Set within the glossy, vapid and veneered world of a car advert, The Talent from Thomas May Bailey plays out an uncomfortable blurring of reality and fantasy. Bailey fell upon the central premise of the film after having experienced the very same desires as his protagonist while working on sets and seeing where he wanted to get to but not quite knowing how to get there – a chronic affliction all too relatable for anyone toiling in the creative industries. A virtual production stage with all of the false promises of an eternal perfect sunset and the vacuous but enticing world of flashy cars plays the perfect host to his satirical look into the film industry and the aspirational desires of those within. With The Talent nominated for Best British Short at next week’s BIFA awards and currently available to stream on All4 we took some time to speak to the London-based writer and director about leaning on his strengths learnt from the world of theatre for the making of his debut short, the metaphorical possibilities he saw by setting the film on a VP stage and collaborating with a DOP who had experience working in the world of car advertising to achieve that polished look.
[The following interview is also available to watch at the end of this article.]
I love your way of looking at the industry and reflecting a light back on it. Where did the inspiration come from?
Our protagonist is this low status production assistant on the set of a car commercial. Whilst I’ve never worked on a car commercial, I have been that low status assistant on set so a lot of my inspiration and research was from different roles I’d had. I didn’t intend for this to be a film about film or about the industry, there is satire in it, a lot of it incidental and me remembering experiences I had and often dialling them back to make them seem more believable. But really, I chose the set of a car advert as it’s really fertile ground for the stuff I wanted to explore. It’s a good sort of starting point for drama, there’s a very clear hierarchy on a set and there’s a very big gap between the highest status person and the lowest status person. More so than most workplaces so it’s just a very good catalyst and when you’ve only got 10 – 15 minutes to tell a story you want as fertile a ground as possible for stuff to happen.
Did the story and the writing of the script then all come together quickly because you were drawing upon all those personal experiences?
The interaction dialogue from within the workplace came quite naturally. What took a lot longer, and I think a lot of writers have this, is the very long stewing process where lots of things that you’re interested in – whether it’s from your experience, stuff you’re thinking about, stuff you’ve read about or seen – have to percolate and work their way down until they end up as one concentrated thing that you can then turn into a story. Some things you leave by the wayside and some things end up as part of it so the long stage was working out what elements I’m interested in and how best to distil those down. Fundamentally, The Talent is really about investigating a feeling. It was a feeling I’d had and a feeling I was interested in, and it’s the feeling of knowing where you want to be and having a sense of your ideal destination but not knowing how to get there. I find that gap between where you are and where you want to be really interesting, once I’d realised that everything else flowed.
Once I realised the central feeling that I was interested in, the feeling that the protagonist has, everything else, setting, story, plot flowed down from there.
I think advertising exploits that gap between where you are and where you want to be. You are told to buy this shit thing and you will be closer to that ideal version of yourself that you’re constructing. That’s what’s going on for Tommy, that’s why this cheesy, faux philosophical car advert speaks to his soul. It fits the feeling he has of wanting to be over there. I really think there’s something interesting about how capitalism manufactures ambition. It tells you to look over there, this is where you want to be, this is the kind of man you could be but if only you buy this, only if you do this and it has to manufacture it so you’ll work towards an ideal that doesn’t exist. Once I realised the central feeling that I was interested in, the feeling that the protagonist has, everything else, setting, story, plot flowed down from there. That took a long time, but once you’ve got the cornerstone, that’s a good feeling.
We’ve all experienced a version of that, sat watching the big flashy car adverts which for some reason make you want a big flashy car!
I love what John Berger says about advertising; “The purpose of advertising is to make you dissatisfied with your current life”. So it’s not even about the car, it’s about showing you there’s a better version of you out there. This is why we’re not even talking about the fucking car in this advert, we’re talking about these weird philosophical concepts and we’re showing a very good-looking person who’s got their life under control driving it. That’s what they’re selling and the car is almost incidental. I really agree with you, I’ve also had those feelings and as you watch these adverts you start to feel something. However if you actually listen to what they’re saying, it’s so empty and vapid because it has to feel deep to as many people as possible so it’s incredibly shallow. It was actually a lot of fun to write the car advert. It was very fun to come up with text that could mean so much to our protagonist and for the audience to feel but is also just really dumb and doesn’t mean anything. And that’s the silly idea at the heart of this short film, that this stupid faux philosophical car advert activates our protagonist’s whole being. It’s just such a dumb idea but it was a very fun one to do.
It was very fun to come up with text that could mean so much to our protagonist and for the audience to feel, but is also just really dumb and doesn’t mean anything.
You explore so many different elements in the film. You’ve got the toxicity of the workplace, that driving ambition among so much more…
It was a lot of fun to make, I had to rely a lot on the heads of department around me to deliver that advert as I’ve never worked on one before but I learned a lot about them in the process. Anna MacDonald, our extraordinary cinematographer, has shot car adverts and was able to bring her own expertise in knowing the kind of lenses we needed to be using, how the virtual production should be integrated and the lighting. We threw everything at that 20-second sequence in the film.
The whole film has that beautiful shine and polish of an advert. How full on was your equipment set up for the shoot?
Virtual production stages are a hell of a lot of fun to work with and a lot of our production value is thanks to the fact that the entire film takes place on the set of a VP stage. The team at Garden Studios believed in the project from really early doors. None of us had shot on a VP stage before but they let us visit whenever we wanted, test out the 3D environment as they were being developed and do little test shoots there as well as explaining everything in painstaking detail to us. The benefit of having a VP stage is you use the equipment you would use on location and everything works right on the volume, there’s not actually loads of special extra stuff. You can have normal cameras and normal lenses – we used Alexa Mini with Panavision G Series anamorphics which Anna would have used in an advert so that’s what we used on the VP stage.
The big difference is the extra prep. If you had a green screen you would do that in post and you could fiddle around afterwards but with a VP stage, you’ve got to do it in advance. All of the 3D environments were made specifically for this short film, there were no default screensavers we downloaded. It was all made for us by Luke Hunter at Oxygen Cube in the Unreal Engine. We spent several hours over Zoom looking at particular types of leaves on the different trees that get driven past in the advert, moving the sun around – it’s very odd, it’s sort of like playing God. But obviously, behind the VP stage there’s an extraordinary amount of expertise and technical know-how that Garden Studios thankfully protected us from.
I think there’s something interesting in being able to summon the end result perfectly and immediately with no sense of the journey that speaks to this central feeling I was trying to investigate.
Was it always your plan to shoot on a VP stage?
The idea came to me in that percolation stage and there were two main reasons for shooting on a VP stage. Firstly, car adverts are normally always shot on VP stages, you’ve got lovely reflections that you wouldn’t on a green screen but I was also interested in the metaphorical potential of the volume. It’s this piece of technology where you can summon picture perfect images in an instant. At the press of a button you’ve got the most perfect, beautiful sunset you could ever imagine. If you were really trying to capture that sunset on location you would have a tiny window for magic hour, you’d be climbing up the mountain with hair and makeup rushing in. There are a lot of real-world constraints that stop you from achieving your chase of perfection but on a VP stage, you press a button and it’s magic hour for 12 hours. You can control absolutely everything and move the sun a tiny millimetre if needs be.
I think there’s something interesting in being able to summon the end result perfectly and immediately with no sense of the journey that speaks to this central feeling I was trying to investigate – knowing the final destination but not knowing how to get there. There’s something about the VP stage that worked as a metaphor for what our protagonist is feeling. I haven’t seen a lot of films or anything really that investigated the VP as a metaphor so that was a big driving force behind it. It also meant that they had to push the tech in ways they hadn’t done before because we were using it in a slightly weird way and we were often asking them to do stuff we didn’t fully understand or that hadn’t been done before.
The instant gratification provided by the stage does perfectly reflect Tommy’s desire for instant fame and recognition.
Exactly and I’m so glad that kind of carried. It’s really important to me that the form fits the heart and soul of the thing you’re trying to make. That’s why it was so important to me that we did shoot it on a VP stage. And, I had an extremely experienced incredible crew who hadn’t shot on a VP stage before so there was the sense over these three days that we were doing something quite difficult. All of those people were really necessary to make that happen and when you can create that sense of shared ambition, aims and also shared jeopardy in a room, it can make for a very special set, a very special work environment.
It’s essentially one location, there are lots of bodies that have to be moved around in one space and the whole thing lives and dies based on the performance of the actors.
The whole production is phenomenally ambitious seeing that this is your first short film.
There’s something about the deep end that makes it easier in some ways. That element of being just out of your depth is really exciting and I didn’t have time to think, “Oh my God, it’s my first short film” because it was the first time all of us had shot on a volume so that sort of first short film thing kind of went out the window. There were bigger challenges so I think jumping in the deep end was a good way of getting over any fear. I set myself up to succeed as there were lots of things that played to my strengths coming from a theatre background. It’s essentially one location, there are lots of bodies that have to be moved around in one space and the whole thing lives and dies based on the performance of the actors. I can’t imagine a more fun way to step into film. I’m very indebted to a lot of people, particularly the real core team who consoled and mentored and gave amazing notes on the script and really were at the heart of the project from the start. My producer Ellen Spence, Emma D’Arcy who features and also produced it and Marco Alessi, who’s an extraordinary writer/director and also exec for us.
So let’s talk about Emma D’Arcy because their performance took me through such a wide range of emotions. How did you come to be working with them and how did you build that role together?
Emma and I very much created and built the role of Tommy together. They were a producer on the project which meant that from its earliest conception, they were giving feedback on the script and I would discuss everything with them. We very much built this character from the ground up together. We’ve actually been working together for a long time, Emma was first in a play I directed in 2011 and we’ve been working together since. We had a theatre company together and shifted roles over the years. We’ve co-directed together, co-written together and co-devised. Often I’m directing them because they’re just such an unbelievably good actor and it’s stupid not to put them in stuff. We have 12 years of practice doing detailed, precise, really investigative work on character and on text.
They’re a proper instinctive actor who lives in the moment, proper experience as the character, proper immersion.
We do a lot of prep together and when you combine that shorthand and that work ethic and that mutual trust and respect, with Emma as an actor it makes sense. They’re a proper instinctive actor who lives in the moment, proper experience as the character, proper immersion. That prep and work ethic with that instinct for realness, for truth, for liveness, is an unbelievably potent combination. I had no doubt that Emma could and would go there and I’m amazed by their performance in this even knowing everything I know about them. They can just transmit their thoughts to a viewer in such an extraordinary way and I’m in awe of Emma as always.
The Talent has just screened on Channel 4 which is great. Every filmmaker understands the challenges of distribution so how did that come about?
There’s a very easy answer to this which is the Iris LGBTQ+ Prize in Cardiff which is the festival where The Talent premiered. We had this beautiful queer audience and community of filmmakers to share it with and every short film that gets nominated for the best British short at the Iris Prize gets screened on Channel 4. Iris was the first festival we got into so we were absolutely over the moon. There was, of course, an awful wait from when we first started pressing submit on these different film festivals between hearing back and once we did hear back from Iris, it already felt like more than we could have hoped for. It was broadcast on Channel 4 last week and it’s been on All4 which has been very cool. People are able to watch it easily and I’m just extremely grateful to Iris for that.
I think more independent cinemas are starting to screen short films before feature films that people are paying to see which did happen a lot more before but was kiboshed by advertising and the kind of car adverts that are in this short film! If you’re looking at films and filmmaking just purely as a product it doesn’t make financial sense to screen a short film because it’s not selling anything. But cinemas are a better way to get them out there, to distribute them, to let filmmakers experience what it is to screen your work in front of an audience so I really hope that trend continues and we actually watch fewer car adverts before.
Speaking of your achievements, you now have a BIFA nomination for the short.
We were utterly over the moon to be long-listed and we couldn’t believe it, then to be nominated after that was just extraordinary. Again, hopefully it means more people will watch it and it’s hopefully another reason that people will click play. Just to be listed alongside those four other shorts, which I’ve seen and I love, it’s just a real honour. Very grateful to all the BIFA voters and it’s been fun to meet the other filmmakers and celebrate with them. As you said, this is my first short film. A lot of people worked very hard to make it look expensive, but it actually wasn’t. We did pay everyone but a lot of the time, we had a lot of working favours and working with companies who gave in kind support in different ways and we just had some very skilled people working on it. We didn’t spend mega bucks on it nor did we have any kind of funding which BIFA takes into consideration.
With The Talent being the inarguable success that it is, what are you working on next?
It feels like there’s a bit of a crossroads for me as a maker at the moment. I wrote and directed The Talent so it’s like, well, what am I going to write and direct next? Then there’s another path directing other people’s stuff and directing for television and I’m sort of feeling the need to kind of choose. But I’m trying to resist that because actually, I want to do both. I love directing other people’s work and I love writing so I’m trying to balance those things. I am writing a feature, I am co-creating a TV show which is in the very early stages of its development with two colleagues and I’m also going around meeting people. I’m a very tunnel visioned person and I think I need to have a slate of a bunch of different things all going on at the moment and carry on spinning several plates at once so I have to work out how to do that. Some really exciting things are on the horizon.
