This week, Madison had the pleasure of chatting to Vivarium’s director and editor, Lorcan Finnegan and Tony Cranstoun, in a Zoom conversation about casting decisions, industry advice and overcoming challenges on set.
Madison: How did you guys meet?
Lorcan Finnegan: There was a film scheme called the Catalyst Project back in 2007, that the Screen Ireland were running to produce three feature films at very low budget. In order to apply for the funding, you had to do this course. The course was really seminars on how to make a low budget film, and getting advice from experts. Tony was one of the speakers at it, he was talking about editing and we met there. And then afterwards, when we went away and wrote the script, we thought “oh yeah he’d be a good person to get as the editor”. I think Tony’s advice was to get an experienced editor if you can, because rather than everybody being inexperienced, at least if your editor is experienced it should help shape the film.
It’s often said that the edit is the final re-write of the story – was that the case with Vivarium, did the story change much in the edit or not really?
LF: The story is the story; it doesn’t really change in the edit. The story stays as the story, but how the story’s told changes. And it did. You rearrange stuff, and move things around, cut scenes, all that kind of thing. That’s my experience, Tony would know better.
Tony Cranstoun: It is always a strange thing. As soon as a director turns it into real pictures – so many things change. You find that you may have cut down on exposition and all that kind of stuff in your script, but then when it becomes moving pictures and dialogue, you realise that the way a character looks or a character speaks or even a little reaction that they give tells you so much more. It’s always going to change. The story goes from a to z – that’s the story – but you can throw away lots of letters of the alphabet.
Yeah! And speaking of the story, was it offering of social commentary or have an underlying social meaning to it?
LF: Well that’s for you to answer!
Haha. I’ve read your story-brief about pressures to be a homeowner and to achieve these certain milestones of success – can you talk through that or the conception of this?
LF: Yeah well different people take different things from it. There’s definitely a lot in there to dissect if you want to. It was inspired by what was happened in Ireland in the early 2000s. The economy was doing really well – it was called the Celtic Tiger. The government and the EU were giving massive grants – to builders, and were building these massive developments in the middle of nowhere, with all these clone houses. And then when the crash came in 2008, a lot of these places were left empty, abandoned and were getting called ‘ghost estates’. Banks were giving out 100% mortgages at the time, but were coming looking for their money back when people were in recession. A lot of people ended up emotionally and financially trapped in these places. We made a short film that was set in one of these places called Foxes; that was directly about that. But then after making it, we wanted to delve into some of the interesting themes and philosophies that we were touching on with Foxes. We wanted to expand upon them in more in a universal sense. So that’s what started us making Vivarium.
Yeah, and the cast is so great. I’ve seen both Jesse and Imogen in other movies and I just love them as actors. How did you approach the casting process?
LF: The casting is really tricky. If you want famous actors – which a lot of the time you need for your financing, because the film is pre-sold by a sales company to certain territories, and they use that money to make the film. So, sometimes you have to have actors of a certain recognisability. I was new to all that because my first film didn’t need anyone famous. Initially we offered it to Mackenzie Davis who wasn’t that big of a star at the time, she is more so now. She’s in the last Terminator movie.
Oh, is she in Black Mirror as well?
LF: Yeah, she’s in San Junipero. And she’s brilliant, she’s a great actor. She’s in an amazing film called Always Shine. I offered it to her, she read it, she really liked it, we met in LA and we went off and did a whole draft for her. She wanted us to wait until she shot another movie called The Turning. And then when she finished The Turning we were trying to cast a guy to go with her. She’s very tall, so we needed a guy who was tall. So, we’re trying to find these guys who are in their thirties, who’d be cool playing second fiddle to a female lead. Surprisingly actually most of them don’t. But anyway, she then did Terminator 6, and asked us again if we would wait – and we said no, we can’t wait another year. So, we scrapped all of that and restarted. At the time when I was looking for actors, Imogen Poots wasn’t available but now she was available. So we offered it to her, she read it, she loved it, we met her in London and we started talking about who we’d get to play Tom. We had a list to go through and some of the people we’d already tried and some of the people weren’t really right. And we kept coming back to Jesse Eisenberg. We thought that he could be really interesting; they’re around the same height, they have interesting faces, they’d look good together. And she knew Jesse from the The Art of Self- Defence. This would actually be their third film together. So, she knew the kind of material that Jesse was into. She thought, yeah Jesse would actually love this. She sent it to Jesse, and he read it in about two days and liked it, and wanted to meet in New York. We met in New York, and we got on really well, so he came on board. Then we were able to make it but technically we’d already been casting for well over a year.
Wow. And is there any advice you would each give to young people wanting to get into your respective industries – or the film industry as a whole?
TC: Well, on the editing side of things, if young people are wanting to be editors, sure you need to have an accomplishment in using all the technology but if you can spend time in a film cutting room during the process – just as an observer – that is really invaluable. I started off as an assistant editor editing on film. You’re in the cutting room with an editor and a director working through material, and you’re privy to all these creative conversations and how they’re thinking about working scenes out. Now, because of nonlinear – the editing process – the assistant editor is basically a computer op, and they’re usually in the basement somewhere, not in the cutting room at all. There is kind of ‘a misfire’ in bringing new talent forwards. Anyone who wants to do it: sure, you can know how to use Avid or Final Cut Pro or Premier, and you can be a whizz and make little movies and stuff yourself. But actually, for the long form art of editing a feature film: if you can write to a list of editors and say “hey I’m really interested in being an editor, I’d love to just come in and make you guys a cup of tea and just watch what you do. I promise I’ll be really quiet and just sit in the corner”. That’s great experience.
Yeah that’s great!
LF: Yeah in the whole film industry, there’s a job for everyone. From legal, to doing sound, to the art department. I studied graphic design and started making things myself – like little comedy sketches with my friends. I learned how to use a camera and shot some stuff, and cut it together. Then I got into motion graphics and made some little animated short, stuff like that – because I was interested. And then people liked what I was making and asked me to direct commercials in that style. So I’d say if you want to be a filmmaker, just go make films. You learn through making stuff. And don’t be afraid to show it, even if it’s not perfect. Because you also need audience interaction as part of that process. Make something and show it. You’ll learn loads every time you make something. And you continue to learn; every project is different. It’s like being given some really difficult thing: you’ve got a script, and then you’ve got to make it into pictures. It’s a problem that you’ve got to solve. And when you get to the edit, you’ve got this big mess of stuff that you’ve collected, and you have to chip away and sculpt it into something. It’s a learning process the whole time.
TC: Every movie that comes into the cutting room is different. There’s no formula. That’s one of the beauties of my side of the thing. You work with directors, and even the difference between working with Lorcan on Without Name, and then Vivarium: they’re under Lorcan’s eye, but they’re very different. Vivarium, for me, is unlike anything that I’ve edited before, because of it being in this weird world, and lots of green screens. So, it’s very different to something that’s in the real world.
Were there any challenges that you faced while making the film?
LF: Any challenges? Yeah, like every day! The whole thing was a challenge. Particularly once they enter into Yonder, because you have to create a place that doesn’t exist. We had a set of three houses – not even full houses, they’re just facades, about 10ft deep, with no roof on them, and some grass, a footpath and a road. But we only had one side of the street. Every time we needed to do a reverse angle, we had to shoot back into the same set – flip the lighting, flip the car, take the 9 off the door. It was such a puzzle to shoot. Maybe that lends itself well to the film because it’s like a weird quantum maze. I hadn’t shot everything on a stage before. The interiors had to be built in a studio in Ireland and all of the exterior Yonder sets were built Belgium in a warehouse. There was a lot of continuity stuff that we had to try and get right, between different countries! My first film, Without Name, was all shot on location – so you can find a shot with your DP and you find a position with the camera and set up a scene there. But when you’re building everything, you’ve only got what’s in is front of you. If you go one way a little bit, you’ll be looking at stands and a building site. We had to construct pretty much everything, so we everything was planned and storyboarded beforehand. When you have lots of Visual Effects, the VFX people need to know exactly how many shots they’ll have to work on because you’ve only got a certain amount of money. So yeah, the whole thing was challenge, but that part of the enjoyment.
Yeah, I can imagine!
TC: There’s nowhere to hide in the edit either. It’s interesting when you’re cutting something that’s location based, you’ve got traffic, you’ve got wind and light play and birds. And for your cutting points, you might use a wipe of some traffic going through frame to finish a scene, or you might hold onto a scene because a bird flies off a branch. Or there’s light play – shadows or some lens flare – all of these things come into play when you’re editing. But this, because it’s on a stage, it’s very pure. There’s nowhere to hide. You’re totally reliant on the performance, and as Lorcan said, the design, the storyboarding and knowing where the beats are. There’s very little room for doing something more improvisational with the material.
LF: If we were shooting that on location, we probably would’ve shot some cutaways or nice abstract shots between houses. But you couldn’t shoot any of that stuff because it had to be set up. On Without Name, we had all this great additional material that we could repurpose into scenes. Even typical audio cues couldn’t be implemented, if a scene starts out bright and you hear birds tweeting, the audience knows its morning. We weren’t able to avail of those little shortcuts because in Yonder there is no nature, no external sounds, no wind.
Yeah, that works so well though for the actual set of Yonder – it being so artificial anyway. It’s a nice parallel that you didn’t actually have those natural moments to draw from when it is such an artificial world. That’s cool, I think.
LF: Yeah, it was all necessary for the story. It was really interesting, like when Jesse was talking about there being no wind and the smoke from his cigarette was going straight up: you couldn’t do that on location.
Yeah, and one question we always ask at Film in Revolt is do you each have a film that influenced you during your youth?
LF: My dad used to rent strange and interesting films and bring them home. I remember watching Space Odyssey 2001 when I was only about nine, and I just thought that was amazing. I was kind of haunted by – for years afterwards – the baby in space. It was all so abstract and weird but showed me that a film doesn’t have to play by the rules of reality, it can be a more dreamlike.
TC: For me, I’d say it’d be Don’t Look Now. I love that film, and it’s got a very famous sequence where there’s a sex scene intercut with the characters getting dressed. It’s breaking the editing mould. And that was early 70s which is incredible, when you think that’s nearly 50 years. I didn’t see it in 1973, but I saw it subsequently and it stayed with me.
Is there anything that you’ve been working on during this Corona period?
LF: Yeah, I’ve been working on lot of projects. We’re starting to cast a new film, that we’ll shoot as soon as we can. It’s called Nocebo; it’s a supernatural thriller about a fashion designer and a Filipino nanny. We’ve been working on the script for that for the past couple of years, and it’s ready to go now. I’m also working a new script with Garret Shanley, the same writer, called Goliath, which is a dystopian fable.
Yeah, that’s exciting!
TC: I was lucky, I’ve been editing a film all the way through. It was shooting in January, so when the virus really came in it was just moving into post-production. I’ve been editing that movie and obeying all of the social distancing rules and will do for another 3-4 weeks. And then come June, I’ll get some summer sun!
Vivarium launched 16 April on Google Play, iTunes, Fetch and Umbrella Entertainment and will be available via Foxtel’s On Demand service from May 6.