Tom Shkolnik, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Edward Hogg and Elisa Lasowski Roundtable
The Comedian is director Tom Shkolnik’s debut film; borrowing from the Dogme 95 movement and mumble-core, the feature was shot using improvisation and no script. The film revolves around Edward (Edward Hogg) an amateur stand up comedian and call center worker, as he drifts listlessly through London with his hopeless romantic flatmate Elisa (Elisa Lasowski).
After meeting young carefree Nathan (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) he embarks on a passionate love affair, as Shkolnik looks at love, lust, race and sexuality with London as the backdrop in this complicated British independent movie…
The Comedian’s filming process was quite unique and organic in the way that the actors had to use their own names, improvise every scene and invent the story day by day. Can you tell us a little bit about this process and how it came about?
Tom Shkolnik: Yes, it all came together… there’s two answers, I guess. There’s the content and the way that we went about making it. The way that we went about making it was really an extension of the way I’d made short films before, so when I came to England, I started going to drama school and I was surrounded by loads of really talented actors who were my friends and my flatmates and we started playing around with this idea of improvising as a way of people having more space for their creativity and so we made short films that way. For me, this film is the conclusion of that journey so it was always going to be in that ballpark because that was the kind of path I was on.
As far as the content of the film, I was really miserable – as I often am – but I was particularly miserable at that time. I had this friend that was working around the corner whilst I was editing a short film and I had a very, very good friend that was working in a call centre and we’d meet for lunch and try and make each other laugh and not go back to work. A few months later, when that kind of settled in my mind, when this idea came about for a story about a comedian who was gay and who was drifting through London searching for meaning and connections, I started writing all these different things. At one point, it was a 190-page novel and at another point, it was a page and my process was sort of manic-depressive, I guess.
Then, something congealed in some way and that’s what I came to the producers with and then we started approaching people and I met loads of actors and I met these guys in all kinds of obscure environments. And I asked each person in the film to pick an element or a word or something that they related to or was meaningful to them and from that, we started our rehearsal process in a way. It was a different journey with each person, but that was the beginning of it.
How did the cast come together? Did you know each other before?
Nathan Stewart-Jarrett: Edward and I had worked together two months beforehand, but apart from that it was all new and fresh.
Tom Shkolnik: That was part of it as well, because I’d always worked with friends from school and stuff and this was the first time that… Basically the idea was: what would happen if you put a group of strangers together and created these fictitious relationships and invested them with so much energy? In a way, when I think of the film, that’s what the film is about. It’s about where strangers meet and try and form something and I think that’s what we kind of did when we made the film.
How was the process of doing improvisation for you? Had you done something similar before or was it a totally a brand new way of working?
Edward Hogg: For me, it was a completely brand new way of working and probably the thing that was initially the most attractive and exciting aspect of how we were going to work. Before I knew how you made a film – you know with a more traditional approach, with a script etc – I think in my head as a young actor going into drama school, it was how I thought films would be made. I don’t think I’d really thought about it in any great depth but it wasn’t something I’d done before and it was an exciting prospect to be able to have all that freedom.
Nathan Stewart-Jarrett: I was pretty scared about it; I didn’t really know how to do it in a sense. During the early days of rehearsals, I just kind of refused to improvise and then I gradually kind of learned that I didn’t have to be funny and that I could kind of follow my instincts because at first, I kept on second guessing things and stopping myself. So, it was wonderful to build up a character from the ground up and live that back-story and live their emotions, rather than just writing it down and having an intellectual thought. It made everything more visceral and therefore more solid. So even if we didn’t have the script, I felt that my performance or what I was doing was built from solid foundations.
Elisa Lasowski: I had done quite a bit of improvisation before, but that was obviously different because every improvisation method is, and Tom has a very specific way of working. If anything, I worked with a theatre company a few years ago and the way that we devised the play was quite personal as well, but it was nothing like this and certainly not on film, where you just show up on the morning and you’re not sure where your day’s going to end. You kind of had to throw yourself in the deep end and see what happens, but it was unusual in that we used ourselves as starting points for all the emotional journeys of those characters. It was kind of unique, but I had done improvisation before, yeah.
The creative outlets of the characters are quite specific. Was there a reason that you wanted to make sure that every character had something that was very creative in the film? How was it to do stand up and do singing and songwriting in the film?
Tom Shkolnik: Yeah, the creative outlets were always in the film. A big part of why I made this film – well, there were many reasons why – but I think a big part of what was going through my mind was that I felt that there was loads of people around me that I knew that didn’t sit into a genre that I felt to be acceptable in British filmmaking or British drama. You either go up or you go down and I was really interested in trying to show the people that were around me that we’re trying to find their voice and trying to find a way of making a living and trying to find a sense of identity and performance for them – whether it was trying to do stand up or singing or art, because that felt very London to me, or the London that I knew in an immediate way.
And so it was all about that and that’s why we also made it in that way, where it was Ed’s jokes, it was Elisa’s songs, but it was these guys, they made it for the sake of the film. Well, some of the songs existed before, some of them were made for the sake of the film, but certainly performing and performing live to an audience was unsolicited, which was really frightening. When I think back on it, to put something that you had made in front of an audience and for it be filmed where the audience aren’t forced to adhere to a narrative of how they’re supposed to respond, you know, the audience respond as they want to respond, and I thought that was really interesting because that was my life at the time. I was surrounded by lots of people that were trying to express themselves, but they were often failing or feeling disappointed by their endeavours.
Edward Hogg: It’s all of our lives, isn’t it? I think that was a part of the process that we were trying to achieve as well, or that Tom was trying to achieve, which was lessening the gap between character and who you are in real life and how narrow you can make that. The fact that we are all creative and we’re all living in a creative industry, what I’m doing in my real life at the moment is going home when I’m not working and trying to write things on the computer; they’re not really that good but I feel like I have to have an outlet for something. It was trying to get as close to what we do in our real lives and then putting that on camera, but I don’t do stand up comedy.
How was it performing stand up comedy?
Edward Hogg: It was hard, but in a way it was very liberating and exciting at times, but it was also very scary. Before we started filming, we did a gig in Greenwich and it was a bigger gig than I was normally used to and for more experienced comics. I bombed horribly – worse even than I do in the film – and that experience, that fear that I felt throughout that gig – and in that gig, I lost all my jokes, I stood on stage and was silent whilst people threw abuse at me – but that fear never went away. Even when I was doing a gig where I had the audience on-side and they would laugh, I was still always… It’s very immediate because you go from second to second and you’re literally going, ‘The next one might not work and it might die and they’ll be silence and then I’ll be stood here in the silence. What’s that going to feel like? Horrible!’ It’s a really scary, but a very pure form of performance.
As a director, how did you safeguard the actors from overdeveloping and over-thinking the plot?
Tom Shkolnik: I don’t think there were any safeguards involved in this film. I tried to have safeguards. I mean it’s a funny thing because on the one hand, everyone needs to be protected; you don’t want anyone to get harmed or emotionally damaged when you’re making something that’s very difficult. On the other hand, there is a need to go to certain places and I think one of the things that was really challenging about this film was the blurring of boundaries, the use of names, the use of autobiographical material.
Elisa Lasowski: The use of our own clothes, everything was real, yeah.
Tom Shkolnik: In a way, that was where we were heading because these were a group of strangers that didn’t know each other and by the time we start filming, it’s going to be a real living environment. So, the lines were blurred and it was really hard for all of us. It was a real experience and we just had to step back and reassess and remember that we are telling a story and that we didn’t know each other before we started making this film and that, in a way, we won’t know each other when we finish making the film, that we’re only actually meeting each other for a very narrow slit that was created artificially for the sake of the film. But it was a very intense experience; I don’t think anyone would lie to you about that.
Edward, Nathan and Elisa, how was it for you guys? Did you find it intense?
Elisa Lasowski: Yeah, it was pretty intense. How can I describe the intensity? It was a mix of using ourselves as a starting point and the way in which Tom got us to develop the characters, he got us to get to know each other, authentically in a way but artificially, as it was always in that rehearsal space and not outside; but still, whatever we talked about was real and intimate. In my experience, whatever you’d hear emotionally within yourself, we’d act on all the time. So if you feel something in particular for someone, you go ‘OK, let’s explore that’. Everything came from a real place and it can get a bit confusing and intense, but it was very interesting of course. And then with some of the more personal stuff that we did like the comedy or me trying to do the music – which also felt like me, Elisa, exposing myself – but at the same time it’s the character, but the stuff that we were doing was our own material and so you know, it wasn’t easy [Laughs].
Nathan Stewart-Jarrett: I think anytime you’re that unguarded for such a long period of time is bound to be intense. Actually, I think there were safeguards and I think they were actually within that room more than anything else. We had to build so much trust in that space and be so free, that that room became a safe place within itself. I don’t think there was a time that I felt unsafe in that room and if there were, we would have then talked about it. I think that room was quite safe. But yeah, it was very intense and I think the lines were blurred and I don’t think that there was another way to make the film. You know, it was right that the lines were blurred and that meshing of a personality as a character and actor was right and deviating from that was also correct.
Tom Shkolnik: It was a long time ago. It’s funny to talk about it, but yeah I think the thing for me was that it was all about stripping the mechanics; so stripping away the mechanics of narratives, stripping away the mechanics of filming and later, it was also the mechanics of editing. So the idea was trying to make something that is completely exposed or is striving to be exposed and I think when one is an actor professionally and works a lot, your tools and your mechanics are the things that get you by in environments which are sometimes very violent and very brutal towards what it is you’re trying to achieve.
I think I was interested in trying to create an environment that was obviously not brutal, even though I have my own brutality at points, but where those mechanics can be put aside and something else that’s more naive can come about. And so it was a process of trust and really trusting each other and going through this journey with all its ups and downs.
Nathan Stewart-Jarrett: It’s also that trust of not knowing where we were going. I think that’s another element as well, it’s not just about what we were doing in the room, but just trusting that we were going to get there or that we were going to get somewhere. I think that’s quite difficult because if you can see an end point and you can see someone doing something that you don’t think goes to that end point, that’s when you can become guarded or it becomes horrible and you just get on with your own thing. But actually just saying, ‘I don’t know what’s going on and you don’t and so we’ll just get there together’ was an amazing process.
There’s that scene on the back of the bus where the argument with strangers ensues and it’s really intense. How did that come about? And how was that to film?
Tom Shkolnik: It was always there; it was always one of the ideas. I didn’t know what form it was going to take but it was based on something that happened to some friends of mine, where they were verbally abused on a bus. When Nathan came onboard, he had certain ideas of where he wanted to go in his journey, which I’d signed up for, and so we started talking about black society and homosexuality within black society. So when I came to cast the girls on the bus, there was a brilliant young actress that came to meet me for the part that Elisa ended up playing and I really wanted her to be in this film and so I asked her if she would cast two of her friends to be her gang members and then I met them and we’d improvise on our own, with me kind of becoming the white middle-class focal point, basically, where they would hurl abuse at me and I would encourage them to be really rude and as rude as they could.
And they kept going and going until we would end up having these screaming rows – again in a warehouse, I was always in a warehouse when I was making this – and there were certain themes that were being discussed in the other part of the process, that I kind of tried to introduce to that conversation. And then, when we came to the bus, it was the first time that these guys had met and they were going on their own journey, obviously, they knew the scene was going to happen…
Elisa Lasowski: You know what? I didn’t know the scene was going to happen.
Tom Shkolnik: Oh yeah, I didn’t even know if you were even supposed to be in it. Didn’t I just say in the last bit, ‘Oh Elisa, you can be in it as well’?
Elisa Lasowski: Yeah, because I had no clue and I actually started to laugh because they were so rude at first. I was like, ‘What is this? They’re so rude, I can’t believe it!’ Yeah, I didn’t know it was going to happen.
Tom Shkolnik: So then it just sort of happened and then that’s what we did.
Nathan Stewart-Jarrett: I think that’s a great part of how Tom set that up because we were all on these different journeys and Tom chose that point in which we meet and therefore, things happen, and that makes improvising kind of easier because you have these characters that you built, but at the same time, it’s life. You know you meet someone and it’s like ‘You’ve got your stuff, I’ve got my stuff’ and new things happen and I think that’s why Tom worked with them so intensely and closely and that’s why they were so volatile. It was good to shoot. I think that was the only thing…
Tom Shkolnik: Ah yes, we hired a bus. We had certain rules when we were making the film and so we weren’t allowed to hire things and it was the only time where we hired a bus because, obviously, I had a sense that the scene was going to become volatile in some way and so it wasn’t appropriate to do it on a public bus.
Edward Hogg: There was a lot of stuff that was shot on normal buses, though.
Tom Shkolnik: Yeah, the first scene where they meet is just us going on the number 30 bus backwards and forwards for about three hours [Laughs].
How did you stop the public from getting involved with your filming? Did they see the cameras?
Edward Hogg: The only time that we did was when Jamie and I had that fight and the bloke brought his kids down. Do you remember that?
Tom Shkolnik: Oh yeah, that was the only time. They don’t give a shit. People don’t care. I guess so many people have cameras and we shot the film with such small cameras and I think half the time, they just thought it was shit that was happening.
Edward Hogg: There was one scene that didn’t make into the film where I did some stand-up on a bus and people commented then, but they weren’t commenting because the cameras were there, they were commenting to me doing my stand-up. They were talking to me, so they weren’t really interested in the filming side of it. I think because the cameras were so discreet, they weren’t in people’s faces.
Elisa Lasowski: I know in the open mic scenes, they knew we were filming because of sound reasons or something…
Tom Shkolnik: No, in the open mic scenes where Elisa is singing, the bar knew that we were going to be filming but part of the deal that we had with all of these places was that we weren’t going to stop their activity. And so in that bar, we came in early and we knew that the guys were going to sit somewhere and Elisa was going to be on stage, so we set some lights very discreetly and then there were two cameras and the situation unfolded as it unfolded. And the other people went about their business and I don’t even think they knew we were there. Maybe they had to sign something, but it was pretty vague what that was and it’s kind of how we made the film. We just went fumbling from one place to the next in the hope of finding something.
Another one of your rules was that there would only be one take of each scene. Did you ever find that a shot was working quite well and then it went wrong? What did you do when that happened?
Tom Shkolnik: Yeah, it happened, but that was it. We only stopped on a couple of occasions, basically to fight and we stopped to argue, but we didn’t stop for anything else.
Elisa Lasowski: But it’s also because they were rolling the camera for a very long time and so the way we would get into scenes sometimes would just be to start. Like, when we played basketball, I remember we played basketball for at least 45 minutes and they filmed the whole thing, so everything we did was just long takes and then they took out of it whatever they needed and we just kept going and talking. I remember one time where we started, we weren’t sure where it was going to go and we just started to chat and Tom started to film that conversation and then we started to do stuff, so it was all one continuous thing.
How have you audiences been appreciating this film? Have you talked to them after screenings and found out what their reactions have been?
Nathan Stewart-Jarrett: I think people have been really positive and we had a screening at the BFI the other day and someone said they’ve never seen a film like it, so I think it has touched a lot of people. I was saying earlier that it’s such a true representation of London and that most of the time, if you see people like this in film, where it’s an ensemble piece, it’s not really anchored on them, but this is unlike most British films.
Elisa Lasowski: Yeah, we’ve had people of all sorts and foreigners as well saying, ‘That’s my life, that’s my life in London’. So we’ve had these reactions with people really recognising those feelings that London sometimes brings: the isolation…
Tom Shkolnik: Yeah, I think the film seems to invoke certain feelings and people either are willing to accept those and go with it, and maybe they get a lot back from it, or they shut down and they just go, ‘This is boring, nothing happens. I don’t like it’. But if they go with it, they start seeing hope in the intricacies that are happening inside it and that maybe there is a certain wealth of emotion and ideas inside it to draw on. But they have to join in; it’s not going to knock them over the head with it. It’s up to them whether they want to or not.
Edward Hogg: Tom and I went to a festival in Israel two or three months ago and we played it to an audience of very old people. I didn’t think they would particularly go for it, I thought it would play for a younger audience, but they loved it. They were one of the most responsive audiences. They were great, weren’t they?
Tom Shkolnik: Yeah, and they were worried about it. They said, ‘You should come home!’ It was in Haifa in Israel and so all these old women came over to me and they were like, ‘You should come home, enough of this London nonsense! It’s miserable!’ [Laughs] Maybe they were right, I don’t know. It was a funny experience.
The Comedian Film Page | The Comedian Review
THE COMEDIAN IS OUT MAY 31