3.40pm: I emerge from Green Park tube station clutching my interview notes and walk down Stratton Street to the May Fair Hotel. I know the way after last week’s “Film-maker Afternoon Teas”, which I attended hoping to talk to Chadian director Mahamad-Saleh Haroun about his new film A Screaming Man — one of the highlights at this year’s BFI London Film Festival. He never turned up. But I seem to have better luck this time round: having taken the precaution of booking more than one set of interviews, I’m about to get two interviewees for the price of one, not once but twice.
3.50pm: I nibble at a scone and sip pearl-jasmine tea, while waiting for my interview slot in the plush interior of May Fair bar. “This is how they lure them here,” a woman sitting next to me says. Last week, she interviewed the Irish director Tom Hall who had just stepped off a plane and was surprised to find cameramen and journalists when he’d only been asked to tea.
4.10pm: The film-makers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman are ready to see me at last. They’ve barely tucked into their tea. It’s not often that two people have a hand in writing and directing a film; beyond telling me they like to bounce ideas off each other, Epstein and Friedman are at pains to explain how their double act works in practice. They have jointly researched and written Howl, starring James Franco as Allen Ginsberg, whose sexually explicit poem of that title gained notoriety through the obscenity trial that followed its publication in 1955. Epstein and Friedman admit that the nature of poetic inspiration — a subject that the Cannes winner Lee Changdong turns to in Poetry, also featured at the BFI festival — interests them less than the poem’s social and political charge. One of them claims he doesn’t even like poetry.
4.20pm: There’s time for one final question as the interview draws to a close. Howl strikes me as a hybrid, generically speaking: its interweaving of colour with black-and-white sequences, of filmed footage with animation, gives the film an experimental edge. To my mind, Howl shares this quality with a number of features shown at the BFI festival this year, notably Eyad Zahra’s The Taqwacores, Errol Morris’s Tabloid, and Clio Barnard’s award-winning The Arbor (reviewed by the NS‘s Ryan Gilbey here). Do documentaries lend themselves to experimentation more than other, more straightforwardly narrative films? Epstein and Friedman, though they come to film from a background in documentary film-making, see this distinction as spurious.
4.30pm: I hardly have time to collect my thoughts when someone motions me to another table, where French writer-director Jeanne Labrune is sitting with her interpreter. Tea for two once again gives way to a triangular scenario. We start by musing on the film’s English title, Special Treatment, which doesn’t carry the sexual allusions of the French original, Sans queue ni tête. But much besides the title may be lost on its new, non-French audience. Special Treatment, somewhat surprisingly billed as a comedy, draws parallels between the professional realms of psychoanalysis and prostitution. The film’s basic premise, as well as its reliance on linguistic puns, may strike English-speaking viewers as somewhat heavy-handed, despite wonderful performances by Isabelle Huppert and the Belgian actor Xavier Demestre.
4.45pm: I compare notes with another interviewer who spoke to Jeanne Labrune before me. The idea for the film apparently first came to Labrune by chance when she picked up a book that fell off the shelf and stumbled on the word “la passe” (meaning “trick”) used in a psychoanalytical context.
5.10pm: Fortified with more tea, I leave the May Fair bar and drift towards Piccadilly.
5.25pm: My wanderings take me to the White Cube Gallery in Mason’s Yard, where Christian Marclay’s The Clock is currently displayed. There’s no getting away from films, it would seem. Marclay’s clever montage of cinematic moments, featuring clocks, watches and the passage of time more generally, is synchronised to show exactly what time it is from the moment you arrive until you leave. Watching countless clock faces makes for nerve-racking, if strangely hypnotic, viewing. Increasingly aware that I should be on my way, seven minutes into a film that goes on for 24 hours, round the clock, I reluctantly pull myself away.
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