On the closing day of the Cambridge Film Festival, director Mat Whitecross was in attendance for the premiere of his new film ASHES. Following on from the critical success of SEX & DRUGS & ROCK & ROLL, it stars Ray Winstone and Jim Sturgess. You can read the TAKE ONE review of ASHES here. Jim Ross got the chance to interview Mat about the difficulties of making of the film, the performances of the cast, and Whitecross’ career to date.

Jim Ross: How easy did you find it to finance the film? The use of Alzheimer’s is really just a framework for a rather genre-bending film, did you find that was making potential financiers a bit squeamish, for want of a better word?

Mat Whitecross: I’m not sure what the problem was in terms of the finance, but I can guess. I think the main thing, really, was we’re in the middle of a recession and every time you go into a financial meeting now people are being more conservative. And I completely understand it, people often have a small pot of money – especially on this side of the pond – and they want to spend it the best they can to get some sort of return on it. As soon as you mention any disease, and there seems to be a particular stigma around mental illness, they freeze up, freak out and say, “There’s no audience for this.” I’m not sure that’s true, you just need to be more inventive in finding the audience, there is one out there. Perhaps I’m not a typical audience member, but I want to see films like this and be challenged by the films I go and see. I don’t want to be patronised by filmmakers. So, in that sense, there is an audience but the thing always seemed to be “Mental illness is so depressing, can’t you make it a bit cheerier?” or “The characters are so dark, can you not make them a bit nicer?” I think it’s nice to have a bit choice when you go into a cinema; recently I’ve been struggling to find films that I really wanted to see and that was part of the reason I wanted to make it.

“…you just need to be more inventive in finding the audience, there is one out there. Perhaps I’m not a typical audience member, but I want to see films like this and be challenged by the films I go and see.”

JR: Do you get frustrated when it seems mental illness always has to be the topic of an ‘issue film’? ASHES is anything but that, it really is just a framework, and I was wondering if that view annoys you, as you can do more and even have uplifting moments in a film based around mental illness?

MW: I think so, yes. Mental illness is incredibly complex and there are as many different forms of Alzheimer’s as there are Alzheimer’s patients. No one has a particular grasp of the truth in that sense, which is a very attractive thing as a filmmaker. It’s much more interesting to do something that is complex. The mind is a fascinating thing and when my father had Alzheimer’s I was constantly wrong-footed. The version of Alzheimer’s he had, which seems fairly typical, is not something I had seen conveyed particularly accurately before. It’s something that can really be joyous and quite funny and can be incredibly heartbreaking. I think you tend to get one element of the disease – maybe memory loss, but none of the violence or you might not get the hallucinations and this felt, I hope, like a slightly more rounded version of it.

JR: A lot of it came from your experiences with your own father, did that personal investment in the story make it an easier or harder film to write?

MW: It felt a much easier film to make in the sense that every film is hard to get together, especially to finance, and whenever we hit a stumbling block – which was frequently – then I would least have a lot of ammunition and drive to get this made. Each one then felt like a challenge rather than a defeat, and when we were writing the script we had an endless amount of material and information. Every time we decided to change the script or do something else, I would know how my Dad would react and we’d decide if it was appropriate to the film or how the character would react. It felt like I knew the subject inside out.

“No one has a particular grasp of the truth in that sense, which is a very attractive thing as a filmmaker.”

JR: In terms of getting it made, did you find that having a significant chunk funded by friends – Coldplay in this case, as you’ve worked with them – perhaps liberated the process slightly and allowed you more scope to make the film you wanted to?

MW: Yeah, absolutely. CinemaNX, the Isle of Man film fund [the major backers] were very good from the beginning and kind of left us alone to be honest. They said they were interested in making the film and needed a certain level of cast, which we were hoping to attract, and a couple of issues with the script, which we were hoping to nail. So they gave as a month to work on the script and cast, and if we achieved that they would make it. There still wasn’t quite enough money to make the film, so we approached a couple of other investors, one being Coldplay. With Coldplay, they’re just good friends and were incredibly generous. They knew how personal the story was to me. I talked about it a lot with them, and at one point I mentioned we were struggling with the financing, and Chris [Martin] said “How much are you short?” I never imagined in a million years they would dip into their pockets. It’s a tricky thing – filmmaking isn’t cheap, even low budget is incredibly expensive, and they put their money where their mouth was. The reason they did it wasn’t that they had a particular axe to grind or to see a return on their investment but they just wanted to help out a friend. Aside from saying they’d do it, that was the last involvement they ever had in the film until they watched it.

JR: Trying to find financing like that must be very hard. Would you prefer to continue working at that level, where you perhaps have more freedom over the end product, or would you rather be given a bigger budget with more marketing heft but less say over the final film?

MW: In an ideal world I’d like to move between different budgets and different projects. I think there’s a strange logic applied to directors’ careers. You make a short film for about ten grand, then you maybe do a TV show where you get to play with forty grand, then you go off an do a first feature for half a million, then the Hollywood film and suddenly there’s no where for you to go unless you’re doing a film for big money. For me, the most interesting careers are people like Orson Welles, Steven Soderbergh and Michael Winterbottom – whom I’ve worked with – who tend to make the budget fit the movie rather than their career patterns. They don’t suddenly decide that they’re big-shot directors and, therefore, can only do big films. I would love to have the budget and canvas to do something bigger, but on the other hand I love doing music videos and documentaries. I’d never say “No” to more money, but for now I’m happy moving between different budgets and types of films.

“For me, the most interesting careers are people […] who tend to make the budget fit the movie rather than their career patterns. They don’t suddenly decide that they’re big-shot directors and, therefore, can only do big films.”

JR: Speaking of career trajectories, you’ve done a lot of documentary work. Did you find that, as some have, good preparation for films like ASHES and SEX & DRUGS & ROCK & ROLL?

MW: Definitely, I found that each complements the other. I love going off and doing a documentary – every time I finish on a drama I think I never want to see another film set in my life. I hate having to sit and wait an hour for a light to go up or an actor to cross town. I’d love to just grab the camera myself and go and film something real. But after a year making a documentary for no money, and not being able to get a mortgage as you haven’t been paid in 12 months, I’d just love to have someone bring me a nice cup of tea and sit down next to a monitor. I think, hopefully, without being facetious, I’d like to think you can bring some of the reality of documentary to drama and some of the slickness and artifice to documentary. We did a film called MOVING TO MARS, for example, and the visual effects team came on board and did this incredible shot that wouldn’t look out of place in a Michael Bay film to start off the documentary. Immediately you’re wrong-footed, so in that sense the two can complement each other.

JR: I think you’ve got an excellent performance out of Ray Winstone, who almost has an element of the ‘caged beast’ about him, except it’s the cage is his Alzheimer’s. Is that what you were going for with him? People maybe have certain expectations of him going in, and was that another way you were trying to wrong-foot the audience?

MW: Yeah, I think that’s a lovely way of speaking about it and I’ll have to remember it. The ‘caged beast’ idea is exactly right. My dad was a very gentle, kind person throughout his life. Then, when he started to succumb to Alzheimer’s, he could become incredibly violent and he was quite young, he had early onset. If you’re 90 years old, have a rage in a wheelchair and get in a strop it’s not a massive problem, but if you’re 55 and punch someone in the face they’re really going to feel it. I felt the best person I could possibly think of to balance those two sides was Ray. He has the best kind of baggage, for me. You often trade off with actors – say you’re Ken Loach; you’ll cast an unknown or maybe a comic who doesn’t have the same kind of baggage and people are see them fresh. Maybe they don’t have any history and that’s a good thing for a certain kind of film, and bad for another. If you then cast them in action film that would feel weird. I think with this, Ray has a lot of baggage to him, and for me it was very useful. You’re used to seeing him play hard men, men who are trouble, men of violence and action. When you see him vulnerable at the beginning, hopefully that is quite shocking – more shocking than if you were seeing a complete unknown. He carries all the weight of those previous films, and yet you’re seeing him ravaged by a disease and problems from his past. That immediately worked for me, and I couldn’t think of any other British actor who could work in the same way, with the correct kind of baggage.

“[Ray Winstone] carries all the weight of those previous films, and yet you’re seeing him ravaged by a disease and problems from his past. That immediately worked for me…”

JR: In that respect, how would you have felt about making it with another actor? Would you have waited for Ray Winstone to be available if he hadn’t been, or pushed on with someone else?

MW: Well, Ray was my first and only choice for it, really. I was lucky enough that he agreed to do it. If, at any point, he said he didn’t want to do it I guess we would have been stuck. He stayed with the project for over a year, turning down other jobs and waiting to see if we could get the finance together. I think the film would never have happened without him, he is incredibly popular with audiences and a massive box-office draw. I think a film this difficult wouldn’t have survived without an actor of his standing.

JR: What are the plans, if any at this stage, for a release of ASHES?

MW: I’m very keen to get it released as soon as possible, we’re hopefully going to do a couple of festivals and I would love to see Ray, at the minimum, and maybe even Jim nominated for the film. I think, with a tiny film like this, very sadly, there’s a kind of expectation on the part of distributors and financiers that there isn’t an audience and I’d love to be proven wrong. For me, it’s an exciting and moving film for a certain kind of audience – so I think it deserves it. I’d love to see it go out there and prove financiers wrong. Hopefully we’ll come out early next year, with another film called SPIKE ISLAND coming out around the same time, so it would be lovely if they could piggy-back off each other. But our strategy is similar to that with SEX & DRUGS & ROCK & ROLL, we have this tiny little film – an underdog British film – and people need to get out and support it. if we were lucky enough to get Ray or any of the other cast nominated, that would be fantastic and give us the springboard to do it.

ASHES screened at the 32nd Cambridge Film Festival. Thank you to Toby Miller for recording the interview, an edited version of which ran on his Cambridge 105FM show Bums on Seats.