So Mark, you wanna talk about it?

WITHERS ON WITHERS: A Very Serious Interview. Mark Withers is a 27-year old film maker. His debut feature, DARKTAILE, took more than three and a half years to complete,running into censorship complications, earlier this year. Currently in pre-production of film number two, MONEY SHOT, Mark is making full use of the casting couch facilities, onboard his yacht, Imakunt, moored off the coast of Morocco. Here, four identical quadruplet sisters, Judy, Trudie, Rudy and Phil, wait on him in their translucent g-strings, with various pastel coloured hair bands, distinguishing them apart. Cans of Mild are placed on ice, meat pies warmed to room temperature and sherbet on mirrored trays, optional; Sucked up either through a stretched and mummified goat’s foreskin or direct from the cleavage of, pick an overly willing sister. Note: Contractual obligation forced the printing of the above introduction, one third of which is blatant prevarication. INTERVIEWER: Darktaile, what’s it about? MARK: It’s about an hour and twenty minutes. It would have been longer, but most people have had enough by the third sex scene, so I cut it short, dispensing with the obligatory ending that ties up loose ends and makes sense of the previous hour and fifteen. INT: But the story, what’s that about? MARK: Haven’t you seen it?! I don’t know. What can I say? It’s like when George Michael got caught buggering that undercover police officer, or whatever he was up to, the truth becomes blurred. You’re asked that question so often, you feel like a robot, or a record stuck in a groove. I’m fed up of that question. If I tell you the story, what’s the point in watching the film? I’ve robbed you of any surprise. Oh and everyone dies at the end. INT: Fair point, I’ll back off the mike. MARK: What’s that, street jive? I like it. “Back off the mike”. I’ll use that. Don’t expect to be paid for it though. INT: It’s yours. MARK: Thank you. Meat pie? INT: No. I’m interested in the beginning, how did Darktaile evolve? MARK: The naked woman? That was fun to shoot. I shot that bit myself. I insisted. My motto is, ‘I wouldn’t expect my cast and crew to do anything I wouldn’t be prepared to do myself’. INT: I didn’t necessarily mean the beginning of the film, more its origins. Where did the idea come from? MARK: Well, Darktaile’s autobiographical. That scares some people. But like all autobiographical works, it’s exaggerated. The average person has never fired a real gun in their life and probably never will, so how can they truly write about its effects? Or alien ass probes, you know? If you haven’t been through it, first hand experience, you’re merely guessing. So you write about what you know. I had some disruptive events occur in the months prior to writing the script, so I used those and more so, the way I was feeling at the time and turned them into a story. You don’t write exactly this is what happened, this is how I feel. You bend the truth, exaggerate, take it to extreme versions of that truth and until you open your big mouth and tell the world it’s actually all about you, to inflate your ever increasing ego, nobody’s any the wiser. It got my Mother worried, when I told her. She wanted to know where she’d gone wrong in my up bringing!? INT: So, you’ve had sex with a dead person? (This happens in the film) MARK: Not literally. Just had similar results, you know. Hi, girls. I mean, the thing about the necrophilia, which actually it isn’t; That’s nothing directly to do with me. That’s a case of thinking, okay, here’s this guy, in this situation and in my mind, this is what he’d do. INT: And what did your crew make of all this? MARK: You know, I never thought to ask. I just bossed them around and got them to do exactly what I wanted, before I threw a temper tantrum. I went through nine pairs of shoes on that shoot and dislocated my knee cap twice. My doctor says next time I stamp that hard again, I may not limp away from it quite so lightly. So I’ve taken to punching people nowadays and learnt from my past mistakes, by only spanking those smaller than myself or getting my assistant to hit the bigger ones. In truth though, nobody quite had a grasp on the concept of Darktaile. It was quite a unique situation, in that no two people had the same idea as to what was going on. That doesn’t mean it was confusing. It’s a case of having a project with no definitive answers. I find it more interesting that way and I hope other people do and from that new concepts are bred and evolve. INT: Your cast and crew worked for free, were they worth every penny? MARK: They were bloody useless. Each and every one of them. You see all those names in the credits, forget about it. I did everything. IT’S MY FILM! I even play all the parts. That’s make up effects. Make up effects that I applied to myself. I even played the part of the dog. Though, to be fair, I MAY have struggled, just marginally, without them. There were about sixty of them at the end of the day, working in different areas; Crew, actors, musicians, mixers, graphic designers, etc. All for free and that’s not to say they were nobodies and wannabes. We had ex-Spielberg employees, James Bond technicians, BBC thespians, Bristol-based dance music people; Incredible talent, crawling out from the wood work, like rats following the Pied Piper. ‘Course, I told them back then that the film would only take about six months to complete, not knowing it would run three years over the planned schedule! INT: It wasn’t a straight forward shoot then? MARK: Nothing about it was straight forward. Not one thing. To go into detail would fill your magazine right up and then you’d need to print an extra hundred page booklet to continue and stick in a plastic bag on the cover, as a free gift. No, it wasn’t easy. You see, the thing about film making, or more specifically, being the director, is that the project engulfs you. I don’t know if people can truly understand this, but you do literally eat, drink and sleep it. Darktaile took me over and for that to be continuous, over a three and a half year period, or to be more precise 1,221 days, nice that, it’s the same backwards way ‘round, is a very long time indeed and it takes its toll. It’s hard to talk about anything else with other people, because that’s all is on your mind. At the busiest and most hectic time of production, the film is ALL you can concentrate on and something as simple as watching a video is nigh impossible, because the concentration isn’t there. Sleep is deprived because you dream about it, waking up with ideas and anxieties, then in the morning it’s the first thing on your mind and you’re off again. Film directing is the hardest game I’ve ever played and I’m about to do it again, I must be crazy. But you tend to forget just how hard it is. I’ve lifted bricks and shovelled shit for fifteen hours a day, but compared with eight or ten hours on set, that’s a breeze. It’s a different kind of tired. By around four in the afternoon, I usually have a banging headache and begin to lose my capability of the spoken word, relying on wild arm movements and incoherent grunts. I’ve people coming at me from all angles, like in a porn film, but when it goes right, there’s nothing like it. Drugs, sex, puppy dogs, all pale into significance and cannot achieve, for me anyhow, that same feeling. But mostly, it isn’t like that. I’ve deviated a little, so answering your question, at least, touching on it, let me see. The first day of the shoot, it snowed. Normally that’s no big deal and we did start in mid-December, however, the area we chose to shoot Darktaile, was picked for its reasonable weather conditions. See, snow hadn’t fallen and settled there for thirteen years and on our first day, it did! That had to be an omen. I lost one actress along the way, on the first day of her planned shoot, when her friend turned up to inform me she’d decided she was too fat to appear in the picture! Fortunately, I got a replacement the same morning and we carried on. Another actor, with quite a hefty role, most of which was still to be shot, pulled out mid shoot, when a ‘paid’ offer of work came his way. So the script was swiftly altered to accommodate that problem and actually worked out for the better, but at the time was like a nightmare. It really is too hard to start going into all the things that made it such an up hill struggle, because there was so much. My advice to anybody thinking about embarking along a similar path would be, unless you are one hundred per cent committed; Forget about it. Do something worthwhile for humanity and science. So many films like this aren’t completed and there were many times when this felt like one of them, but when I say I’m going to do something, I generally do do it. I also didn’t cherish the thought of sixty odd crew members out to kick my ass. Sorry, I didn’t really answer your question too convincingly there, did I? INT: No. But you are forgiven. Your film may be crap, but it’s one film more than I’ve made. MARK: You didn’t like it? INT: I haven’t seen it. MARK: Then how can you comment on it like that? INT: Well, if most of the population haven’t seen or even heard of it, it can’t be all that good. And it’s black and white! MARK: It’s early days. The film’s virtually brand new. I’m in a bit of a catch-22. You see, I spent a lot of my own, hard earned, painful arse, money on making Darktaile. Now, I don’t have any left for the proper promotion of it, so everything’s moving VERY slowly. As an example, Eraserhead, was premiered in 1977, after four years of production, then proceeded to trickle out into the world. Not until around 1981 had it began to achieve its cult status. There’s a lot of wankers in the industry, I’m not saying that to be bitter, but these twats are born into it and film making becomes a social event, complacency, without heart. Originality is pushed aside to jump on board the next gangster film turkey or one of the many, now inevitable, Bridget Jones copies. It’s way too early to give up and quite frankly, I never would. Somebody once asked me how long I’ll give myself to make it? Make what?! Where does the line of ‘making it’ come? For me, I’m already ‘making it’, because I’ve achieved the one thing I always wanted to; A feature film that I wrote and directed. However, if ‘making it’ means signing on the dotted line for the brothers Warner and churning out the next dog shit summer brain drainer, I won’t ‘make it’. That holds no appeal. Of course, I’m going to say that now, nobody’s waving the zeroes in front of my face. But as I stated before, I generally stick to my word and film making means more to me than money. If it is to stay fun, that means working with a small crew, all of whom I know by name, on a picture that I control, because the price tag is low enough to leave me and my merry men and women hassle-free alone. Jerry Bruckheimer breathing down my neck and querying why ten dollars were spent on a new folder for the continuity assistant, sounds about as appealing as Barbara Streisand offering up her ovaries for fertilisation, the old-fashioned way. I shudder. If I take another twenty years to reach my desired level, I’ll still be average aged for a film director and whilst I may have no money, I’ll be the oldest guy with the youngest starlet(s) on my arm. Brag/wish. Like Inter City, we’ll get there, eventually. INT: Thank you very much. MARK: You’re welcome. Sherbert? Mark Withers: Available for services in the arenas of script writing, film direction, editing, children’s parties and as an inexpensive escort to dodgy social events. Contractually obliging note: Always inform friends and relatives of where you’ll be and at what time you intend to return home. Interview taken from RJM magazine, October 2001 This is the Big Brush Films 'Micro-site' if you like what you've seen, go to Level 2, check out the Big Brush Films Mega Site!