I was thrilled to be invited by editor Annabel Brady-Brown to submit a piece on the Clint Eastwood film Invictus (2010) for the gorgeous new Metrograph magazine. It appeared as part of a career retrospective featuring some heavy-hitting Clint fans: Tarantino, Woo, Desplechin, Denis, Hamaguchi, Assayas, Kurosawa… Pick up a copy at The Metrograph cinema, 7 Ludlow St, NYC.

Invictus (2010)

Director: Clint Eastwood

Politics, in its multi-directional belligerence and complexity, is plenty like rugby: a familiar rugby cliché is that if you didn’t notice the referee during the match, then they must have done an excellent job. A light, but highly experienced touch is required. Eastwood’s unparallelled ability to articulate only what matters on screen means this wildly ambitious project (a “sports movie” about how the 1995 Rugby World Cup catalysed a momentous rapprochement in South Africa’s history) was always in safe hands. Yielding to Morgan Freeman’s amicably stubborn Mandela – a performance of rare serenity and warmth – Eastwood concentrates his camera on those forsaken places he always films with such economy and profundity: street corners, crowded back-rooms, late night lamplit offices and here, the darkened tunnel before the match, the stadium crowd humming in anticipation. Two musical moments feature in their entirety – the anthem Nkosi Sikeleli Afrika, and the Maori haka – and when the rugby final(ly) arrives, it’s a musical melange, like a dream, like the ballet in Fred Zinneman’s Oklahoma! (1955). But the people watching are inspired by the very real movement of the earth beneath their feet: grounded in their astonishment and euphoria.

I was thrilled to write about a film which Wyrm of Bwlch Pen Barras filmmaker Craig Williams put me onto: CUADECUC, VAMPIR (Pere Portabella, 1971) for Reverse Shot’s annual Halloween Pumpkins feature. To read my piece, you can click the image of a leering Christopher Lee above, or here.

So why watch Cuadecuc, vampir on Halloween? Because it is a treatment of horror which examines and elevates the sensations one normally experiences when watching horror: the sense of anticipation, of mystery and bewilderment, and fascination at extraordinary and uncanny imagery, conjured here by a potent mix of pure classicism and pure innovation.

Albert Serra’s first present-day film steers us into a cinematic register at the intersection of Chris Marker and Michael Mann, at once naturalistic and surreal, sublime and subliminal. Benoît Magimel’s De Roller is the slippery, white-suited High Commissioner to French Polynesia, an intoxicating South Pacific collectivity of paradisiacal beauty and colonial chicanery, teeming with stories true and untrue, between myth and deception. De Roller’s power is ebbing, though you wouldn’t know it at first as he parades about the island, mingling with the local nightclub’s Ori Tahiti dancers and taking meetings with concerned locals. One of the islanders, Shanna (Māhū actress Pahoa Mahagafanau), the film’s only open-book character, detects his vulnerability early and reverses the political polarity by becoming his protector and companion. As the sea of intrigue rises and De Roller’s obscure, aesthetically bewitching fantasies begin to emerge, we sense his hold on things listing, then slipping away. His principal antagonist, the slight, whey-faced “Admiral” (Marc Susini), whose naval cap doesn’t quite fit, brings to mind Delphin Servaux’s headmaster in Vigo’s Zero for Conduct—comically grotesque and all the more intimidating for that. By prolonging each sequence beyond its natural duration, Serra calibrates the action to the oneiric pace of that world and underscores the extent of De Roller’s impotence and the emptiness of his monologues. The Admiral’s final speech—from a disgraced colonial power which treats its “property” as a nuclear testing ground—blows the film off course, lurching on waves of imbecilic patriotism, running Serra’s film aground in a dreadful reality: to France’s eternal, devastating shame.

For our 20 year anniversary symposium, writers were invited to examine how their approach to - or stance on - a film had changed over a period of time. I chose a film I was scared to write about - CITIZEN KANE - at a time when I didn’t know I was a writer. You can read the piece here or click on the photo above.

What Citizen Kane talks about is pretty much common currency everywhere now. The supremacy of the self, the squandering of talent, the exploitation of ignorance and fear, the abandonment of virtue. Welles himself lived all of this at the sharp end, while working in the film industry, from the release of Kane in 1941 until his death in 1985. Yet there is a romantic way to look at it…if we want.

A sweet weekend in Aberystwyth with The Wyrm of Bwlch Pen Barras at the Abertoir Festival. We drank with Chris Cronin and the makers of The Moor on Saturday, met Robin Ince and attended his podcast, I watched Corman’s The Tomb of Ligeia on Sunday morning, had lunch with Bryn and his brilliant wife Anna, then a lovely screening of Wyrm with The Sin Eater.

The first Amicus film - British micro-budget horror, CIty of the Dead.

I provided this year’s Fourth Night Pumpkin for Reverse Shot. It’s about a very peculiar, and potentially quite influential horror film: CITY OF THE DEAD.

“It’s a confrontation, mirroring the film’s plot, between ancient and new. It’s also a statement, and in a sense a dirty trick, but a devilishly good one too. Nothing that follows this sequence feels the same as before, nor can it really be so. Every subsequent image, which might have looked staid or studio-bound, has now been contaminated with something resembling realism and impregnated with the dread that accompanies unpredictability. It’s almost like a bond of trust has been broken between the filmmakers and the audience and replaced by a gloriously assaultive atmosphere of threat.”

Cesar Troisgros with his team in Frederick Wiseman’s Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros

“To Wiseman, a non-invasive camera changes nothing in the process of a human being simply playing the role of their own life. Not for Wiseman the hang-ups of cinéma vérité purism or hidden cameras, because in the great theater of life, we are all more or less concerned with showing our best side, articulating our best interests and creating a spectacle by our actions which we want others to see. In other words, we are all acting anyway. The only condition Wiseman sets himself is that the camera must serve the purpose of capturing the subject and not interfere further—any looks to camera, for example, are cut in the editing process. But this inevitably means that Wiseman must accept (within reason) a divergence in how his protagonists react to the camera’s presence by instinct—and the results are illuminating.”

You can read the review here, or click on the photo above.

With Craig Williams on the red carpet at LÉtrange Festival 2023

Craig and I hopped over to Paris for a night to introduce our film (in French) before the screening as part of the short film competition. Thanks to Eric Challard who was a most gracious and entertaining host.

Photograph: Carol Morley

It was an honour to present The Wyrm of Bwlch Pen Barras on behalf of director Craig and myself at its UK premiere at the Shetland Screenplay Festival. I was interviewed beforehand by horror expert and all-round critical royalty, Mark Kermode.

A really good house (85+) was in attendance - a very generous and knowledgeable crowd, in a terrific, intimate setting (the arts centre, Mareel, in Lerwick). I received some lovely, encouraging feedback from delegates who recognised the influences of the Mabinogion and other folk-horror ideas.

Photograph: Matt Bauer

Our second and final private cast & crew screening was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on Saturday 20th May. A wonderful occasion, graced by the crew (l-r: JA; Isaac Whittingham (gaffer); Matt Wildman (sound recordist); Christian Hughes (clapper loader); Jamie Cobb (key grip); George Bettles (standby carpenter); Vic Pugh (Anwen) and Craig Williams (writer-director).

Julien with writer-director Craig Williams at the Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff. Poster art by Richard Wells.

It was such a thrill to see THE WYRM on the big screen. Thanks to Cardiff’s Chapter Arts Centre and to all those who came to support the film, especially Seán Carlsen, who plays the sinister Dai. We’re hoping to play at festivals throughout the autumn and I’ll update the Rushes with news.

Samantha Morton in Steven Spielberg’s MINORITY REPORT (2002) - a film which deploys Bach’s Cantata BWV 147

I contributed a short piece to The Bach Choir’s website on Choral Music and Cinema showcasing the Choir’s own numerous contributions to cinematic soundtracks over the years (and of course not forgetting its classic 1962 War Requiem recorded with Sir Benjamin Britten, filmed by Derek Jarman in 1988).

I was thrilled to be asked by debut writer-director Craig Williams to produce his new film, the Welsh folk horror short THE WYRM OF BWLCH PEN BARRAS (2023). We shot it on 16mm (with renowned cinematographer Sean Price Williams) in and around the North Wales town of Ruthin and on the mighty Bwlch Pen Barras mountain pass itself. The film is in post production. More details to emerge soon.

To close off Reverse Shot's week of creepy Halloween viewing recommendations, I wrote about comic genius Matthew Holness's 2018 nightmare, POSSUM. Scroll to the bottom of this page if you dare!

More compelling insights into the world of acting with the unique and wonderful Stansted Players, playing a small role in a production of THE LIARS by the deservedly little known dramatist Henry Arthur Jones. Eight part songs - by the likes of Finzi, Balfour Gardner, Gilbert & Sullivan etc - were inserted into the heavily truncated text. The production was devised by the miraculous Alastair Langlands and led by Jessica Price as the unhappily married Lady Jessica, with Dan Rasbash as her young paramour, Ned. (I played George, a busybody.)

Warren Clarke, John Duttine (hooded) and Anthony Bate in Alan Clarke’s PSY-WARRIORS (1981)

I wrote about the queasily prescient BELOVED ENEMY and PSY-WARRIORS for Reverse Shot. Trump-Putin, Reagan’s Star Wars program, Abu Ghraib…all unwittingly evoked by Clarke and Leland’s uncompromising work.

You can read the essay, part of the 1981 Symposium, here…

“Le Samouraï presents us not for the first time with a fully interiorized, “locked-in” Melville protagonist, like Bob in Bob le flambeur or Maudet in Magnet of Doom (1963), but one whose loneliness and single-mindedness are mechanized and supercharged. This object explicitly demonstrates his corresponding ability to unlock, infiltrate, and destroy the lives of others.”

You can read the essay - part of Reverse Shot's symposium on objects in cinema - here

Interview with Aïcha Macky, director of ZINDER (Niger, 2021)

I was privileged to be asked to act as interpreter for the Nigerien filmmaker Aïcha Macky and the Malagasy filmmaker Michaël Andrianaly when they were interviewed by Edo Choi for the presentation of their films (respectively, ZINDER and NOFINOFY) on the first weekend of MOMI’s 2021 First Look Festival.

Both films can be viewed in the links below:

ZINDER (2021)

Director: Aicha Macky. Camera: Julien Bossé. Editor: Karen Benainous. Music: Dominique Peter. Production: (Documentary – France-Niger-Germany) A Point du Jour, Les Films du Balibari, Tabous Production, Corso Film, Arte France presentation. (World sales: Andana Films, Lussas.) Producers: Clara Vuillermoz, Ousmane Samassekou, Erik Winker.

Reviewed in Variety by Guy Lodge: https://variety.com/2021/film/reviews/zinder-review-1234952400/

NOFINOFY (2019)

Director: Michaël Andrianaly. Camera: Michaël Andrianaly. Editor: Denis Le Paven. Music: Nonoh Romaro. Production: (Documentary – Madagascar-France) Producer: Sylvie Plunian

I was interviewed by AlAraby TV on Orson Welles’s radio output and its influence on his films (which was enormous). A short clip is at 22.30 here.

“But revenge is intrinsic to cinematic storytelling because it represents our most primal human expression of justice. Eastwood ultimately gives us, his audience, what we have always come to expect from the Man with No Name. In so doing he confronts us—without judging us—with the inherent moral deficit of the western genre and of the movies themselves: their natural, instinctive reliance on violence as entertainment, when violence is the ruin of everyone.”

I wrote about Clint Eastwood’s 1992 western masterpiece, UNFORGIVEN, from an outsider’s point of view, for Reverse Shot’s foreign culture symposium: “Great Beyond”.