For our 20 year anniversary symposium, writers were invited to examine how their approach to - or stance on - a film had changed over a period of time. I chose a film I was scared to write about - CITIZEN KANE - at a time when I didn’t know I was a writer. You can read the piece here or click on the photo above.

What Citizen Kane talks about is pretty much common currency everywhere now. The supremacy of the self, the squandering of talent, the exploitation of ignorance and fear, the abandonment of virtue. Welles himself lived all of this at the sharp end, while working in the film industry, from the release of Kane in 1941 until his death in 1985. Yet there is a romantic way to look at it…if we want.

A sweet weekend in Aberystwyth with The Wyrm of Bwlch Pen Barras at the Abertoir Festival. We drank with Chris Cronin and the makers of The Moor on Saturday, met Robin Ince and attended his podcast, I watched Corman’s The Tomb of Ligeia on Sunday morning, had lunch with Bryn and his brilliant wife Anna, then a lovely screening of Wyrm with The Sin Eater.

The first Amicus film - British micro-budget horror, CIty of the Dead.

I provided this year’s Fourth Night Pumpkin for Reverse Shot. It’s about a very peculiar, and potentially quite influential horror film: CITY OF THE DEAD.

“It’s a confrontation, mirroring the film’s plot, between ancient and new. It’s also a statement, and in a sense a dirty trick, but a devilishly good one too. Nothing that follows this sequence feels the same as before, nor can it really be so. Every subsequent image, which might have looked staid or studio-bound, has now been contaminated with something resembling realism and impregnated with the dread that accompanies unpredictability. It’s almost like a bond of trust has been broken between the filmmakers and the audience and replaced by a gloriously assaultive atmosphere of threat.”

Cesar Troisgros with his team in Frederick Wiseman’s Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros

“To Wiseman, a non-invasive camera changes nothing in the process of a human being simply playing the role of their own life. Not for Wiseman the hang-ups of cinéma vérité purism or hidden cameras, because in the great theater of life, we are all more or less concerned with showing our best side, articulating our best interests and creating a spectacle by our actions which we want others to see. In other words, we are all acting anyway. The only condition Wiseman sets himself is that the camera must serve the purpose of capturing the subject and not interfere further—any looks to camera, for example, are cut in the editing process. But this inevitably means that Wiseman must accept (within reason) a divergence in how his protagonists react to the camera’s presence by instinct—and the results are illuminating.”

You can read the review here, or click on the photo above.

With Craig Williams on the red carpet at LÉtrange Festival 2023

Craig and I hopped over to Paris for a night to introduce our film (in French) before the screening as part of the short film competition. Thanks to Eric Challard who was a most gracious and entertaining host.

Photograph: Carol Morley

It was an honour to present The Wyrm of Bwlch Pen Barras on behalf of director Craig and myself at its UK premiere at the Shetland Screenplay Festival. I was interviewed beforehand by horror expert and all-round critical royalty, Mark Kermode.

A really good house (85+) was in attendance - a very generous and knowledgeable crowd, in a terrific, intimate setting (the arts centre, Mareel, in Lerwick). I received some lovely, encouraging feedback from delegates who recognised the influences of the Mabinogion and other folk-horror ideas.

Photograph: Matt Bauer

Our second and final private cast & crew screening was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on Saturday 20th May. A wonderful occasion, graced by the crew (l-r: JA; Isaac Whittingham (gaffer); Matt Wildman (sound recordist); Christian Hughes (clapper loader); Jamie Cobb (key grip); George Bettles (standby carpenter); Vic Pugh (Anwen) and Craig Williams (writer-director).

Julien with writer-director Craig Williams at the Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff. Poster art by Richard Wells.

It was such a thrill to see THE WYRM on the big screen. Thanks to Cardiff’s Chapter Arts Centre and to all those who came to support the film, especially Seán Carlsen, who plays the sinister Dai. We’re hoping to play at festivals throughout the autumn and I’ll update the Rushes with news.

Samantha Morton in Steven Spielberg’s MINORITY REPORT (2002) - a film which deploys Bach’s Cantata BWV 147

I contributed a short piece to The Bach Choir’s website on Choral Music and Cinema showcasing the Choir’s own numerous contributions to cinematic soundtracks over the years (and of course not forgetting its classic 1962 War Requiem recorded with Sir Benjamin Britten, filmed by Derek Jarman in 1988).

I was thrilled to be asked by debut writer-director Craig Williams to produce his new film, the Welsh folk horror short THE WYRM OF BWLCH PEN BARRAS (2023). We shot it on 16mm (with renowned cinematographer Sean Price Williams) in and around the North Wales town of Ruthin and on the mighty Bwlch Pen Barras mountain pass itself. The film is in post production. More details to emerge soon.

To close off Reverse Shot's week of creepy Halloween viewing recommendations, I wrote about comic genius Matthew Holness's 2018 nightmare, POSSUM. Scroll to the bottom of this page if you dare!

More compelling insights into the world of acting with the unique and wonderful Stansted Players, playing a small role in a production of THE LIARS by the deservedly little known dramatist Henry Arthur Jones. Eight part songs - by the likes of Finzi, Balfour Gardner, Gilbert & Sullivan etc - were inserted into the heavily truncated text. The production was devised by the miraculous Alastair Langlands and led by Jessica Price as the unhappily married Lady Jessica, with Dan Rasbash as her young paramour, Ned. (I played George, a busybody.)

Warren Clarke, John Duttine (hooded) and Anthony Bate in Alan Clarke’s PSY-WARRIORS (1981)

I wrote about the queasily prescient BELOVED ENEMY and PSY-WARRIORS for Reverse Shot. Trump-Putin, Reagan’s Star Wars program, Abu Ghraib…all unwittingly evoked by Clarke and Leland’s uncompromising work.

You can read the essay, part of the 1981 Symposium, here…

“Le Samouraï presents us not for the first time with a fully interiorized, “locked-in” Melville protagonist, like Bob in Bob le flambeur or Maudet in Magnet of Doom (1963), but one whose loneliness and single-mindedness are mechanized and supercharged. This object explicitly demonstrates his corresponding ability to unlock, infiltrate, and destroy the lives of others.”

You can read the essay - part of Reverse Shot's symposium on objects in cinema - here

Interview with Aïcha Macky, director of ZINDER (Niger, 2021)

I was privileged to be asked to act as interpreter for the Nigerien filmmaker Aïcha Macky and the Malagasy filmmaker Michaël Andrianaly when they were interviewed by Edo Choi for the presentation of their films (respectively, ZINDER and NOFINOFY) on the first weekend of MOMI’s 2021 First Look Festival.

Both films can be viewed in the links below:

ZINDER (2021)

Director: Aicha Macky. Camera: Julien Bossé. Editor: Karen Benainous. Music: Dominique Peter. Production: (Documentary – France-Niger-Germany) A Point du Jour, Les Films du Balibari, Tabous Production, Corso Film, Arte France presentation. (World sales: Andana Films, Lussas.) Producers: Clara Vuillermoz, Ousmane Samassekou, Erik Winker.

Reviewed in Variety by Guy Lodge: https://variety.com/2021/film/reviews/zinder-review-1234952400/

NOFINOFY (2019)

Director: Michaël Andrianaly. Camera: Michaël Andrianaly. Editor: Denis Le Paven. Music: Nonoh Romaro. Production: (Documentary – Madagascar-France) Producer: Sylvie Plunian

I was interviewed by AlAraby TV on Orson Welles’s radio output and its influence on his films (which was enormous). A short clip is at 22.30 here.

“But revenge is intrinsic to cinematic storytelling because it represents our most primal human expression of justice. Eastwood ultimately gives us, his audience, what we have always come to expect from the Man with No Name. In so doing he confronts us—without judging us—with the inherent moral deficit of the western genre and of the movies themselves: their natural, instinctive reliance on violence as entertainment, when violence is the ruin of everyone.”

I wrote about Clint Eastwood’s 1992 western masterpiece, UNFORGIVEN, from an outsider’s point of view, for Reverse Shot’s foreign culture symposium: “Great Beyond”.

Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman put together a film using contributions from the participants in this symposium, held before lockdown in the main theatre of the Museum of the Moving Image. It’s called “Critical Interventions” and examines in a multi-mediatic way the reasons one is moved to write criticism.

I was thrilled to be invited onto Reverse Shot’s Happy Hour to discuss my favourite two subjects: Orson Welles being libelled again and that most discredited genre - biopics. Great to share an hour with special friends and collaborators Michael Koresky, Farihah Zaman, Jeff Reichert, Aliza Ma and Eric Hynes.

“Like a bookkeeper filling an addict’s account with free bets just as the addict is ready to go cold turkey, Scratch introduces the enchantress Belle as Jabez’s housemaid (the French actress Simone Simon, who would catch fire the following year in Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People), while a simple handshake—call it a free rider—extinguishes Jabez’s nagging conscience. He spends the rest of the time rubbing his affair with Belle in his wife’s face, while poor Mary tends to the upbringing of their troubled, nascent Donald Trump Jr. of a son.”

Read the entire piece here. Happy Halloween! (And please vote).