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| Taking to the stage |
Hunky Dory marks the feature debut of director Michael Curtis Johnson and writer and star Tomas Pais. The film tells the story of Sidney (Pais), a "glam rock dilattente" who finds he has to reassess his life after his young son George (Edouard Holdener) turns up on his doorstep for longer than expected. The plot beats may sound familiar but this is a character-driven narrative, hinging on a magnetic performance by Pais in the central role and great chemistry with Holdener, which saw the film pick up a Jury prize for acting at Slamdance Film Festival in January.
Chicago-born Johnson and Pais, who is originally from Lisbon in Portugal, have known one another for 10 years and collaborated previously on short films together.
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| Waiting for the train |
"We had similar stories of trying to get our careers off the ground in Los Angeles, me with my directing and acting and him with his acting and finally we decided we wanted to do something together," says Johnson. "He came up with the idea for the story and we came up with the screenplay together."
The David Bowie reference of the title became unexpectedly poignant just before the film's premiere with the news of his death. Johnson is quick to point out that though they both had someone in mind when they created the character of Sidney, it wasn't Bowie, but he says the singer was an influence.
He added: "When I came on, I was a new father and the record had meant a lot to me - the transitioning between your personal life and your creative life and trying to find balance between those two things. That's where the inspiration for a lot of this came - that struggle of how do you maintain your own identity as an artist and at the same time fulfil your obligations to your family and the people you love. That's really the whole reference. He's inspired so many of us to do the things that we do."
One of Bowie's greatest legacies was the sexual freedom that he showed was possible, inspiring more than one generation to be comfortable with who they were. Sidney also doesn't care about sexual boundaries and Pais and Johnson are to be commended for just treating his choices as part of the fabric of his life rather than using them to define him.
"If Sidney was here right now he wouldn't be okay that we would even put him in the box as bisexual," said Pais. "He would be, like, 'No, I'm not that'. He wouldn't want to be put in a box. It was a conscious decision for him to have this sexual fluidity and to never address it and to have it never be about that. That's just who this guy is. When I initially came up with the character I don't think I had as much complexity as we had once we started collaborating. I just wanted to make him a sweet guy. But then Mike came on and added a whole other dimension to it - abrasiveness."
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| Confronting responsibility |
Johnson added: "Talking about the sexuality aspect, I think more what we're doing is talking about his idea of performance. Sidney performs in his own life. Even though he struggles to be successful in his creative life, he's always performing with whoever he's with to be the person he needs to get the love that he wants. He really wants to be loved so he'll be willing to change his identity for all these different people to give them what they he thinks they want so they'll appreciate him. I wouldn't say pansexual either but, within the instances he's in, he's just trying to be the best version of himself that he can be for that person, and it's not really his true self when he's doing that."
If you want a good role in the cinema as an up-and-coming actor then one way to assure that is to write it yourself. Pais says he knew that it was something that he could thrive at. "I knew I had to make it challenging for myself in terms of who this character was," he added. "But I also knew it was someone who I could connect with and I could create that character and embody that character - so that I could do the best I could."
Johnson added: "The screenplay is great but Tomas performed it differently to how it is written. So he did that classic actor thing of taking something that's written and making it his own. Because I know there's plenty of ways other actors could have interpreted this role and not done it nearly as well, so I think he definitely, for being the writer on the project still went through that process. He lived as the character for two months beforehand."
Living as Sidney for two months doesn't sound like an easy task. The character is a drug-taking night owl, who burns the candle at both ends.
Pais said: "I lived as the character until the point where it wouldn't compromise me as a person - certainly I went as far as I could go with it for those months.
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| Hunky Dory poster |
I had been growing out my hair for a while and I started engaging in certain late night activities and staying out late. A couple of weeks before shooting I started bleaching my hair. The first time I did it, it didn't really work, it was just kind of copper and orangey, so I did it two more times before I got it to where I wanted it. I didn't want it to look perfect, so I purposefully let the roots show and everything. But my hair was fried. It's was only a couple of months ago that I got my actual hair back."
Pais says this process of immersing himself in a character was very important to him, so that by the time he reached the set, being Sidney was second nature. He added: "I remember Philip Seymour Hoffman talking about before he did certain characters he had to rewire his brain before it became second nature and I very much relate to that. So I do that because we only have 10 days on set so you need to embody that person."
The pair are full of praise for Pais's young co-star Holdener.
"He's such an incredible little actor and performer," said Pais. "He's very much a performer - there's not very much in Edouard as a person that exists in George as a character. To me that was inspiring and impressive. "
Johnson added: " The textbook when you work with child actors is: 'Try to make them comfortable. Try to make them play games so they'll be themselves, so the artifice of the film will fade away.' Edouard's not like that. He's a performer like any of the other adults in the film. You don't have to talk down to him or trick him. He comes prepared."
The cinematography of the film is also impressive, especially when you consider it was shot in just 10 days. Johnson says he's known cinematographer Magela Crosignani (The Imperialists Are Revolting! Mosquita Y Mari) since grad school.
"She's audacious," he added. "When we were shooting the club sequences, we didn't have that many lights, so she was tearing lights out from different parts of the club and using them just so we could get those sequences down. Her phrase for the world is 'genteel poverty'. There's always something that's a little rough but there's always a beauty underneath all of it."
The good news for fans of the film is that this is just the start of Pais and Johnson's feature collaboration, with another film already in the pipeline.
"It's the same type of thing," said Johnson. "We like to have a traditional story then have a lead character. Tomas calls himself a leading character actor and I think that's very true. So he takes this character and throws him into a familiar story - I mean, this story is as old as Chaplin and The Kid. It's not anything new, we've seen this kind of adult child relationship, but what I think Tomas brings to it is a unique twist that can subvert some of these traditional ideas.
"Our next one's about a guy who gets out of prison and gets dragged back into a life of crime. But he has a complex relationship with another inmate that he knew inside and his wife, who he met as a pen pal while he was in prison. So there's this nice dynamic and triangulation between these three characters. It's really more about the personal than the plot."
Pais added: "It's a bit like music. The chord combinations are the same but it's how you compose it."
Hunky Dory will screen at Cleveland International Film Festival in April and will screen at ArcLight Chicago in May. For more information about the film and screenings, visit the official Facebook page.
