Interview With Director Mark Jenkin (Rose Of Nevada)

Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary British cinema. Mark’s first two features, Bait and Enys Men, showcased the director’s love for grainy 16mm images as he traverses the myth and culture of Cornwall in a manner unique to the area. His third feature, Rose of Nevada, follows suit, as we see Nick, played by George MacKay, and Liam, played by Callum Turner, join the crew of a mysterious fishing boat, only to find themselves transported back in time after the first voyage. Ahead of the film’s UK release, Oscar Trinick sat down with Mark Jenkin to discuss his love for shooting on film, his feelings on the past through cinema, and the stories of a human face.

Oscar Trinick: I think I just wanted to start with something that I just can’t get out of my mind whenever I’m watching your films. What is it like to direct, write, edit, shoot, compose and do the sound for your own films? And were there any specific challenges or aids to it for Rose of Nevada?

Mark Jenkin: I love all aspects of filmmaking, so if I can write, direct, shoot, edit, and do the sound and do the music, then I will. I’m really lucky that I’ve managed to establish a process where I can do all of those things, and that’s not to say I do everything on my own; I work with a really important group of collaborators across all of those departments, but I like to be very involved in all of those departments.

This goes back to how I started making films when I was a teenager. There was me and a mate of mine who used to borrow a video camera, and we used to write films, then we would shoot them ourselves, and we would direct them ourselves, edit them ourselves and be in them as well. I think I got to a point a few years ago in filmmaking when I’d lost a little of my enthusiasm, because I was working in a much more conventional way. I was only doing certain bits of the filmmaking process. I was a kind of writer or a co-writer, and then I was a director, and I’d lost touch with the camera, I’d lost touch with being able to edit stuff. Then I just decided to go back and do it the way that I did it when I first fell in love with film.

I made a film called Bronco’s House, which was a short film made in the same way as my first film, Bait, which I made in a completely uncompromising way, and it had some success; it allowed me to be able to continue working in that way. So for me now, it’s totally normal to work in that way, and I need to reiterate, I don’t work on my own. There are a lot of people who work with me who, without them, I wouldn’t be able to make the films.

There were challenges, but only challenges that were also present when I made Bait and Enys Men. I had been slightly overstretched at times in what I was attempting to do; it’s a challenge in the moment, but I always think that being a bit overstretched and a bit close to the edge in terms of not being able to get everything done is a really good place to be creatively. The adrenaline kicks in, and your brain starts moving very quickly; you stop thinking, and you just start acting and doing.

I use quite old equipment. The clockwork camera that I used is about as old as me; it’s about 50 years old. It served me well. With it, I shot Bronco’s House, Bait, Enys Men and about 3/4 of Rose of Nevada, before it finally gave in, and the spring broke. So that was more of a challenge emotionally because that camera had been with me through everything, and then it couldn’t quite make it to the end of the film.

OT: I felt that with Rose of Nevada specifically, you create a fascinating tension and contradiction between your love for shooting on a 16 mm film and a set of characters who want to escape the past. Is this something that you kind of contend with as well, or do you find kind of comfort in the nostalgia of the way you shoot?

MJ: It’s not really about nostalgia for me because growing up, I never shot on film, or certainly not on 16 mm and not on these cameras. It’s not something I’ve gone back to. I started shooting on Super 8 in the 90s, but I never shot 16 mm. I loved film when I was shooting on it as a teenager, but it was the only thing to shoot on other than really crappy video. So it was a no-brainer for me.

My move back to shooting on film, having shot digital for a few years, was at first a nostalgic thing because I realised I’d fallen out of love with film, and I thought I’m going to go back and retrace my steps and find where my first love was, and it was in Super 8, which then I started shooting on again, and then it progressed to 16 mm.

I think if it had been purely nostalgia and a comforting look back at the past, I wouldn’t have stuck with it because it’s quite difficult to do. Especially at the time when I went back to shooting film because it was when Kodak looked like they were going to go out of business, and it was quite difficult to get hold of film.

I try to look forward as much as possible. I shoot on film, but I edit digitally. I live in the digital world as we all do, but I capture my images with a film camera because it’s the type of camera that I understand. I love the aesthetic of it. I love the limitations of the workflow.

OT: With digital filmmaking, is there anything that pushes you away from it?

MJ: I just don’t have the same connection with the technology. And I really loved shooting stuff on Mini-DV in the late 90s, through to the mid-2000s. But I found that the technology, as it does, just sped up and up and up. Suddenly, Mini-DV was superseded by HDV and HD, and then it all became about the technology. I just, I haven’t got that brain, I couldn’t keep up with it, I don’t understand how digital cameras work, so I can’t have an intimate understanding of the way the camera works. Whereas with a film camera, I just understand it and know the idiosyncrasies of shooting on film.

When I was younger, I spent a lot of time in the dark room working with chemistry, chemicals, and printing. It’s much more about what I understand of the analogue filmmaking process. I’m not anti-digital in any sense. Plenty of films that I watch and love are digital films. I just don’t have any interest or understanding of it. If somebody asked me to make a film digitally, they might as well ask me to build a house. I’d be useless at both.

OT: One thing I’ve always found extraordinary about your films is the way the faces in your close-ups feel like they have so many stories behind them, even with the lack of dialogue. How is it that you go about finding these faces and linking them with this sense of Cornish myth?

MJ: Faces are the most important thing in cinema for me. The problem for me is working out who not to cast because every face is interesting and every face is beautiful.

We’ve got this myth that in the golden age of the Hollywood studio system, we had these amazing matinee idols and screen goddesses, and everybody was much more beautiful back then, which I don’t believe in. I think we’re probably more beautiful now than we were back then because we’re healthier, we eat better, we’re better hydrated, we’ve got better lifestyles. But we don’t photograph our actors in the same way that we used to. It’s much more about the way people were filmed back then.

I think the human face is the greatest production value you have when you’re shooting a film. Once you’ve cast the actor, you’ve got this face to explore. The actor has a character to explore through their face, through their eyes. I don’t think enough films really exploit the human face, and I try to do that.

It’s partly because I shoot my own films. I operate the camera, and as a director, I want to be closer to the actors than anybody else on the crew because I need to be able to talk to them and I need to be communicating with them. If I’m close to the actor, then the cameras come with me, and by default, what I’m filming are big close-ups.

Also, the eyes, as they say, are the window to the soul. You can say so much through a look that you can’t through dialogue. I don’t know how it necessarily relates to the Cornish mythology that I’m tapping into, but I think it’s just a way of communicating any story that anybody’s trying to tell you. You do it best through what the human face is doing or what the human face isn’t doing.

OT: I felt that Rose of Nevada is, in ways, a companion piece to Enys Men. Your new film is about being bound to the sea as opposed to being trapped on an island. I felt both also shared motifs about the sparseness of flowers and motherhood in the absence of a father figure. What was your intention behind these connections, if purposeful? And what is it that keeps on drawing you back to certain ideas and images?

MJ: That’s a big question that I probably won’t answer to your satisfaction because I don’t want to talk too much about the themes, but the themes that you did mention are all definitely present, and some of them are intentional, and some of them are not intentional.

Somebody said to me the other day that my films are all about community, and I hadn’t really thought about that. I thought, well, aren’t all films about community in one way or another? But then I thought, maybe not all films are a statement about community. So I do seem to be obsessed with community. I say seem to be because I don’t see these as intentions. I see these as results of me telling certain stories. By concentrating on very specific communities in the very specific place that I live in, there’s an authenticity to it, which allows those themes around community to be universal in terms of the audience.

I realise that my films are really concerned with or influenced by the thing that, in Cornwall, we call Hireth, which is a Cornish word that hasn’t got a direct English translation. The fact that I can’t define it is the reason why I end up making films that address it. Effectively, Hireth is a sort of longing for home. It’s linked to nostalgia; it’s linked to a feeling of melancholy, it’s linked to loss. It’s about the gentle sadness associated with the passing of time. It’s linked to the Cornish diaspora; the Cornish ended up travelling thousands of miles away from Cornwall at certain times in their history in search of work in the same way that the Welsh and the Irish did, and a lot of people did.

Home could be defined as it could be a place, but it also could be a feeling, or it could be a person, or it could be a smell, or it could be an atmosphere, or it could be an idea, or it could be completely false.

OT: I kept on being drawn back to an incredible 2012 documentary called Leviathan, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, which homes in on the horrors of commercial fishing in ways that I felt were similar to this. What was it that drew you to portray the darkness of the fishing sequences in the way you did? Or did you just find it was a sense of realism that took over?

I think it’s about the realism. Fishing often gets romanticised on screen and you’ll have a fisherman who’s got a few lobster pots in a boat and he goes out and the weather’s always really nice and catches lobsters and then goes and sells them down the pub and he’s got simple folk with a simple way of life, which is such a dangerous romanticisation of what is a really perilous way to earn a living. It’s still the most dangerous civilian job you can do, but also how perilous it is economically. I really wanted to get a sense, on the boat, of how dangerous, unrelenting, repetitive, noisy, claustrophobic it was. You don’t often get that on screen.

A lot of that was to do with the sound design. I made sure that it was so loud that there’s a relief when the winch has stopped, when the net stops being hauled, or when the engine revs are knocked off on the boat, and you’re just bobbing in the water. I wanted there to be these moments of stillness to really amplify how noisy and dangerous sounding it is when the boat’s fully operational.

Leviathan’s a good shout, actually. I did see Leviathan, but I hadn’t thought of that as a reference, but it certainly is. With Leviathan, it’s almost like you’re seeing the horror of the fishing from the point of view of the fish, whereas in Rose of Nevada, you’re seeing the horror of the fishing from the point of view of two deckhands, or certainly one deckhand, because, one of the deckhands takes to the fishing like a fish to water, if you pardon the pun, whereas George MacKay’s character of Nick finds the whole experience traumatising.

I just wanted it to be as real as possible. A lot of it’s in the sound, like the storm sequence. I wasn’t convinced by the storm sequence until the very final minutes of the sound mix when we put in a real booming sound to show the green water, the swell hitting the hull of the boat, rather than it all being about spray and wind. I just wanted to make it as visceral as possible.

OT:  I was also fascinated by the score in this. What is the process of doing that like? Is it something that you’re thinking about at the same time when you’re filming, or is it all post-production? And if you could talk about the specific sounds that we hear as well?

Yeah, it’s changed for me because when I did Bait, I really fell into doing the soundtrack by accident. There was never meant to be any score on that film at all. I made some drones to go on the film to cover what I thought were sonic gaps on the soundtrack that I didn’t think were going to be there permanently. Then I ended up falling in love with the sound and with the drones that I’d made. From that point onwards, I started making a bit more music in everyday life.

I do tend to map out roughly what I want the music to be like beforehand. With this one, the piece of music which is the theme for the village scenes is a bit I played on the guitar, and I put it in as a temp track. In fact, I did take it out at one point and replace it with an electronic version of that scene. Everyone who heard it said, no, you’ve got to put the guitar back in, and I don’t consider myself a guitarist, so I’m a little bit self-conscious about that. I don’t really know what I’m doing with the music, so it’s quite exciting.

I use different vintage effects boxes and pedals, and I’m sure I’ve got them all wired up wrong, and they’re not being used in the way they were designed to be used, but my ineptitude and my lack of expertise are one thing I cling to when I’m making music.

OT: I found in Rose of Nevada that you define a lot of things around little trinkets and tokens. Is this something you find specific to Cornish culture, or is this something you do as a means to tell a story?

MJ: I like being able to fill in the gaps in or indicate character traits by the objects that people are surrounded by. They tell the audience as much about who the people are as the words they speak. Sometimes, people like the art department and the set dressers will bring props onto location or onto the set and they might be intended to be for the background, but nothing’s really safe from my camera because I love shooting close-ups, so I’ll spot something on a shelf or if there’s certain things like in the pub scenes, the pictures and the ornaments and stuff like that, I made sure I had close-ups of everything. Then, in the edit, I decide where they’re useful and where they’re saying something.

My favourite scene in the film is probably where George’s character has just done the washing up, he’s standing in the kitchen door, and he’s looking at his wife who’s sat in the front room playing with their daughter, and he just looks at her neck. It says so much about a character; all of these things that are not dialogue, and not faces, fill in those gaps in the character.

I want to ask the audience questions. As an audience member myself, I love a director who says, what do you think this means? You do that by avoiding dialogue and giving significance to things that ordinarily would be insignificant.

OT: I found Nick to be a fascinating character. He wants to escape this time trap, but Liam is someone who quickly takes it in. The past recognises them both, but they don’t really recognise it, even though one takes it in and the other doesn’t. Beyond your view of how these characters interact with the past in this film, do you think that there’s an obsession with the past in broader terms of cinema nowadays?

MJ: I think it’s inevitable because it’s a past-tense art form. Cinema is a machine for capturing ghosts. You don’t have to go back very far to watch a film where everybody in the film, every actor and every creative within the film, is no longer with us, but they are reanimated on the screen. The light that they reflected is suddenly on the screen, and we’re watching these fantastical ghosts tell us stories from the past.

It takes so long to make a film, I’m writing a film now that, even if everything goes perfectly, it won’t be out in cinemas for four to five years. Even though I haven’t made it, it’s already in the past when I think about when it will come out. The past is built into film, and we’re constantly celebrating old films, which we should do. Every film, even the newest film, is still old.

You see it all the time when actors are doing the press circuit, and they’re going, tell us about your brand new film, and then you can see them trying to remember because they shot it two or three years ago.

The other side of it is that people do romanticise old films. You hear it all the time. I read a thing the other day saying the heyday of independent film was the 90s, but then I remember the 90s and in the 90s everybody was going, oh, these films are shit, the 80s were the best films, but then during the 80s people were like, these films are rubbish popcorn movies, the 70s were the best time. We romanticise the past all the time, I think that’s the human condition. Sometimes it’s harmless, sometimes it’s very harmful.

OT: What is it about Cornwall that you think separates it from the stereotypes of English culture?

MJ: Because it’s not England. Just to asterisk that, that’s not an anti-English statement; I’ve got a great love of England. Cornwall is very linked to England; historically, geographically, it is intrinsically tied, but culturally it’s been traditionally very different. I think there’s something there that is interesting, a contrast between the bigger country of England and the smaller country of Cornwall in the same way that it is with Wales and Scotland and Ireland, and Northern Ireland, there are these amazing differences culturally, linguistically, historically, but it’s a paradox because I like concentrating on the difference. I love going in and showing how idiosyncratic and distinct Cornish culture is. The more you highlight the differences on the surface, the more I think it emphasises the fact that we’re all the same.

I’m very lucky that I’ve got that context of Cornwall, where I can be very specific. I can make these characters very distinct and give them a real authenticity that the audience can key into, even though they may never have been to Cornwall or even heard of Cornwall, but can hopefully recognise an authenticity and go with a story.

When I made Bait, I thought I was making a film about a very specific story to a very specific part of Cornwall, which is a very specific part of the UK, but then it went to America and I had a woman come up to me at the New York premiere and say to me, she was very tearful, you’ve made a film about my dad, and he lived in Barbados. I took it to Istanbul, and somebody told me there that you’ve made a film about what’s going on in Turkey at the moment. I’ve never been to Turkey before. I’ve never been to Barbados. I think that’s really important to me.

Rose of Nevada is released in cinemas on 24 April and on BFI Blu-ray and BFI Player this summer.