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Shooting People <shootingpeople>

	Shooting People interviews Director of 'Park’	528 giorni fa
	Shooting People's James MacGregor interviews Director Justine Gordon Smith "I have always thought that you can see the bigger picture by looking small, if you see what I mean. One of the things that's relevant to many people watching this film is, they will have a park at the bottom of their road, they will have all these social groups from park drinkers to little old ladies. The film documents not just the community but the way we live today in our culture and that is something we should hopefully all be thinking about." - Justine Gordon Smith 'Park' is a unique insight into urban Britain and the people in the city. It?s an amazing view into our parks and the people who use them, live in them and in cases die in them. _____________________________ What was your route into filmmaking? I moved to a flat in a London council estate. I met people outside the theatre environment and it really put me back in touch with real people. I got really involved with people, sort of standing up for them, campaigning because conditions were really bad and everyone had lost hope. One of my neighbours had an only son in his twenties with schizophrenia and a year after I moved in he jumped to his death from the 10th floor. His Mum believed he did it because his doctor changed his medication without telling anyone and three days later he was dead? The authorities ducked responsibility and tried to imply that it was Daniel's mum's fault and because I was able to, I helped her get a lawyer and get an open verdict rather than suicide because it wasn't suicide- Dan's mum had been trying to get them out for years because she was always terrified he would jump and the last time she tried a council officer said to her they saw no point in moving him because if he was going to jump he could do it from suicide bridge up the road... You decide if you think that was suicide or just a tragedy waiting to happen because no one would listen. As I was thinking of quitting design and wondering what to do, I opened The Guardian one day and it said "Fully Funded MA". Coming from the theatre I was pretty skint and it suddenly seemed to make sense so I did my MA in film. Half way through the course, I had to make a 10-minute film. So I sat down and thought well, what do I know? And I went out and made a film about my neighbours. Daniel's story is just one of many and I thought it was time to tell them. THE BLOCK gained you BBC Newcomer Award 2001 didn't it? Yes, but I never made it to win anything. I went out and made it because I felt passionate about it. Suddenly there was all these people coming into the edit suites, saying "Wow." My friend Lee Rogers helped me in between his own project and then helped me edit it and we just submitted it for lots of things and got amazing feedback from filmmakers I really admire. Developing your work from there, you were known now within the BBC - was it a conscious decision to work outside, as an independent? Well, it all seemed a bit of a fluke. I had gone off to do an MA in documentary filmmaking, but I knew I was just starting out and had a lot to learn and I figured I could learn more by making my own mistakes and I guess I just wanted the freedom to see if I could do it again. I had learned that as a director, you have massive responsibilities. Not only for your crew, but for the people you film as well. I loved the idea of going out and telling these people's stories, of people who would never normally get the chance to tell them. What sort of stories do you like to seek out? Real stories about people's life - and death. About how they survive, how they live, who they are, what makes things tick, just lots of questions. I like to find people who would normally never get the chance to be heard, in a way. That's my focus for the moment at any rate. There's something really human for instance, in getting to know a park drinker and finding out why they are in the park, finding out who they are and then finding out they are a really decent person. Let's talk about your film PARK - where is "the park?" It's in a really ordinary postcode in London, N19 Archway, called Elthorne Park, a really little local park, like any local park that there is, the kind anybody has at the end of their road. I had just finished cutting The Block and I went in there. I had never gone in the park before because it had a really rather sinister look to it, a sort of forest. It is completely open like a lemon-shaped roundabout surrounded by housing and its got loads and loads of trees and you have no clear way to see through it. There are no gates or walls, so anyone can go in 24/7. An urban jungle? It was an urban jungle then. I had never been in there and I wondered, "Ooh is it safe?" And I found this Peace Garden. The local people had built this, a lovely Japanese garden. It was meant to commemorate Hiroshima and now it looked like Hiroshima had hit it. There was a circle of five commemorative cherry trees and three of them had been cut down and used for firewood by the local park drinkers. And there was this fountain, this beautiful water feature, with all these cans of lager bobbing up and down merrily. I got really intrigued by it and thought how did this garden become like this? How did that happen and what does that say about this community? What made you decide that was where you needed to spend the next couple of years? At the beginning I had no idea how long it would take - it just so intrigued me, so I went to the local authority and asked permission to film there, without them charging me a fortune or anything for location fees. The one condition was, that I didn't just film one of the social groups, i.e. the park drinkers, that I actually filmed the whole social community. It took me six months to research it and I joined the local park group and I started working at the Social Exclusion Centre next to the park as a multi media tutor to get to know that group and I just started to live amongst them. How did the local community take to the idea of their local run-down park becoming a film setting - did they think you were mad? They thought I was on a hiding to nothing! The idea of making a film in the park doesn't immediately make you think it would carry as a story, but the idea does carry and it carries very well. Working at the Social Exclusion Centre, hanging out there all the time, I started to meet people, real characters. I applied to Carlton -Metroland - to get funding to do it as a one-week thing, which was really optimistic, because you can't cover something like that in a week, so they turned me down. Then I found out about the Community Media Organisation, who give small grants out for media projects and I came up with this idea that I would make a film and screen it in the park as a social experiment, because in urban areas people become isolated, they don't mix, they don't interact. What would happen if you showed them each other? What would happen if you showed the people who hate park drinkers what they are really like? What would happen if you show people what teenagers were really like, why they hung out and smoked weed, showed other people where they were coming from? That was how I pitched it to the CMO and they liked it enough to let me have a bit of money. After that I had to find a cameraman, a sound girl; all of that. We couldn't afford to pay ourselves, so over the long period of time needed we worked in the park in intensive blocks, recording what was happening on "a day in the life" of the park basis, really. We didn't arrive for just an hour, or set up interviews, that kind of thing. After about three months, the first cameraman got really fed up with my set-up because he really wanted structure, that really wasn't what it was about, so we had to part company. It was about developing relationships with people and finding great characters over time and a lot of opportunism. Then I found a young Danish filmmaker called Marlene Rasmussen and she agreed to collaborate with me and I gave her a co-directorship and we carried on filming for another year. How easy was it, while filming in their park, to build that element of trust with the community? You have got that six-month period in which to build up relationships with people, which is what I did, but then you have got to get the community used to you and used to the camera, so they are not really aware of you any more. When I started, even though I worked at the social exclusion centre, the park drinkers were really antagonistic towards me. Everyone took the attitude of "You can't film us," sort of thing, or "You can't just film us and then go and sell it to Channel 4," sort of reaction, but over time I won their trust. Working with my first cameraman I managed to get a couple of drinkers involved. Just as I was getting their confidence, there was a big community meeting called by, "the park group", about the future of the park. I persuaded three of the drinkers to go to it because it was their park too and they were members of the local community and they should be able to go and have their say. It was quite an interesting meeting because one of the drinkers had been really badly mugged and he wanted the community to know how he felt and he kept swearing and it was quite inappropriate and some of the parents got really annoyed and upset about it. It made the point, in away, that that conflict existed. That was picked up on by the local paper, but when they looked into it, they discovered the drinkers had said to the meeting that they were in the park 24/7 and really needed some kind of shelter so they did not get pneumonia and the community had said, well, if that's what you need, we'll try and organise something. The paper heard about that and before we knew it the paper was in there, went along and spoke to some of the drinkers without telling them they were reporters, got their names, printed their names in the paper and we had this headline "Row Over Drinkers Shelter" where they rang up two local residents, who weren't even at the meeting but who had opposing views and built the article around them. The simple fact is, there was no row. All that had happened was that the drinker who was mugged, who was upset about it, swore and so he was asked to leave the meeting at that point and the meeting then carried on. The Park Group said they would put the shelter in their long-term plan, but then we had this big row blown up in the paper and it caused controversy, so they never got their shelter - and I got the blame for it. One of the lads had a real go at me and I had to stand up to him and I said in the end "You are asking people not judge you because you have a can in your hand. Well, don't judge me because I have a camera. Not all filmmakers are bad people." After that, he couldn't have been more helpful and has ended up in our edit. Was the group of park drinkers always the same people or did your characters change? I hate calling them park drinkers because they are just people who hang out in the park and that is labeling them already. Some of them are hard core drinkers, some are people who like to come in and hang about with them now and then, some of them are just philosophers and some of them are Irish travelers. You can't just lump them all into one social group because they are not, they are all very different people. One of the guys, who's like a kind of natural philosopher in the film, George, stopped me from being attacked on the first day of the shoot because one of the travelers was going to mug me for the camera. George helped me manage that situation without any conflict. I just fronted these guys off and he left me alone. I was just honest with them and treated them with respect, so they let me be. In my experience, if you are straight with people, it avoids lots of potential problems. But there are loads of characters in the film from diverse ages, races and backgrounds, so an audience is bound to find a character familiar to them. Were you deliberately looking for things? Really strong documentary making allows the viewer to make decisions. You have to take your subject matter in an objective way. Someone might look at the teenagers and because of where they are coming from; they'll see them in a different way from me. You need that, because documentary has to have something in it for everybody. You have to present the evidence and let people make their own interpretation. Story telling is about getting to the core of the issue or story but also about leaving enough room for people to make up their own minds. I would love to turn up and film and have it change people's perceptions of things, but in the end, you can't make anybody do anything. You can only be responsible for what you do. One of the things that helped make the project such a success for me was that we treated everyone with respect, whether you were a ten year old child or a little old lady, everybody was treated with the same respect and dignity. So a great vibe developed between us and the people in the park, which gave us truthfulness, which is really important to me. Who were some of your favourite characters, discovered during filming? One of my favourites is Josephine. She's an elderly lady who goes through the park every day at eleven o'clock. She feeds the pigeons and she goes to the shops. The park's her refuge from the urban world. She talks about human nature, how cruel mankind is and she is an advocate for the animals. One of my favourite lines of hers from the film about pigeons is "They're not rats on wings, they're descendents of the dove!" Josephine says the park is "Not a Garden of Eden, but a concrete jungle." In anthropological terms, the park is really a human jungle and it's Josephine's refuge from the concrete and the cars. When someone dumps all their household rubbish at the edge of the park, Josephine asks the leaf sweeper if he will clear it up, but he explains that's not his job, he's only a leaf sweeper. So she then starts questioning him about who is top dog at the Town Hall, to see if he can arrange to get it done. She's such a breath of fresh air because she's eccentric, but she also speaks with resonance, especially when she talks about the throwaway society and what the implications of that are for us. Is the film something of a sociological essay as well as a film document? Well I have always thought that you can see the bigger picture by looking small, if you see what I mean. One of the things that's relevant to many people watching this film is, they will have a park at the bottom of their road, they will have all these social groups from park drinkers to little old ladies. The film documents not just the community but the way we live today in our culture and that is something we should hopefully all be thinking about. Is it all urban grime - is there any humour? Josephine is really funny, she is really entertaining, and she's quite the comedian. I'd love to see her teamed up with Bill Oddie in a wildlife programme, because as a double act they would just be hilarious. But everybody has a Josephine. Everybody has council workers. But what's different about this film is that it doesn't take the traditional route and follow two or three characters. It is like a giant conversation, so you have mums in it, children, it crosses generations, crosses race. You get a real rich multicultural sense. There are lots of laughs and lots of great characters. A real mix of London life? Yes, but increasingly across Britain we are a multicultural society, so what we find in this park, well there are probably parks pretty much the same as this in Birmingham or Glasgow. It's got something for everyone in it, so structurally you do follow certain characters all the way through the film, but we also meet people who are just passing through, or who just happen to be there, in this park. It's like a tree that is planted puts down roots and it is always going to be there, it is never going to move, but people can move on. We see the park as it is and it is like a fixture, with people that are moving through it, just like the city itself. I also used to hang out in the park when we were not filming, so people did not get the idea that we were bussing in and bussing out and I grew to understand how vital the park is to the city dweller. How easy is it to support yourself whilst you work on a long- term project like this? Well all of us, between bursts of filming, had to go off on gigs, on other jobs. People are amazingly generous and gave us work. You know, "You are a poor documentary filmmaker, come and do this DVD for us and we'll pay you this." I have then managed to live on that for a few months. I could have gone down the broadcast route, but then I'm not 21, I'm in my thirties and I think I learned more from doing this than I would ever have done had I been someone's researcher, because its about learning how to deal with people and how to build relationships with your subjects to gain their trust. People are so cynical today about cameras and TV that you need to take a slightly different approach if you are going to get that authenticity. Another means of survival has been running local video projects and training people to make their own stories and some great work has come out of it, and that is something I really want to build on in the future. How did you approach the edit? I knew that because of the organic nature of the park and what we shot, that the edit was going to be a long job. I took the rushes to Brian Tagg to have a look and he liked what he saw and offered to do me rough cut that I could send in to channels as a way forward, so we could raise money for post production. He's an amazing man and he took us to see Hoover Street Revival, which he'd just made. The editing in that just blew me away and I really wanted to work with him. Then he got really busy - well he is in demand - and we had to try and find another editor, but deep down in my gut, I wanted to work with Brian, so I sort of, well, held out for Brian while I continued work on it myself. It took another six months before he had a window again, but he came back to me when he had a space and we jumped at the opportunity. Marlene and I had to job share to make it possible, because we both had other commitments. Brian spent about seven or eight weeks with it and has just signed off to start his next project. At the moment I am getting ready to dub the sound on, then we send it out and see what happens. I feel confident because I think it is pretty unique. I don't think a broadcaster would go out and spend two years filming a park over the four seasons. I don't think the project would ever have happened had we not been prepared to live on the breadline and juggle. What were some of the highs and lows of the project for you? When Brian Tagg came in, I was getting really stuck editing it myself because I had so many great characters and lines and I really felt and kept being advised to narrow it down. You know, find six characters to identify with and follow them all the way through. When you go into the park you never know what is going to happen or who is going to be there however many arrangements you make and the choices of what you could do with the material are in a way limitless. What Brian had the expertise an knowledge to do, was to go with the material and the way it was shot and that is what makes it work, which is great for a young filmmaker. You are trained in a certain way, do this, do that and you are trying to follow these instructions, but he has experience and confidence enough to be able to break all the rules. It's like Matisse says, you can't do abstract until you have learned to draw. I'm still learning my craft, but Brian knows enough to be able to break all the usual conventions and rules. My other highlight was the actual filming. After a while I stopped trying to impose my preconceptions onto the Park and just went more with the flow of people and who they were and what they wanted to say. You have to ask the right questions and you are making it happen, but you are not imposing your ego or bias. The lows are probably all the stopping and starting and having to work round people's availability rather than sticking to schedules and the guilt that people are working hard and you can't pay a decent wage. On top of that a couple of times I was so skint I could have ended up sleeping in the park myself which was pretty scary. Do you feel you have achieved what you set out to achieve? As ever when you start on a journey the route on paper is very different from the reality of doing it and if you said to me back then that I would still be working on it now I wouldn't have believed you. I set out to find out why the park was in such a state and I think I've answered it as much as possible in the finished product so you'll just have to watch it to see if my assertion is true, but what we've all made together way exceeds my expectations as I really think we have made something really special and I've learnt so much that in the end I'd say it's way in excess of my original aim. I'm very grateful to everyone who worked on Park and who were prepared to get up at 5.00am for all the early shoots. What are your top tips for long- form documentaries? Make sure the people you choose to work with are all singing from the same hymn sheet. that you've all got the same agenda and that you all believe in what you are doing. You also need to collaborate with people that are not just going to give up, because it is tough. You need to listen! -and observe! That's my kind of style anyway, I like to go with the flow, but it is important that you do take notice. If Marlene was answering this then she'd probably say that to make a film you need to have a good system in place. Even though the nature of the Park was organic we had to be very organised in our preparation, so we had extra batteries, release forms, the right kit and stock, so that is important and later when you have a huge stock of tapes they need to be organised so you don't get lost... Anything that - with benefit of hindsight - you might do differently? I would not recommend the route that I took. I think with retrospect, I would have raised more of the money at the beginning. I think I went into it quite naively. I went about the concept of film the right way, but to make it over such a long period I needed more resources. If you are going to go out there and shoot a fantastic scene, you need to know that you have got the equipment to do it with, like being able to switch from doing an individual interview to doing a group, with all the equipment that needs. Where is Park's natural home? I think its natural home is BBC 4. I would like it to go to cinema; I think it's a cinema piece. I would like to see it in cinemas and it is going to lots of festivals because it really is a unique portrait of urban Britain as it really is. How tough is it breaking in to the documentary market? It is going to be tough. It is possible to transfer it from DV onto film. Really though it is about talking to the right people and being very specific about where you want it to go. Is it market that's in some ways restricted - by being formatted perhaps? Yes, it is, but there are strands in Denmark and Scandinavian countries for instance, where they regularly show documentaries that don't have a format and a documentary film that runs for an hour is OK for TV. If you had to pitch the film now to someone, what would you say about it? The Park is a unique insight into urban Britain and the people in the city. It's an amazing view into our parks and the people who use them, live in them and in cases die in them. Did being a Scot help - give you an outsiders eye perhaps, on London life? Yes, it did. It is very difficult to see things from inside. You have to go outside to see some things properly. I want to make my next film in Scotland, with a returning Scotswoman's eye! _____________________________ Justine Gordon Smith's long-term documentary Park was finally completed in the late spring of 2007. The 50-minute film has just had a community screening. PARK- a portrait of a small space in a big city. Amidst the urban sprawl the local park is a haven – Through the cycle of the four seasons PARK gets close to the mix of eccentrics, degenerates, delinquents and every day people who share it. Josephine hates the city but loves the wildlife; Gerry will forgive, but never forget; Bernie finds the courage deep inside himself to love and be loved. Told through personal vignettes, PARK gives a fascinating insight into modern British metropolitan communities and the personal and collective challenges people face. PARK, four years in the making, is the latest project, produced by Justine Gordon-Smith, (winner Best BBC Newcomer 2001, Performing Rights Society Award 2002) for her Documentary On Your Doorstep Series, devised to reveal the compelling stories and humanity within the everyday world around us.
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