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| South Of Hope Street |
Director Jane Spencer's fourth feature, South Of Hope Street, imagines a near dystopian future with striking parallels to the present day. It's the year 2038 and World War 3 rages. The Black Boots faction has the upper hand. Nonconformity and mystery are outlawed, and the truth is whatever narrative the government choose to propagate. Reaching a crisis point, the government decides to build a giant wall in the sky to hide the truth. In the midst of the chaos, Denise (Tanna Frederick) and Tom (Judd Nelson) band together with their disaffected friends to fight back, and are joined by Benjamin Flowers (Michael Madsen) and his mountain-dwelling hippies.
Spencer made her directorial debut with the 1991 comedy drama Little Noises, starring Crispin Glover as a writer who takes advantage of his mute friend and plagiarises his poetry. This was followed by Faces On Mars (2003), a quirky LA set drama, before the 2014 London set black comedy. The Ninth Cloud, about a young woman's relationship with a theatre director.
In conversation with Eye For Film, Spencer discussed the unpredictable audience, film as a mirror, drawing comparisons between film and paintings, and why it’s necessary to rewatch films.
Paul Risker: What does cinema mean to you?
Jane Spencer: It goes back to when I was about ten-years-old. I was obsessed with film, and I would make my mother drag me to films - every film, like Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? She'd say, "I'm not taking you to that." I saw all of David Lean's old movies, including Doctor Zhivago. I'd seen On The Waterfront on television, and I was entranced by the actors, the feel of the movie and going into this other world. It was a dreamworld more or less, or a state of time that you liked and wished you could enter.
So, I've always loved films, and what does it mean to me? I consider cinema to be an art as well as a business, and it's capable of changing things in the world for good or for bad. I do believe there are a lot of things that cinema can accomplish, including the idea of exploring ourselves by looking into those mirrors on the screen.
PR: Outside escapist cinema, I've always been intrigued about how films start off by being the characters and end up being about the audience.
JS: When I was studying acting - not to act but to direct - at The Actor's Studio, they used to say, "Okay, you are simply a mirror. You're not up there to be grand", although narcissism is quite prevalent in our field.
It's interesting that that's what it is - it's about the audience and every audience is so different, even when you screen a film in the same country. When I screened what I thought was a comedy in Switzerland, they took it so seriously and told me this was dreadful, and asked how could the characters live like that? Faces On Mars was a comedy, with a Withnail And I type feel to it, about this bunch of losers in a room in Silver Lake. I didn't feel sorry for them at all, but the Swiss are very social people, and they were upset. They couldn't understand how anybody could live like that and wondered where their bank accounts were? I said, "Go to Silver Lake in LA and then ask me that same question, because they're there, believe me." When I screened it in England, it was laughter, but then they were more serious in Scotland - I don't know why. Of course, the people in LA were laughing because they know these guys, and it's an uncomfortable kind of laughter.
PR: I find the idea of the actor being 'present' an interesting concept - for example, Cillian Murphy’s quietly sensitive performance in Small Things Like These. This approach creates space for the audience to enter the film. In contrast, I think about Al Pacino's larger-than-life performances, like in Heat, which I grew to have mixed feelings about.
JS: If you can see the performance, then it's usually not a great performance, as my acting teacher would say. And I wasn't trying, believe me [laughs]. Al Pacino's early work was brilliant: The Panic In Needle Park and The Godfather. I don't know why he started doing the big stuff, because he's capable of doing such brilliant work, and he's one of my favourite actors from a certain time period.
He and Robert De Niro are always compared. With De Niro, it's all in the eyes. He's very still, and he doesn't move around a lot unless he's working with Ben Stiller, and even then, he's still. That's very interesting. People will ask him what he's thinking about, and he'll say, "As long as I'm thinking about something, then you can see I'm thinking about something in my eyes."
There was a great teacher at the Actor's Studio and the Strasberg Institute named Charlie Laughton. He was Pacino's teacher, and I took one class to see what he was talking about. He'd say, read the ingredients of a mayonnaise jar but inside of you think about the death of your dog. He said, if you're not saying what you're saying, you can't depend on the words to say it. Believe me, as a writer, I like to have the words said correctly, but there has to be a subtext.
PR: I think of cinema as an act of manipulation and misdirection. A film can also resemble a Trojan Horse, in that the film you think you're watching is not the film you're watching.
JS: With cinema, you don't depend on your imagination as much as you're manipulated, whereas for theatre, you have to use your imagination to create whatever the two actors are creating on a stage or, in a novel, you have to use your imagination. But cinema, it's all about where the director aims the camera and what they want to include in that shot. That's absolutely true, it's a manipulation to show, and to try and get across an idea. There are some directors that are less like that, such as [John] Cassavetes maybe. He was always the maestro, but he let the actors run the show and he created some brilliant stuff. But then he used such wonderful actors as Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel.
PR: Picking up on your point about the director's intention, what were you looking to communicate with South Of Hope Street?
JS: I purposefully borrowed things. For example, in my film I say, "Okay, build the wall against mystery. Hide the mystery; hide from the sky and only think about what they want you to think about." That was explored in The Truman Show, but in a very different way.
South Of Hope Street is an old script that I wrote a long time ago. I picked it up after making another film, right at the beginning of Covid. I didn't realise, but a lot of people were going, "God," because I had the equilibrium pills from the government, and I had this wall being built and, of course, Trump had already been President.
The black shoes I equated in a bit of a comical way to the brownshirts and the rise of fascism, and also Sylvia Plath's poem Daddy - "You do not do, you do not do Anymore." I open the film with the character reading Sylvia Plath, and I have the Black Shoes, so people can put this together as her statement against the patriarchy and the Nazis. So, I was trying to have her notice all these ugly Black Shoes clumping around and if we had a bigger budget, I'd have had a whole army of Black Shoes. Anyway, I was playing with these ideas, and a lot of the movie is blatant symbolism.
PR: We return to the idea of film as a mirror, and in this case, for our everyday reality.
JS: That's exactly right. It's a reflection and some people don't like that reflection because they're like, "Where's the plot?" It's a metaphor and I say, "Why don't you watch it and go with it?" It's the kind of movie that either speaks to you or it doesn't. And if it doesn't, then it probably will not work for you at all.
PR: I wonder whether using cinema as a metaphor makes our point of view of the world around us clearer?
JS: Well I hope so. I also found the lead character to be an everywoman who is struggling in the world. She's not so active, and she's like a female Hamlet—should I stay, or should I go? She sees the world as being absurd and thinks about whether she should leave. We start with her thinking, 'I'll slash my wrists right now.' She's playing at it, but she's thinking, 'Why should I hang around? It's insane.'
She's in a labyrinth with all these weird and crazy characters who are deluded or are in complete denial. I just played with these ideas, and there was a lot of editing because I had so many characters. I had a wonderful editor, Patricia Rommel, who edited The Lives Of Others, which is a dark film. When I presented her with this, she asked, "What is this?" It's not a straight comedy, and I hope it has some dark comic moments, but she was great in the individual scenes and helped me to carve them out. And Stefan Kälin, another editor, was also great. It took two years to edit the film because I had to redo all the special effects—they looked like Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes.
PR: Are the themes in South Of Hope Street subtle or does this depend on the intellectual and emotional baggage the audience brings with them?
JS: People make of it what they focus on. Some people focus on the rise of fascism and, obviously, I put not so subtle symbols in there, but I also think it's funny because I showed the film to my brother who happens to be a Republican—don't ask me! He said, "Yeah, that was great. The Fascist Biden administration." He completely identified with these people who are too left and are trying to run his life with my film. I thought, 'Okay, well I guess we'll get a large audience.' They can make of it what they will, and I know what I meant. People do tend to do that in any movie, unless it's being pounded into you, so you can't imagine it's about anything else.
PR: If a film's meaning depends on the audience, then cinema is in a never-ending existential crisis.
JS: It's like any work of art—you look at a vase, and you think this design means this or that. You identify with it for different reasons, or you don't identify with it at all. It's like anything you're examining, and I believe films should be examined quite a few times, or at least some films, because they have many different layers.
I heard a filmmaker, it might have been Quentin Tarantino, say that a film should be the same as a painting. Of course, a film is not stagnant and still, but you go to the museum, and you look at these paintings many different times and in many different moods, and you have a different reaction. Or you wonder what you ever saw in that? Like five years later you've outgrown it.
I've seen On The Waterfront many times since I first saw it when I was a kid, because I'm trying to figure out what its magic is. It has great performances, and it's dated because it's old, but there's something magical about it. I'm starting to think it's the cinematography of Boris Kaufman. He shot for Jean Vigo before he shot On The Waterfront. That black and white cinematography is so beautiful, and it perfectly captures the world of the 1950s on the docks. Yes, the acting is great, and the story is interesting—a little dated but still very interesting. But it's something Kaufman caught in the visuals, and it's the same with Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography on McCabe And Mrs. Miller. So, it's Kaufman's cinematography and also the music of Leonard Bernstein [laughs]. You combine those things together, and it creates something magical—that's my opinion. But yes, it's a work of art, and you look at it again and again.
South Of Hope Street is available on VOD.
