A special screening of the critically acclaimed Junkhearts was held at the Cornerhouse cinema in Manchester. Afterwards director Tinge Krishnan talked about the process of making her debut feature film and what projects are coming up next.
When did you get on board with this film and how did it come about?
I had just had my first baby, I got sent a script and I said 'ill get back to you on a couple of weeks' and then I found myself in the bathroom just reading it while my baby slept so I called up the producer the next day and I just said 'I am really really intrigued by this, lets see what we can do' and we started working on it immediately.
So was the script quite fully formed when it came to you?
It was quite fully formed I mean it's been through a lot of different incarnations and we probably took it through another four or five drafts after that.
What was the thing that hooked you? What was the thing that made you think that 'I want to make this film'?
I guess it was two things, I think one was exploration of post traumatic stress disorder, because I had just come back from the tsunami as well and I'd had PTSD and I'd wanted to find a way as a film maker to convey the experience of that, sonically, emotionally and visually. And one thing I guess was the relationship between Linette and Frank and the potential to bring to life a female character. On the page there was the potential for her to be quite passive and I thought as a female film maker I could bring something else to her and that's when the image of someone like Candice came to mind.
Was that something you worked on when it came to the script, that Christine and Linette where quite strong female characters?
Yeah I think inevitably as a female film maker, that's what producers look for you to bring. So if you have got a piece that's written by a male writer they look for you to flesh out the female characters from your experience and from what you know as a woman. I mean it's hard for me to write male characters really authentically so I often enlist the help of male writers to help me with that. I'd got this image of someone who was a bit like Candice, so I was quite clear that we wanted it to reflect the kind of ethnic diversity that you get in Britain, because on the page again it could have been quite monochrome, so I kind of wanted just to bring a bit of colour to it as well. So we went up to Nottingham and we found Candice, she comes from a workshop which is run by a guy called Ian Smith, it's the television workshop where Paddy Considine, Samantha Morton and all
of those Nottingham actors come from.
She had done some acting before was in television. Was this her first feature?
She had done some acting classes and then she completely left and she'd gone to college, she'd had some quite tough experiences that had made her re-think her life and she'd decided that she was going to go to college, which was great but it meant that when we first saw her and then we got the finance about a year after we first saw her, by the time we came back and said 'look we really want Candice' they had already lost her and they didn't know where she had gone. So Ian had to track her down, which he did and we were really grateful that she hadn't grown too much by the time she got back.
Were you involved with getting the others on board, were you quite involved in the casting process?
The way it works is that Karen the producer was a real stand for going for high end cast, which they were for us really, being on such a low budget. We had the casting director Chloe Emerson who had cast a lot of big feature films and so she was really helpful in structuring the process and then I would write letters begging the actors. Then we went to meet Eddie and we really clicked and it
was clear we would be able to work on the project together. His main concern was he was worried that he was going to be too young for the part of Frank, but when he saw that I had done like a whole time-line and I had worked with people who had been in the army and we calculated it
all out in the terms of Romala; Christine's age and his age and it all worked fine so he was quite happy after that.
You mentioned this before but dealing with something like post traumatic stress disorder, it is quite a responsibility it is quite a serious issue and you said you suffered with that, so how did you approach that, especially with Eddie as well?
I guess I did deepen the research a little bit, so I went and spent time with councilors who specialise in soldiers with PTSD who self medicate with alcohol, which is quite a specific group but which is quite a large group as well. So I worked with the councilors to try and flesh out some
of the details of Frank's character. Eddie was on such a tight schedule and he is very research driven so he wasn't able to spend as much time as he'd of liked, so he was looking to me to provide that kind of research and then of course my first hand experience was helpful when we were there,
just to dig into the emotions of it.
What was your first hand experience?
I was in the tsunami so I volunteered and that involved being a liaison between mass mortuaries and hospitals and in that process I came down with PTSD.
Apparently this wasn't your first choice of career, what was your first choice?
I was a doctor.
And what made you change then from being a doctor to being a film maker?
I think it's because I had always written since I was a kid. I always wrote stories and I used to read them out in the play ground at school and every lunch break people would come and watch me read. Bit I was always really interested in sciences as well, but then when I was a doctor I wasn't able to spend as much time on expressing my creativity, plus I was working in A and E and could see a lot of people dying around me so that kind of focused my mind, if I did want to do it I should make that move as soon as possible.
I know you didn't have a huge budget so how long did you have to shoot?
It was about four weeks on six day weeks, so 24 days. We were shooting a little bit around Eddie's schedule, a little bit around Romola, Candice was quite free for the production and Tom had commitments as well because he got casted for Walter Sellers production of On The Road by Jack Keroac, playing Alan Ginsberg. We wanted to shave Tom's head for Danny but they had ordered him to grow his hair into some kind of Alan Ginsberg 1950's thing and obviously with Walter Sellars he
takes priority so we couldn't shave his head, so that's why he wears a hat because we couldn't afford a wig. We could afford a wig for one scene, which was the sex scene, which is the only time he takes
his hat off.
You were shooting right in the middle of London, were people bugging you during filming?
It was quite mental on Brick Lane because we reccied it on a Thursday and because we were on a low budget production and everything changes, we ended up filming on a Saturday, and trying to film an emotional scene on a Saturday in Brick Lane is really mental, especially when Chris who plays the banker, he was cast in Eastenders and he played a paedophile, so we had people walking passed shouting 'paedo'!.
I really enjoyed the cinematography in the film, the way that the camera was used and also the colours in the film, who was your cinematographer?
She's called Catherine Derry. She kind of came up through the ranks, she's not from film school she came up clapper-loading and focus pulling, she focus pulled for Chris Doyle, she camera operated for Peter Shitisky on Eastern Promises, she actually operated that scene when Viggo Mortensen
is all naked and wrestling. And she actually shot some of Fish Tank when Robbie Ryan the DP on that had a few days he couldn't make, so she shot some of that. She's really one to watch, she's great.
Was everything shot on location and which kind of camera did you use?
All the exteriors were on location, the exterior of the flat was on location. The inside of Frank's flat was a build and that's because we knew we were going to need more space. I wanted to have a lot of movement but for it not to be all hand-held and that would mean tracking, so we needed enough space to lay track. Luckily Karen's Dad is in real estate and he had a warehouse that was empty, so we built it. But the only thing was, it was for sale so we had estate agents walking into rehearsal. Cameras; our day exteriors were film, this was to do with budget but the ideal would have been to have 16mm, but we didn't have the budget to use 16mm all the way through so we used the 7D on the interiors and that's a really nice camera, it has lovely shadows and depth of field, but we knew that it didn't have the latitude to handle the contrast you get with the bright exterior, it would look video so we used film on our day time exteriors, it could handle the night time exteriors.
What are you doing next?
I'm working with a company called Revolution, who are Michael Winterbottom's production company and we are adapting a book which is a best seller on Amazon and it's a thriller, it's about a woman and when we meet her she seems really harrowed and traumatised and we don't quite know why. And this weird unlikely romance happens with the guy upstairs who is a psychologist and she has OCD, so there's this kind of quirky romance that builds up. But then we realise that her OCD is a response to something that has happened and there is a stalker that no one actually believes in, and he's a policeman so that's why he is such an unbeatable nemesis. It's actually written by a woman who is an intelligence analyst with the police so it's just full of really nice authentic details.
Do you have any directors who are an influence?
Scorsese is a huge influence, I really love Lynne Ramsay as well, there's just so many, you know Stanley Kubrick, just name a director and I'd probably love them.
The Cornerhouse cinema regularly holds screenings of new British cinema with Q & A's with the directors. For more details visit their website
To read the Brit Flicks review of Junkhearts click here