Filmmaking Is About Restraint - An Interview with Carol Morley
- Posted: 16th Dec 2011
- Category: Articles
- Tags: carol morley, joyce vincent, feature, artist
By Olivia Humphreys
Carol Morley's film interweaves interviews with imagined scenes from the life of Joyce Vincent, whose body lay undiscovered for three years after her death in her bedsit above a shopping mall in North London in 2003, to create a piece that explores contemporary, urban life.
Olivia Humphreys spoke to her about how film can approach such emotive topics with sensitivity and creativity.
OH: There is still a lot of mystery around Joyce’s death - is the story of what happened to her clearer to you than how it comes across in the film?
CM: People keep asking how Joyce died but there is no way of finding that out, because the pathologist said the cause of death was ‘unascertained’. In terms of other things, I did find out a lot that isn’t in the film, partly because there’s got to be a certain amount of selection of course in a ninety-minute film, and partly because I always felt the film wasn’t an exposé as such. I wanted to treat the subject matter sensitively and not just put everything in that I ever found out; and not in order to somehow frustrate the audience, I never wanted to do that, but just because actually, how much do we need to know before it becomes a little unseemly?
OH: You were really sparing with your use of the real images of Joyce.
CM: I wanted to delay the actual image of Joyce so you could begin to create the picture in your head of her. She becomes built up through how people talk about her, so you come to be very aware of the fact that this is going to be a constructed person and you’ve got to question ideas of veracity - not in a horrible way but just in terms of everyone has different ideas of somebody, that’s the nature of documentary. I did have a lot more photographs of her I didn’t use in the film - me and the editor did work them into the film at first, but then we realised that it conflicted with Zawe [Ashton, the actress] playing Joyce. And anyway just because you have things, doesn’t mean that you necessarily show things. I think filmmaking is about restraint and what you leave out as much as what you put in.
OH: There’s also some extraordinary footage at the end of the film, and its impact might have been diminished if you had scattered images of Joyce throughout the film…
CM: I do think at the moment, in the age we occupy, there are so many images around, you’ve got everything on your phone and you can film everyone, images can lose their power as a kind of ideological tool. So I like that idea that there wasn’t too much of Joyce, it means her existence becomes even more powerful in a way, both on film and in reality.
OH: I found it interesting that the further you went back in Joyce’s life, the more rose-tinted the memories appeared to be.
CM: The one thing that struck me about Joyce’s life and the way people talked about it, was the very strong feeling that this shouldn’t and couldn’t have happened to her. However you presented the film, it had to be done so the viewer couldn’t have imagined that that was what she could have come to, to be so forgotten.
I didn’t want to blame the childhood, it’s very easy to do that, and of course there were certain things like the death of her mother that had, as someone says in the film, ‘a profound effect upon her’; but by all accounts this was a family just trying to be together, so I really didn’t want to demonise the family. Instead I wanted the childhood to be very warm, so there’s a lot of gold and warmth in the scenes from Joyce’s childhood.
OH: Part of the film’s intention is to shift attention away from Joyce’s death and onto her life; yet you chose to focus much of the film on her last day. Why is that?
CM: The thing that attracted me to the story was the fact that the television was still on [when Joyce’s body was found, three years after her death]. I just found that really profound, this very modern image of the flickering television. I felt from the start that the bedsit [where Joyce died] would become a central point of departure, so that you felt possibly these were the things Joyce reflected on in the last day of her life; and this is obviously me as a filmmaker making a decision, because we don’t know. I felt the television was this brilliant way of coming out of the bedsit into the interviews or bringing you back in.
I like this idea of the mystery of Joyce, and I did feel I was making a film noir really; that’s why she dresses in blue all the way through, and it’s quite shadowy. I always felt it was a detective film noir and at the heart of many film noirs is the woman, the puzzle to be solved and I thought that was Joyce. And in her bedsit, she occupies that space of mystery. I really don’t like illustrative reconstructions, and I felt you could imply stuff in that bedsit without having to illustrate what people were saying.
OH: The tone of ‘Dreams of a Life’ is a sad, reflective one; was there ever a point when you felt angry, rather than sad, about what happened to Joyce?
CM: It’s weird because I did find someone who probably was Joyce’s last [and possibly abusive] boyfriend; I talked to him, but I didn’t get him on camera. The only way I could have got him in the film is to go bang on his door and to be very confrontational, and I just didn’t want to make that film. And then I started to think, am I being cowardly for not doing that? But that wasn’t the film I was making. It’s not a film about blame and I never wanted it to be a film about blame; viewers can think about ideas of blame, but I never wanted to make the sort of film that was casting accusations about, I felt that was a disservice really. That could have been a film too, it just wasn’t mine!
I was also really interested in this idea of what Joyce’s story said about a lot of different things, especially about how women are constructed in contemporary society, and what it is to be a woman. If I had gone more down the route of being angry with people or accusing them, I think it would have just closed down the possibilities of exploring those questions.
OH: Joyce’s family chose not to take part. Did that cause you to reconsider your approach to the film?
CM: Somebody said actually they thought it was really good the family weren’t in it, because they felt it then became more a film about friendship; there aren’t many films about friendship, and it wasn’t necessarily an objective of mine to make one, but I seem to have done that.
Martin [Joyce’s close friend and former boyfriend] was the first person that really agreed to be in the film and the first boyfriend of Joyce’s that I met. I think that his story was most interesting to me in the sense that he’d known Joyce when she was twenty and he’d also known her towards the end, and as a filmmaker you’re always looking for a structure or ideas of how you can begin to tell the story in a more cohesive way.
OH: Joyce comes across as a very private person, who to an extent seems to have chosen to be alone; did you have reservations about exploring her life on screen, so publically?
CM: Joyce is dead so she can’t agree or disagree with the making of the film; I did struggle with that somewhat, but on the other hand in eighty years we’ll all be dead, we’ll all be gone, and maybe it takes this one life to open up questions about contemporary life; in some ways I thought that gave me permission.
There was another thing I felt gave me permission, which sounds slightly weirder, which was so many signals coming all over the place that Joyce wanted me to make the film: her family called her Carol, she’d lived on the same street as me, we were the same age, there were endless connections that came up. Maybe I was just justifying it but it made me feel in a way that I was meant to do it. We’ll never know if she would be pleased or not, but Martin says because she wanted to be a singer, and in the limelight in that way, she’d have liked it; so I did feel that I’d given her her voice back from being so silenced.
Dreams of a Life is released in UK cinemas on Friday 16th December. Find out more at dreamsofalife.com