Mark Jenkin is one of the UK’s greatest working filmmakers. Starting his recent run with 2018’s Bait, he has since produced a trilogy of Cornish films. The latest of these, Rose of Nevada, played at this year’s Manchester Film Festival and will shortly be going on a UK-wide Q&A tour before coming to cinemas nationwide on the 24th April.
The film stars Callum Turner and George MacKay as two fishermen who find themselves drifting through time to a 90s Cornwall. It’s this time-travel element that we begin our discussion with. As it is present throughout his work, I ask what draws him to this idea of distorted temporality and why this time he went full-on time travel.
“You know, I hinted at it before with Bait. There was a certain element of time slipping in there… I think if you slip back in time, if you have a flashback, nobody really bats an eyelid at that. You don’t really consider that as any sort of temporality issue, it’s just a kind of reminder, or restating a theme or a piece of plot. But if you’d flash forward like I did in Bait, suddenly it becomes a conversation about temporality. So I think the conversations around the release of Bait and the way that I was portraying time within the edit made me think about it a bit more, and then I was more explicit with it within Enys Men which is really more of a ghost movie, but as my partner Mary [Woodvine]… pointed out, you know a ghost movie is just a time-travel movie and a time-travel movie is just a ghost movie. Maybe they’re the same thing.”
“When it came to Rose of Nevada I think I wanted to do it much more explicitly and to be able to say to people, ‘I’ve made a time-travel film.’ And so the time slip within the film, the time travel, it’s kind of mysterious, but it’s not mysterious as to whether it’s happened or not. It clearly has happened, and the characters talk about it as if it has happened in a way that’s much more direct… So I think it’s just kind of inevitable for me to make a film that’s about time travel at some point, just because I love the way that temporal dislocation and temporal discontinuation, if that’s the word, is communicated so beautifully through film language. If you’re willing to experiment a little bit with the way that the sounds and the pictures work and the way non-linearity within film language can be exploited.”
I ask him if recreating Cornwall during the 90s was something he enjoyed. “It’s the one department I’m not massively involved in, I’m sort of across all the other departments, but when it comes to the art department, a bit less so.” But that doesn’t mean he was not still involved with the process. “I gave Felicity Hickson, who’s the production designer, quite a steer on what I wanted to emphasize within that period, you know, because that was, like in 1993, I was 17, so it’s probably like the height of my cultural development.”
“A lot of it’s actually quite linked to Manchester, because Manchester was certainly the centre of the UK at that point, and maybe the centre of the Western world in terms of culture. So, you know, we’ve got some Manchester icons within the film that I was quite insistent on being in. And the things like Nick/Luke’s tape collection, that’s actually my tape collection.” Admittedly I didn’t catch the Manchester references something I tell Jenkin is reason enough for me to go back and watch the film. “Yes definitely, get the Mancunians going back multiple times,” he jokes.
We move on to discussing another one of the recurring preoccupations across his films, the image of lichen. “It has significance now, but it didn’t at the time,” Jenkin tells me. “I just filmed it because it was there. I spin the camera around when I’m not filming people and pick up what’s in the landscape and what’s in the locations we’re in. And it’s just that quite often I’m shooting close-ups of faces and hands and things like that. So my focus is quite close-up and there’s lichen on almost every surface where I live and different types of lichen. I still don’t think it’s conscious, it’s not like I’m obsessed with it, but it’s ended up becoming a bit of a motif in my films in the way that feet and hands are as well.”
“I film feet and hands ’cause they’re there, and I film lichen ’cause they’re there, and then afterwards you kind of work out the meaning and you sort of work out what people’s hands tell other people about their personality, or their mood, or their state of mind or whatever. And feet do the same thing. Feet are sometimes a good indicator of class or profession or something like that. And I think the lichen, I’ve learned more about lichen since featuring it in my films than I knew beforehand, so there are allegories within the way that lichen lives and what it is and our understanding of it. I think as long as there’s lichen there, it’s going to end up in my films, like the sea and the rocks and the sky is always in my films.”
I ask him why he loves filming in close-up so much. “I just think the best production value we’ve got is the human face when you’re making a film. So I like looking into people’s eyes when I’m watching a film. I think the human face is such a beautiful and interesting thing.”
“I’m not necessarily interested in huge wide vistas and telling a story within a huge choreographed wide shot. I like to build the film up from montage. I like to build the atmosphere and the rhythm and the sound and everything from sort of montage and collage really. People ask me why I shoot so much stuff with close-ups and I hadn’t been that conscious of it before. And I hadn’t really noticed that a lot of filmmakers don’t do that, I suppose.”
“I think we sort of celebrate the kind of golden age of Hollywood, for example, with how beautiful everybody was, like matinee idols and the screen goddesses. I don’t think those people are any more beautiful than we are now, and I think we’re probably more beautiful now than we were then, because we’re healthier, and the world’s healthier, and we eat better, and we drink more water, and less alcohol… but the way that the human face is put onto the screen isn’t done with the same care and attention that it was done in the past. It’s like, you know, give that person a massive close-up, allow the audience to look into their eyes, allow the audience to look into every crack on their skin or every blemish on their skin, allow them to almost be able to feel what it would feel like to have the wind going through their hair that you’re looking at… to get intimate with people – which I think we used to do on screen, but we don’t do that so much anymore.”
The faces in question are a mixture of returning actors from Jenkin’s previous work, the likes of Mary Woodvine and Edward Rowe, as well as newcomers, the big two being Callum Turner and George MacKay. “I worked with Shaheen Baig, who’s a casting director, who put together a list of people for me to consider, and then there was a very short list of people that I then met. I don’t even remember whether I met anybody other than Callum and George.”
Jenkin recalls meeting with the two leads very fondly. Originally, mostly down to the written ages of the characters, he was considering George to play what ended up being Callum’s character. “But then I met George and we hung out for a bit and we were chatting and he’d read for Liam. I never get actors to read from the script. I don’t like doing all that kind of stuff. I just like meeting people and being able to look at them and chat with them and just see who they are and they get to see who I am. But after a few minutes of speaking to George, I was thinking actually he could really play Nick. He’s kind of a bit of a chameleon age-wise. He could easily play older than he is but equally he’s got a real use and an innocence to him that’s kind of built in an inquisitive sort of nature that I needed for the character of Nick – and not inquisitive as in, excited by the world and wants to find out what it’s all about, but inquisitive as in, kind of ‘what the hell is going on’ kind of inquisitive.”
“And then as for Callum, through our mutual agent, Callum’s name appeared on the list. And I remember seeing Callum on a TV show maybe 15 years ago called Glue, an E4 TV show. And I remember at the time watching it and saying to Mary, that guy is a movie star who’s stuck in a TV show.”
“And then I met him and we hung out for an hour or so, and then realised that we hadn’t talked about anything other than Cornwall and where he grew up in London and football. So we had to arrange another meeting to actually talk about the film, and we met up again. Again, we just mostly talked about football, and then just as we were about to go our separate ways, I said to him, ‘Do you want to do the film?’ And he was like, ‘Do you want me to do the film?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I want you to do the film.’ He was like, ‘Well, I want to do the film.’ And then that was that.”
“There’s a lot of familiar faces. I work with Mary [Woodvine] all the time, I work with Ed [Rowe] all the time. And then a lot of other people behind the scenes, the camera team I work with and sound people and stuff, but yeah, it’s really important that George and Callum and the rest of the cast who came from outside of Cornwall fitted in with the family. And what’s been really nice is hearing George and Callum talk about how sort of honoured they were to come down and work and be part of what we were doing as much as we were grateful for them coming down and giving us their sort of their beautiful craft and star power. So it all worked out very well. It was very enjoyable.”
Prior to its wide release, Jenkin is going on an extensive tour with the film, each of which will be accompanied by a Q&A, something Jenkin tells me is “the best part of the filmmaking process”. “I find filmmaking really hard and if I’m doing a Q&A, it means the film’s been made and I’ve done the hard bit and I’m just… You know, sometimes it’s exhausting, but you know, what a privilege to be paid to travel around the country, visit cinemas that you wouldn’t ordinarily go to, introduce your film to a normally, nine times out of 10, a sold-out cinema, and then come and talk about your work afterwards.”
“I would never moan about doing a tour or Q&As, it’s quite the opposite. I love it and I can’t wait. But I mean, in a couple of weeks when I’m trying to get from Newcastle to Edinburgh, the train’s been cancelled and it’s pissing it down with rain. I might have a slightly different take on it, but at the moment I can’t wait to get going.”
“It gives you a sort of distorted view of the state of cinema because we’re supposed to think that cinema’s dying, that no one goes to the cinema anymore but people turn out for this.” He asks me how old I am [23], “Exactly, people your age are going to the cinema, that’s the amazing thing. You’re probably the age where you grew up with streaming so going to the cinema is the different exciting thing to do. Whereas for my generation, being able to watch stuff on streamers is the different thing. For lots of people my age it’s like ‘Oh wow, you don’t have to have to go to the cinema anymore’ whereas the youth are coming through for the cinema as a different experience.”
“I’m still trying to get to the bottom of why my films are popular. A lot of people kind of tell me it’s because they feel different. I find that very difficult to believe. I can’t get my head around that because for me, my films look like what I see in my head. I don’t watch my films objectively. But what has always excited me and what really confounded me in the first instance when I made Bait is that I went out and did the first Q&As on the tour or previews, or festival screenings – it was people your age who wanted to come up and talk about it afterwards. And I always thought it was going to be old men who wanted to talk about old film cameras. But it was actually young people who wanted to come out, which was really exciting because, you know, it’s always good to meet young people, but it’s always really exciting because young people are the future. And if they’re engaged in this, then it does give you hope.”
On the weekend the films release, the BFI will be showing all three of Jenkins’ films as part of what they are dubbing ‘The Cornish Trilogy’. I ask Jenkin about this label and if he views his films as a trilogy.
“I didn’t. I do now, it does feel more like a trilogy. I can’t remember who but someone from BFI Distribution called it the Cornish trilogy. And that was the first time I really thought of it. But it’s great. I found it really freeing in a way, because it’s made me think, right, what am I going to do next? I’ve done the Cornish trilogy, even though I didn’t set out to make a Cornish trilogy. It’s not to say that my next film won’t have anything to do with Cornwall, it will. I’m writing something at the moment that’s set in America, but it’s got a Cornish protagonist.”
We bought the discussion to an end with a discussion of Jenkins’ picks on the Sight and Sound Poll, a poll taken once every decade where filmmakers and critics are asked to give their top ten films of all time which is then amalgamated into a list that attempts to give the consensus on what the greatest films of all time are.
I specifically want to talk about his inclusion of Daguerréotypes, a film by Agnes Varda (one of my personal favourite filmmakers.) I tell him I see a link between the way Varda’s films and his own depict the link between people and place and ask if he thinks about Varda when making his own films.
“I’ve been asked about my list, but I don’t think I’ve been asked about that one before,” something I take as a personal badge of honour. “I think, well, it’s interesting that you mention people and places because that, at least on the surface, isn’t why I’m obsessed with that film. It’s just that I haven’t thought of that until now, but that is really interesting because yeah, from the title all the way through the content, it’s about that street and that place and those people and the way a place is made-up of people. So I think that’s a really astute comment you’ve made there. And that will be my reason for loving this film from now on, so thanks for getting there. I mean, my love of that film and a lot of her films is just her engagement with the way the film’s made technically. I think that it’s an absolute masterclass in editing. A film entirely made in the edit.”
“She could have gone on filming and filming and filming. But it doesn’t become anything. It doesn’t become a film until it’s edited. And the way that it’s edited, it’s just beautiful. And if you haven’t done it, watch it with the sound off. Just watch what she does. And I don’t think any of it’s possibly really planned in the shooting of it, it’s when it’s put together, the sort of the action cuts, composition cuts, association cuts, cuts on colour and everything like that. It’s a complete masterpiece. So yeah, I think [Varda is] probably someone I think about in a way. I try not to think at all when I’m making films. I try and do everything on gut instinct, but gut instinct is informed by experience. You know, I think the instinct is built from the experience of life. And a lot of my filmmaking life will be that there’s key people or key films that I’ve seen, and that is certainly one of them that sort of to me unconsciously.”
Rose of Nevada will be touring around the UK shortly and will release nationwide in cinemas on the 24th April.
