Audio Guide is screening part of St Kilda Film Festival’s 2020 program. Directed by Chris Elena, starring Emma Wright and Nyx Calder, Audio Guide is about a woman who is told the secrets of the world through an art gallery-issued audio guide. Janine from Film in Revolt spoke with Chris about working on the film.
Janine: Audio Guide is not quite like any other short film that I’ve seen before and I’m interested to know how this project came together. Did it start with an idea or were you given the script in full?
Chris: Thank you! Audio Guide came about because I used to write and direct my own films but noticed mid-way through shooting my previous film that I’m not that great of a writer. I thought, alright, it’s probably better that I collaborate with a writer instead. Then Lee Zachariah (Audio Guide writer) spoke to me about having writers block and he goes, “I can’t write. Nothing is really helping. I can’t write for myself.” And then I don’t know why I said it but I said, “Then write for me. If you write something for me, I’ll make it. Even if it’s a travel ad, I’ll do it. Just give me something so that I can direct someone else’s work. I trust your writing.” Once he gave me the script I realised it was almost like a silent film. I don’t know if he did that on purpose or if he saw my last movie where everyone spoke for three years! [Laughs] I worked with Emma (Audio Guide actor) on my last movie and she killed it. I gave her this script first and said, “If you’re with me on this, let’s just do it.” And she said, “Yes.” I self-funded Audio Guide and went to Panavision and said, “I’d like to shoot on film, what do I need to do?” They were very generous and Kodak were very generous. Then we spent three days shooting around Marrickville and Newtown.
Oh, wow. That’s incredible. The coolest thing about watching Audio Guide was that it was shot on film which is so rare nowadays. Shooting on film definitely added a certain texture that you wouldn’t get with digital. What made you decide to go with film?
Film is my number one choice for anything I do and because I self-fund everything, I always try to shoot in film. When I first started wanting to make movies, I remember the look of film being so beautiful and not of the current time. Movies aren’t shot on film anymore and when they are, they look more like a painting and there’s something grander to it. I remember thinking, man, I’ve got to do that. You know, if we don’t have money for other things, film will make it look like we do. Also, I didn’t go to film school. Well, I did for three hours but it was not a great experience. They told me I had to shoot digital and that film is dead, so I left. But shooting with film is actually teaching me to be a better filmmaker because you can’t watch the scene right after you’ve shot it. You just have to trust the take and if your Director of Photography says it’s in focus and it looks good, you have to trust them. Not everything is so immediate and everyone’s on the same playing field. You get three amazing takes instead of ten okay ones. With digital, you just keep shooting and shooting and film doesn’t have any of that. No one could watch it after we shot it so everyone just had to trust each other. Film allows me to learn more about trusting instinct, directing and working with actors, and forcing yourself to get something to look beautiful instead of just shooting it because it’s there. And really, as a filmmaker, working with aesthetic more, especially if you’re not a very technical person like me. The last reason to shoot on film is it’s timeless. It looks timeless and it doesn’t look like it was shot last week. Audio Guide is a movie about a piece of technology telling you about the history and the past of things so I wanted it to feel like it could have been shot five or six years ago.
Yeah of course. When I started watching and I realised it was film, I was kind of in awe because you rarely see that these days. And whenever I see a movie that’s shot on film, I’m just like, oh, it’s just beautiful. I don’t even have the words for it.
It’s like you’re getting spoilt.
Exactly! That’s it. Another thing I wanted to ask was that one of your lead actors was present on screen but had no dialogue whilst your other lead was purely dialogue and had no screen time. What was it like working under those circumstances and what was it like bringing it together?
In theory, it should have been hard, but it wasn’t because both Emma and Nyx are so goddamn good at their job. I’d worked with both of them before on my last movie and so we had a previous working relationship. We like working back and forth and I’m quite easy-going and playful with actors on my projects. I know that working on a movie is already difficult and we don’t need to make it harder. Let’s just relax and when the take comes, we go and get into it. With Nyx, I said, “Here’s the script,” and, “Do you want to be the lead? I’m thinking of Emma for the lead though.” And they’re like, “No, I want to be the audio guide. I’ve wanted to do more voicework.” And then it was done, I didn’t even have an audition to go by since I already trusted them. Which is not a great thing to do as a director but when I trust my actors so much, something in me just let it happen. I sat down with Nyx and we worked on an accent for the audio guide that wasn’t specifically Australian. It had a formal tone to it that could have bordered on British and it just sounds like something you’d hear in a gallery. That way, anything they said sounds like it has real weight to it and sounds like information. Once we developed that we recorded it three times. And I was like, great, I’m going to use this on set and gave it to Emma. And she said, “No, I’m just going to go on instinct.” Everything you see of Emma in the film, she’s timed it based on the script. She’s not listening to anything. We couldn’t get it to time properly whilst filming so Emma just said, “Tell me how big you want me to go, how small you want me to go, and I’ll time it from there. It will work in post-production.” And I agreed with her on that. We recorded it just to get a feel for the pacing of how it would sound and then Emma just did all that by herself. Because we spent two months going over the script, she got it. We had mostly two or three takes the entire film. There are a few one takes in there which we got and Emma just killed it the whole time.
That’s so incredible. I’ve only seen Emma perform in theatre before but she’s always so great. Which brings me to another question, the thing with working on film is that it’s always interesting how you incorporate sound. What was your approach to the sound design in Audio Guide?
That’s one of the few things where I wish we had more time to develop a sound design that was really precise. Because in my head, I was like, this has to have the most precise sound design and the most specific quality. I was really excited about heightening the senses. But then as we were shooting it, and the more we were looking at it in post, I realised we didn’t need it all that specifically. And that kind of calmed me down. Basically, it was the idea that we were going to try avoid music. Emma is leading the film so much that the sound design ends up becoming secondary. But we focused on atmos. Atmos was the biggest thing and making you hear how big or small a room was even when she’s outside.
Yeah, definitely. I could definitely feel that when I was watching it.
Thank you, that’s a relief because Emma’s face is so emotive, and those close-ups are practically dialogue. We were essentially replacing dialogue with close-ups. I needed the audience to hear it and feel it so that they know the proximity and geography of the room without us entirely showing it. That was the intention. I was going to go more specific, but I kind of brought it back and said, you know, Emma’s leading the show, and it’s pretty good.
Yeah, and it worked pretty well. Audio Guide engages with big ideas about fate, purpose, knowledge, religion and more. This is pretty heavy stuff that is overwhelming and can make you feel insignificant but the film doesn’t necessarily end on a sad note. How did you condense such big ideas into Audio Guide? Was that a difficult process? How did you come up with the ending?
As you can tell with me answering these questions, brevity is not my strong point. I wanted to carry that over to Audio Guide where we have these gigantic ideas that are part of the premise. I wanted to get those ideas in a concise fashion. It was a matter of going from one point to the next to the next in a concise way, but also really giving it some depth, which thankfully the script gave us enough to do that. And that allowed me not to overthink things. It’s all in the script and Emma’s responding to it. The main idea was that Emma’s response is more important than what’s being said. That was my reading of the whole script. When she hears that part about her religion, Emma’s response is more heartbreaking than the actual information she hears. It’s not about the information, it’s about how it affects her. That was the whole thing. The real answer is, it was all on her. It was all on Emma’s reactions to give us the weight of those circumstances. Also, with the ending, I did kind of change it up from the original script which was a little more ambiguous. In my head I realised we couldn’t do that to her, we’d kind of punished her the entire film and we had to give her something in return. The ending where the audio cuts out was a deliberate decision to show that this story is really about the person. It’s a movie about a person learning that the world is different from what they originally imagined but what they learn isn’t the point. It’s about how that person feels and what they go through. I also think that a lot of films where a woman is the focus, they put her through the wringer. And I object to that because I think that it’s quite mean and that they never give that woman something in return. They never give her an ending for herself. It’s always so much suffering and suffering and either she just makes it or she dies. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to give her a smile or some kind of warmth so that even though the world is so different to what she thought, at least she has something. So yeah, it was really more about how everything she went through came in full circle and it’s not about the information, it’s about what you’re going to do with it.
That’s really lovely! The very last question that I have is – what’s a film that impacted you in your youth?
Paul Thomas Anderson, his movies, I love him. All his films are like someone who’s so overly emotional and not sure what to do with that emotion made a movie. And they gave him too much money to do it. When I saw Magnolia at the age of fourteen, I was just in awe because it breaks the rules of brevity and has no emotional restraint.
Oh, Magnolia was just insane. The first time I saw it I didn’t know how to sit with everything I’d just seen.
Right? He was so young and so emotionally vulnerable that he made this movie for people who feel like the world is crashing around them. And there was something about Boogie Nights that was rather sweet. For a movie about pornography, I thought it was going to be quite sleazy and gross, and there are a few moments, but it wasn’t just about that. Paul Thomas Anderson has a kind of maturity so I love his films in general. But two movies that broke the mould for me are…hang on…can you see that?
Chris turns his camera towards a poster of Southland Tales on his wall.
Oh, I haven’t seen that before but I’ve heard about it.
Yeah, it’s a bit like Magnolia because it’s got too much in it and it’s too ridiculous. Southland Tales was this film that everyone claimed was a disaster. It’s from the director of Donnie Darko and it got booed and everyone hated it and said it was too long. When I heard about it, I thought, okay this might be for me. [Laughs] So I watched it at the age of fifteen or sixteen and it broke something in me because the film plays by its own rules, it tells whatever it wants. It feels more like a vaudeville show than it does a movie at times. That influenced me to go, okay, make something that feels unique. Even if it’s a disaster, at least you tell your story. It really made me decide to tell stories that feel different. Give the audience the world, even if they reject it, give them everything you have. In my mind, a film that plays by its own rules is already a number one. If a film is referred to as a disaster then I’m like, how do I see it? It sounds like a masterpiece already! I’m all about films that don’t care about failing. They should give you a sense of destruction and chaos and again, give you something in return. And the second movie was In the Cut. It’s a Jane Campion film with Meg Ryan which I saw at around fifteen or sixteen because David & Margaret (At The Movies) gave it five stars each. I was young so I went to Blockbuster and I snuck it in with Inspector Gadget and got away with it even though it’s R-18. In the Cut changed my perspective on female protagonists and the difference between how a male filmmaker and a female filmmaker will frame a woman in danger. It showed me how when women are front and centre as the protagonist, sexuality is usually put forward as number one. And it’s like, no! You have to do more than that. You’ve really got to give your female protagonists agency, character, purpose and then sexuality can come much later but you should work towards it and really earn it. In the Cut made me aware of how to approach making films with female protagonists and how to give them strength and complexity.
Yeah. Oh, wow. Okay. That’s two films added to my never ending ‘To Watch List’.
Southland Tales will break your brain. I’ve had to apologise to so many people for recommending them Southland Tales.
No apologies necessary ever. All films are a worthwhile experience to watch even if you hate it. At least then you know the things you don’t like and things that don’t work for you as a viewer. But yeah, I love watching chaotic movies. I went to go see Cats in cinemas with my boyfriend. Don’t ask me why because I knew it was going to be terrible and it was so terrible but it was still a fun time.
Right? Chaos! Sometimes I find chaos kind of comforting. I feel like I’m at home while everyone else is going “What is this?!” Look, if there’s one way I can sell Southland Tales despite its cast, is that mid-way during the film there is an intermission with Justin Timberlake lip-synching to All These Things That I’ve Done by The Killers. There’s dancing and singing and it’s mental. When I saw that sequence, I thought, this is what I want to do. There’s like a bravery to go to your audience with that sort of thing. It’s the same with Cats. I went to watch that and thought it was a disaster but I was like, I’m in! I’m with you on chaotic movies.
That is a hundred percent a mood. Well, that pretty much wraps up this interview. Was there anything else you wanted to say about Audio Guide?
Chris: If anyone sees it after reading this interview, shoot us a message on the page and let us know what you think. Always want feedback for the next movie. I’m also crowdfunding for my next film, Refused Classification, if they’d like to take a look.
Thank you so much for this interview Chris.
No, thank you. Thank you for reaching out and watching the film. It means a lot.
Audio Guide
St Kilda Film Festival
Chris Elena began his career studying Creative Writing at the University of Wollongong. His first short film The Limited, premiered at the Queensland Film Festival. His most recent short Audio Guide won the Best Actress prize at the Sci-fi Film Festival in Sydney, was nominated for Best and premiered in the USA at Cinequest in March 2020. Chris regularly shoots on Super 16mm film and has a working relationship with both Kodak and Panavision to support his projects