieces as well, so that was never a question for us and it was great that he did it because he made it happen basically, at the beginning, we wouldn't have been able to finance the film. And what I like about him a lot is that you see him at all the events, you see him at all the BFI stuff and he knows and you look at his career and he does massive great big films and he does lots of indie stuff, so he's thinking about what that selection of movies are in that year that he puts his time into, which is great. So that was great and then you can't really argue with the Irons casting because that's just so perfect [laughs].

I was just going to say that. So when you brought it to Jeremy, how did he react? Did he jump on board straight away?

Yeah, pretty much. I had a few chats with him and he's a very sharp man. He doesn't suffer fools, and obviously being an elder statesman and highly respected skilled actor, it's all a bit hairy, but he'd seen Sightseers and he liked that, so there you go, what can you say?

And then Luke Evans is someone that I kind of knew, I'd seen him in The Hobbit and thought, 'Who's that? He's fucking brilliant, that guy', but didn't really think about it, and then his name came up on the casting list and I watched The Great Train Robbery. And then I talked to Neil Maskell, because Maskell was in Train Robbery as well. And he said, 'Oh god, Luke's great, really, he's such a nice guy'. And that's rare for Neil, so I thought, yeah, okay [laughs].  

I was going to say, I think this is the best thing Luke Evans has done, actually...

Oh, man, so I met him and I could see he could be really cross [laughs]. And he hadn't been – he was kind of smouldering in The Hobbit, but you could see there's much more energy and anger that's in him. And then we just let him rip, really, and that was a revelation. 

And Charlotte? Or Sienna, rather?

I've liked Sienna's stuff since seeing her in Factory Girl. I'd seen her in that and up until that point, I only knew her from newspapers and then I watched the film and I saw the titles and was like, 'Fuck, THAT'S Sienna Miller, oh my God, she's brilliant, that totally doesn't tally with my slightly prejudiced view of what she would be like'. And then I saw her in The Girl as well and thought she's brilliant in that and then I met her and she was terrific. But her and Elisabeth Moss have got this thing of, you know, you look at the rushes and there's no spare frames in any of that stuff, everything they do is great. And some actors are different and they build up to it and you get it and it's all fine and it's always going to get there but they some stuff and they try stuff out, but the timing of those two is just so fantastic and they're just so fascinating to look at, I think. 

Do you have a dream project you've always wanted to make?

[Pause, makes 'Urgh' noise] I don't know. I don't have dream [laughs] projects, but there's some stuff we're working towards. We're kind of trying to go towards doing a Battle of Britain project, maybe, or some big State of the Nation type thing. I want to do some big sci-fi stuff if I can. I think it's like, to be able to have a career where – alright, the big dream project is this, is to have a career that's like a 1940's director, to be able to go from genre to genre and from assignment to assignment that are all very different and for the films to be good [laughs]. If I can do that, then that will be brilliant, but it's not a specific thing, 'I really want to do my adaptation of Joan of Arc', it's not like that it's more to be able to work within all those different areas, to do cowboy movies and to do musicals and to do sci-fi films. At different scales, as well, they don't have to all be - you know the dream isn't really to spend more and more money because that doesn't really help. Probably the best experiences in terms of production are always at the lower end. 

There's not another book, for example, on the same bookshelf that you're thinking, 'Well, maybe that one...'?

Not at the moment. I mean, we're a bit gun-shy for adaptations of books at the moment, because it is a tricky one. A book gives you a leg up in terms of, just on a basic level of people know about it, will want to know about the adaptation of that book because they like it. So that's an advantage, but the disadvantage is the flip-side of that coin, is that you then can't - depending on how roughly you handle the book, you get into all sorts of trouble down the line and then you can never really - the book has always cast a shadow across the project because you didn't initiate it. So it was interesting doing it, but it's not necessarily something we'd do again, for a while, for a long while. But I might do a comic book adaptation or something like that.

Any particular comic book?

Nothing springs to mind at the moment. I wrote a spec version of Strontium Dog, 2000 AD, but I don't think I ever showed it to anyone, it was just an exercise in looking at it. But I think they're doing it as a TV show now.

What's your taste in comics then? Are you drawn more to the 2000 AD stuff?

I'll read anything. I think I'm kind of on the end of my second comics renaissance. So I read them when I was a kid and then stopped when I got to like, 17, 18, and then I started rebuying them when I was thirty, I had to rebuy all the comics I'd sold – I sold them all for beer when I was a teenager. So I'm going back and re-buying Starlord [note: the British one http://www.starlordcomic.com/, not the Guardians of the Galaxy character] and 2000 AD and getting all those '70s things and The Crunch and I'm buying up Metal Hurlant at the moment, the original ones, not Heavy Metal.

I wanted to ask a question about the BAFTA moment in the movie [where someone is beaten with a BAFTA], going back to what Elisabeth Moss said about you giggling, I felt you could practically feel your giggles coming off the screen at that point. What kind of reaction have you had to that?

I don't know – we got one sniffy review that said it was a bit knowing. I don't know. It made me laugh because it wasn't scripted when I think Purefoy says, 'BAFTA him!' [Laughs very loudly] That made me fucking howl laughing. And then the other thing with Luke Evans, it isn't in the film, but it did make me laugh a lot, Luke Evans is on the ground and Peter Ferdinando has to go like this with the BAFTA [mimes thumping someone with an object but missing at an angle], looks like he's hitting him and Luke's going, 'You're going to hit me in the face', he goes, 'No, I'm not, I'm not', and Peter's just such a klutz, he goes [makes punching noise] and Evans goes, 'Jesus Christ' and Peter's like, 'Oh, man...' He was alright, it was rubber. But I put it in the film – well, Amy wrote it, but I got to talk to [special effects genius Dan Martin] and he'd made the BAFTA, obviously, and we got the plaque done, so the plaque says, 'Ben Wheatley, Laurie Rose and Paul Cosgrove, winners for Sons of Krom', I think it is, 1974 [laughs]. So I've got my BAFTA and they can't take it away from me. And it's a much better BAFTA than the ones they give out and it's got blood all down it as well and it's in my house forever. So I win. [laughs]

END

Interview with David Keating, director of Cherry Tree

This interview originally appeared on WOW247 (RIP).

Interview with David Keating for Cherry Tree

Where did the idea come from, first of all?

So, I made a film called Wake Wood, which is in similar emotional territory, with the writer-producer director Brendan McCarthy and Brendan then had the idea for Cherry Tree. So it came a few years ago and it was quite a lot of conceptual work about what are the emotions behind it before we ever really settled on whose story it was. So it went through quite a few iterations with Brendan as the screenwriter and producer.

What kind of preparation did you do, and did you watch any particular films beforehand?

The preparation that I did principally was getting down and dirty with the centipedes. We met first in a small suburban bathroom in Belfast where there's a centipede enthusiast who kept them in her bedroom. So me and two of the effects people were there and we were in a bathroom because putting them into a bath was the safest way to be able to photograph them. In fact, in the FrightFest program, the big image of the centipede, I took that day with it climbing down the front of my lens. You know, it's one of those funny things where when you start to relax a little bit, you start to get a little too close and the centipede handler will just go, 'No. Too close.' Because they can suddenly move very fast and their venom is very nasty.

So you did your own centipede wrangling?

No, we had a fantastic centipede expert with us. We met Dr Michel Dugon, who is one of the leading venomous animal specialists and a fabulous guy. And he worked very closely with the actors, actually. He was really key to the kind of trust that we built up, because there are very few effects shots with centipedes in the film – they are 95% all real.

So the centipedes that are effects shots, are they CGI? Animatronics? Plastic animals? Or something else?

They're a combination of things. Some of them are real but digitally enhanced. I think in two shots there's a 3D model.

So most of the shots where the actors have centipedes on them, they're all real?

Absolutely. In fact, I don't think there are any shots with the actors where the centipedes aren't real.

Including the sex scene?

Real.

How did the actors react to that?

They were fabulous, you know? It was very interesting, because I was like a broken record about safety in the very beginning, when I met the actors, even before they were cast. And once they'd read the script, I would give them a speech about how not to worry, they would never have to interact with a centipede, in fact it wasn't possible for them, they were too dangerous, so I gave them this whole speech, which after a certain number of weeks went completely out the window. I had to just completely eat my words. But that's kind of the process, where you're going, 'Okay, is this safe?' But you've got somebody there who's being very clear and level-headed, so we hit a point where Michel said, 'This centipede will not bite you' and the actors trusted Michel enough to go, 'Okay'.

Was it in their contracts, that they had to be okay with centipede handling?

No, absolutely not. In fact, Naomi Battrick is one of the physically bravest people I've ever worked with, but she's absolutely terrified of spiders. She is viscerally arachnophobic and we did work in some conditions where there were a lot of big spiders, not in front of the lens, but just in the locations and it was very, very hard for her. So I was quite worried that she was going to be fearful around centipedes, but actually she was fine, she was very brave.

So you wouldn't subscribe to the adage, 'Never work with animals or children?' Or centipedes?

You know, all I seem to do is work with kids and animals. In all the films I've made, I've wound up working with some combination of the two. We had big animal scenes in Wake Wood too.

With films such as It Follows and The Witch, there seems to be an explosion of low-budget psychological horror films. Do you see Wake Wood and Cherry Tree as fitting into that explosion?

[Long pause] Well, these are love stories. Their genre is horror and their sub-genre is reanimation or witches, depending on how you want to classify, but Cherry Tree is a story about how much a teenage girl loves her dad. That's what it's about. So in as much as these films fit into a wave of other films, the emotion that people feel, the love within families, that's a theme we've been exploring forever and I'm sure we'll keep exploring.

Do you see those elements as something that horror can exploit particularly well?

Well, love and fear are a very interesting pitchfork, love being one of the big motivators in life and fear being one of the big demotivators.So, for me, it's really interesting to pair them up. I don't know if I'd be able to make a film if I wasn't able to explore ideas that I felt I understood or I'm really curious about. So there's an element of that which is 'Okay, you've got a plan, stick to the plan, deliver the plan' and there's quite a bit of that in filmmaking, but there's another side which in some ways motivates me more, or at least as much, which is about, 'Here's an idea, let's explore it, where can we get to with this idea, on the back of this idea?' And that principle operates with the whole team, with the effects people and very much with the actors.

Did you learn anything during the making of Wake Wood that you applied to Cherry Tree?

[Very long pause – 23 seconds] I suppose that I learned that I have not gotten over my teenage obsession with cameras and actors. On Wake Wood, I sort of reconnected with, 'Oh yeah, what was it that I was nuts about when I was fifteen? Oh, right, this.' Actors and what happens when you put a camera in front of them. I noticed on Wake Wood that that was really what my particular passion was. So I indulged it on Cherry Tree, I suppose.

Are you keen to explore other genres or do you see yourself sticking with horror?

You know, the first film I made, The Last of the High Kings was about how much love there was within a family and the second film I made, Wake Wood, was about how much a married couple love their kid. Cherry Tree is about how much a teenage girl loves her dad. Obviously, we're opening FrightFest, so it's a horror, but that's the genre, it's not what it's about. For me, there's a difference between genre and thematic material and I will definitely make more horror films if I get to make more films, but not only, I would think. But the only continuity that I could sort of pledge to is I'll probably keep making love stories. And some of them, I hope, will be horror. That's a really messy way of answering your question, but I hope it makes sense.

What's the hardest thing to get right, overall?

[Pause] The contract you have with the audience. The promises that you make at the beginning and then delivering them. And I often think about my mentor, John Boorman, who had a big influence on lots of my thinking about film. And he talked about setting objectives for himself and always failing to achieve them. I think lots of filmmakers feel that way and we set our objectives and then we try and jack them up even higher and then we maybe get some of them, maybe not all. But I think one of the difficult things to manage is that film audience relationship, and what you promise at the beginning and how much you deliver and maybe how much they'll let you get away with by the end.

What steps do you take to ensure that you achieve those objectives? Because you don't know for sure until the film screens to an audience, so what sort of sense do you have of it as you're shooting?

Questioning, 'Have we connected this character to the audience?' At one point, I was very concerned that with the character of Sissy, we hadn't seen her by herself, so that was something that we were able to correct. We see her by herself later in the film than I would have liked, but I wanted the audience to feel that this character has an inner life, and that's not so easy to do if there's always story to be advanced, or other characters to interact with. It's probably easier to do with somebody by themselves and I was just conscious of that, so it's things like that.

And also you have to be careful, in that sense, if your film is predominantly from [lead character] Faith's point of view, then it's difficult to go outside that point of view and set up whatever else you need to set up, so it's a tricky balance...

You know, you're absolutely right and the point of view was something that we all discussed quite a lot. There was a version of the script of Cherry Tree that was really from Faith's dad's point of view,  Sean, it was about a dad who's very sick and he's really worried about his daughter and then he discovers that his daughter is pregnant and then he discovers that his daughter has made this terrible deal, so it's his journey. And I felt that that rendered Faith passive, and I pressed very hard that we flipped it and made this all about Faith, make it her story.

How do you see the future of horror cinema in the UK?

[Pause] I think it's going to get weirder. I hope it is. Probably, maybe more like the '60s, you know, wilder. I love the idea that horror has the kind of muscle to be a broad church, to gather in all sorts of strangeness and viscera, in not just the physical sense, but that the things that make you feel viscerally. Maybe I'm just saying what I hope for.

Do you have a next project lined up in which you could contribute to making it weirder?

Yes, I do. It's very, very different. It's a horror film, but it's very, very different to the last two that I've made. It does involve kids and a family and it's quite wild. I can't really say any more than that. I was sort of desperate to talk about it, because I'm actually at that stage where I'm like a burst pipe about it but I got warned off, I got told to keep my mouth shut about it. The reason that was actually given to me was that all this takes much longer, which I know perfectly well from experience, but of course, if you talk about it now, people sort of expect it to be out next year.

How important is Video On Demand to the future of independent filmmaking and distribution?

I think it's really important, Video On Demand can take us back to theatrical on demand where if you want to watch a film by yourself on your laptop or on your tablet or however you want – effectively, we've got Video On Demand on aircraft now, that's great, that's fine. If you want to gather together and watch stuff, it can be your family or your friends or your classmates or fellow enthusiasts who you gather together and share, or you can just vote for it to be on at your local cinema and in a couple of weeks it very possibly will be. So I think what we've been doing for too long it is pouring content at the audience, where they're 'If you want to see this, go there', whereas now, the audience really has a say in where they see something, how they see it, what version they see.

I was thinking in terms of horror films in particular being able to find an audience that perhaps they wouldn't otherwise find, outside of dedicated film festivals like FrightFest, for example. It's quite hard to get horror films a decent distribution deal, most of the time...

It's hard to get any film distribution. In a way, in some regards, I think genre films are having a better time than – let's say fantasy films, for argument's sake, fantasy films in that broad category are having a much easier time than drama.

Who are your main horror influences?

I loved how Stanley Kubrick made The Shining. I thought that was inspired. We don't tend to think of him as a horror director, but it's one of the great horror films. I love the way Spielberg made Jaws, again, what a magnificent horror film, and brilliantly made. So I think the spirit that Robin Hardy conveyed in The Wicker Man, I watch the film and go, 'How did he do that?' You kind of think you know and go, 'Oh, that's because of that and so-and-so's so creepy', but that's a film that operates on so many different levels at once.

Can you remember what made you interested in that particular genre in the first place? What made you want to direct films with horror elements in them?

[Pause] You get to chase your wildest imagination and as a team we're trying to up each other, go, 'Great, that's a good idea, can you go further?' You get to play with centipedes and chuck blood around, so it's very fun. As well as it being fun, there is a dark side to life and we are,  I think most of us tend to try and walk in the sun, but we know it's there and I think I've always been really interested in exploring ideas that say, 'Look, there's more going on than what you see'.

And finally, do you have a particularly amusing centipede anecdote?

Two very quick ones. We got the biggest ass lens to do a particular shot, a piece of kit called a Barstow, I think that's what it's called. I mean, on the front of the camera, it looks like a fucking machine gun. It's this ridiculous thing, we've got the camera up here and this thing down here [gestures] and it's massive and we had a monitor and we were right in on the centipede's head, like right there, and you're going, 'Awesome, awesome, awesome...' and the centipede had been eating pig skin and in giant size on the monitor, it threw up, and that, I believe is the most disgusting thing I've ever seen in my life. Check the DVD extras – I assume it'll be there. But actually losing one on the set too. They're absolutely fine as long as you know where they are and you know where you are and that's completely fine, but as soon as you don't know where one is, it could be absolutely anywhere, as in crawling up the inside of your leg. We just couldn't work – we had to clear the set until we found the centipede.

Where was it?

It was curled up under a chair, basically. We were all [frantically checking ourselves to see if it was on us] and being completely ineffectual about finding it. Going, 'Where do you look?' 'Well, we've looked there', 'Well, look again, look again' ...

Nobody freaking out, or everybody freaking out?

Some people walking away, some people going, 'I'm not scared of that centipede'. In fact, it was the chief electrician said, 'Just leave this to me', and I think it was the centipede wrangler and the electrician just searched the place and found it.


END

Amy Schumer's 15 Funniest Sketches

Note: This piece originally appeared on Virgin Media, but disappeared when they did a site revamp. It was written in August 2015.

Amy Schumer's 15 Funniest Sketches

You might not have heard of Amy Schumer, but the release of her comedy Trainwreck (directed by Judd Apatow) this week is set to change that. Her ever-increasing popularity is due, in large part, to her Comedy Central sketch show Inside Amy Schumer, which features excerpts from her stand-up shows and a series of brilliant sketches that take potshots at a number of cultural issues, from body image pressure to gender stereotyping, rape culture and sexism in Hollywood, alongside the standard subjects of relationships and sex. Fortunately, though the show doesn't yet air in the UK, the good people of Comedy Central have made her work available on YouTube, so here's an Amy Schumer crash course, with 15 of her funniest sketches.

1) 12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW7-XPumv9A (full length, not official); https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96LgRmOF9_o (clip, official)

Schumer's crowning achievement to date is this brilliant parody of Sidney Lumet's black and white classic 12 Angry Men. Essentially a single sketch, but lasting the entirety of her 20 minute show, it features the likes of Paul Giamatti, Jeff Goldblum and John Hawkes as 12 jurors, only instead of debating whether or not a young man is guilty of murder, they're trying to decide whether Amy Schumer is hot enough to be on television. The genius of the sketch is that it hits all the beats of the classic film, from the surprise production of a certain object to a revealing emotional breakdown at the end. Inspired, and beautifully executed.

2) Last F**kable Day - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPpsI8mWKmg

Schumer's best short sketch to date is this brilliantly conceived skewering of sexism and double standards in Hollywood. While walking in the woods, Amy comes across three of her heroes, Tina Fey, Patricia Arquette and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who have come together to celebrate Julia's last f**kable day. As Julia explains, “In every actress's life, the media decides when you finally reach the point where you're not beliveably f**kable anymore”, citing the example of Sally Field, who went from playing Tom Hanks' love interest in Punchline in 1988, to playing his mother just six years later in Forrest Gump. 

3) Celebrity Interview - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNfBbJ0pzbA 

Amy's appearance as starlet Amy Blake Lively (ouch) on late night talk show Cliffley Lately (with the host played by Trainwreck co-star Bill Hader) is an almost painfully accurate send-up of the sexism and pandering of celebrity interviews with beautiful women. From the forced flirting with the host (“I've always had a little bit of a crush on you”) to the leering audience and the pandering to the openly masturbating fanboy crowd (“My favourite movie, I'm so embarrassed...is Star Wars...”), this is so spot-on that you'll never be able to watch an actual US talk show interview again without thinking about it.

4) Girl, You Don't Need Make-Up - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyeTJVU4wVo

If you've seen one Amy Schumer sketch in the past, the chances are it's this one, as it did the rounds on social media after it first aired. It's a very funny pastiche of a boy band pop video (basically, it's One Direction), in which they dance around Amy singing that she's so beautiful that she doesn't need make-up...until she takes her make-up off, at which point they change their minds (“Hold up, girl, we spoke to soon / With this whole no make-up tune...”) As with all the best musical parodies, it's also catchy as hell.

5) Operation Enduring Mouth - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWbSsLQDIPA

Another well-aimed dig at sexism in Hollywood, this spy movie sketch zeroes in on the fact that women in action thrillers are either side-lined or reduced to titillating sex objects. Receiving a brief for a top secret mission, her male counterpart (code name: Crossbolt) is given lots of thrilling espionage activities to do (rapelling down a building, hacking into a mainframe, that sort of thing), while Agent Amy's (code name: Butter Face) mission is to distract the enemy with oral pleasure.

6) Compliments - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzlvDV3mpZw&xrs=synd_youtube_040715_ias_7

A number of Schumer's sketches focus on the social interactions of women, often filtered through film and TV tropes. This one takes the idea that “women can't take compliments” to ridiculous extremes, with each of the women responding to compliments with ever more self-deprecating comments. (“Look at your little dress!” “Little? I'm like a size 100 now. I paid like $2 for it – it's probably made out of old Burger King crowns...”)

7) Multiple Personality Disorder - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36SHd0J61c0 

Okay, so not all Schumer's sketches have important things to say about cultural issues. This one's just a very funny routine that takes the piss out of thrillers where a character has a multiple personality disorder. The joke is that Amy's character is terrible at accents, so although her disorder is real, she lacks the facility with the dialects and voices to be any good at it. “Basically, she sucks at having multiple personalities”.

8) POV porn - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb8nc9TTpB4

Lots of Schumer's sketches focus on sex from a female perspective and this one takes that idea to its logical conclusion, imagining what a woman's eye view of POV porn might look like.

9) You Can't Go In There - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARhyKBNFHmY

This is another sketch that pokes fun at gender stereotyping, getting a surprising amount of comic mileage out of targeting secretaries in movies and TV shows whose only job appears to be to shout “You can't go in there!” as someone barges into her boss' office. The fact that the sketch appears to be set in the 1980s somehow makes it that much funnier.

10) Herpes scare - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9JmCHmH35k

A recurring theme in Schumer's sketches involves her playing a version of herself as a selfish, thoughtless character who's only out for herself. In this sketch she tries to make a deal with God (played to perfection by the always excellent Paul Giamatti) after she finds out she might have herpes. (“Could I just, like, blow you?” “I'm gay....”) 

11) Who's More Over Their Ex? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv3Y7BiMt9E

This send-up of a game show in which two people compete to see which of them is more over their ex is so good that you find yourself thinking that you'd actually watch the show if it really existed. The rounds include: ignoring a phone call from the ex, having a conversation with a mutual friend without mentioning the ex and changing your relationship status to single on Facebook.

12) Football Town Nights - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM2RUVnTlvs

This is a great example of Schumer's gift for parody being used to stick the knife into an important social issue. On the surface, this sketch is an obvious parody of the TV show Friday Night Lights (right down to Schumer doing an expert rendition of Connie Britton's Texan accent), only it uses that vehicle to deliver a sizeable smackdown to rape culture, specifically the assumption of entitlement amongst high school athletes, with the football team and the entire town kicking up a fuss when the new coach (Josh Charles) institutes a No Raping policy. (“No raping? But coach, we play football!”)

13) He's Good-Looking - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgp5q9Fd0a8

A sharply observed sketch that centres on the idea that men are reluctant to admit that other men are attractive, with a side order of homophobia. When her boyfriend professes to have no opinion as to whether Channing Tatum is hot or not, Amy invents increasingly convoluted sexual scenarios, forcing him to choose between the attentions of Channing Tatum or Eugene Levy.

14) Sex Tips - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TXHSwMzS8s

A version of this sketch appears in Trainwreck, in which Amy's character works as a writer for men's magazine S'NUFF. In this sketch she plays the editor, pushing her staff of writers to come up with 500 new sex tips for the latest issue, all of which end in “....until he explodes”. The punchline comes at the end, with a news report that several men are suing the magazine after they were accidentally raped by their girlfriends after they followed the tips.

15) Sexting - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqYCsqUCNgo

Sexting has popped up in a number of Schumer's sketches, so it was a toss-up between this one and the one about the professional Sext Photographer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQMMOvD1Bp8). In this one, Amy's trying to respond to a request for a sexy text, but she hasn't quite got the hang of it, so her texts say things like “Rub all of my feet” and “Tell me what all my remotes do”, as well as composing and then deleting a number of other options, like “Tell me I'm safe in my apartment”.