The next interview in our stagey chat series is with Lisle Turner. Lisle is the director of award-winning documentary, The Last Show, which has recently been released on YouTube for free. You can watch the documentary here.
Hi Lisle, how are you? Thanks so much for chatting to Stage to Page today! Would you mind introducing yourself and telling our readers how you first got into the industry?
One of my first jobs was working for a cinema company. I ended up running an independent repertory cinema called the Prince Charles just off Leicester Square. We programmed 20+ different films a week and that was a great way to kick start my film career, just watching lots and lots of films by amazing writers and directors. When my wife Claire Coaché was studying physical theatre in Paris I went with her and taught English. It left me lots of time to think and write. That led to my first short film You Can Go Now. We made it with our own money and went so over budget we had to sell our flat in Brixton...
But it got some nice feedback, particularly from the Director of Photography Barry Unsworth who really encouraged me to keep making films. Then I went to work for Amnesty International making films, documentaries and TV for them. That was my film school! In 3 years we made over 50 productions and I learned from great actors like John Hurt, Patrick Stewart, Brian Cox - the list goes on - writing for them was amazing. I also learned the language of camera from great Directors of Photography like Sean Bobbitt. Just watching people like that work is the best kind of education. I also got nominated for a BAFTA for a Channel 4 show we made to raise money for the charity, so that helped too. But then I fell in love with theatre...
Your latest project, The Last Show, is now available online after its recent premiere. Can you tell us about the documentary and the inspiration behind it?
After I’d been working in film and TV for a few years my wife Claire asked me to start to write a story she’d found. She makes physical theatre and that kind of visual, poetic work blew my mind. It still does. That first play was about women being put in mental asylums for having sex with people their parents didn’t approve of. They were called moral defectives. The play, The Idiot Colony, was produced and won several awards. Then it was programmed for a run at the ICA by the London International Mime Festival. That kickstarted our entire theatre career and we now run, alongside our film company, Open Sky Theatre which is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation. So, we owe a lot to the Mime Festival. As artists we make film, theatre and digital theatre which blends the two. In the penultimate festival our feature length digital theatre piece Cold was screened. When Helen and Joseph the festival directors announced the festival was closing we were gutted. The Last Show was such an amazing labour of love and is our thank you to them for 47 years of hard work, genius programming and supporting artists like ourselves.
The Last Show is made up of interviews and features spanning almost five decades. How do you even begin on such a monumental task like that?
I don’t normally direct documentaries so I didn’t really have a process to follow. We treated it like a narrative film. I wrote questions that had a story arc, we did loads of interviews with people who had been involved with the festival and then we shot what B-roll we could during the very last performances. Then we filled in all the gaps with 47 years of archive footage! I have to say that this would have been impossible without Helen, the festival’s co-director who also produced the film. She told us where to look and then secured the many, many permissions involved to use the footage.
How does directing a documentary like this vary from your previous works, such as COLD and Here and Now?
Writing and directing narrative film is a much more linear thought process than documentary making. I write a story, I visualise it and then create storyboards and a shot-list. Then that’s what I shoot, allowing for the improvisational magic that happens along the way of course. A film also has a lot of talented heads of department who bring a wealth of ideas to the table and the director can simply choose what will work best for the story. I love that process! Cold was a little different because I wrote a prose story and then Claire and the actors improvised the action. I then turned that into a script which we shot like a feature.
Again, a full crew was involved. For The Last Show Director of Photography Kie Cummings and myself were the only people filming - I was directing and doing sound recording! Helen would tell us about something happening somewhere in the festival and we’d charge across London and film as much as we could. It took editor Dave Jones and I a long, long time to work that happy chaos into a structured story. Thankfully the questions gave it a shape but it was still a real labour of love. The process fitted the subject. Everything was about doing it for love not money.
A question I ask everyone we chat to - my blog is called Stage to Page. But if you could turn any book, from page to stage, what would it be and why?
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari for two reasons. First Yuval is one of the great minds of our generation and it was the most exciting non-fiction book I’ve ever read. Secondly, I have no idea how we could do it. That’s always exciting!
And finally, why should anyone reading this watch The Last Show?
Watch it because truth and beauty are rare in this world. Helen and Joseph spent 47 years seeking it out in the form of the world’s most poetic, visual theatre and putting it on stage. Their efforts should be remembered and now that the festival has come to a close, something new must emerge to fill that void.
No comments