"Me And The Editor Had This Theory...": THE FALLING Director Carol Morley Tells All

There is a stereotype in England that people from the north are generally more friendly. Carol Morley certainly makes a convincing argument for believing that to be true. The somewhat uneasy atmosphere of any fifteen-minute interview is immediately diffused when somebody ushers you into the room, as she did, under the appellation of "darling."

Originally from Stockport in Greater Manchester, you begin to sense that Carol has gained
this amicable disposition from a lifetime in jobs as diverse as tea-girl to market reasearcher. Certainly, she provides hope for those of us who dream of finally getting round to making beautiful films one day. The director's interesting path into film in no way should take centre stage, though. Morley's first fiction film, The Falling is quite a wonderful thing, and it deserves the limelight. The film will be released in UK cinemas on the 24th of April.

ScreenAnarchy: Would you say THE FALLING was very influenced by your previous short film THE MADNESS OF DANCE?

Carol: Yeah, when I did that short I discovered this whole topic of mass psychogenic experiences that goes back to medieval times. And I found it very intriguing, because experts don't really know why they happen. So I remember even before making that short film, I thought, I'm going to make a feature one day set in a school about mass hysteria. It took a while though: that was ten years ago!

But I knew that's what I wanted to do. And after Dreams of a Life, I needed to do something collective. So I was drawn to telling a story where people connected. Schools are also pretty universal, so almost anyone can connect to them too.

Is it also important to you to connect different artistic traditions in your films?

Is it important? I don't know. I wouldn't say so. I kept a sort of scrapbook, and that felt like this amazing way of connecting people to the material and communicating what you wanted quickly. So when I was writing The Falling, because the history of mass hysteria goes back to medieval times, I wanted to tap into that. Including a sense of older traditions was important for that. You would start to look at Renaissance paintings and you'd begin to see their colours in the school uniforms, because school uniforms are very historic. So I was trying to reach back, I just don't know if it would be important to me in every film, that's all.

Could you tell us about how music influences your creative processes too?

Well before I even write, I will have a soundtrack. A lot of the original songs from the 60s or before, for example, I wrote to. They would play as I wrote, and I think I assigned a song to each character. I think most of these songs made their way into the film too. So the Mary Hopkins that opens the film (and Florence later plays it) was written in '69 about the moon, and I feel music helps add a characterisation to the film very early on in this way. You're not just applying it later in the edit.

And then with the Tracy Thorn music, I had a dream that Tracy had done the music [laughs]. We'd already filmed the school orchestra scenes, and then I managed to get hold of Tracy after my dream so we got her to compose with the instruments we'd filmed. She'd never composed for film before, though. I loved that, I love the idea that she didn't bring any baggage with her. She didn't do the music to pictures either, she'd feed me the edited music and then we'd work with that instead. You see, often what happens on films is people work with guide tracks, and then they get really used to that. So by the time the composer comes in, scores will often get rejected; I think Kubrick did that once. So I think it's really important the music isn't just put on later. You need to work with it, I think, which means it's important for me to introduce music much earlier than most other films might.

THE FALLING also has very refreshingly central female characters. Could you tell us about how you approached writing these roles?

Well, I don't even think of them as female as such. I just think about them as people going through experiences, you know? For me it's disappointing when you see films and the women in it are just the girlfriends or have no narrative drive, and you're like, "Jesus Christ!" So I like to think I'm making a film for everyone instead. Which means that when people say, "oh, your film's really weird," I get really hurt, because I don't see it as weird. And you end up thinking that maybe it's just not common to look at women experiencing certain things, and so it's rendered weird. I don't know.

But obviously I have stories I want to tell where women are going to be strong in those stories. I was very inspired, when I first started getting into films, by Douglas Sirk and that kind of 50s melodrama. The "women's films," as they were called. And growing up I watched a lot of Coronation Street, so I think you end up taking inspiration for a variety of different female characters from various areas. I remember seeing Bugsy Malone and being wowed by Jodie Foster too, because you look back and end up thinking how many films with young leading female characters were there really?

What was it like giving such major roles to such a young cast?

Amazing. I mean, Masie obviously already had her Game of Thrones experience. So she didn't behave like she knew loads, but you could tell she was confident with what was going on on set. With Florence it just felt as if she'd already done it in a different life. But the main thing I think you should do as a director with actors is see them as your front line. It doesn't matter how good everything else is, it's performances you engage with as an audience. So I think as a director you have to give the space over to them and hide everything else. For that reason I wasn't trying to make being on set seem like a big deal. We were there for the actors, not the other way round.

And it was really exciting and a pretty intimate set. We weren't loaded, so it wasn't what Masie would have been used to on Game of Thrones where you don't know who's in the trailer over there or whatever. But I think this meant that the cast all supported each other, and they all lived together during the shoot and we did a lot of workshops. Which essentially meant that by the time we started filming, Masie and Florence were really close.

Coming back to this idea of people finding your film weird. Do you think that's partly because you use sound and images in a quite avant-garde way in THE FALLING?

The thing is though, regarding innovation and things like that, I don't feel like I do things differently. Or I don't set out to do so. Still, I guess when I when I went to art school and studied fine art and video, you weren't taught how to do something. You were taught how to use the equipment, but you weren't told, "this is a three-act structure," or "this is how you make a short film." So my experience with film is out of a sort of experimental tradition, where it would do a disservice to the film and its story not to play with it.

But I don't think I'm being weird. I think I'm being respectful to the material and to the characters by trying to find new ways to present something inside them. I think people just find the topics in my films weird, because of the fact we don't address them in real life.

There are also scenes in your film where images of the character Abbie flash over other images, how did you edit those?

Well, me and the editor had this theory that if you put three frames together you would only see one of them. And every time we watched it, we would see something different. Also,
when the DVD comes out, if you extract those bits and put them together they make their own story. So the extra features might give you clues into the film! But yeah, we were calling these flash-frames "subliminals," because you see them but I believe you don't see them all. So in some ways they are subliminal. We wanted these to feel like you were inside somebody's mind losing it a little bit, and also that they were fracturing the story.