Sunday, 17 March 2019
4 p.m. at The Earl Cameron Theatre, City Hall
Dir.: Adrian Hedgecock
Country: UK
Runtime: 7:05
Pleased To Eat You! is in the BIFF Programmer’s Choice selection and is a short (very absurd) musical film directed by Adrian Hedgecock about a few helpless landlubbers on a raft who decide to eat their friend when he dies of exposure to an animated sun. The film is written by Hedgecock, Oliver Lansley and Anthony Spargo; the latter two star in the film along with Lee Ravitz. If anyone remembers Trey Parker & Matt Stone’s Cannibal! The Musical (1993), you will find yourself on familiar (and hilarious) territory.
Adrian lives in London (not conducive to scriptwriting on a decibel-level) and although we talked over FaceTime, I felt I’d already met him metaphysically in the form of Pleased To Eat You!, which graced our projector screen when the pre-screeners and I were watching short films for the Bermuda International Film Festival (BIFF). We were won over by Adrian’s little musical, which, oddly enough, gives a pretty good indication of Mr. Hedgecock’s personality: colourful, warm, but minus the cannibalism (Whether or not I’m disappointed by Adrian not being a cannibal is hard to tell at this time).
Adrian’s early years were spent working for the Moving Picture Company (MPC): a visual FX and production company headquartered in Soho: ‘I ended up working in visual FX there, which was something that hadn’t really been on my radar as a filmmaker up to that point,’ Adrian notes with headphones dangling out of each ear, ‘I started out as a runner and ended up coordinating and production-assisting on Hollywood movies, which was great.’
Your correspondent saw an opportunity for gossip. ‘What was your favourite one that you worked on?’
‘Sunshine, probably. Danny Boyle’s Sunshine.’ Released in 2007 with a script by Alex Garland. Good answer. This background—MPC especially—gave Adrian, ‘the completely misplaced confidence to press ahead with this ridiculous project [Pleased To Eat You!].’ MPC worked on portions of the film, with several other FX Houses contributing to the look of the film. ‘It wasn’t their [MPC’s] fault they couldn’t finish it. It was coordinating it with all the other people who were working on it.’
Scheduling. The enemy of art. ‘On Return of The Living Dead Part 3,’ I corroborate, ‘they saved a hell of a lot of money by getting different FX houses to do, like, one special effect each. It was mad.’ True story: the film was shot in 24 days using one crew for principal photography and another crew for FX shots. Given the tight schedule (and time is money in filmmaking) 5 separate FX companies were used to complete film. ‘Hang on,’ Hedgecock flummoxed, ‘Part 3?’
‘Part 3, yes.’
‘Wait, when was this?’
‘This is 1993,’ (Not the year we’re speaking in; when the movie came out, which is also the same year that Cannibal! The Musical came out. Interesting.) ‘I think it was Brian Yuzna who directed this; the one that’s based on Romeo and Juliet, but it doesn’t matter—’
‘Wow you are a horror buff,’ laughing, ‘I love horror films as well but I’ve never come across that. I’ll have to track it down.’ My army grows. Back on topic: But the real merit of Pleased To Eat You! is its conscious artifice: there is no attempt to achieve any kind of realism a la Tom Hooper’s Les Miserables (2012). ‘I don’t know if we actually achieved this,’ modestly remarking, ‘but the idea was—with the visual FX—to create a world which for all intents and purposes looked physically real, but which you knew could never really exist,’ clearing his throat, ‘and that grew out of the extension of the idea of Hollywood, of the musicals that I love, all being shot in studios and recreating outsides inside, in the studio space.’
Hedgecock’s film also—this being something we paid close attention to at BIFF—worked on its own terms as a short film. ‘I don’t want Pleased To Eat You! to be a feature film,’ I say, ‘not cuz it would be irritating, but because—’
Picking up his pencil, ‘I’m just gonna cross that off the list—’
‘Because it’s perfectly encapsulated in a little vessel, you know what I mean?’
‘Lovely,’ nodding as if he walked into a hotel room and discovered not one, but two TVs, ‘well, that’s really nice to hear. Thank you.’ There is, as Mark Kermode would say, no fat on Pleased To Eat You!. It is a lean & well-executed film, which is not only the result of Hedgecock’s direction, but also the music by Alexis Bennett and cinematography by Aadel Nodeh-Farahani.
One last thing: ‘Given that you co-wrote the screenplay, what do you think is the place of the writer in the filmmaking process?’
Adrian stares at me blankly for a few moments, and finally says, ‘Huge. Everything.’
Huge and Everything. Your correspondent was feeling pretty good.
‘Writing is everything,’ he continues, ‘as people say, it’s the blueprint for the film. I think writing a script is extremely different to writing a novel. When you’re writing a script, you have to at once tell a complete story and direct the reader toward every single thing that’s important in the film,’ he takes a deep breath, “but at the same time leave so much space that it can be interpreted and physicalized. I found that with films I’ve written or made from scripts you can agonize over one little thing and be like, ‘how do we get this into the film?’ and ‘will this make sense?’ Then you get on set. And you start shooting, and you’re like, ‘Oh…that actor looking over there and making that face solves everything.’ And then you cut half the dialogue because you didn’t need it in the first place. Cuz that look, that action, that visual action and reaction on screen did it for you.”
Attempting to add to those nuggets, I mutter, ‘It’s quite a divisive issue. I remember there’s a wonderful quote from Harry Cohn,’ co-founder, former president and production director of Columbia Pictures, “who said, ‘The writer is the most important person in Hollywood. Just don’t tell the sons of bitches,’ which I think sums it up quite well.” Adrian laughs. He was exactly who I thought he was going to be.
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