Taking on the early life of Dali as a cinematic subject is no mean feat, but add to that the complexities of his relationship with filmmaker Luis Bunuel and Federico Lorca and you have a huge task. But this is the task director Paul Morrison took on in Little Ashes, and we just had to find out how he coped...

 

MV: The whole biopic is a big undertaking, covering one artistic is big enough but three must have been a daunting task!

PM: Well I started with a great screenplay and that helps a lot. But I suppose we weren't aiming for a biopic, this was supposed to be a kind of snapshot of these three people's lives at a particular moment. So it;s much more interested in this triangle of relationships than trying to tell the whole story. So, we didn't try and do what would have been impossible!

MV: Do you think people will be surprised by the how the personal lives and the work of these individuals intermingled in this period?

PM: Yeah, I think that a lot of people, especially outside of Spain, don't know this story. And even in Spain, although this story's been in the public domain for twenty years or so, nobody's ventured to make a film about it and people are a little reticent about it. They're still a bit reticent about raucous homosexuality: it gets mentioned but not talked about.

MV: Was there a sense that you had to tread gently with these big national heroes?

PM: I think we had to get the bottom line of our facts straight, and we wanted to be rigorous about that. And then these are national heroes each of whom whose essence was being themselves and pushing themselves as far as they could in terms of their own heart and their own work, and that was also an inspiration to us to go for it and give it all we've got as artists... with a small 'a'!

MV: So there was nothing too frightening then?

PM: It was better to treat it as an inspiration rather than a burden! Though there were moments. In Spain they have a funny law where the family of the deceased still have power over the good name of the deceased, and Bunuel's son was great he just said 'I don't know what my father did, I don't know whether this is true or not true' but he hated the thought that he might stop anything I wanted to do, he hated any form of censorship and just said 'go ahead and do what you will'.

MV: Bunuel seemed like a trickier character to pin down in Little Ashes, he vacillated in his opinions more than Lorca or Dali. Was he the hardest one to get right?

PM: I think Matthew [McNulty] does a great job in playing him because in some ways he's the antagonist of a good part of the story and yet Matthew manages to bring out his human-ness at the same time. He was kind of a homophobe at that time in his life, and he was mad about sport - a very physical person - but he was also an intellectual, a very bright guy and also a human being. And Matthew somehow manages to bring all those things together in a believable way. The thing I'm proudest about is that, particularly with Dali who has been shown as the manic-clown-genius which he presented himself as, we have gotten behind that and show the human.

MV: Is it difficult sometimes to avoid letting Dali dominate, and to go against general perception of him?

PM: I think Rob[ert Pattison] did a great job in finding the balance, and certainly my kind of initial thing to Rob was to play the script, play him humanly, don't worry about mimicry. But actually he managed to do both, and by the end of the film Dali is the person that we know from the newsreels and has kind of grown into the mask.

MV: That seems to be the difficult thing with these extremes. Did you have a similar problem dealing with the extremes of their work? Was it hard not to be drawn into surrealism in your filmmaking?

PM: I talked it over with the DoP and we decided quite early on against trying to make a surrealist film because the heart of the story is the relationships, the performances and the intimacy of the actors, and if you tried to make a surrealist film that would take you out of that. And also we wanted to make our own film and give it our own stamp and our own style rather than try to imitate what they did. I mean Antonio Banderas is doing a film [about Dali] at the moment and they're going to have melting clocks in it and all the rest and I'm very glad we didn't go down that route, it wouldn't have been right for this film. [Laughs] And we didn't have the money for it anyway!

MV: There is something very, almost nostalgic, about the way you painted the relationships and the worlds they lived in and the world in which they could collaborate. Is this something you don't think can happen anymore?

PM: I don't know. I think it happens all the time! Not necessarily in that way but any time you make a film it's a wonderful piece of collaboration and a lot of creative people get together and they spark one another off.

MV: But it's a very different beast now. The way we interact is much more organised and there's less of the bonding moments like the bike rides through the hills and swimming in the moonlight depicted in the film. That's where I got the sense of nostalgia from.

PM: It's interesting you say that, I didn't intend it to be nostalgic I don't think. And we certainly shot it in a way that it could feel quite fresh and contemporary rather than being true to its period. I mean a lot of it is shot hand-held and we deliberately chose a camera that would help us do that.

MV: Have you now got a taste for it? Are there more artists you think people should see another side to?

PM: [Laughs] What might be my next film is a film about another artist but I think that's almost coincidence! It's a film about an artist called Charlotte O'Sullivan who in a way was what Anne-Frank is to diarists, she is to painting. She painted her life story in the forties in the south of France as she grew up under the Nazis.

MV: Is it tempting to appropriate the style of the artist when telling their story, rather than put your own slant on it?

PM: I think it's very tempting, and very dangerous.  I think you can lose yourself with a film that can try to appropriate their sensibility. You are informed by it but don't want to copy it. Lorca's love of the soil and nature and the rhythm of the countryside certainly informed certain shots in Little Ashes, but I wouldn't want to try to make a Lorca play.

MV: If you had to list five films an aspiring director had to watch, what would they be and why?

PM: Godard has to be on that list, any early Godard: Alphaville, Le Mepris,  A Bout de Souffle. Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. La Regle du Jeu. Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven and Bunuel's Exterminating Angel.

Little Ashes is out in the UK now. If you like, you can read our review of it HERE.

Interview by Michael Edwards