Introduction

Why 'Naked Cinema'?

Audiences enter the world of a film through its complex surfaces and structures, whether they are elaborate or minimal, realistic or fantastic. But invariably it is the human in the frame who guides us through the labyrinth of feeling and visual information; it is because of him or her that we want to know what happens next. The intimate, powerful relationship between audience and actor may feel natural, but it is a construction, the end result of many working processes. This book attempts to strip away the mystique and look at how we come to feel we know actors intimately and what it is that they and the director have to do to arrive at an apparently seamless and effortless result that feels 'true'.

Believing that transparency - a willingness to reveal what you know - not only strengthens your own practice but also, curiously, evokes further mysteries beyond language, is what lies behind the title of this book. Just as actors themselves often feel emotionally naked in front of the camera - and know that this is necessary - this book aims for a similar state of openness. I will begin by revealing my own hand; some parts of the story that led me to become a director.

I grew up loving actors and acting. My grandmother had studied singing in the 1920s, then worked in variety in Charlot's Revue in London's West End before becoming a more 'serious' actress (she used the term proudly), playing ingénue parts in productions such as The Ghost Train. She stopped when she gave birth to my mother at the relatively late age - for that period - of thirty-three. As a child I was entranced by her stories of life in the theatre and often played with the black metal box of greasepaints which she had kept intact since her years on the boards. It was the gleam in her eye when she recounted the camaraderie, the thrill of stage fright, the feat of memory she had achieved when she was asked to step into a lead role only three days before opening night - and managed to be word-perfect - that entranced me. It wasn't just the buzz and glitter she evoked, the late smoky nights in Soho after a show, the fans at the stage door (including her own beau, who became my grandfather). It was also the look in her eye that suggested she had touched something mysterious and essential: a sense of purpose, a wicked irreverence for what was considered proper in pursuit of what she felt to be true.

Beatrice Fox - 'Hunny'

She remained an entertainer throughout her life, but her stage was limited to the home, where she shone: laughing, telling stories, creating domestic beauty, but above all caring for others. She served, with a sense of duty and out of love, but for me she was a queen. I wished I had seen her on the stage. I would have led a standing ovation. Hunny, my Hunny! For that was the name I knew her by. Her stage name was Beatrice Fox, but the name Hunny evoked sweetness, bees, the good creatures who make all life possible.

My mother too dreamed of a life on stage, but her ambition was to be a singer. She gave birth to me when she was still a teenager, swiftly followed by my brother Nic, and was only able to study professionally when she reached her thirties. She aimed at opera, but a short-lived career touring the provinces singing in the chorus of an ice-skating show deflated her longings. She became a devoted music teacher and continued singing, passionately, in amateur opera troupes. Nic and I were often in the heartbreakingly sparse audience, witnessing the love and vigour, the energy and desire that amateurs demonstrate, doggedly, in pursuit of excellence.

Nic became a rock musician at sixteen, and was backing Chuck Berry on bass guitar at the Albert Hall by the time he was eighteen. And my father, though his métier was design and the properties of wood - some of my earliest memories are of playing in the sawdust in his workshop while he worked, humming happily, late into the night - loved music, especially Beethoven. He would conduct to recordings as if the phrasing of the orchestra was in his hands. Years later I watched as he came alive when he stood up to address a crowded hall of students, lecturing on modernism. It wasn't just the excitement of the ideas that ignited his passion, it was the thrill of being watched, being heard, and being able to deliver. I saw the circuit of energy between performer and audience in which the speaker articulates, for himself and for those listening, ideas and experiences that had somehow previously remained vague, a dull outline. I was once again witnessing a form of theatrical presence, the occupying of an ancient space, an arena.

When we were tiny, I coerced my brother into participating in shows performed in our bedroom. Our bunk beds were the stage, a blanket used as a curtain. My mother and perhaps a lodger or two were the audience. At primary school I wrote plays and bossed around an often bewildered, but willing group of ten-year-old participants. And then at fourteen I was lent an 8mm camera and put the viewfinder to my eye. Framing the world - in black and white - made my heart beat faster and clarified my sense of purpose, without my consciously knowing for a moment what that was. But I announced to a largely cynical and uninterested world that I was going to be a film director.

The road to this intoxicatingly thrilling and powerful place would prove to be more arduous and full of obstacles and deviations than I could ever have imagined. I left school at sixteen to prove I could honour my ambition, joined the London Film-makers' Co-operative (there was no film school at the time that accepted undergraduates), devoured hour upon hour of films from Warhol to Eisenstein, and, by and large, taught myself the rudiments of shooting and editing on out-of-date 16mm film stock in the ramshackle but extremely lively 'Arts Laboratory', a collectively run, idealistic endeavour. The results - the no-budget school of film-making - were abstract, anti-narrative and very short. But unlike many of the 'structuralist' film-makers in the co-op (whose passion, borrowing heavily from linguistic theory, was decoding the 'language' of cinema), my efforts always involved looking at people. I wanted to see the human face, the human body, illuminate the frame.

A foundation year at St Martin's School of Art taught me how to look - really look - in hour upon hour of life drawing. I joined a 'happenings' group. We performed on the London Underground and called it 'guerrilla theatre'. A few more years of washing up and chopping carrots in the steamy infernos of restaurant kitchens to earn money whilst painstakingly labouring at my 'underground' cinematic works (including several 'expanded cinema' events, which consisted of live action simultaneous with projected footage), led me circuitously to spend a year studying dance and choreography at The Place in London. Friends and family were puzzled. Dance? What did that have to do with cinema, with my stated ambitions? Nothing, on the surface, but a great deal underneath. It was attending class, day-in day-out, in whatever I 'felt' like doing, that taught me self-discipline. It was the collaborative endeavours of dancers working together in the rehearsal studio that taught me about the evolution of form in a process shared with others. And it was the crafting of my relationship as a choreographer with dancers that began to teach me how to direct performers. How to use their unique qualities. How to search for their genius. I stayed on at The Place for another couple of fruitful, physically demanding years.

With Jacky Lansley in Limited Dance Company, 1974

The decade that followed began with forming a dance company ('Limited Dance Company', co-directed with Jacky Lansley and so-called because it featured a limited amount of dance) and then morphed rapidly into a series of collaborations and solo shows in the world of performance art. These were sometimes played out in small theatres and art galleries, but above all in public spaces. We explored 'real-time' in slowly unfolding events or performance marathons and 'real-space' by putting on shows in swimming pools, ice rinks, squatted houses, abandoned warehouses, all of which became our arena. In cinematic terms, we were working 'on location'.

Berlin, 1976

Death and the Maiden, 1975

The audiences were enthusiastic but the spaces and places were inherently limited to one self-selecting type of crowd. Watching Patti Smith play live in Central Park to a huge, mixed audience, one hot summer afternoon in New York, on a stop-over in the middle of a performing and teaching tour of US art colleges, sparked in me a burning desire to occupy a larger stage.

I joined a music group, drawing on my mixed bag of skills as a performer, and embarked on several years of touring in Europe playing the festival circuit. This was an all-female group of improvising musicians - known as FIG - playing in heavyweight jazz festivals in France and Germany and in Communist Party festas across Italy. We occasionally shared the bill with such luminaries as Miles Davis and Chet Baker, but were musical anarchists and political renegades in the context of such virtuosos. I was by far the least skilled, musically, in this group and, later, in mixed ensembles, but developed a nice line in improvised lyrics - a kind of wild, deconstructed rap. Looking out at a sea of faces, feeling the power and attention of an enormous crowd,...