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The Times We Live In – An Interview with Marc Isaacs

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by Olivia Humphreys
As Second Run DVD releases a collection of his films - Lift; Travellers; and Calais: The Last Border - DFG speaks with acclaimed director Marc Isaacs about his approach to story, character, and the importance of having a sense of humour.
Calais: The Last Border Calais: The Last Border DFG: It’s a trademark of your documentaries that we never forget you’re there, filming. Why?
Marc Isaacs: I think it’s important not to remove that sense of who’s holding the camera and what they feel… I’m very aware of my role in the process and there has to be some acknowledgment of that and where you stand in the process of making the film, who’s holding the camera, and what’s their game. It’s the difference between this kind of film and current affairs, where it doesn’t matter who’s shooting it, it’s just there for a particular purpose and there’s no sense of an author behind it. That’s completely different from what I’d call creative documentary, you’re very clear where they’re coming from.

Is that why you chose not to edit out your shocked reaction to one of the characters in Calais: The Last Border telling you she might kill herself?
Moments like that are very interesting: the relationship changes and something breaks, and you’re forced into the scene in a way you didn’t anticipate and that’s what’s great about documentary, it’s reality - you can slip into thinking it’s fiction, and then something like that happens and you’re reminded, f**k it, it’s people’s real lives, and I like that.

Do you have a simple set of rules to follow when you make a film?
You need a setting, you need a story and you need characters. If you have those three things you have everything you need to make a good film. But you need some formal binding device in which to present the story. It’s about our relationship to stories: we expect ‘once upon a time there was a town called Calais’, so once you’ve got that clear, that contains everything. Once you’ve established what the film is apparently about, you can go off on tangents, as long as they seem to be a variation on a theme, or a progression of a theme.

Depressing industrial landscapes feature heavily in your films. Do you find them particularly visually interesting?
I film them because they provide an echo, a counterpoint, or they reinforce something. I’ll be interested in a space, then I’ll wait for someone to turn up who can express what I want: take Paul, the Jamaican guy in Calais who ends up in no man’s land, I stalked that location first and found him there afterwards. We only see Steve, the bar owner, in his bar, except once or twice when he’s decided to leave - then we see him out of that and on the edge of a big wide landscape, because he’s there to reflect possibilities of the future. It’s never just there to be pretty shots.
Lift Lift We never really see the centre of the town in Calais…
I don’t do that because it’s not really about creating a space in that way. I’m making a film about the Square Mile now, and I don’t shoot big GVs or helicopter shots of the City from above. There’s very few shots of the landscape. Instead you sense it through the scenes in which the characters exist, so it gets created in the background of the frame rather than shooting the landscape. For me it comes down to the point of the view of the film – I could have two or three people with cameras shooting stuff all over the place but you would start to ask yourself, whose point of view is this? If you’re seeing a character and then cut to another angle suddenly you ask awkward questions about who’s the filmmaker. For me it would destroy the language.

Is that why in Lift you chose not to leave the lift itself, apart from a couple of shots of the building’s exterior?
Yes, there are scenes that are happening that you’re not party to, so you’re almost creating another film in your head: when the drunk guy talks about seeing the Golden Eagle you’re suddenly in the hills of Scotland, and yet you’re in a lift, and I think that’s really interesting, how having limits affects us. Some filmmakers would choose to cut to a cheesy reconstruction or show it. I think there’s a whole layer in the film that just exists in your mind, that’s what I mean about giving you space to interpret, to bring your own thing to it.

Did you feel the lift enabled you to catch people when they were off their guard?
It’s an awkward thing to stand there; people are naked if you like: there’s nowhere to hide, and whatever they do is revealing. That’s probably true anyway, but it’s magnified because it’s their face against a metallic background and they can’t really ignore the camera, so even if people don’t say very much it’s still quite interesting.

How important to you is the sense of an ending?
Endings are always tricky but at some point in the filming process I have ideas about what that might be - so in All White in Barking I leave Dave on the beach, I knew that was probably going to be the ending while I was shooting it, because he takes you to this place and you know that something new is going to start there. You’re always looking to find an ending, but it doesn’t have to be final – I like it in Calais, where we leave Tulia at a birthday party which is not really an ending, it’s a continuation; Ijaz is about to try to cross over, Steve’s off in a caravan, Paul is in the hotel, you feel he’s going to do something tomorrow; with all the films you could almost start the film again. It’s arbitrary but at the same time you’re creating some sense of closure for the audience. So yeah it’s important to have a good ending, but not an ending that everything’s sewn up and resolved, like you tend to get in Hollywood drama.
DFG Members can download the interview in full from the DFG Community Not a member? Then find out why joining is good for you.
The Marc Isaacs Collection is available now from Second Run DVD.

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