Ahead of its world premiere at the Manchester Film Festival, Chris Green, director of Manchester thriller Synthesized, spoke to us about the film.
I asked him how the film came into existence. “I just wanted to try something different,” Green tells me. “It came from the music I was listening to at the time, my films are heavily inspired by music and I’m working my way through genres. The last film was mod music, this one was synthesizer music.”
I ask him what it is about synth music that made him want to base the film around it. “[Synth music] can be quite poppy and melodic, but it can always be dark and sombre and frightening. A lot of film scores with synths are quite brutalist and industrial and I wanted to explore that and use it as a force for narrative.”
The film stars Thomas Turgoose, most widely known for This Is England. “I’ve gone on to work with most of the cast from This Is England actually. I think I’m working my way through them all, I’ve worked with Steven Graham, I’ve worked with Perry Fitzpatrick, I’ve worked with Chanel Crewell, and now I’ve worked with Thomas.” Green tells me this almost with the air that he has only just made the link.
Turgoose was quite a creative force on the film: “At first the character [Turgoose plays] was a bit like Ryan Gosling in Drive. Very Monosyllabic, didn’t say much, brooding, moody. But it didn’t work for us. We’re making a British film now an American one. The backdrop is very different, it’s working-class and it’s grey and it’s bleak so the character just needed to be an everyday guy.”
“When Thomas came on, we developed it together. I give Thomas a lot of credit for working with me and bringing the character to a place where he’s fully formed and can put in a performance that I’m hoping people at the festival will really enjoy. He really wanted to make it his own and I think he does a fantastic job, really does.”
I ask him if This is England is a key text for him. “Yeah, I love Shane Meadows. But it’s the film he made before that, A Room for Romeo Brass, which was quite dark but also full of just wonderful humour, which I love even more. It’s that sort of gritty, British, rye-humoured film that I really like.”
Other areas of inspiration he cites are Billy Elliot, the work of Ben Wheatley, and more recently I Swear. The common link is clear, smaller-scale, British dramas that take place within a working-class environment. I ask him if this is something that is important to him in his own filmmaking.
“It’s that old adage about writing what you know. I grew up on a really rough council house estate in Lower Broughton in Salford. And it was tough, there was a lot of violence, especially football violence. And my dad died when I was fifteen. And I went off the rails and I was doing mad things. But at the same time, this creative energy started to flow out of me and I started to just write stories in a pad.”
“I started to write prose and get an old-school typewriter and try to write a book. But I’m not educated enough, my vocabulary is not extended enough to write classic novels,” Green laughs as he tells me this. “But then I saw screenplays and thought, yeah, okay, I can do that. I could be a little more concise, open the scene up and let the characters take over with the action and dialogue.”
“The first film I directed, Strange Ways, Here We Come, was based on my experience as a postman, getting attacked by dogs and people trying to rob you and stuff like that. So it all comes out of experience. Although I couldn’t play a synthesizer if you gave me a million quid.”
The film is very grounded in its Manchester setting, something I wanted to ask Green about. “I live in Whitefield, which is right next to Prestwich, and a lot of the locations in the film were basically facing the cafe where I go for breakfast. It’s a bit of a fading precinct that looks really gritty and brutalist so we were lucky that we could just use that as a location.”
“And it’s always budget-driven. I can’t just sit here and think, opening, exterior LA beach. Because I’m just not going to raise the money to make that film. I want to make films and I know I’m going to have to end up raising the money for the film so let’s write it and make it as cost-efficient as it can possibly be. And if I have to do that, why not have it on my doorstep.”
We talk about what it’s like working at that low-budget range. “What I’ve found with low-budget independent films is that people are really gracious and really supportive,” Green says. “If they know you’ve got no money, people want to help out. And what you get is a film that still costs a lot of money, relatively speaking, but in film-terms costs very little but is able to punch above its weight.”
A lot of this support came in the form of musicians Green tells me. “We were very very lucky to get Sam [Look Mum No Computer] to come and work with us, who has been selected to represent the UK in Eurovision.” Orchestral Manouveurs in the Dark rerecorded their synth classic Enola Gay in the style the main character would play it in for the film, as well as Kim Wilde lending her vocals for the film.
“I think without that kindness and without that support, these little films would never get made. So I am very very grateful to them. And to [Manchester Film Festival], very happy to be doing my first ever film festival because I’ve never done one before at the ripe old age of 58.”
We talk (too extensively to put in the article) about the festival and what we’re looking forward to. Green tells me that he’s looking forward to “networking and meeting other filmmakers. I’m particularly really looking forward to seeing a film called Chatlines directed by Neil Ely and Lloyd Eyre-Morgan, because I love those guys and I know that they shot the whole thing in five days.”
“I’m also really excited to see what the reception is for Synthesized because I’m letting it out to the world now and this is a piece of art we’ve created as a team. You can keep working on films, and going back and doing little touches and sound mix and grade, but we’ve got to the stage where we have to let it fly now.”
Synthesized has a sold-out showing at Home as part of the Manchester Film Festival on the 27th March.
