Night poetry, and how to start making films
Award-winning director Barney Cokeliss talks us through his much-lauded Leica film ‘Like the Night’, the poem that inspired it and how young filmmakers can make their name.
As the European film industry finally emerges from a year of lockdowns, Barney is in Lyon, France and thrilled to be shooting again on a long-running series for the French bank CIC.
This is just one of the many projects that has kept the globe-trotting British-born director, writer and photographer continuously busy since he first shot (excuse the pun) to prominence at festivals such as Sundance and Venice.
In between takes, he took time to talk to us about ‘Like the Night’.
Cresta You are obviously a very successful director with projects all over the world, so what drew you to the Leica film?
Barney Cokeliss The thought of making something for such a legendary brand was really enticing - I’ve been taking pictures since I was fourteen years old and Leica has always represented a pinnacle of camera design. I hadn’t realised that they also invented 35mm stills photography, determined the 36x24mm “full frame” format that we’re still using today, invented the film canister and decided on 36 shots on a roll. It’s a bit nuts how much that one company has contributed to photography!
There are some brands where you just know that your own aesthetic and obsessions will complement what they want to communicate. And since they’re obsessional about quality when it comes to their products, I guessed (correctly) that quality would be their number one priority in making a film.
As it turned out, Leica were also really great to collaborate with – ambitious, open-minded, enthusiastic and patient. Though I didn’t know that in advance!
As for me working all over the world, one of the pleasures of the project was that I got to involve (or rope in....) my production pals in five countries on three continents and make something truly international.
Did Leica approach you, or vice versa?
Leica UK approached me, having seen my short film ‘Night Dancing’. They wanted to make something to showcase the fact that they’ve moved their cameras into the video realm.
I came up with the nocturnal theme, since Leica are famous for their wide-aperture lenses which gather more light in the dark.
‘Night Dancing’, the film that alerted Leica to Cokeliss
Where and when was it filmed? How long did it take to complete?
We shot in a lot of places – Bucharest, Berlin, Los Angeles, Lesotho, New Orleans, New York, Paris, Soweto. We were only able to do so by keeping the crew very small. As well as directing and scripting (though Lord Byron wrote the words...) I also produced and mostly lit the spot. So it took many months from start to finish.
Is the poem something you've always wanted to translate into a film?
Funnily enough Byron’s ‘She Walks In Beauty…’ is one of the small number of poems I’ve known completely by heart for years. When Leica and I decided on the night theme, though, I did look around for alternatives to make sure I'd done my due diligence.
I might well have gone for a Robert Frost poem, but it turns out that Frost is still in copyright!
“Byron’s ‘She Walks In Beauty…’ is one of the small number of poems I’ve known completely by heart for years.”
I think the poem is incredibly beautiful, of course, and I like how it was malleable to a new context. I think we got away with the switch from making it about the beauty of a woman to being about the beauty which surrounds a series of women as they walk through the night. And the references to “her eyes”, to “dark and bright”, to “rays” and “shade”, all seemed perfect for the subject matter of photography.
I also liked the occasional mismatch of accompanying more ominous or foreboding images with some of the more delicate lines. To me there's something about hearing those positive, tender words alongside tougher images that touches on the duality in everyone - even the mobster or the sinister figure can have a vulnerable side.
At the same time, I was keen not to make it a Poetry Film. I wanted the words woven through Anné Kulonen’s music and Ben Leeves’s sound design as just one of the textures, rather than being the element that drives it all.
So I asked Anné to voice the poem without much emotion or emphasis in the delivery - like an incantation, something muttered or whispered in your ear. This was to avoid having a declamatory read overwhelm a film which I wanted to be led by the visuals.
Initially, I'd thought about having different voices read each line of the poem, but in the end it was simpler and less distracting to stick with one.
I'd love there to be a whole series of films based on poems - it's something I’d watch if one of the broadcasters or streamers commissioned it!
Anné Kulonen, the Finnish-born composer, won a Cresta Silver award for the music in ‘Like the Night’, and also voiced the poem.
Where have you been based during the pandemic and were you able to get much done professionally over the last year?
I spent the year in London, hunkering down as the pandemic first hit, just as I arrived back from a shoot in Chicago.
I remember doing conference calls for another US job straight after that and being aware that the plans we were making - which involved international travel - were unlikely to come to pass. I think people in different countries realised at slightly different moments how much lockdown was going to be required.
As it happens, I've just got back now from shooting in Chicago for the same loyal agency (Gyro) and client (Insperity), and it's been an interesting way to bracket this strange year. I was really lucky to have a couple of tv projects in development so I had writing work to get on with when not many people – understandably – wanted to use directors who had to travel to get to a shoot.
You have shot in more than 26 countries. What are the best and worst places to shoot?
That’s a tough one! There are so many different factors involved.
It's hard to single places out and I don’t want to offend any of my wonderful friends and colleagues, but my highlights include New Zealand. It is a wonderful country to go to for any reason, and one I lived in for a year as a kid. The film culture there is highly sophisticated, yet combined with a good-natured, relaxed and egalitarian mind-set, along with mind-blowing landscapes, food and wine!
As for bad places to shoot. I think anywhere can work as long as you prepare appropriately for what is and isn't possible in the place you're going. Obviously, you can't show up in Outer Mongolia and expect things to run like you're in LA.
That said, I do fondly remember blowing out the electrical system of a huge stadium space in Chile on a Toyota shoot for Dentsu Toronto. We had an in-shot lighting change and, every time we triggered it, the fuses would go in the middle of the take, plunging us into total darkness.
But that doesn’t make Chile a bad place to shoot – on the contrary. The production service people there are really on it, the crew are dedicated and knowledgeable and the landscape and light are extraordinary.
Likewise, the leeches in the Malaysian jungle weren't particularly fun, but the Malaysian production and crew were great.
Sometimes you just have to get used to a different way of working. I remember being amazed and a little embarrassed on a shoot in Casablanca when the ECD of the agency took on the role of chivvying the crew along like a first AD. At first I thought it was terrible that he felt he had to do such a thing but to everyone around me it was completely normal.
One of the great pleasures of my working life is going back to places repeatedly. It's great to discover new places, but it's also a real privilege to feel that you I can show up in, say, Bucharest or Cape Town or Toronto or Hong Kong and have not just a favourite local restaurant or a cosy room in a hotel that you already know, but also friends from previous adventures to catch up with.
I can't think of any other industry where people bond so quickly, working intensively together over short periods of time, and then go their separate ways, hopeful of seeing each other again but with no particular time frame guaranteed. This makes every reunion a pleasure and makes you feel like a citizen of a community which is defined more by what we do than where we do it.
How did you get into a notoriously difficult-to-enter profession?
I did entry level jobs: production company runner, editing assistant, on-set runner and so on. Some of them while I was still at school, which was a privilege only possible because of family connections. For example, the mother of my oldest friend is a documentary editor and I would work at her cutting room during school holidays in exchange for precious access to the Avids at the weekends.
This meant that I could edit my first short films, something that would have been very hard otherwise.
To give you an idea of how different things were then, one of my more dreaded tasks was to be sent down six flights of stairs into the basement to stagger back up lugging the enormous, heavy, 2GB hard drive!
I did an English Lit degree and some postgraduate work and nearly became an academic, but the lure of filmmaking was too strong. I'd been taking photographs since my dad put a camera in my hand for my 14th birthday and, for me, filmmaking is a way to combine the storytelling interests which drew me to English, with my visual/photographic interest. It's hard to beat that combination, especially when you add music.
Despite having made a couple of short films at university that were well received and even went to festivals, I was rejected by the film school I applied to (it hadn't occurred to me to apply to more than one). But I got accepted – on the second try – onto an incredibly competitive training scheme at the BBC. That was a huge opportunity and led to my first commission. While I was still a trainee, I made a two-minute film (commissioned by MTV) that went to Sundance and a 10-minute film (commissioned by BBC2) that went to Venice.
I didn’t really realise how fortunate this was. I even spent half a day during Sundance trying out snowboarding for the first time. Not the most career-savvy use of the time!
Essentially, then, it was through making a couple of shorts that I was able to get attention in the industry. So when people ask for advice, I tell them they don’t have to have a huge body of work before they get going professionally. It's more a question of having one or two stand-out pieces.
The other bit of advice I give people who want to be filmmakers is just to get on with it any way they can. You don’t learn as much through watching other people do something as you do by doing it yourself – even at a tiny budget level with limited knowledge and disastrous results. It's likely that anyone's first efforts at filmmaking will be poor, so why not get those substandard efforts out of the way as soon as possible?
Now that almost anyone with as little as a mobile phone and a laptop can create a short video, how does a young director make his/her mark?
I think the way you make a mark is by having something fresh to deliver.
This doesn't mean that you need a particular message and it doesn't, in my view, mean that your filmmaking has to stem from your own identity. I think that’s limiting (Zadie Smith has written a really good essay about this in a fiction context).
I think that at the heart of any filmmaker’s work is a certain atmosphere. A feeling that emanates from them and their interests. It's like a signature.
I think it's connected to the way the best ideas come to us. In my experience, at least, they don’t come as conscious ideas. They come as a kind of mood – a semi-conscious buzz in the back of the brain, a feeling you can't quite shake and need to get out onto a screen.
To me, that's what makes filmmaking personal. The personal identity, background, experiences of a filmmaker will of course affect their choice of material and what they bring to the screen, but those things aren't inherently cinematically interesting. No matter how vital and urgent a particular issue might be, a bad film about them will still be a bad film.
So to me, ultimately, what makes a good film is that distinctive atmosphere/tonality/voice.
In practical terms, I’d say to people starting out:
- Don’t obsess about production value.
- Don’t worry too much about making a long piece (festivals prefer to programme shorter pieces).
- Don’t wait.
- Don’t think that you have to amass a certain amount of experience before you take something on. I turned down a couple of big opportunities in my twenties because - in retrospect - I didn’t feel qualified to take them on. Of course, one definition of something worth doing is something you're not yet qualified to do. You'll become qualified by doing it!
- Go towards the things that scare you (in a good way).
- Remember, it’s an iterative process: your first effort doesn't have to be extraordinary, or even competent. You may break through with your fifth attempt, so get on with getting those first four attempts out of the way.
- Aim for the emotions: whether you're making people laugh, cry, jump or whatever, that’s what will make them respond to your film.
- Bring something of the films you love into your own work. If you can figure out what you love about them and why you love it, it may give you a sense of what you want to bring onto the screen, and that joy and enthusiasm will be palpable to the audience.
As for the lowering of technical barriers to entry, I think it’s a really positive thing.
Until recently, filmmaking has been limited to those who can gather the resources to get the equipment and people together. But equipment is now more freely available and the number of people you need has become fewer.
Not at the top end, of course. In many ways the labour and technical requirements of filmmaking haven’t really changed for 60 years. Camera technology changes, the lights change, but you still need roughly the same people doing the same jobs as you would have needed if you were making, say, Citizen Kane or Some Like it Hot.
What has changed is how cheaply you can make something more observational/spontaneous/contemporary. Even French New Wave filmmakers needed film going through a camera and lighting to get an exposure indoors.
Now, with 4K video on most people's phones, there's not much holding back people who own a phone and a laptop from making a film which relates to their surroundings, the things and people they have at hand.
But you still need a story. You still need to be able to put in front of the camera whatever your story needs, and if we want stories which don’t just spring from the immediate surroundings of filmmakers (which would be limiting) then it's not just the equipment that’s needed, but everything else.
I listen to the Script Notes podcast religiously and something Craig Mazin and John August talk about often is the massive increase in accommodation costs in major cities (the ones people tend to go to start a film career). Assistant pay hasn't gone up much over 20 years, while living costs have gone up exponentially. So, while it may be easier for someone in their early twenties to get their hands on equipment that can shoot 4K video (a resolution that didn't even exist when I was making my first shorts), that person may well not have as much freedom of movement and flexibility of time, unless they're from a wealthy enough family, to pursue their goals.
Craig Mazin and John August recording the weekly Script Notes podcast, of which there are now 500 episodes.
How important are awards to directors like yourself?
Awards are a great shot in the arm because they make you realise that the work you are pushing so hard to make happen is chiming with an audience of people who care about the medium you're working in.
For years, I would sometimes be frustrated that certain of my stronger pieces wouldn't win as many awards as I hoped, and it's only recently that it's occurred to me that a lot of the time, they weren't being entered.
So here's a top tip for up and coming commercials directors:
- Try to set aside some money to do some entries of your own. Advertising agencies make tons of commercials every year and it's just not feasible for them to enter everything they do in every relevant category. And production companies can’t enter every contender in every category every year. These entries aren't cheap. That’s something that was so wonderful about the 2020 Cresta Awards. By making the awards free to enter, you helped ensure that you see everything that could be worth awarding.
Of course, it's worth remembering that to the outside world, advertising awards aren’t exactly salient. I bounded in on my partner last month to declare excitedly that I'd been nominated for a directing award. She was happy that I was happy, but had absolutely no idea what the award was, and she's a high-powered TV executive producer...
You took on most of the cinematography duties on 'Like The Night' and won numerous cinematography awards, yet you also worked with some great cinematographers. How do you decide when to do your own lighting?
I shot nine out of the ten locations on the Leica film by necessity, really. We were using very small crews and it was only in Bucharest that Phillipe Kress, who I'd just shot something else with, was able to kindly stick around and light some Leica scenes for me. He made a big contribution to those scenes and I was really glad to have him there. For the rest of the film, though, it was such a stripped-down production that it made more sense for me to do it myself.
It was surreal winning major cinematography awards and being nominated in that category alongside people like Linus Sandgren who won the Oscar for La La Land. You'd be amazed at how little equipment we made do with (some scenes I lit with the brake lights of a unit vehicle or one small LED). And it was my first time doing my own lighting for moving image.
For me, the collaboration with cinematographers is one of the great pleasures of filmmaking. On the practical level, of course, the good ones do something in a way that you could never do yourself and they take all those technical aspects off your shoulders. But it's more than that.
What I love is that constant dialogue – the back and forth about camera position, lens choice, blocking, actor movement, camera movement and so on – that makes it a joint journey of discovery which produces something better than either of us would have come up with on our own.
Who's the director you most admire and why?
In advertising, I think Frank Budgen was the best. He could do the coolest, most unexpected and stylish work one month and then do something off-beat and funny the next.
There aren't many people you can say that about. There are stylists then there are storytellers. Mr Budgen was both. I hear he was famously hard to produce for, late to make decisions and capricious in his desires. I've no idea if that’s part of what made his work so good, or whether it's just an aside. I suppose those things wouldn’t be tolerated in someone who was less of a genius. I do remember one art director that we had in common saying that on one job Budgen made an unexpected and last minute request to have a white horse in a particular shot (in a commercial which had absolutely no reason to have a horse in it). Everyone was bemused, but in the final film, those 14 frames of the horse elevated it to a different level.
In features, it's a tougher question as there are so many people doing great work.
My north star has always been Martin Scorsese for the sheer relish with which he embraces the medium. The way the shots are cut together in – for example – Who's That Knocking At My Door? The wit of It's Not You Murray, or all those masterstrokes of camera movement, editing and voiceover that we know so well. I love the playfulness of having a voiceover line begin 'Back home years ago…' while a title comes up over the shot to place the scene, saying 'Back home years ago'. Or the way he cuts from one piece of music to another in the middle of a scene, or accompanies a fight scene with music from a completely different tonality.
I also love David Lynch, particularly for his strange, ineffable atmospherics and films which invite more of an emotional understanding than a logical one.
Lost Highway is a particular fave, partly because the narrative is oblique and you're left feeling like you know you've experienced something significant but you can't quite put it into words. My theory about it is that it's actually a covert vampire film. But I doubt Mr Lynch would confirm or deny.
“I also love David Lynch…for his strange, ineffable atmospherics and films which invite more of an emotional understanding than a logical one.”
What projects are you working on now?
Right now I am in rural France, shooting some commercials for the CIC Bank with the Paris agency Australie - a team I've been honoured to be part of for quite some time, who are always a huge pleasure to work with.
After that, I have to deliver the series bible for an adaptation of ‘Heap House’ - an epic Victorian fantasy YA novel by Edward Carey, for which I've just written the pilot.
I have some other TV projects in development, including one based on a short story by China Miéville, the multi-award winning 'Weird Fiction' writer.
And I'm cooking up the next cinematic adventure with Leica, which I’m hugely excited about.
What is it that draws you to a particular advertising project?
The opportunities which excite me most are the ones where I get to use what David O. Russell calls the 'holy trifecta' of camera movement, music and performance.
There really is a magic when those three things are harnessed together. I'm open to all kinds of genres (funny stuff, scary stuff, cool stuff, emotional stuff) but what I love most is the intersection of the cinematic with the emotional.
Ideally, I'd want the spots I make to move the audience while embodying a kind of cinematic power which comes from that trifecta and choices made in editing, sound design, lighting and composition.
I've been lucky to have opportunities to make this kind of work as it's not the most commonly made. The Macmillan Cancer Support film that I made for Neil Shanlin and Katie Welch Cook is one example - the subject matter itself is inherently powerful and Neil and Katie backed me in all the filmmaking choices that made it so moving.
I guess that kind of work allows you to bring more depth to the screen. It was about people falling – a metaphor for how you feel when you've had a cancer diagnosis – and then being caught. A key reference point for me was Renaissance paintings of the ‘Deposition From The Cross’, the moment when Christ is taken down after the crucifixion.
There's no way that anyone would be aware of that when watching the commercial, but I think it gave the images a weight, balance and symmetry that they might not have had if I hadn’t those things in mind. That kind of reference feels appropriate when, as in the case of a cancer charity, the subject matter really is life and death.
You're also an accomplished photographer and the Leica cinema commercial was launched alongside an exhibition of your photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum. What can you tell us about the way your photography informs your filmmaking and vice versa?
It's a good question and one that makes me feel a bit better about taking so many photographs all the time and running up such a big bill at the lab!
For me, photography is a kind of zen practice. I love the quiet simplicity of it being just me and the person I'm photographing, without the army of people involved in filmmaking. So they complement each other.
‘Like the Night’ won a Cresta Silver for Outstanding Direction, a Bronze for Cinematography and a Silver for Music (Anné Kulonen).
Production company: Paddington Pictures
Director: Barney Cokeliss
Client: Jason Heward, Leica UK
Barney Cokeliss, director, writer, photographer…and Cresta award winner.
Barney is represented by the following companies:
Mad Cow Films (London) - madcowfilms.co.uk Someplace Nice (Canada) - someplacenice.tv Them Media (US) - them.tv Film&TV - danny@thruline.com
