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Two inspirational writer/directors talk about making films: Anthony Minghella talks to Joshua Marston
Photo: Micky Goeler
Joshua Marston relaxes before his SCENE interview
Mon, 24 Jan 2005
In a recent Script Factory session co-presented by Shooting People, a packed house listened to two very different writer/directors - Anthony Minghella & Joshua Marston - talk about making their films.
In London from New York to see his film Maria Full Of Grace premiere at the London Film Festival, Joshua was happy to hang out at SCENE and enjoyed a warm conversation with Britain's most celebrated filmmaker.
After its rapturous reception in London Maria Full of Grace will open in the UK in March 2005, released by Icon Film Distribution.
Joshua Marston's Maria Full of Grace
Anthony Minghella talks to Joshua Marston Maria Full of Grace as part of The Script Factory’s SCENE at The Times bfi London Film Festival on Saturday 30 October 2004, Curzon Soho, London
Anthony Minghella (AM): I don’t know if all of you have managed to see Maria Full of Grace yet, but it’s a fantastic movie and it’s a privilege to be here with Josh. It’s extremely irritating that it’s his first movie and a lot of what I’m going to talk about today is informed by the envy over how he could get so far, so quickly.
(LAUGHTER)
AM: What we are trying to do here today is to imagine that we are having a conversation in a café, without an audience here…we won’t be able to actually do that, but it’s a good discipline to keep us honest. There were a number of headlining things about the movie that struck me first, and I think would strike anybody. I should say I saw this film first in Sarajevo [at the Film Festival], and at the end of the movie I was looking for this Columbian guy who had made the movie, and then I came across this guy [points at Joshua], who is an impostor clearly. The first thing I want to ask is what are you, a young American director, doing making a movie that is set in Columbia and is in Spanish?
Joshua Marston (JM): That’s not a small first question, is it? I’m not really sure…the movie started after a conversation I’d had with a Columbian woman in Queens in New York. It was sort of typical of conversations that I would have when I was in cafes in New York, and I’d hear someone with a little bit of an accent. I’d ask: ‘where are you from? And what brought you to the USA, and how are you finding it?’
AM: It’s a pick up line, basically? [Laughter]
JM: Exactly! So I was in the Columbian neighbourhood, which is near the Indian and Korean neighbourhoods in Jackson Heights. I was in a restaurant and got into a conversation with this woman who revealed that she had previously been a drug mule. She described what it was like, and while I’d heard that this happened, I had never wanted to imagine it in detail because it’s a such a gruesome thing. This woman described what it was like, moment by moment - swallowing grapes to get her throat ready and then swallowing drugs and getting on the airplane – and I think the fascination of that was the starting point. I was startled by the story, thinking this woman has actually done this, and I thought, who becomes a mule? What factors lead to someone doing this? So I became interested in a making a movie that put the spectator in a similar position to the one I was in – one of discovery. I wanted to make it feel real and authentic and try to make the window pane onto this world as transparent as possible.
AM: Yes, but there is a missing beat there. Most people don’t sit in a café and hear stories like this and think, I’ll make a film about it. It’s incredibly courageous if you’ve never made a film before – well you’d made a few shorts – but that’s very brave to put yourself in the position of film director and think OK, this is a story I’ll make my first film about. I’m sure there are a lot of young filmmakers in the audience, so I wonder, how do you go from thinking ‘that’s an interesting story’ to ‘OK, I’ll make a film about it’?
JM: Well I got inspired and so I wrote…I’d been to film school so I knew I wanted to make a movie. Do you mean biographically, how did I get there?
AM: Yes, literally, how did you go from ‘that’s an interesting to story’ to an award-winning movie based on this story?
JM: The leap that you are talking about is that I’d been to film school and was fishing around and had been writing things, loads of things that are buried in the bottoms of drawers and will hopefully never see the light of day. I’d only just gotten to the point where I’d actually written a script, and then a second and third draft, and really worked at it before showing it to someone I really respect who said to me very clearly, you need to move on, this isn’t going to work. They were telling me something I already knew, really. So I was in that position of being really frustrated and this woman’s story, though it sounds ridiculous to say, was so compelling that it really did just write itself very quickly. Mind you, this first version was very different from how the film actually ended up…
AM: I think I heard you say that in this first version, there were no lines that remained in the finished film. Is that true?
JM: Yes because I hadn’t done any research up until that point. I mean I’d read about [the drug trade] in newspapers. Actually prior to getting into film school, I was very interested in politics and thought mistakenly that I might want to go into politics. I went to Washington and tried to study political science as a grad student and hated that…so I wasn’t completely ignorant about Columbia, but when I sat down to write a first draft of this story it was based on the little information I had and what she had given me. So, I’ll be honest, at that point it was just about this tension. I wanted to write something that would be a political thriller so I blazed through what could be called ‘the first act’ and made up some absurd motivation for her, just to get to the meat of the drama. Once I did that it was so compelling that I couldn’t stop writing, but I hadn’t talked to enough people at that time so it was really boring. I’d actually drawn out the tension way too much and there were no interesting characters. There was none of what I needed.
AM: America in particular is full of books on “How to get ahead in filmmaking”, “How to make it as a director”, but I don’t think I’ve ever read in any of those books, ‘go and write your film in Spanish about drug dealing and that will work’…I mean, at what point did you think, I am going to make this story but I have to do it in Spanish and not in English?
JM: Well the language thing was from the beginning really…I mean we had the conversation in Spanish.
AM: Do you have a whole rosary of languages depending on the conversation [huge laughter]…is Spanish your only language?
JM: Well I have a couple of other languages…
AM: We should just terminate this conversation now! I don’t think this is going to be instructive for anybody. I haven’t heard anything yet I can use. We are going to do the rest of this in Czech. [laughter]
JM: No, I think for me doing this in Spanish was always so important because I love learning a language. That’s one of the most enjoyable things about going to another country outside of the United States. The learning curve is so steep and you have to immerse yourself in the culture, language and politics - all of your senses are stimulated. So I just felt it would be most authentic to do it in Spanish. My Spanish wasn’t good enough at first to write in Spanish, so for the first year and a half, I wrote in English and then actually worked with someone who is Columbian. He did a pass to translate, and I did one. He was from a different part of Columbia than where the story was set, so instead of trying to do it in slang we decided to make it neutral and then later when I worked with the actors more, we injected the slang into the script.
AM: And aside from politics and film school, your background was also in photography, wasn’t it?
JM: Yes. I started taking photographs in High School. They were documentary photographs and involved a lot of travelling and meeting people and talking to them and watching them work. I’m often very fascinated by craft or manual labour, with process. I think that’s why that section of the film where they prepare the drug mules is so detailed. I’m always really impressed with anyone who does anything very well, who is an expert so I think that’s why my photos were in that vein. But I often would go out and meet these people and hear their stories and take their pictures and then I would come back and wanted to tell more of a story than was immediately presentable in the photographs so I think that was why I was more interested in moving into film, but I didn’t have the balls to do that for a long time.
AM: When you went to film school, did you think I’m not going to be able to change the world by going to Washington, I’m going to change it through movies.
JM: A little, though I think I was already a little disillusioned about changing the world by the time I got to film school. I never really sat down and said ‘ I want to change the world with this film’ when we were making it. I may hope it now, when we are finished with it, and may have said it in interviews. But I went through this really interesting moment while we were casting it - we cast both in Columbia and Miami – and there was a moment when we said to people of Columbian descent, please send us all your 17 year old daughters…
AM: …that’s very suspicious…
JM: …yes well, they then asked us: ‘what are you doing?’. And when we told them we were making a film about a drug mule, the wall came down. Columbians are very protective of their image, and rightfully so, especially Columbians who live outside of the country because it’s so maligned in the press. I think that’s when I really started talking and begin to articulate just what it was I wanted to do with the film, and I said to them, yes, Columbia’s got this problem with its image, and you can either stick your head in the sand and make romantic comedies or whatever, and pretend like this [drug trade] doesn’t exist. Or you can take this opportunity to confront this head on and show something more truthful and try to reinvent the image. I always though that part of this problem was this very simplistic approach to the issue, there was this anti-drug trade propaganda in Columbia similar to Nancy Reagan’s ‘Just Say No’ campaign; there were billboards all over that said ‘Don’t be a Mule’, which is kind of absurd. I hoped we’d go beyond that and not lecture people, so this idea of trying to change the world with a film, I was really against the idea of using the film to try to teach people not to be a mule. So it’s kind of ironic that when we went to Columbia to show the finished film, and I was extraordinarily nervous as it was at this film festival in front of 1500 people. Sitting in a room full of Columbians and putting myself in their situation of watching it, this was the first time, I’d really thought: ‘wow, this could have the impact of making people think twice about becoming a mule’.
AM: Well I think when you see a very good movie – and yours is a very good movie – I think the nature of dramatic fiction is to force you for 100 minutes to inhabit more than one point of view. So in your film you are forced for a moment to become a young Columbian girl faced with a series of choices and alternatives and a series of social constraints and challenges. You observe the way certain opportunities arise and are accepted or rejected, so for the time you are watching the movie certain behavioural patterns become available to you and recognisable to you. You do a service to these people and say, at the very least, sit with us for two hours and imagine what it is like when these are your choices. I think that’s the beauty of film. It can’t change you directly, all it can do is nudge you, in the same way that Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11 – like it or not – when you sit there watching George Bush in front of those school children with the seconds ticking by…everyone in the world feels the same way. We are forced for a second into this strange dialectical place. And your movie does that. I think one of the other beautiful things about your film is that not only where you took us with how you portray the Maria character, but also with how you show ‘process’. In that scene where she swallows the drugs pellets, I was uncomfortably squirming in anticipation of those pellets hitting my bowels. The kind of tenderness of that scene and the way they give her those pellets. It’s incredibly gentle and there are no macho guys with machetes, it’s almost like they are giving her the holy ghost - that’s disarming as well. At that point you realise that everyone involved with this particular ecology are just making a living. The film is very un-inflected, there is no [deep serious voice] ‘Dom…dom…da’. There is almost a documentary feel to it. Actually, I think now would be a good time to see the first clip just to orientate you. The clip we are going to see is one with Maria, and it’s a performance from an actress who had never been in a film before. It’s an extraordinary performance and we’ll come back to this in a minute.
EXTRACT from Maria Full Of Grace:
MARIA TALKS TO HER BOYFRIEND ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF GETTING MARRIED…
AM: Most writer/directors tend to be fascists who can’t bear to have anybody fucking around with their script but I gather that you are a little bit different when you work with your actors. Do you want to tell us a little bit about how a scene like that developed?
JM: Well I had a procedure for this film, but I don’t know if it will harden into a fixed procedure for every film I make. It was a procedure that was very specific for this film, and it had to do with the fact that, because I don’t speak Spanish – Columbian Spanish - well and I had to get the script to that final level of feeling and sounding very Columbian - in the characters, and the world, and the language. So what I did in this situation, was I gave all of the actors half of the script (up until the moment where Maria gets on the plane) and told them read it as many times as you like but you have to give it back to me. Then 3 or 4 weeks later when we were actually on location and ready to shoot, I would say ‘Do you remember the scene where Juan and Maria break up?’ and ask them to do that more or less from memory. They would improvise from that and they would come up with all sorts of interesting things. Then we would go back to the script that I had written and talk about it and compare it with what they had done and sit down and re-write the scene together. In this process, I’m obviously directing, in terms of what I want from the scene and what has to happen, but each one of them are the expert on their own character and they are making the call on whether they would say ‘return’ or ‘go back’ or whatever their character would say, and we were also incorporating anything good we might have come across in improvisation. In this way we did a final polish on the script. That took the script to the final place, but it also gave them a real sense of ownership over the characters.
AM: I think it’s a remarkable method, and I think that Ken Loach has a similar techniques but I don’t know any other filmmaker who is brave enough to do that. It will be interesting to see if it does survive. Ok – so they have rehearsed and you develop the script in this way. When did you start shooting?
JM: All of the rehearsals were about 2 or 2 1/2 weeks prior to shooting and I would go home on each night and type up what we had worked and distribute it.
AM: One thing I’ve heard and I’ve tried myself on occasion, is when you are on about ‘Draft 15 or 16’, and you have got a tricky scene and about to go into production, is to sit down and try to write the scene again from memory. Then what tends to happen is that the real necessity of the scene remains and the devices and the grace notes tend to be eliminated, but it’s very daring to do it. In this situation, you had the added complication that you weren’t even shooting in Columbia you were in Ecuador. Why was that?
JM: Yes, that was one of the most nerve-wracking things. The producer and I had made the decision to shoot in Columbia and had been scouting locations and it was just before the Presidential elections in Columbia and things started to go wrong – there were bombs – and basically we just couldn’t get production insurance. And it was one thing for us to go and put ourselves at risk for our movie, but no matter how much they liked the script, at the end of the day I would have been uncomfortable asking the DOP and the rest of the crew to risk their lives for what was just a job. So we scouted around for other locations and because I had been to Ecuador, I knew there were places we could use. Originally when we were in Columbia, we were going to use a really small crew. I fought with the DOP and the producer, because I wanted to do it in super 16, and they thought I was crazy. But the reason for that was I wanted to have a small light crew and leave a very light footprint, partially because not being Columbian, I wanted to make sure that if we saw something on the street that we could turn the camera around and film it. I wanted to make sure that all the fabric of life in Columbia was woven in. I was second-guessing myself constantly, to the point where I though of having the equivalent of a dramaturge. I talked to a Columbian filmmaker who I thought of having at my elbow, but finally the producer and I decided that with all of the actors we had on board that we really did have those voices there already. There interesting thing about the film was that it forced me to be perhaps more collaborative than I might otherwise have been, and that was the big lesson for me, that it could work. It made me stay open through the whole process, much like when you are writing a script and you have to try to not get attached to that script but be open to the process of discovery all through the shooting and through the post.
AM: Just from the perspective of the music of a scene - the music of the dramaturgy – one of the things you clearly love is when there are more than two people in a scene. That scene in the flower factory is very evocative. Most of us imagine that for a first film, and this was certainly true for me on my first, Truly Madly Deeply, that if I ever had to deal with more than two people in a room that I got in a huge panic. You certainly seemed to be able to handle this very naturally.
JM: …’seemed’…
AM: In just a moment we are going to talk about the discipline of the scene, but first I want to show another clip. This is the scene when Maria has left the flower factory and she is given a lift to another town to look for work.
EXTRACT
Maria gets a life to town and on the way is invited to become a mule
AM: One of the things that is very interesting to me as a writer, and a director is that when you say ‘writer/director’ and ‘improvisation’ and ‘first film’ and you look at a lot of interesting young American directors in the independent sector, or even British and European directors. What you seem to get are a lot of tonal scenes, behavioural scenes. I don’t know if any of you saw the Wong Kar Wai film last night [2046]? He’s a brilliant writer/director, but the narrative structures tend to be abandoned, or are secondary to tones and thematic interests. That’s true of a lot of young filmmakers – the rigour of telling story is lost…and this could really be as a reaction against narrative, especially for American filmmakers who so fed up of ‘narrative, narrative, narrative’. The independent voice tends to be a tonal one rather than a narrative one. That of course can be beautiful too, but it’s not particularly rigorous in shape, and one of the things that struck me when I was watching Maria Full of Grace again, was that there is nothing accidental about it. There is nothing in it that isn’t essential. There is one scene in particular where a women is talking and she mentions a sister in America, and you think that these are just people idly talking, but much later in the film you realise that this apparently casual information is vital information. I think that’s one of the most remarkable achievements of the film, is the degree of rigour you achieved - given that there was improvisation, given that this was your first film, and that you have never directed a film before. I don’t know how you do it, but when you look at it and analyse it, it does have this amazing through line running through it. It’s like this amazing perfectly formed independent feature with a strong story with an element of thriller about it. What I want to ask is, was all of this in your mind or did it sort of happen as you went along?
JM: Well it sort of happened as we went along – and while I am very happy to hear the compliments - to me it’s not that mystical or significant. Maybe because I am American and went to film school, I think this is a very traditional three act structure. I can tell you the frame where the end of act one happens, in fact we just saw the end of act one. I had written the script over and over and actually the improvisation came very late in the process. Now as I bang my head against the wall looking for the next project, and having listened to Mike Leigh earlier, I’m inspired to try to bring in the improvisation earlier. Really, the improvisation didn’t affect the structure. To me, when you talk about that scene in with the sister, I almost cringe because it feels like that’s so obviously the gun over the fireplace that is going to come back to haunt them later. If anything, maybe the improvisation, by virtue of the performances, helped to embellish that. The process of writing before we got to the improvisation…I would cringe if anyone read that, it was so, so embarrassing and it was all plot. I sort of feel like there are three pillars of screenplay, and you have to have like one and a half to start and by the end of the process, to have a successful screenplay, you have to have all three. They are story, character and theme. In this film, I started very solemnly with story, and didn’t know much about the characters and nothing about the theme. People say ‘well, how did you tell this story about a Columbian woman’; about a year into the process I realised that aside from making the film about a girl who lived very far away, I was making a film about a girl who was doing something that is very universal, in trying to figure out the meaning of her life. The short films I’d made before were all about meaning, so when I realised this, I felt more comfortable and confident because I thought, ‘OK there is me in the script’.
AM: You do yourself a disservice because for those of us who struggle to write and those of us who read a lot of screenplays, there are very few that are as tightly constructed. And I hate the fact that you mention Three Act Structure with ‘the turning points kicking in at 38 mins’ and so on and so passionately believed in it, but maybe this can be the rebuke to my conviction that the minute you start writing in a formal way, that you can’t make a beautiful film because you’ve done it.
JM: Well also, this [gestures at the screen] isn’t the script, it’s the edited film. I look back at the shooting script…actually when I was translating it back from Spanish to English I had to keep getting up from the computer in frustration because there were so many bad scenes that I had just forgotten, that had sort of fallen away in the first week of editing that just weren’t necessary.
AM: Well that’s of course the third part of the process. The writer/director gets the one final shot and gets to deal with their humiliations in the cutting room before they have to admit to anyone – and not as modestly as you’ve just done – just how bad their work looked once they got into the editing room. We have one more clip to look at and then we’ll open up for questions. This is the scene when the mule shows Maria exactly what she is going to have to do.
EXTRACT: MARIA SWALLOWING GRAPES
AM: I read an interview that said you actually made her swallow these things.
JM: …but they didn’t have heroin in them…we didn’t have the budget for it…
AM: Many girls were harmed in the making of this movie…
Any questions from the audience?
AUDIENCE: When you were writing this, did you separate yourself as a writer or did you constantly feel like you had a director’s eye there?
JM: I wasn’t conceiving shots, if that’s what you mean. You aren’t supposed to write in camera angles and writers are supposed to respect the director’s territory, so I guess I was just respecting myself, really.
AUDIENECE: How come you directed it. Why not get someone else to do it?
JM: I was wanting to be a director and I was writing for myself. Then I got very attached to it and didn’t want to give it up.
AUDIENCE: How long did it take you to raise finance?
JM: We spent about a year after I had finished writing and I connected with a producer who I had crossed paths with at film school who I respected very much. He connected with it, and gave me notes on the script and then I continued to work on the script while he showed it around. We got really good response, but it was ‘we love the script, it’s a page turner and we couldn’t put it down, but could you do it in English?’…it was like ‘What if Maria had had a nanny who had taught them all English and they were practicing their English…[laughter].
AM: …that was me by the way…
JM: The producer had a connection at HBO Films who had heard about the script and wanted to see it. When we told them it was in Spanish, they were like ‘yeah, yeah, just send it to us’, and we say “ NO the WHOLE thing is in Spanish’ and they still said, ‘yeah, yeah, just send it to is’. It was read by a woman who had gotten herself in a position within HBO, which is already a unique institution, to just make small films. She had done American Splendor and Real Women Have Curves and I think that the fact that it was in Spanish was actually really appealing to her and she liked the fact that it was different. We might have been able to make this in Europe or in Spain, but HBO gave us more money than all my dentists and aunts and uncles could combined…
AM: HBO deserve real credit for the way the have really picked up where the BBC left off, with a commitment to innovation and real dramas.
AUDIENCE: How much did you expect the budget to be and how much did it end up being in the end?
JM: …that’s like asking me to get up here and take off all my clothes…well for our first budget when we were applying for a grant, we thought it would look good to come in under a million dollars, so it was 999,000 dollars [laughter]. Ultimately we had to give HBO a budget that came in under 3 million and it ended up being 3.6 million. Originally we honestly didn’t really think it would be good business to do it for more than a million and a half because we didn’t think a Spanish language film could sell for more than a million dollars.
AUDIENCE: I am so amazed to hear that your lead actress hasn’t done any film work before, and I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about her and the casting process?
JM: She is amazing – they all are – as soon as we found them I was in this bizarre situation of feeling completely happy with all of my actors. There wasn’t one I felt worried about, I think partly because they were all Columbian. As I said earlier, I knew that the actors were going to have to act as a balance for me because I am not Columbian and I wouldn’t be able to spot check the accents, I knew they had to bring a lot to their roles. So we were casting in the US to start and then when things got up and running, we moved to Columbia. In Columbia if you are a professional actor, then you are mostly making a living working in soap operas, so I was worried that I would get actors with a lot of melodramatic habits, so in addition to looking at professionals, we were also looking at non-professionals. We set up two teams, one doing standard auditions and the other going to school and little towns with a megaphone on the car and just trying to get people to come. You can’t just hand people who haven’t acted before a scene and expect them to act, because they will just imitate what they have seen on television. I was doing this same thing in New York - we would just sit the person down and have a conversation and then if they were interesting, we would film them telling a story we had asked them to prepare for the audition, about a time when their image of a person they know had changed. It could be a friend or a family member. The goal was just to hear whether they could tell a story, and whether they were intelligent and sensitive. If that was good then we would ask them to try an improvisation with a scene. Over the course of three months we saw like 800 girls. Some were almost right. It was very nervous for me because we had the producer and HBO watching, and the dates were approaching and I was rewinding tapes and convincing myself that if I had someone who was 80% right then I could direct them to take them to 100%. We got to a point were we had to push the shoot by a week and I thought, ‘how long is this going to go on before they just put their foot down and tell me that I just have to go with someone’. Literally, the next morning a tape arrived with another dozen auditions on it and Catalina was the first person on the tape. I can literally remember where I was sitting when I first saw the tape…it was that dream of thinking your actor is going to walk in and incarnate that role, and she was Maria. She was also creative, intuitive, smart, and took direction well and the camera loved her. To the extent that the film works, it is because I wrote the film up to a certain point and the she took the baton and then carried it the rest of the way.
AM: …a very good answer and I think we should have time for just another question or two.
AUDIENCE: In the post-process, I just wondered what it was like. How much input was there from HBO? Were there screenings involved and who actually had the final call?
JM: Well I didn’t have final cut because it was my first film. We started with one editor and I think by virtue of the fact that I was in South American and couldn’t sit down with her, and we couldn’t watch dailies and also because I was a first time director and maybe hadn’t developed the skill or language to talk to an editor, we never really fully gelled. By mutual agreement – she was very nice about it – we switched editors, but both of them contributed an enormous amount, and I learned a lot from both – not least, how to communicate with an editor. Throughout the edit, HBO didn’t really pressurise us and we were very careful not to send them anything too early on. Probably during the whole process we only got about three or four sets of notes – some of which I would agree with, and others where I would think, this is ridiculous…I would be screaming. In these cases, the producer would sort of calm me down and help me find what was useful in the notes. The producer was very good at negotiating this relationship, but really there were none of those major horror stories you hear about with the studios.
AUDIENCE: The woman you met in the café…did you keep in touch with her and has she seen the film?
JM: I didn’t – I think it was partly the anonymity of that conversation that allowed her to open up to me and if I’d asked for her name, it might have been a little uncomfortable. Of all the conversations I had during the research process, there was one in particular that was very moving. I drove a long way to this jail in Pennsylvania and slept the night then went to the jail the next day to meet this man. At the end of the six hours of visiting hours, he was only half way through his story, so I went back again the next morning and spent another whole day listening to him. After this we kept in touch, and I had sent money to his family. One time he called me up and said ‘when they arrested me they took my suitcase and I would really rather you have it because you are going to Columbia for your film’. So one day I was sitting there and the doorbell rang and it was his suitcase. It was this Purple Rose of Cairo moment. My script sort of came out of the computer and here was this suitcase, and he asked me to go through it and it was the weirdest thing. In the suitcase were these things that I had written and a phone number with his contacts name. It was really bizarre. Then eventually I went to Columbia and delivered the suitcase and we still kept in touch, and after a few years later, he got out of prison shortly after we had finished then film. He was trying to get his life together – his was a very sad story in its own right - and when we went to Columbia for the premiere, he called me and said ‘is it OK if I bring a few family members?’. When I said ‘sure’, he said ‘is 12 too many?’. I saw him after the premiere and he told me that while watching it, he was holding his wife’s hand and every time he saw something he recognised or that he had lived through, he would squeeze her hand. By the end of it, she had tears streaming down her face. It was a big thing to hear these people’s stories. The whole motivation had been to ask ‘who is a drug mule?’. People tell these really compelling stories about what leads them to do this desperate thing, and they are presented in propaganda as being naïve or lazy or selfish or greedy, so part of my motivation was to humanise this individual. So I was very nervous with him seeing this. All I could see were places where I had fudged it and I was sure he was going to call me on it. So the next day, we had coffee and I grilled him about it and he thought it was ‘on’ so I was so relieved.
AM: Well, it certainly is ‘on’…there is one wonderfully serendipitous thing in the film. When Maria makes a decision at the end of the movie, there is a sign behind her. When you see the movie, have a look at the sign.
Thank you Josh Marston.
[HUGE APPLAUSE]
to read transcripts from other Script Factory events
Photo: Micky Goeler
Joshua Marston chats to fellow SCENE visitors Gurinder Chadha & LFF director Sandra Hebron