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J.M. You didn't set out to make a career in film but simply had
these ideas for images which you wanted to put sound to, which ended
up as finished film works.
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J.T. That was one of the things that drew me to using moving
images, the fact that you could work with sound. The story was, my
uncle died and one of the things he left me was his 8mm camera and
that's the one I made my first film 'Transfer' with. It was about
cross-dressing and people's sexuality; coupled with things you were
into at the time, which was drug taking. This room that we're in
used to be my studio and still is in a way, there was a cutting room
and editing bench right down one wall, with a big screen at the far
end. There was also a section cordoned off and used as a projection
booth and right down the bottom was a sound dubber with a little four
track and mixing desk. 'Shell Shock Rock' was done in this room, by
the time I got to make that, it was relatively sophisticated down
here. Prior to that I had made loads and loads of little things,
trying to learn how to do things, like holding something in sync. You
would have a little L.E.D reader, which was hooked up to the pulse on
the tape recorder, which flashed behind the perforations of the film
going into the machine. The air raid shelter which is behind the
house here was where I used to put people, God love them, to do
voice-overs. People don't believe how technically difficult it was,
and that was only in the mid 1970s.
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J.M. So how did you acquire equipment at the time, with such
limited resources?
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J.T. It was assembled from various sources, I would think nothing
of jumping in my car and driving up to an old boy in Derry, guy
called Terry Mc Donald, to glean information from. I see myself I
suppose in the likes of you or other people coming to me for
information, I had such an incredible thirst for it. Just to finish
talking about sound, it was a great achievement even to get sound,
videotape wasn't really there, it was around obviously but not in the
form it is today. Whenever I was learning how to work a camera, I
didn't think of it as being a director, producer or cameraman. I was
a filmmaker who came out of Art College as a painter. So I was left
in the position that if you want to do it, you have to do it
yourself. So I had to learn every aspect as much as I could, in order
to get through it and make it. I had a partner at the time Alwin
Jones who is still around and we both were very similar in the level
we were at and joined forces in 1977.
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J.M. With all the advancements in digital technology today, would
you work in video or would you have particular preference to shooting
film?
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J.T. I'm a filmmaker, I shoot video and have done loads of things
for other people on video, you have to earn a living. I've never
embarked on any project of my own on video tape because no matter how
sophisticated it gets, it's never going to catch up with film. I
could never have made 'Hobo' with video equipment, it just wouln't
have stood up to it, all that banging, crashing, heat, cold and dirt.
The thing about film equipment is it's precision machinery and
optics, everything clicks like a rifle going together. Also film is
different because you're burning pound notes every second. You think
about what you're doing much more precisely. Even the art of taking a
picture on film like lighting it for example, video lighting is so
unsuitable, it can't be anything else but unsuitable but lighting for
film is such a hit, it's drama on 35mm, everything is there, which is
pretty scary too.
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J.M. Would you see a strong difference or similarity in the way
you would approach things visually as a filmmaker and as a painter?
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J.T. I know I have a different eye than a lot of people, which is
why I get hired, people recognise the difference in what I do. It's
very difficult to pinpoint exactly what that is but I know what's
important to me in a photograph or film. The way it should be
approached and how to get the best out of it, a landscape for
example, how to instantaneously frame a picture without having to
really think about it. I think a lot of that has to do with studying
painting, the golden rectangle and all that, or is it the golden
triangle? A lot of crap you see on T.V is obviously shot by people
who don't know how to frame a picture. Going to Art College gave me
an attitude as much as anything else, different people drawing on
various aspects of life. I was drawn to images that were important in
your formative years, hence all the work I did in America.
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J.M. Dealing with the various subjects that you depict in your
film, what is your initial attraction to record and document these
various stories and is there a strand running through them?
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J.T. It's not always evident at the time why you do something or
what makes you do it. Looking back, it appears I have chosen
subjects that have been pretty important to me, in my development.
The other thing is people say I've terrible great patience to make
these model aeroplanes that I make. Yes I do have patience but its
the vision at the end of the day that keeps you going and it's
exactly the same with film, you have to be prepared to have a thing
plastic in your mind, so it can take on its own life and form. It has
to be couched in a subject that I'm interested in and if you look at
all my films, it's music. 'Route 66', which was about America, the
two fundamentalist films about Northern Ireland, 'Dust On the Bible'
and 'Power in the Blood'. Then there was a film about song writing in
Nashville, then 'Hobo', a documentary about Atlantic Records and then
'Uncle Jack'.
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J.M. You seem to create a whole world based around a certain
individual and explore that to its fullest.
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J.T. People say I steal other people's lives to explore my own but
who doesn't. My greatest influence looking back was D.A. Pennebaker,
who is the father of contemporary American documentary film making.
The documentaries you see on television now are not documentaries but
journalistic wallpaper with that terrible enforced drama of 'Twin
Peaks' style music and that grave voice of the presenter. There's the
journalistic approach to documentary as well which you see all the
time, the pictures are only an excuse for the voice. Half the things
could be on radio and half the things on T.V should be on radio.
'Don't Look Back' was D.A Pennebaker's film about Bob Dylan. I've
probably told this story too many times but I did see Pennebaker
making part of that film in Belfast when Bob Dylan was playing here.
It was all before I got into film or even went to Art College but I
said to myself, 'fuck I'd like to do that, this is as good as rock
and roll'. I didn't know who Pennebaker was at the time. When I went
to New York I went to see him and we became friends and I ended up
doing a bit of work for him.
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What I have done in the past is come up with a general
landscape as to where you want to place the film, 'Hobo' is an
example of what I'm talking about, so you can go out and shoot a film
with some sense of what you want to get out of it. I didn't know what
the story of 'Hobo' was going to be other than that we were going to
travel on a long journey on a train and it would be going west. Then
you would go and do a recce and that throws up other ideas, you start
to get a glimmer of where the story might go or at least the nuts and
bolts of it. Doing reccies for 'Hobo' was very much confidence
building like learning how to jump trains. You have to let the story
breath in an artistic, cerebral sense but you also have to pin
certain things down because you have to film the image, in terms of
'I wanna stop here, there, film that etc.'. Then you come back and
develop the idea a little, into three sections. One section, which
sets the story up, puts in the background; you got to tell people
Minneapolis is in the middle of America, crap stuff. You have got to
do all these things and do them subtly, so that the information is
passed on without people realising they are getting the information.
You got to know Beargrease and Scot, you got to know a sense of where
they were going and coming from, a little bit about the history of
hobo's etc. Then there was a moment in the film were I felt there had
to be an expanding of the spirituality of jumping a freight train,
notions of freedom. To finish off the third section you had to get
back to hard-nosed reality. So I set up something for that and it was
a bit like a generational thing, where you had the young fella at the
start of the film with Beargrease as his mentor. Then you had
Beargrease on his own and then at the end you were to have
Beargrease's mentor, who turned him out and showed him the ropes. The
guy we lined up for that was too sick and had cancer and he died
eventually and to cut a long story short we wound up with someone
else by chance who was even better. It was Duffy who had been an
advertising executive on Madison Avenue in New York and now collected
tins by the railway tracks for money and that brought a real
hard-nosed ending to it all. Then things developed within the story
as you started making it; you start noticing things that become the
narrative and not the background. The narrative that comes out of
'Hobo' was this thing about responsibility.
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J.M. I remember a sequence where Beargrease is in a call box in
the middle of nowhere waiting to jump another freight train west. He
is scolding his daughter for not turning up to school. This ironic
notion of trying to retain this role of fatherly discipline when he
is out there living his own freedoms through his life on the rails as
a hobo. The contrast becomes quite comical but his concern is very
genuine and moving as well.
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J.T. Yeah! All that sort of thing. I've been doing it for years;
I've had to keep myself pumped up in order to make films. You got to
keep the enthusiasm up there and out there, keep the adrenalin going,
all the sexuality and everything going in your life in order to give
you the energy to just do it. And all the time you have this place
called home and children to be reared, it's a terrible dilemma, its
life, dreams and desires. So what you realise is, there are certain
things within this story that are becoming more and more important,
you have to allow it to move and be flexible within itself. So that
eventually through hours and hours of pouring over transcripts, you
have to find out the important way this story is going. You can't go
out and up the road and re-interview people in a lot of films. You're
kind of reading what is inherently in the material and taking that
out and making it into a coherent thread. At the end of that you have
what this idea has metamorphosed into, it might be the same notion
you started with but you can't let yourself be tied down.
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J.M. Because you work on a one to one basis often engaging quite
closely with your subjects, do you find it difficult to detach
yourself personally from the process and subject matter of the film?
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J.T. I always feel I become part of their culture, or tried to in
some way, because you're drawn to them. Vernon Oxford which 'Power in
the Blood' was based around, was the only way I could approach making
a film about this country and its problems. Vernon had been very
popular because everybody had been reared on Hank Williams and Vernon
sounded like him. I love Hank Williams and I had known Vernon's music
as a recording artist a long time before I met him or even thought
about making a film about him. The thought of a missionary bringing
Jesus Christ back to Northern Ireland seemed like an interesting and
amusing way of making a film about your own country. What it did do
was provide me with a canvas to be able to take Vernon round all
these various places, some of which he had gone before and some he
hadn't. It built up a mentality of what this place is like.
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J.M. I suppose it comes from using the eyes of an outsider to take
a fresh look at something so familiar and personally close to you;
using Vernon as a vehicle by which to see Northern Ireland from a
totally new perspective, a whole fresh look at the ironies and
farcical extremes.
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J.T. Yes it did create a vehicle and I got to know Vernon very well,
he laid hands on me and all that kind of stuff and we used to pray
before every day's shooting. At the time I felt like I needed some
guidance and this is a man I felt I trusted because I knew his music.
I didn't do that on purpose, I just got drawn into it. Like when I
went over to Nashville to make 'Heart on the Line', about the
songwriters who write the songs people identify within country music.
I identify with country music very strongly and in a sense I wanted
to find out who had written these songs and why they had written
them. Also I was now leading my life by the mentality and stories
within those songs and I could see myself in them, the lying,
cheating and drinking. Really country and blues music are my routes.
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J.M. Of course, a lot of those songs are great stories in themselves.
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J.T. You would find yourself leading the lives within those songs,
a number of circumstances click into position, nothing is fixed.
Things in life come along which set a direction for you. I met Harlan
Howard, the most prolific songwriter in Nashville of all time, who
wrote songs like 'Pieces' for Patsy Kline. I met him by accident in
Yesterday's Bar in Blooms Hotel in Dublin. I was there to talk to
Nancy Griffith who had brought him over on tour. He was basically on
holiday and we began talking at the bar and then there's an idea that
comes out of that and a film. The film was really to see what those
boys were like.
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J.M. What first attracted you to documentary film making in the
first place as opposed to other formats within film such as drama or
fiction?
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J.T. When I first started in film, documentary was the only thing
you could do, and the way I got into it was based all around that
whole notion of the one man band. I saw him with the camera on his
shoulder, the sound recordist, it was free style and what he was
doing with the camera was very inspiring to me because it had the
beautiful fluid kind of painterly quality to it. It was an emulation
of that till I developed my own style, whatever that is, certainly
not like Pennebaker! |
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