British voices carry more than people from most other nations. It’s especially true in a city such as London, where it feels like you’re privy to everyone else’s personal lives as you’re going about your own day. This sense of eavesdropping on other people’s narratives is excellently, mysteriously explored in Jamie Fraser’s Green Space, which uses a fixed-vantage point to observe several interweaving narratives within Burgess Park, South London. Mixing oddball comedy with slice-of-life drama, the story gets great mileage out of this green, luscious location, subtly developing over the course of 24 hours. Particularly impressive is the way the space is mapped, creating a panorama of British life that spans from the banal to the monumental, all captured from the same view. We caught up with Writer/Director Fraser to talk about being inspired by landscape paintings, the fine line interconnected narratives have to tread and casting from London’s alternative comedy scene.
This certainly appears to be a park that you are familiar with. Tell me about Burgess Park and what attracted you to it.
I used to live five minutes from Burgess Park and I’d cycle through it every day on the way to work. These cycles were some of my happiest moments living in London because it is a really lively, chaotic, well-loved park where something strange is always happening. This idiosyncrasy seems connected to the park’s history and design. It was built on the site of streets razed by the Luftwaffe bombing, and there are even remnants of a disused canal running through the middle of it. Unlike London’s better-known Royal Parks, which are more fussily designed, Burgess Park has a chaotic, improvised, ungraspable feeling. To me, the best thing about Burgess is that people in the local area feel real ownership of the park and are proud of it.
Landscape painting allows events of seemingly contradictory magnitude to coexist in a single space.
I love how you shot everything from the same vantage point. Did you always know that you wanted to shoot from this angle?
I was inspired to shoot this way by landscape painting. There’s a famous W.H. Auden poem about Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” where the poet discusses how landscape painting allows events of seemingly contradictory magnitude to coexist in a single space. I started thinking that the same idea applies to parks and other good public spaces, in the way that they allow our singular lives to rub up against each other in the real world. I wondered what would happen if you apply this landscape style to a multi-narrative film. Imposing this small limitation turned the project from a neat concept to a film I could see playing in my head.
There’s certainly a surveillance feel to the cinematography. What kind of camera and lens did you use to achieve these shots?
We shot with a Blackmagic Ursa on a DJI Ronin 2 flipped upside down, a pleasingly neat and cost-effective solution from my Cinematographer Theo Tennant. The rig itself was more like a gaming set-up than anything I’ve used on a film before, with the gimbal movement controlled by one joystick and the zoom lens controlled by another. It was very intuitive and satisfying and, yes, a bit surveillant. Not unlike living in the opening scene of The Conversation. Between scenes, the crew all wanted to have a go on the joysticks, swooping and zooming across different bits of the park.
It was very intuitive and satisfying and, yes, a bit surveillant. Not unlike living in the opening scene of The Conversation.
There are these transitions between the different scenes, but it feels like you were aiming for long, flowing takes. Did you initially think about how you could shoot it in one take?
Thanks for spotting my dirty secret. I did think of it as an uninterrupted movement, with slow fades to get us between the different times of the day. But when I came to edit the film, I discovered these fades were actually horribly distracting and corny. So I went, begrudgingly, with sharper cuts.
Later, composer Jeremy Warmsley started to send through bits of score and I loved the way he was layering so many percussion instruments against each other, to match the layered action of the park. So I asked him to send me a variety of triangle pings and we used those to punctuate the edit points, to sound like someone was conducting the action of the film.
There’s a big cast involved in this kind of film. What was the casting process like? Did you shoot them all over the same day, or were there a lot of days involved in shooting?
Most of the actors you see are old friends from the London alternative comedy scene, which is where I got my start in writing in my early twenties. I love working with comedians and my impression is the actors mostly got a kick out of shooting something in such a strange way. It was daunting to have such a large cast but shooting over three days helped to minimise the strain.
I love working with comedians and my impression is the actors mostly got a kick out of shooting something in such a strange way.
The schedule also allowed for blocks of time between sequences, which is where the idea to film myself in the park came from. Basically, we needed something to do while we were waiting for the light to change. So I’d run down into the park with a second camera and play this goofy, disruptive filmmaker while the crew filmed me with the main camera.
What I loved was the way it felt like you were listening in on other people’s stories. How did you approach the way you wrote the script? Was it based on things you heard or saw in the park?
I wanted the film to recall that feeling when you’re walking down the street and you hear an enticing snippet of a stranger’s conversation and you wish you could follow them to hear how the story ends. This happens to me a lot. In general, I’m a big eavesdropper and I compulsively scribble down things I hear in the street.
As far as narrative, the sequences in Green Space are a mix of things I’ve experienced myself or stories picked up along the way from friends. For example, the reclining urination moment is just a good story my friend told me over lunch one day. She had a friend who used to piss in public like that, and the thought haunted me for weeks.
It was interesting work to find a balance of randomness and order that worked for our film.
What I also really enjoyed was the ways the stories echo one another and the ways characters all interact within the same space. How did you think about creating a whole piece out of these different vignettes?
I’ve always loved multi-narrative fiction, like Short Cuts, Slacker or Tom Rachman’s novel The Imperfectionists. I’ve wanted to take a stab at my own version for a long time. When I figured out I could use this particular park as a ‘container’ for a series of interconnecting stories, I was really excited. But something I realised while writing is that the degree of connection between your stories is the trickiest part to get right. If the stories are too densely or conveniently linked, it starts to feel over-written and unreal. Equally, if there’s no red thread between the vignettes, the audience might lose patience with your meandering. It was interesting work to find a balance of randomness and order that worked for our film.
What did you learn about the value of public spaces from creating this film? Did it make you see them in a different way?
It sounds like a platitude, but good public spaces play such a crucial role in the mental health, social and civic life of an area. What worries me is that the human, emotional value of a park is so easy to overlook because it is hard to quantify on a balance sheet. As a result, small local parks are often the first to go when it comes to redevelopment.
For instance, while we were shooting Green Space, a smaller park nearby called Peckham Green was blocked off and built over without consulting the nearby residents, who were appalled at this loss to their neighbourhood. This happens all the time, and a study last year showed that nearly three million people in the UK now live more than ten minutes walk from a green space. While it’s good to celebrate the success stories of thriving parks like Burgess Park, our public spaces are not a given and have to be protected actively.
What are you working on next?
I’m working on my debut feature, which continues some of the same thinking I started in this short. It’s a comedy about a wealthy misanthrope who goes for a run through the city on his lunch break and gradually realises he’s been wasting his life. I’m hoping to shoot it next summer.
