An Insight into the making of Festival by Close-Up Film writer, Richard Dilks, who worked on continuity for the film
What possessed 'The Book Group' creator Annie Griffin to have 50+ speaking parts in her first feature and shoot it on location in Edinburgh during its famous festival? For her, it's about atmosphere: the festival should be part of the characters and the characters should be part of the festival. Having a large cast and rehearsing en masse made the cast of Festival not just into features within the city, as we shall see, but into something of an ensemble.
Mention of the word 'ensemble' brings to mind the American maestro of the form - Robert Altman. He has made his own British ensemble piece - Gosford Park - and indeed Griffin immediately cites him as a formative influence on her. Facing the blank screen that would become her first script for the big screen, she asked herself the question, 'what excites me in films?' Altman's films, and particularly ' Nashville ' were her answer; she feels that in them 'it's the world that you become interested in, not just the individual characters'.
One of the excitements linking Nashville , The Player or Gosford Park is their multiplicity: actors are often playing characters who are themselves acting a part, sometimes on stage or screen; often in their personal lives too. If all the world is a stage, the artistry of Altman's films captures a lot of reality. The artistry of Griffin 's film is very different: no dollies, no track, one crane shot, hardly anything on the tripod. The camera - the "interested camera", as she refers to it - is handheld almost throughout. Like The French Connection , the film makes you feel you're watching a documentary which happens to feature lots of surprisingly articulate people in unusually dramatic situations; it imbues a sense of being at the Edinburgh festival, amongst the crowds, in the clubs, with the performers and with the critics. In this regard, Griffin's film features a lot of reality: the jostling Royal Mile is filled with hopefuls of every kind (in 2004, over 700 performing groups staged 25,326 performances in 235 different venues throughout the city), watching and being watched.
One of the joys of Gosford Park is its levels: Clive Owen playing a manservant who is playing the part of a valet to Lord Stockbridge whilst then playing innocent of murder; Helen Mirren playing a housekeeper trying to reign in her interest in her given-away son. Festival saw actors perform for their colleagues in rehearsals. In the case of Chris O'Dowd or Stephen Mangan (playing famous TV comic Sean), they took to the festival itself and performed at or observed as much live comedy as possible. Many then performed parts on camera that were divided between their character's public performances and private scenes. For the first half of shooting, the festivals continued all around.
BBC Radio Scotland broadcasts a live radio show from a tent in the northern half of George Square, so Festival shot a Radio Scotland radio show from the southern half of George Square just after the BBC show finished, thus purloining most of its audience; the Perrier Awards are not known for restraint, Festival 's award ceremony is a neatly-plotted rampage; whilst people leaflet the Royal Mile, Festival' s Faith leafleted the Royal Mile with her one-woman show about Dorothy Wordsworth whilst radio critic Joan (Daniela Nardini) asked people unaware they were on camera what they thought of the festival. In the midst of it all, with radio mikes and shot from far away, were some of Festival 's players - particularly Faith (Lyndsey Marshall) - ad-libbing with the crowds before 'Cut!' saw an assistant director scurrying after the unsuspecting punter to get their permission to appear on screen.
Chris O'Dowd, fresh from Vera Drake , had a different kind of performance to tackle as Tommy O'Dwyer: his part as a stand-up comedian requiring him to perform stand-up to a room full of extras. There were a few paid stalwarts as extras, but Festival mainly relied on culling some of the festival punters off the street and onto set, even at 8am on a wet Thursday. O'Dowd got laughs from them in an evil-smelling underground cave of a venue at that time because of his natural comic talent, which blossomed; his research, which involved performing incognito at open mike events during rehearsal and shooting, and the rehearsals for Festival'.
It is rare that films have significant rehearsal periods, especially low-budget (£1.9m) British ones. Griffin wisely insisted - and her special relationship with FilmFour from 'The Book Group' no doubt helped - on two weeks of rehearsal with as many cast members as possible. On most days of those weeks there were twenty or more actors present. The script was viewed as a work entirely in progress, and progress was certainly made as actors played their own scenes and then had their fellow performers and Griffin comment on them. Sometimes they played each other's scenes, sometimes they took wildly divergent routes in different rehearsals - different takes, in effect, but without the tension of cameras. They would come back with new material, new material that emerged during rehearsal would be noted and worked in to following rehearsals. A process of chopping and layering saw some parts of the script change substantially, others hardly at all. What was guaranteed to change, however, was performance: the first take on the day would be the first with the pressure of cameras and the shooting schedule, but it would not be the first performance under peer pressure. The dangers of staleness inherent in that much practice were balanced by the fact that the script continued to change in shooting: rehearsals were to establish parameters, hard points over which whatever skin emerged in shooting would be draped and cut in the edit suite.
The standard comment on directors is that they 'know what they want'. This is applied to directors who, whilst they know they want tea rather than coffee, have no idea what they want from performance, camera or both. Griffin does know what she wants and, though the two things aren't necessarily joined at the hip, knows to push until she gets it. She is not an actor's director in the sense of being cuddly towards them. The phrase 'funnier, faster' springs to mind. She's an actor's director in her pursuit of the best performance. As producer Chris Young says, 'She never stopped auditioning them.' That she can be that tough is partly explained by having been an actor and performer herself; she knows how tough to be. Her understanding of the motives, pleasure and pains of performing underpin the film. Elements of Festival are drawn from her life - so actors found themselves playing on even another level.
The "interested camera"'s job was to link these scenes with those shot after the million visitors have gone, after the flyers have been trampled or pulped. In these less public scenes - shot in the churches, hotels, flats and houses of Edinburgh - the sensation of players playing still pervades. For Griffin , the defining quality of performers is their neediness. She sees being an actor as one of the hardest jobs in the world - the waiting to be picked - and so partly excuses the neediness that so interests her and drives her film. Festival is indeed a welter of need and manipulation, sitting on the line where the personal and professional rub against one another - all the sex scenes are entwined with characters' careers and there are few expressions of emotion that are free of calculation. As Griffin says, 'There's a neediness in performers. The relentlessness of that desire to get up in front of people has its dark side.'
Richard Dilks
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