Creative Nonfiction #2: Sophie Fiennes on Four Quartets and documenting theatre on film

Sophie Fiennes 0:00

Ralph was worried that I wasn't shooting closeups. "You're not getting enough closeups, Sophie!"

Alex Heeney 0:07

that was director Sophie Fiennes talking about shooting her brother Ralph Fiennes in her new film, The Four Quartets, which is a documentary and a document of Ralph's production of a TS Eliot poem that was never meant to be performed as a play, but that he turned into a play to save British repertory theatre after the devastating economic impacts of the lockdown. And on today's episode, I talk to the wonderful Sophie Fiennes about her unconventional way of capturing a theatrical performance on screen and what it was like to do so with her brother.

Alex Heeney 1:14

Welcome to episode two of the creative nonfiction season of the seven Thoreau podcast I'm your host Alex Heeney, editor in chief of seven Thoreau. While most of the episodes in this season directly pick up where our ebooks objective realities left off. This episode on documenting and recording theater is more closely linked to a broader interest at seven throw in the relationship between film and theater and in capturing theater performances on screen. So today's episode is ostensibly about the Four Quartets, which is a production that Ralph Fiennes initiated adapted for the stage directed and starred in, and that production has been turned into a film by his sister the documentarian, Sophie finds who has created an A marvelous document of this production, that is also kind of a film into its own right without being a film adaptation. I'll begin the episode with some context about recorded theatre and what the Four Quartets is and why the project is so fascinating and worthy of discussion that I'll play my interview with Sophie finds and finally we'll wrap up with some thoughts on what to watch and listen to next, when thinking about documenting theatre. What is this as a form? How is it changing? What can we learn from it? And what is Sophie done to innovate within the form with the Four Quartets? The origin story behind this whole project is that in true Ralph Fiennes fashion, his idea of what should I do during the Great British lockdown of 2020, was, I should learn a very, very long poem. And of course, that was the Four Quartets which is actually a poem that he grew up with, and then of course, as only Ralph Fiennes would think to do, he thought I will, how can we save British theatre? If they the theaters have been closed for months, they're all bleeding money, and he thought I know I'll put together the most esoteric production you could possibly imagine a one man show of an 80 minute poem by TS Eliot about time and death and oddly enough, kind of like being out of time and this almost sort of locked down mentality of or pandemic mentality of time slipping away and yet you're in some sort of limbo space. And he was like, Yes, well, that'll save British theatre because I'm Ralph Fiennes AKA, Voldemort. And can't Almasy Coriolanus, many, many other spectacular roles. truly talented fellow. And and of course it did. I would not think it's a British theatre, but it is a show which traveled around regional theaters in the UK. It's sold out it received rave reviews. And as he was developing the show, he was in conversation with his sister Sophie finds who is a documentary filmmaker, and they were talking about it and at some point, the idea came that they should document it. And she had been to rehearsals and had been talking to him about it as he was developing it. And she has had an ongoing interest throughout her career in documenting works of art now, the most famous of that is probably her documentary about Grace Jones, Grace Jones Bud Light and BAMMY where she spent a couple of years following Grace Jones around as she was going through a particular moment in her life while also Actually staging certain original performances for the screen that the two of them created together. And if you want to hear more about how that film was made, we have a great interview with Sophie by Alina Vlasic in our ebook, in their own words, documentary masters volume one, and we'll put a link to that in the show notes. So I, I had, of course read oiliness interview with Sophia. So I knew that she was super smart. And it had really interesting things to say. And I was pretty much set on chatting with her about this film, even before I had seen it. I mean, how could it go wrong? Anyway, it's 80 minutes of Ralph Fiennes whom we would all be content to listen to reading the phone book. Of course, the production is so much more than that. And I think what's really fascinating about it is that this is a really, really thoughtful capture of that performance document of that performance. Now, it's something that we've talked a lot about on the podcast is recorded theater, and all of the ways in which recorded theater can go wrong and some of the ways in which it go, it can go right. In the first year of the pandemic, the Old Vic Theatre in London was doing some experiments with this where they were actually doing live streamed productions that were designed to be live streamed via zoom to people's homes, so they were actually directed for the camera. And that's something that we documented on the podcast in Episode 49. We talk about lungs, which was starring Claire Foy, and Matt Smith. And it was done in split screen and we were so enamored with it. And then they did a few more productions, which were, you know, not quite as formally inventive and interesting, but that that we liked, and we covered those in Episode 60, where we talked about the production of three kings, a one man show with Andrew Scott and a production of faith healer, which is essentially like three monologues with three different actors put together. And, you know, we this was not the first time that we have talked about first nor the last time that we talked about recorded Theatre on the podcast. In 2021, the Almeida Theatre actually recorded the production. Yael Farber is production starring sir Sharon and Jews McArdle of the tragedy of Macbeth. And they recorded that and live streamed that to people's homes. And that was an interesting production because they had clearly put some work into thinking about how to make this translate to the screen at home, how to edit it, how to shoot it. And of course, we've talked about national theater productions. In our episode on the deep blue sea, we talked about the wonderful Carrie Cracknell production of the deep blue sea, starring Helen McCrory and Tom Berg and compared it to Terence Davies screen adaptation. So those episodes are all now members only. So if you'd like to have a listen to them, become a member go to seven dash ro.com/join. And you'll get access to our entire podcast archive, plus all future episodes and all of our members only episodes past, present and future. I think what's interesting about the Four Quartets is that it's neither live capture recorded theatre per se, nor is it really adapted for the screen, what Sophie finds has done is really, really remarkable, which is give us the sense of being in this black box theater, and a very intimate space with this with this monologue, where we get a sense of the blocking, she has kept the blocking the lighting, the set all the same, it's just sort of like turned up a notch so that the camera could capture it, but they've they've been completely true to the original production. And she's used long takes and is very careful in her editing. And the result is that unlike some of these other productions, where you feel like you're getting a version of the play, but a highly edited one when was so much information loss, where you feel like something's going on outside of the frame that I don't know about but I should know about and I can't possibly know what that is. Instead, Sophie finds is actually you know, be very careful with her. Her still frames um, for the most part, the camera is quite still and when something happens outside of the frame Even we know what's happening outside of the frame. And that allows her to really preserve the, the theatrical space into cinematic space, which I've really never seen done before. You know, Julie Taymor, when she captured her production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, she actually directed the the screen version of it and Her idea was okay, we've got like, we run through the performance three nights in a row, and then we're going to cut it together. And the idea is to give the audience the best seat of the in the house for every moment. And and you know, that does work very well. But you and and it does, you know, keep you in it and make it feel like a film. But you are also aware of the fact that you know, you're watching a mishmash of performances, which which is happening in the forecourt quartets as well. But you know, like, how much of this is really the for the stage and how much of is it is the film, I think that's one of the more successful examples.

Alex Heeney 11:05

And then another thing that happens is that there are these archived theatrical productions. And if you're unlucky, they're like a VHS with one shot, the camera doesn't move. And it's, you know, so low res that good luck making out any of the faces because they're trying to capture the stage and it's a VHS tape, it was shot in the 90s. You can't see really any of the faces and that and now as a dedicated reference fan. I have in fact, sat in the New York Public Libraries library for for the performing arts and watched his Korean Linus which is one of those horrifying VHS tapes, and I've also watched his Hamlet, which fortunately has a few angles and you actually can see his face. And, you know, I've seen many other recorded productions or opted for the screen productions of stuff that Ralph Fiennes has done. Something that we talked about in our conversation is the Almeida theaters production of Richard the Third, which Ralph Fiennes starred in as the titular Richard the Third directed by Rupert Goold, who has directed both films and film adaptations of plays. He did the wonderful Richard the second starring Ben Whishaw. So as I tell Sophie, in this conversation, you know, I saw Richard the Third on opening night. And a big part of that production to me was the blocking and just how they use the stage. And one of the things that was part of that was there was this giant, like golden circle that hung over the stage, which was effectively like the Hollow Crown. And it was the idea of this sort of the Sword of Damocles being the British crown that you could see in at all times. But as Julie tambor has talked about, and you know, I'm sure many people disagree, and I'm not sure I fully agree with her is that often theater can be a vertical medium, whereas film can be a horizontal medium. And what happens when they captured that production is you you can't really see that little Hollow Crown, that giant Hollow Crown and a lot of the shots. And what they do, of course, is they follow Ralph Fiennes around the stage because he's fucking Ralph Fiennes and you want to see him act. And you know, there's something wonderful and glorious about that, that you get to see his performance so completely. And there's also something totally awful about it, because you have no context for what he's doing. You don't see what the other actors are doing, where they are on stage, how they're reacting to him, and what the blocking is, and so it becomes a little bit of like a performance in a vacuum. More recently, Ralph Fiennes has had several productions that he's done, either at the National Theatre or elsewhere, which have been recorded by National Theatre Live and Antony and Cleopatra is one of those I think it's on NT at home, but you can also see him in straightline. Crazy which is also rentable AT and T at home. And the thing about those is they are live recorded, and it's always this outside crew that sort of comes in, they have kind of a day of rehearsals, and then they film it and they edit it live. And of course, this is a wonderful document to have. And it's you know, it has been for the most part, the closest most of us can get to seeing productions that are either you know, across the ocean, or that we just simply couldn't see or you know, as is the case with some of Ralph Fiennes's earlier work way, way before National Theatre Live, you know, stuff that I simply was not old enough to have gone to I think his quarterly leanness was like in the mid 90s, I would have been like seven or eight. Maybe it was even in the late had nine years but like who, you know, even as a 12 year old, I would have been a bit young for it. So it's a wonderful resource, but we're still very much figuring out this. And I think what makes the Four Quartets such a remarkable document of this production is that Sophie finds really got to know the production inside out. And when she thought about how to frame it, it wasn't about how do I get all the closeups of Ralph Fiennes? It wasn't about Let's follow him around the stage. It wasn't about let's never cut it was how do we? How do we mimic the rhythms of this and give it a cinematic rhythm? How do we find a way to make it dynamic without losing what makes it great as a stage show? In my conversation with Sophie, she talks about her inspirations for this which range from Yes, or 00 Sue's films to thinking about Samuel Beckett, who she feels was a big inspiration for Ralph and how he directed in stage this production reading about the poem and some critical analysis of the poem and how that influenced her. And I think the result is something really, really remarkable. So I'm gonna play you the trailer for the film, and then we will transition straight into my conversation with the wonderful Sophie finds about the Four Quartets and her career in capturing performance and art on screen and how she thought about Four Quartets almost as a dance performance how working on a documentary about acting on the right before she started recording, this had a huge impact on her and much, much more. It's a really, really wonderful wide ranging conversation, and I really hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Ralph Fiennes 16:53

What might have been, and what has been point to one and which is always present.

Ralph Fiennes 17:11

The tolling bow measures time, not our time, run by the unhurried ground swell, a time older than a time of chronometer is older than time counted by anxious worried women, lying awake, calculating the future, trying to unweave unwind, unravel, and piece together the past and the future between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception, the future future lists before the morning watch when time stops. But you are the music while the music lasts?

Alex Heeney 18:05

How do you capture theater on film? And I know you've done quite a lot of bad and obviously in this film, but I know you did. You've done like how to capture live performance. This is not your first rodeo for that.

Alex Heeney 18:18

So I'm really excited to hear about that process. And

Sophie Fiennes 18:23

yeah, no, I like to talk about that. Because it does fascinate me. And it's some goes back to I mean, I worked with a choreographer and dancer called Michael Clark, who's British or Scottish, actually Scottish dancer, choreographer. And I worked with him doing live work, you know, producing it and worked very closely with him and then made a film where I filmed his performance. And that was like one of the that was the first long form film that I made. So I've been sort of wrestling with this for a while. And I'm also really fascinated by cinematic space. And so it's a lot about how to bring the space onto the into the screen to bring the viewer into that space. And so I've always, I've actually been more of a viewer of, of cinematic fiction, in the documentary, but I ended up making documentary because you didn't have to kind of wait to get the finance to, you know, it was like it could just be a filmmaker. You could also move around in the space with a small camera, and you could, you know, think about the space cinematically in a nonfiction context because you had this mobility with these cameras. So I still seem, I'm always looking at that. But when I, I took the you know, with the Four Quartets my in my just evolved a way of responding to the poem, which is based in recognizing the structure of the poem itself, though As an academic who has read the time of Elliot, who's probably maybe maybe 15 years younger, go Helen Gardner. And she was an academic of English. And so she had Ricci has written this essay on the Four Quartets where she really breaks down the structure of the of the Four Quartets. And she points aren't that different. They're different. Each quartet repeats a similar structure of language. So there's the sort of the pastoral, then there's this urban, domestic urban. So the twittering world references to London. And then there's the lyric passages which are rhyming. And then there's what she calls the blank passages where he's talking the philosophical passages. So these these different registers, and then there's the, in those philosophical ones, he's talking about talking about time, he's talking about, about language about words. And so I just, I decided to create a way of filming that was repeating through each quartet that responded to these different registers within the podium. So sort of, rather than thinking of wise mediums, close ups, I was thinking more about how to have also allowed accumulation within the poem and within the performance, to not be broken by an edit. And wanting to also work with the magic of for theatrical shifts. So letting it kind of breathe for itself and not interrupting it, but finding the moments. And that's something that, that I would also discover in the edit, where I could make those cuts based on the way of filming it that I also, you know, looked at it a lot and watched it in rehearsal, work with Mike Ely, who is the cinematographer of those sequences of everything that's in the theater. And so, you know, things like, you know, Ozu, the Japanese filmmaker, or, you know, the way that this these small domestic scenes where someone leaves from the left, and then enters from the right, so you, your frame becomes a sort of a becomes a kind of theater of its own in the sense that the space can double up according to how the framing allows for, for sort of parameters. So thinking spatially with the edges of the frame, was also it for this response to this. And then in the process of, of working with, like stamp, I came up, someone introduced me to the work of, of a film theorist called Stanley Cavell, who's an American film theorist and philosopher. And he's, he writes really interestingly about the frame and what's beyond the frame. So this idea of the space beyond the edge, where, where race is, or where the poem, or Elliot is looking to where things are placed spatially beyond the frame, because obviously, so there's so much editing in the poem, it's got so many images in it, that I wanted to allow the poems, you know, shifts to just speak for themselves really, particularly as opposed to doing it with such sort of articulation. So this idea of what he sees, you know, on the edge of the frame here, or, you know, he was doing so much of that, that, by creating this frame, it he we see it beyond him, as it were. So it's kind of responding to a lot of these ideas about space. And, you know, framing.

Alex Heeney 23:40

So how do you how do you think about that thing that, like you're telling him, you know, this is where the frame is? And so he's thinking about that, or is this something that you're just responding to?

Sophie Fiennes 23:51

Oh, no, no, I don't, no, no, no, no, he needs to feel, you know, as a performer completely supported. We did identify that, you know, he wouldn't look into the, you wouldn't look into the camera, but he could look in a sort of frame of about, maybe it was a frame around the camera. And this is, Mikey Lee suggested to him for him to be able to look just beyond the frame, which was probably around a maximum of half a meter. So he had, he had a framework to look and then I was also I did say to him, you know That to Find places within the space behind the camera with that. But it was this that my conversations with him were very much rooted in responding to what he was doing. And then bringing the camera in and not not sort of, you know, having him I don't want him to have to think about anything other than what he's doing. We obviously, shot with one camera, broke down the poem. So, you know, we could keep moving the camera and we, we, we staged the whole of the theatrical set and lighting into a space that we could move the camera around in. So we weren't locked into kind of stalls in a theater. How did that work? We rented this English National Ballet is a ballet company here. And they they've just built an amazing new building with what's called a production studio. So we're, if you're making a big, elaborate ballet, and you need to sort of know how the lighting is going to work, you need to build it in a light locked environment, where you haven't got a huge auditorium behind. But you've just got a big black space with wings and with, you know, pulleys so that you can not wings but with, you know, with flies, for putting onto your it's, it's a big stage, and it was brilliant, was very expensive. We managed to pass you to say please, you know, they said, Well, we, we would charge for a Porsche commercial. We're not a Porsche commercial, please. But they were so it's just quite difficult when people have a sort of corporate mentality, which they did in terms of hiring out their space, but we just about managed to be able, because that was really the, though there weren't that many spaces that we could have done that in because we wanted to be able to have a distance on it, and move in. And so that was a great, that was perfect, too. And then we could bring it in from the theater, they were to strike the show, and just import it into this space, which was theater friendly. Yeah, then we had the space for web for the camera. And just to build exactly the lighting cues and focus it and because I'd worked in theater with within dance i i know a bit about theater lighting, what that entails. And so that was all, you know, we had very good team, the team from the original from the show come from the West End. So it was also like it's in race body, the whole thing, you know, it's like, a month later, it would be very different proposition. But if he were, he'd been doing it for five weeks. So it was like breathing octaves or air for him. But he also kind of had to calibrate it, because he's not having to project it. And that kind of allowed it to be more intimate as a delivery, which I think he really enjoyed. So, you know, he was very, he's very independent as an actor in that sense. And he's so experienced, and he's so experienced in theater and loves theater. And so this was a very personal project for him. And we had been discussing it as it was emerging as an idea for him. You tried to envisage what's going to work. And we only have three days, which was quite hair raising. And I think that was the biggest stress for him was that he? So I had to devise a way of filming it that we could do it in three days, which we sort of just about managed to do. And then the thing that I've never edited a fixed performance. Normally, I'm editing. I mean, I have edited fix performances, dance performances, but not not speech. I've edited you know, Grace Jones sing singing or, you know, dance pieces that I've filmed, but not theater. So it was interesting how I found it very interesting, how different the takes were that, you know, you could have like something delivered, you know, an hour, sort of 40 minutes in and if you depending on the performance, if it's just slightly modulated, it seems to sort of change the whole shape of how it's building. So that was really kind of like, painstaking, but quite riveting. So yeah, there's always that discovery. And that's, that's, you don't really know, but you have to see what works.

Alex Heeney 28:55

Did you like film it all the way through? And then do it several times that way? Or did you break it?

Sophie Fiennes 29:01

No, no, no. I broke it down into pieces, according to these, these different elements, like, take something like Burton Otto and you've got the garden and then the bit where he goes into the dark of London and then I wanted to be more domestic so that we were kind of closer into the stage. So you feel like it could be the corner of a room or it's a bit more enclosed. So, you know, changing, you know, a shortlist that was deciding from you know, to go from which part of the, in fact, I've got the script here. So I print out the clay, the poem rather, the text. And then, you know, I've got sections for each one. I've timed the different sections. And then, you know, make making decisions. My sort of Bible, then actually wrote out in advance, wrote out what the color coded and wrote out what the shots were so We move through each quartet, and then re re re framing the camera, you know, with the whole poem, I printed out pictures so I could be, you know, have somebody that I knew where, where the light where the light what the light is doing. And so this is kind of useful. So then I was writing there, what was, you know, different shots and how they would go, how far they would be covered in the text. And then when you get to editing this, then has another nother life. Yeah, it's all very much broken down. In that sense. It's not like sort of live from the Met or something where you've just got lots of cameramen and your honor, then go and get moved here. You know, it was really kind of carefully you know, we reposition the camera each time and shot on film shot on 16 millimeter with one camera. So is there

Alex Heeney 30:53

What was the reason behind shooting on 16 millimeter?

Sophie Fiennes 30:56

I think because there's something beautiful about the theater, theatrical lighting shifting on film, I think film responds to light just so differently. And I've shot you know, actually, most even going back to this Michael Clark film, I shot that on film. So I've shot quite a lot of performance on film, because the way that it responds to light just has more, just feels more more sensitive on the Tonal Range, even though 16 millimetres kind of slightly rougher. But it also felt like it was fragile for this. There's a fragility in it, which I think helps with poems, fragility, and you know, all of it, because it's quite a confronting piece really, it takes you to quite a kind of, sort of shattering moment. That that I that feeling of fragility, and then Tim Lumpkins lighting Toria Sturaro, the cinematographer who worked a lot with Burton Lucci. And, you know, he was one of the first cinematographers to recognize that, it was, it's really, to play with the lighting desk of a theatrical lighting desk, when he did this Dick Tracy film with Warren Beatty, he famously was the cinematographer on Apocalypse Now. And he loves color. So you know, and he's a wonderful thinker as a cinematographer Sturaro. And he, he, I remember seeing him talking about using like the theatrical light desk. And so there was that feeling of this sort of these, these pauses in between the poem or transitions, that the light the space of the lighting changes. And so there's something about seeing that on top and on film, it just would be harder and more plastic on digital. Because it's all about definition. Whereas it's something about the way that film was responding to light. It's almost like a whole different. It's like apples and pears in a way.

Alex Heeney 33:11

I guess I'm kind of wondering about how this translation process works. Like, it's kind of a unique situation here, because the performer is also the director of the original piece. And then you come in, and now you're creating sort of a new piece from this, that's also maybe kind of a document of it. Like, how does that work

Sophie Fiennes 33:33

was exactly what you said, it's like, I see myself as a document as making a document. But with with great sensitivity, but also being able to respond to this kind of hermetic world and then break out of it and bring in this air and bring in the app, go to the actual places and do some sort of forensic psychogeography. And that was fascinating because you realize when you do sort of come across the perm, you think, Oh, yes. And then you know, the birds were there and never did. They were dry leaves. And oh, there was a, you know, the chapel and there was a pigsty, and there was a whole thorn bush, and you go to those places, and you see his, like, an incredibly detailed, everything that that he's describing is there. And particularly one of the things that Helen Gardiner points out in her breakdown of it, of the poem is that how the importance of the sunlight is always referring to the light that the sun is doing this on the water or that or, you know, he's, and so you get that there when you see that the sun is still doing those things that he's, he's speaking about something very concrete. It's, and he was interested, he wrote sort of landscape poems about landscapes. He was, he was very, you know, he landscape was important to him, particularly Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he had a holiday house. And in fact, you know that I salvages refers to his childhood, in St. Louis, and where they, you know, the Mississippi, the river Sippi. And then the ocean. And that sense of the sea, and the vastness of that. So it was important to, to kind of go to those places to create in a film, you know, a sort of sense of, of a journey that otherwise, I think you'd be disorientated for too long in the dark space. So I think it helps create, for me, it was, you know, feeling that those spaces are still they're talking about time and this moment of remembered time, and then the actual places there. And it's really strange, that it's all there. So from the point of view of Yeah, I was very respectful of what Ralph had done. And I was also having conversations with him as he was evolving it. And I actually sat here with him, and we looked at, we looked at a fixed camera of it. And, you know, I sort of gave some thoughts of, you know, about it as a piece as he was evolving it. And I went very early on, and it was in the middle of the pandemic. And he was, he did a first dress rehearsal he was doing and that was it. But there wasn't a dress or has there was a rehearsal, he learnt it. And then he worked for a week doing doing, running it in a little town hall, a small hall, like a local village hall, somewhere in the East End of London. And that was, I think that was maybe February, March, because it was still in lockdown. And the whole of the East End was completely empty. So walking around in this empty streets, and then seeing this rehearsal in that space. That was kind of amazing. But I also have this this thought about it, I've had this thought recently, I don't know what this whether you kind of what you think about this, but it's like, it feels like we're very used to looking from our vantage point of now looking back in time. And I feel that this poem has this uncanny sense of looking at us from the 20th. So it's like we're caught in the gaze of his of his of this poem. We're seeing ourselves but from the 20th century in the 21st century. Does that make sense? You know what I mean?

Alex Heeney 37:32

Yeah, it does. I mean, I was thinking of it in slightly different terms. But the same idea that there's this, this quality, and I think, I don't know how much of it is just the poem or the way that it's, you know, Ralph has staged it, and you've captured it. But there's this sense of it, as the poem is sort of, like, out of time, it's like, you're in this space, where you're, you're looking at time, and you're thinking it about time, but you're somehow out of it, like it talks about all these transition points, like being on this being on on the tube and sort of you're, you're moving towards something, but you're not quite there in all the spaces that are out of time. And the idea of staging that in like kind of a black box theater, with the, you know, kind of dark and, and monochrome, it also pulls you in this weird space of being like you're you are physically out of time, because you are there watching this performance. And I was thinking, well, it's really interesting, like, how do you think about translating that to film? And I mean, for me, one of the things that was interesting is the way that you the way that you take us to those to those actually, to those actual spaces, like to me, I felt like that heightened that sense of being out of time, because you are reminded of the fact that you are in this space, thinking about these places that aren't.

Sophie Fiennes 38:54

No, I think I really like what you're saying about that. And I hadn't occurred to me, but I completely know what you mean that you are sort of out of time, you're kind of in his head range is a kind of, yeah, it's a kind of strange netherworld of The Conjuring of these these conjuring all of this life from this point of emptiness. I mean, I think that there is the influence of Samuel Beckett in the way that they've staged it slightly, that one of my favorite Beckett texts is one called the unnameable. Which is where he speaks like a voice from a space that's like a black void, where he's kind of suddenly realizing he's breathing and, and then there's amazing point where he says, I must be crying because the tears are rolling down, but I don't know where they're coming from. But, you know, he Beckett writes this extraordinary voice kept speaking from a void, though, I think there's an influence in that sense. But I think it is out of time. I mean, I like the way that you're feeling about it. And, you know, really, this is the first time I've been able to speak to anyone about about the film, so it's really nice to catch feedback of how it lands for people. And, you know, I think, I think you also get that scale with the landscape as well. Which is somehow release from the particular human nature of something it's like, out of the interiority of it this kind of terrifying, you know, hit interiority that we all carry. I mean, it's not necessarily terrifying. But if you think if you go start thinking on it can be quite overwhelming to think about time, as passed as moments last

Alex Heeney 40:44

How much are you? Because you talked about like, changing the lighting cues for the film? Like, how much are you trying to retain?

Sophie Fiennes 40:50

I didn't change.

Alex Heeney 40:51

Oh, sorry.

Sophie Fiennes 40:53

No, no, no, the only thing that we did do, and I learned that, from when I was making this film with Grace Jones, when I was staged, I then created a whole state of the whole show that didn't exist, right. But we literally we went into a black box theater. And I knew the songs I wanted for the film. And I worked with a lighting designer to light the stage for each song, to create this spectacle of a performance, which was like a sort of dream of the show that grace, you know, wasn't really doesn't exist, because actually, at this point, if you're touring, you're generally in festivals, you get a short get in time, you can't. And she loves theater to love, she wanted to be an actress, she didn't want to be a singer. So I wanted to create this like dream show. And when we were doing it, you know, you really have to the lighting all has to be a little more luminant than you would ever have it if you were putting it on stage for the film stock to register it. So the all of the cues are exactly as the show. And we're totally contractually following the show it what it is a document of the show in that sense. I didn't want to do sort of destabilize anything. But just we needed to bring up the luminance to allow for the light meter readings to work.

Speaker 3 42:12

Oh, I see. Okay. That makes sense. But what I

Sophie Fiennes 42:16

was wanting to do in the film was to show the transitions, so you've got lighting states, but it's the sort of it's like the sort of breadth of the transition of when the stage space closes or opens or something comes up in the psych or, you know, so using the space through the lighting, you know, there's that's how one is even seeing it is through the lighting. Right. So no, we didn't touch that. We totally honored everything about the show. It's okay, worked 100% with that.

Alex Heeney 42:47

So like, it's all it's basically like Ralph is just kind of running the show, aside from you know, that, yeah, running it all the way through, but the blocking is the same the set is, I mean, I know it's a new space, but he toured the show all over the UK. So that's Yeah, that's

Sophie Fiennes 43:03

exactly exactly how the show was set is exactly what we kept. Because otherwise, he would have been, like, a bit confused, you know, to be the same, exactly the same.

Alex Heeney 43:15

But then the then if I understood correctly, but like some shifts in the performance happened to make it sort of more camera friendly, as opposed to the same days as a theatrical or is that just like, really,

Sophie Fiennes 43:28

it's more, it's just literally that you turn up for the bowl? It's just dimmed up. But the queues themselves, right. And the thing of them is exactly, because when we spent one day in the theater in the West End, and Mike Ely, the cinematographer, and we arrived there, and the guy who was the theater lighting guys quite young, was like so you know, how are you going to do this? And Mike just had his little light meter, which is that essential tool of the cinematographer where you measure the light measuring so he went to measure the psych, he was measuring all of the light to then get it more luminance go up one stock go up in, you know, F stops. Yeah. So he was just pushing it like stop and a half, I think across the whole and sometimes it needed to be maybe two stops, right. But it was just pushing it to be that much lighter than it would have been in the theater. But the focusing on the structuring of the show through the lighting as Ralph directed it, is completely honored. But what's, you know, what, what I'm doing is, is I guess modulating it through the editing. In a sense, it makes it more intimate, but also more intense because if you're sitting in the theater, you can look up a way you can, you know kind of get your hands you look to the left or you got more you know your We're sort of in this goldfish bowl of the theater with a performer. Right. So in this sense, you know, you're really working to this, you know, to create, you know, a sense of seeing it. That's, that works to cinema.

Alex Heeney 45:17

Yeah. I mean, I would imagine that one of the big challenges is to find the right rhythms for those for that and like, I know that you talked about designing the shots to sort of have to do with the rhythm of the poll, but then you also have to figure out like, the rhythm of putting those things. Yeah, they're in the edit.

Sophie Fiennes 45:36

Absolutely. And then I edit my stuff myself, my stuff, my own stuff, I do my own editing. So yeah, that was, you know, as I say, really interesting how, how different points. You know, how, where to find that the most, the least disruptive edit, that would also kind of charge it charge the energy of the space. And the real gift for me in making this film is that prior to filming the performance and making at the same time a documentary about acting with a brilliant, brilliant theatre director, called Declan Donalyn. Great for cheek by jowl by Joel Do you know Jeep by Jerome?

Alex Heeney 46:18

I do? Yes.

Sophie Fiennes 46:19

Yeah. So I met I 18 years ago, I said to Declan, I got this fellowship, and I said, Look, you know, like, Can I watch you direct work with actors? Because I felt like I don't really know about, I don't really, you know, it's like, this kind of work with actors. What do you know, what does that entail? You know, because I've been, I've worked with Peter Greenaway. And he, you know, he would just kind of say to the actors, oh, you know, you're the star of the show. And they, and it was that as if that was enough. And you know, Greenaway would always cast these really great actors like Michael gamble, and Helen Mirren. And then he would never want to talk to them. There's a kind of terror of the app talking to the actor because you don't. And then of course, they again, they're all coming from theater, those actors. Yeah. So they join playwright. They all knew they all work again, like Ralph, they're sort of self sufficient. And they work. They have a really strong technical muscle. And so they could manage that. But I never felt like I'd seen like what it meant. What is the dialogue with actors? Quite I didn't really know. And, but when I read Jacqueline's book called the actor and the target, I was really fascinated by it. And then I said, Can I sit in on it because Raiford performed with Declan, he played Romeo in Romeo and Juliet. And, you know, he gives it to work with Declan again, but Declan likes working with younger actors, and he likes working outside of the UK. So you know, catch it, if you can, I saw on there, so I went to see it twice, then recent production of live stream, okay. In with a Spanish company. It just absolutely brilliant. Anyway, I said to Declan, can I watch your rehearsals because I don't know how I think because he'd worked with Ralph and I, I think I'd met him when I'd gone to see the show. But anyway, I sat in on the rehearsals to listen to kind of learn about it. Like, he was very let me watch rehearsals for like six weeks. And then I said, you know, Declan, let's make a rehearsal film? And he said, No, no, no, Sophie, it's so fragile. The rehearsal process is just completely like, No, you couldn't bring cameras into that. It's got to be a really, you know, safe space for the, you know, save not in the modern sense of the term, but just that people are going to try things and, and it was some, but it was so riveting watching that, and it stayed with me. And I thought, okay, you know, he doesn't want to do it. And then in the pandemic, he called me, they called me him and Nick or Murad, and they said, Sophie, we're ready.

Alex Heeney 48:55

Years later, 18 years later.

Sophie Fiennes 48:58

So then they said, But what we've been doing, we've been doing these workshops, and they're quite interesting. And so before I shot with Ralph, I actually filmed for two weeks, this workshop that they sort of, on Macbeth, so four sets of Macbeths. And Declan just just seeing his whole way of, you know, what I really like working with acting, but with his, his way of working, which is, you know, in the film, and I've actually got to finish it, cut it, you'll see, but he really, he's very, you know, the space is really a huge part of what he's doing. It's all about what happens in the space, what's out there, what the actor sees, liberating the actor to allow themselves to see what the character is seeing in moments. And so it's a bigger conversation about how he works, but this sense of what he calls distribution where so Where the distribution of what is seen in the space. So I was I was also really absorbed from this filming, with cheek by jowl, huge sensitivity to distribution of the space. So I kind of brought this theatrical, you know, sort of thinking about space from Nick and Declan. And I think that also gave Raphael confidence that I had this kind of knowledge of something that really matters to him. And if you if you're, you know, there, you can listen to that, and not true but useful podcasts that they did ya website, because that's a lot of it. So this thing about the space and thresholds you know, that was great to bring that sense to filming. So thinking about, again, with Stanley Cavell on film theory, and about all this ideas about the edge of the threshold of the edge of the frame, and where's the audience in their relationship to that space? And, and not thinking in terms of close ups, but thinking in terms of portraits? You know, it's like trying to kind of change the language about how to think about filming and not fall into these defaults.

Alex Heeney 51:14

So how did that affect like how you were setting up the frames and thinking about shooting that

Sophie Fiennes 51:22

I knew I wanted to have very long takes. Because I knew that you know what Ralph was doing? And Elliot, as I say, it's kind of already edited. In that sense, it's already got its rhythms. So a lot of it was just trying to, you know, create my luck for the edit. And then I realized that, you know, I learned a lot in the Edit about what, what worked and what didn't, I kind of created an initial condition, sensitivity to space, and then I brought it to the editing. So it's kind of refining across the detail of, you know, like, there was one moment where he reaches out in the dry sort of ages. And he goes out, you know, and the grapes on the autumn table, and he put his hand out of the frame. And Mike the kept wanting to sort of, he just didn't believe that I shouldn't follow. Like, I said, No, it was fine. If it's out of the frame. That's where the great Sir doesn't, you know, he wanted I was, like I said, I'm really sorry, might have to tie your hands behind your back. Here, he wants to follow Ralph, if I said you can't, you know, if he, if he, if he's out of the frame is fine. So it was, it was very much kind of allowing that that's, and also that's the thing about documentaries, that it's never in your control, and you never have a second take. So you know, you kind of you but you know that you get so much kind of magic for free. Because life is just constantly, things are sort of happening. So I think I sort of bring that sense of you know, you kind of you have to make your luck. And you have to sort of, you know, yeah, just slightly hold your breath and hope it'll work and then quickly learn when it's not working. How to adjust it.

Alex Heeney 53:12

Yeah, no, I mean, I love that. Because, you know, it reminds me a lot like I saw race and Richard the Third, like on opening night at at the Alameda. And then a few months later, I saw the recording they did. And the recording was like insistently following him around the stage, he couldn't see the blocking. And I felt like I'd seen two completely different productions. I was like, it miss talk, the stuff that I loved about seeing it. I think that

Sophie Fiennes 53:37

was probably there at that opening night. I know. Exactly. It's this thing about, you know, this sort of a set of assumptions that, you know, are about, you know, outside broadcast people coming in, they don't know. I mean, Ralph was, you know, very much like, Sophie, you've got to really know, the police, you've got to know the, you know, he's quite neurotic Ralph, you know, it's like, that's why he's brilliant. But, you know, it's like, you know, I sort of, you know, absolutely, you know, had I saw the show many times I sat in for the rehearsals, I I studied it, I had to know it. And when you do that those kinds of, you know, like you say capturing you've just got, you know, cameramen who are just think Well, of course, I just follow Ralph finds, of course, that's what I should do. Just that's what you do. And of course, you have to question those assumptions. But I'm coming from this very particular like, you know, pleasures around certain ideas, and particularly around space because I think like that's why I could see it with Declan with what he's doing with these actors. It's amazing how to see what they do change. And this thing about the space it's because there's definitely said we live in the space that's where we live, we live in space. When when we die we lose we lose the space Huh, it is about that's why your idea about this kind of, like, out of tightness is because that space is it's a kind of simple, but it's void in a way, edges of something familiar but but so this idea of the space was really, really riveting for me too, I really felt fed by, as I say, the standard Kanwal ideas and the depth and sort of ideas and then in my own sort of love of Ozu and how he handles space and, and also, in fact, you know, if you the grammar of the cinematic grammar of space was a very particular thing. Like if you're making films in the 50s, and Hollywood, you know, you've got that is just a given. And, but but since cinema got more kinetic, it got more about like impact and touched on like speed. It's been at the loss of the space. Yeah. And that's where the intimacy campaigns because we inhabit space.

Alex Heeney 56:05

Yeah. I mean, I, there's this quote that Nicholas Hytner has said many times about the difference between theater and film, which is that like in theater, a room is a metaphor for something else. And then film room is just a room. And you kind of have to

Sophie Fiennes 56:19

agree with it. But it's interesting. Okay, I totally, I totally don't agree. That's like God, you know, Tarkowski is not just a room. It might be Nicholas Hytner. Oh, no, Nick.

Alex Heeney 56:41

I mean, fair enough. I guess I was just gonna ask like, so how do you think about the difference between? Because even if that's not true, like there is a different, like, theater does require a certain kind of like, you sort of imagine a time

Sophie Fiennes 56:56

as well, because you're changing spaces in theater as fast as you are, if you're cutting, like I say, kinetically. Yeah. If you think spatially like one of my favorite films is this film called sell on Mexico sell on Mexico, which is a kind of classic Mexican noir film, it's all set in as a dancer in a sort of prostitute, bordello. And it's really sultry and so sexy kind of extraordinarily brilliantly crafted dance sequences spatially. So I think like, it depends on how long you stay in a space because on film, the image starts to evolve its own haunted Vnus its has its own life, the uncanny nature of of cinema, right. So if you think of a film like Gilda, you know, then do you know that film Gilda with Rita Hayworth. So for instance, that sequence among the Meo that was my reference point for shooting Grace Jones. And because of the way the camera is there, that she marks the space and the camera totally allows us to see what's happening in the space. That cafe like I feel like I've been in that cafe in Yeah. You know, it's like a physical thing. I mean, if you think of films, that that so that grew up the cinematic grammar, or what cinematic staging, I think when it was when film was closer to theater, yeah. There's much more understanding of space or much more interest in space.

Alex Heeney 58:29

Yeah, I think so. People still do that. But they're the number is it's small compared to you, do you think? Join a hog? I think it's Andrew Hague, also. Yeah, incentive to stay. Yeah, those are two of my top ones for sure.

Sophie Fiennes 58:50

So no, I agree. So, you know, I was thinking about something like Rome, Open City, Rossellini film, I mean, the sense of space in that and then also the theatricality of the performances even though supposedly near realism. Those Those actors are all so much coming from theater.

Alex Heeney 59:10

Yeah. Realism is a shifting target, isn't it?

Sophie Fiennes 59:15

Because the thing about is that reality itself has been unreal. Yeah. You gotta keep searching for your realism because it's never really that real. Yeah. And that's what's brilliant about the cheek by jowl show because it's all about I'd never I didn't know the play of the la barca play life is a dream but it's this character who's taught has been locked in a locked in a tower by his father because there's there's apparently a curse on him and then the father decides to let him out to see if he can actually be a leader. And then he turns out because he's been the lead in this little grown up in this kind of isolated way. He's completely rogue and then the father has theirs puts him back in they said that that was a dream, you know, and You know, he goes, was it real? Was it? It's all this kind of skeptical? Is it real? Is it really real? Is it a dream? You don't know. And when I saw the play, I didn't know when the play was written. I thought this must be like Dada 1930s You know, and turns out, it was written in 1638. You know, so this thing about, you know, is it real? What is, um, you know, it's always interesting. That's like, look at us. Now we're talking. We're sort of sitting in our rooms on a computer on one side of the ocean. Yeah. It's kind of crazy. Yeah.

Speaker 3 1:00:41

I mean, it's interesting, you're saying that you saw you, because you had been in rehearsals, and you've seen this sort of like one frame take of the show. These days, it seems like we've got, if you look at like, the bigger broader picture of what recording theatre looks like, you've got like, live from the meta and NT live, where we're following the actors around, or you've got the stuff that ends up in libraries, with like, one steel frame that, you know, it's great performances, but it's excruciating to watch.

Alex Heeney 1:01:12

Like, I think that's what like, because I was in New York City. And I sat in, I watched Raven quarry Elena, so I'm like a VHS tape, like one frame. And obviously, what you're doing is more dynamic. But there's also, there's something great about the fact that these tapes are longer, and that you ended up with a space. And I'm just wondering if that's something that has to do

Sophie Fiennes 1:01:34

with lenses, it's to do with optics of lenses. And also for me, I looked at that, like a dance performance, because I felt like, evolved, you know, and use the use of his body was something that was part of what he was acting from, yes, the voice, but the body too. And I didn't want to lose that space. So full body. So you know, and then we would travel along in those sections, but I wanted people to be able to orient, you know, know, the orientation of where he was, you know, it's much better, you know, we've got proper sort of film lenses, whereas a perfect shot with a prosumer camera. You know, it's just, I mean, one of the most, you know, this, I think the film that I made that really, really loved and he said, you know, let's, let's do this was this film I made about a dance performance or artificial things that disabled and non disabled Dance Company stop gap. And the choreographer, they said to me, can you know, can you make this into a 25 minute film? Roughly 25 minutes, but the show itself was an hour and 10 minutes.

Alex Heeney 1:02:47

Wow, okay,

Sophie Fiennes 1:02:48

I had that. Shot. Yeah. And then she was great, the choreographer Lucy Bennett. And we, because she was really open to kind of, okay, so I just had it on the timeline of, you know, in a rough way, just even with the wide shot to sort of cut the choreography into a different, different sort of, you know, order different different shape. So you had this idea of actually setting in a derelict shopping mall, and then someone who worked from the company found this amazing derelict shopping mall. And, and we reset the choreography in a physical space that could continue so you'd get the geography of this shopping mall. And so we repositioned what was the frontal dance performance into these strange spaces, but that they could be coherently linked. That was an interesting thing about space. Because it wasn't a theatrical space, it was a real space, but we took apart the theatrical performance and, and reset it. And so that was that was interesting, too. It's like sort of unpacking like, it's a bit like having like a, you know, fortune teller thing. And to fold it open, and you find a different shape to it. With that film, I had this idea that the camera would always be slightly moving, like at any point, the cameras always slightly moving very, very slowly. But otherwise, it was also allowing us to see the body. Because as soon as you lose that you, you lose the space to.

Alex Heeney 1:04:21

I mean, it's interesting in the way you're talking about how you have to sort of like take these pieces apart and sort of put them back together is of course, that's how these things are rehearsed and learned. It's not like you run it in a hole, but then in performance, like the presence of the audience is so important, and you get into like, a flow and a certain movement and

Sophie Fiennes 1:04:41

we definitely we definitely work choreography. We work chronologically across the show for the four quarters, because I Ralph definitely felt that he wouldn't be able to jump around. Yeah. He needed to be continuously, you know, through a passage and working because there is is a kind of thought line that he's building there. So we didn't want to break that. And so yeah, because I was, I was relieved that he could stop it and start it even within a quartet. Oh, wow. Yeah. But no, he's very, he's very, very disciplined. So, you know, he's almost kind of sacrifices himself to his work completely. Always really hard work. You know, he, I don't know anyone who works as hard as him actually. In terms of he's sort of dedicated that sort of precision and, yeah, complete dedication. But that's why Yeah, I wanted to really capture I think I've seen as you clearly haven't, you know, I've seen, you know, I think pretty much all his stage work.

Alex Heeney 1:05:49

I definitely haven't seen all of it. I'm not all the

Sophie Fiennes 1:05:54

Coralina. So, yeah.

Alex Heeney 1:05:57

I've seen a lot of recordings of some of the older stuff,

Sophie Fiennes 1:05:59

I'd say. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I feel I felt like this was something very, you know, really sort of personal to him. Even though it's interesting, because, in fact, you know, he's already in a way taken a big liberty with poem. Yeah. So, you know, I didn't want to take more liberties on top of that. In that, you know, it's, you know, he's turned it into a subjective, embodied performance, as opposed to a reading or, yeah, he's put his he sees through character, I think he sees he approaches, making something like that through character. Not necessarily Elliott. But just the text. As the kind of in the classic unit, a set of relations. Yeah. And the character is a set of relations in the world.

Speaker 3 1:06:54

Did you have like a dialogue about that, or that's just kind of something that, you know, emerged, because you've been talking to him about the, the, you know, the production since its inception. And so then it was, you know, like, I know, with Grace Jones, she was kind of like, that's okay. It's your film. I'll perform for you when you need it. But like you. It's not my film.

Sophie Fiennes 1:07:17

I think that for Ralph, you know, he's, he's got such strong voice memory of doing that of being in the show. And in fact, one of the hardest things was, he was very resistant to me filming him from the side. The profile, or the three quarters, was always like, he wants to turn because it's like, Mike, and I like going, can we do we can get away with it. Please wait, just look there, just look over there, please. He was like, I should be put to the camera. And I really, like I fought hard to get those kinds of oblique, seeing him but not having him see, you know, always controlling the events, but he had to be seen from the side. And so I think it's that thing of he was used to carrying it as one person on the stage every night. So it's can terrifying. Kind of see it not feel that he's got but as he's very pleased with his performance, so that was good. And though he was yeah, he liked the challenge of, of modulating it to the camera. And there was we took it to the nth degree. And we did go back and have to cap pick up some areas that I knew weren't particularly well covered. And I because we had a technical rain on the last day. So we had to go back and do stuff and further away. And, you know, he ran a very long take from East Coker, which actually a lot of it is in that section with the dance in his cocoa is this tape because it will he was really kind of going for it. And then there were all the grips who were run managing the technic Crane had been on some Netflix series for like, months and months or some Amazon TV series and, and after he did it and the lights one of them it was like, like this little boy. And then they went Blimey. That's that's the most performance I've seen, you know, after 510 minutes and I've seen on you know, sort of five months on a Netflix series. It was funny. He you know, he trusted it to me. He knew that he couldn't really have done that himself, like make a film and be in it. But yeah, I think we come from very different places. In terms of how we think, Phil Mickley but we respect each other. Yeah. And I definitely you know I do consider part of what I do is create documents of things that I feel should be created. Create you know, the This process of documentation matters if for some reason, yeah. And to be as true to that as possible.

Alex Heeney 1:10:10

Yeah, I mean, well, speaking of that, like I'm wondering about the sound, because one of the things that tends to plague recordings or documents or theater is a sound, it's bad 90% of the time, and you can't have bad sound in something like this, especially because it's all dialogue, and you would miss such a huge amount.

Sophie Fiennes 1:10:33

Yeah, yeah. Well, so I mean, he had like two radio mics in his collar. And then oh, wow, the difficulty is that you know, the sound, that's the boom sound that's closer. There's always the nicer sound, but you can't have a boom. So we this the sound designer, the sound in Philly, jumpy, who did the sound mix. spent ages, you know, he's brilliant, just in his really brilliant Philippe. And I was really happy that I could work with him because he really cared. And, you know, he had to spend a lot of time making the radio mics, not sound too hollow. And because they're near to the throat, they often pick up things that are happening that aren't that don't sound as much as vocal as if you have a mic in front, but you can't, in order to really get that sound, the mic has to be a distance that would be visible in those shots. So it is a wrestle You're right. I mean, sound is a really, really, you know, important. And that was Philippe Spence a long time. Sort of really working on making the sound, not to reverb be not like it's not, it didn't we didn't want it to feel like he's in this reverberant space. But it doesn't want to feel as if there's no space. So he Philippe had this sort of lots of recordings of ambient sounds. And I think it was like a church in Georgia. He'd recorded some sound that was a non sound or, you know, there's, you find you have to find the sounds that fill the space, but don't do anything to it that tells you where you are, but just makes it feel like it's an embodied space, or it's, it's a real space. And it's crucial in film.

Alex Heeney 1:12:31

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you're talking about editing to like, certain rhythms within the text, like, what did that look like?

Sophie Fiennes 1:12:38

What do you mean, in terms of? Well, I

Alex Heeney 1:12:43

mean, you were talking about there are like different sort of structural elements, and that you were trying to repeat.

Sophie Fiennes 1:12:50

Yeah, it's to do with, you know, these different sections, like, you know, as identified by, by Helen Gardner. So it was really about creating a language, a language for each register, because he's exploring language, Elliott is descriptive. And it's slightly magical, and strange. And then it's the kind of urban of London the underground, the hills of Putney, you know, Tandon and Putney High Growth, you know, I gate all of those, that's a conjuring of urban space. So as I say that I just it was about the proximity of the camera and allowing because we rave was worried that I wasn't shooting close ups using enough posts up Sophie and I and then I just thought in fact in a thought, I'm just going to do these lyric passages. So something like ash on an old man sleeve as all the ash the burnt roses, leaves dust in the air suspended marks the place where a story ended. Dust in breathed is a house the wall, the wainscot, and the mass, you know, this, there's so all of these these rhyming bits, I did closer so that you feel the sort of the rhythms of the of rhyming language, I suppose, you know, so it's like spatial proximities that are modulated to these different different parts of the poem. And because the idea of the words is he's, he's in he's trying to sort of see if it's possible to make a poem that does what the late Beethoven quartets do, which is to do with kind of quite radical changes of rhythm. And breaking the assumption that like, if you think of some long fellows poems, or sort of a higher Walther, it's got amazing constant rhyming. And, you know, he's, you know, wrestling with language Elliott to make it rhyme. They're not rhyme to digress So he's wrestling with words and meanings, you know this. So it's a lot about how, if you had four different elements, different instruments in a quartet, that will be bringing, you know, their different qualities. So he does that with language with the, with the language, it's not sort of mechanically prescriptive. But you can see that he does have these four different registers within each quartet, so that they really return. So you they come they come back up out of each quartet, so there is a, you know, the recurrence of, you know, landscapes. And, you know, and city cities, and then history is sort of it doesn't, you know, by the time you get to a little kid, and you've got this church, which is, in a sense, replacing the domestic space is the sacred space, which is the letting go of the domestic because it's reconciling to death, right. So, in that sense, you know, you so you could say that the, you know, then he has the dream about the urban, the urban in the, in the dawn wind in the urban Dawn, wind, unrelenting when he meets the ghost of Dante. And he sort of has this conversation with a ghost at night in the city. So you can see there's the city in that in little Gidding and then you've got the underground in East Coker. And then you've got the hills of Putney, and all of the gloomy, you know, the gloomy exteriors of London that's urban, and then in in dry, salvages you you don't have urban because this is sort of it's as if this passivity of the sea sort of, as it were sort of washes over everything. You know, it's this huge sort of unrelenting space of like a sort of material of the sea that has no edge in the sense that the city does or, you know, it's the sort of material of the sea. So he kind of changes it in the dry salve ages. And originally, he wrote it he wrote three Cortez and then George Orwell wrote a really stinging review. And, and sort of, you know, and I think then Elliott was like, off and he wrote a little Gidding. It's quite interesting to come across that, the George Orwell essay where he is very critical, because there's a feeling that, you know, it's just not cool to write about religious belief. Helen Gardner, also put together a brilliant anthology of poetry of the metaphysical poets. And I think Elliot was kind of wanting to write a metaphysical poem, as much as he was, yes, a believer and he became very, you know, churched up. And so this thing of Pentecost, it's quite hard to approach it if you're not religious in the Christian sense. I saw the Pentecost the Pentecostal moment, is also like the moment of renunciation and, and sort of not letting go. Letting go Yeah.

Alex Heeney 1:18:39

If you're interested in continuing to explore how Theatre has been captured, recorded and documented on film, we have done several episodes where we've discussed theatre productions that have been recorded. If you go back to Episode 49, and Episode 60, we talk about the Old Vic theatres in camera series, which happened at the beginning of the pandemic, where they actually were when the theater was closed. And so what they did is they staged live productions that they directed to be streamed live to people's homes around the world via zooms it was directed for the camera, but performed live on stage in an empty theater. And we talk about the play lungs in Episode 49. And in Episode 60, we talk about three kings and faith healer. In bonus episode number 17, we talk about the Almeida theaters, experimentation with live streaming, a show that was playing to a live audience, but live streaming it to people's homes also during the pandemic, which was the production of the tragedy of Macbeth starring Sasha Ronan and James McArdle and that's in our bonus episode number 17. Finally, we did a couple of episodes in which we talked about National Theatre Live productions which are are also live streamed live recorded productions but these ones are live streamed to cinemas. And so we talked about the Angels in America production from several years back in episode 98, and compared it to the HBO miniseries. And in Episode 108, we talk about carry crackles and t live production of the deep blue sea and compare it to Terence Davies film adaptation of the play. These episodes are all now more than six months old. So now they are exclusively available to our members. If you want to listen to them, then you can become a member you can do so at seven dash row.com/join that will give you access to our entire podcast archive. So not just those episodes, but all of the episodes that we're referencing this season and everything else under the sun that seventh row has covered and as a member, you will get a personalized podcast feed that you basically just open up in the podcaster pod catcher of your choice once you subscribe, and then once you've opened it up in the pod catcher of your choice that will just load in there like any other podcasts b You don't have to log in somewhere you don't have to keep reloading it, you'll just get all of the new episodes, both the episodes that are free to everyone and members only episodes and have access to our entire archive. Next week on the podcast, I'll be talking to Canadian filmmaker Philippe fellow doe but his new four part documentary series like being on tick, this is not an accident. The series had its world premiere at Hot Docs this year, and it's about the lack of Aegon teak rail disaster, which happened in 2013. And the show documents how this was allowed to happen and why similar disasters have continued to happen since the series is a riff on the true crime genre. Falardeau is more interested in looking at systemic problems than laying blame on any individuals. To prep for that episode, I recommend listening to our masterclass with Bella doe and also the Canadian filmmaker Mina shoom, in which they discuss their careers and approaches to filmmaking. You can listen to that in episode 46. Or you can watch it on YouTube or there's a link there'll be a link in the show notes if you want to see it with video. And in two weeks, we'll have an interview with Sam green about his live documentary 32 sounds which is kind of the flip side to recording theater it's kind of turning a film into a live experience. To find out more about the creative nonfiction season go to seven dash row.com/creative nonfiction pod that's sav e n t h dash r o w.com/no spaces creative nonfiction pod. I will also put a link to that in the show notes. On our website for the season you'll find links to all the episodes and show notes as well as information on all of our ebooks on documentary. If you'd like to keep exploring creative nonfiction filmmaking, I recommend getting a copy of our ebook subjective realities the art of creative nonfiction film at subjective realities.com The book features a ton of in depth interviews and filmmakers who are working in different modes of creative nonfiction. And they talk about their specific films as well as more generally how they think about pushing the boundaries of documentary cinema. If you'd like to get in touch with me you can find me on Twitter and Instagram at be worse than us that's BWESTCINE a s t e. You can find seven throw on Twitter and Instagram at seven throw SCBWI NTHRO w you can also email me at contact at seven dash ro.com That's s e n t h dash r o w.com. If you enjoyed the episode and are enjoying the season, please consider rate rating and reviewing the podcast. It helps other people find us and we're deeply deeply appreciative of every rating and review that we get. Thanks for listening

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