Little Ashes Promotional Blitz

With so many new and exciting clips (need we mention the trailer's premiere?) we are beginning a distribution of our own exclusives. A few weeks ago, we promised you more excitement from Raindance, the film festival where Little Ashes made its initial debut. Sam, an LA Administrative Team member who saw Little Ashes, twice, and who also had the amazing opportunity to meet and interview the filmmakers and actors at Raindance, first shared with us her review and her experience at Raindance, and now she shares her interviews.

With that, we now launch a series of exclusive interviews from the cast and crew of Little Ashes. First off, we establish the series with a Q & A from Little Ashes director, Paul Morrison. There's still more to come, so check back soon!

Can't wait for later and need your Little Ashes fix? Head over to the main tMF site for an in-depth, four-part series focusing specifically on Little Ashes, including more interviews!! 
 

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Today we’ve had a little screening upstairs for UK distributors, I’m going to go meet and greet when they come out of the movie – and hopefully they will all have loved it and are going to be fighting one another for the right to distribute it in the UK (laughs).

 

(laughs) As many as possible! It would be nice if it would cross over from being an art movie, because I think there is a lot in it for young people, so it could cross over – Robert will probably help with that! (laughs)

 

Yea that would be great.

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The other thing we’re doing today is filming and being interviewed for the DVD extras, the EPK (Electronic Press Kit).

Gosh that’s a difficult question. I think your job as a director is to tell a really good story, so your job starts when you work with the writer to hone the script. To make sure every scene is working, make sure there is no dialogue that doesn’t belong. That the movie as a whole has a rhythm to it, with the highs and the lows, and that it is coherent. So that’s your first job. Then you have all kinds of arguments with the producers about what they want to cut out of the script because it’s too expensive, and we don’t have the money to shoot it! So you try and figure out other ways of maybe achieving the same thing, combining scenes for example and working with the writer as well. They really are your main jobs.

 

 

No not really. Well, it would have been nice to see Salvador in a train going to Cadaques, and Lorca in a train going to Andalusia. You know the spiritual homes of the two main characters are at opposite ends of Spain and they actually have a lot of significance in the movie, on who they were, their identities and the landscape. So yea I would have liked to have a train (laughs). But we couldn’t afford one. As it is it’s probably fine because train shots just waste seconds in movies (laughs) might as well just get on with the film.

 

 

Well in the period I described to you, when you’re honing the script, I don’t do too much research. I like my head to be clear, to think about the drama and the writing of the story. (I do more) afterward, when I’m going to be asked loads of questions by really smart actors (laughs) - particularly Robert, who’s very very smart. Every actor is different, some just work from the page some like to do a lot of research. For me it was important that the actors weren’t mimicking the characters, particularly with Dali where there is a lot of media and footage and people have an idea about him in their heads – a caricature of Dali. These were young guys and it was very important that they act from their hearts rather than their heads.

 

 

(laughs) yea it makes me feel over responsible to get the facts right having a documentary background, but also these are Spanish icons... its the same as (a non English actor) playing Shakespeare.

 

 

Oh God!

 

History rather than a portrayal if that makes it easier...
 
Well being a film maker Bunuel has always been a bit of a hero for me, I think they are all really creative in their own way.  Because Lorca was very much working from the heart and the soul I feel closer to him.  I feel more of an affinity for him than Dali who focused and explored more of the mind.  Though I wouldn't want to talk in terms of favorites (laughs)

 

Well partly we chose Barcelona because it's better preserved - the buildings from the period the movie is set- than Madrid.  We also shot in Cadaques where the Dali family had their summer home.  To me Cadaques, the landscape of Cadaques, was Dali's spiritual home.  It has this weird volcanic rocks, well actually they're not volcanic but you see these rocks crop up in Dali's paintings and you think that they come from his imagination but actually they are this region.  Some of the rocks look like strange birds and animals, which we see in the film.

 

 

Well sex scenes are always difficult to shoot (laughs)
 
Uncomfortable difficult or technically? (laugh)
 
(laugh) uncomfortable and technically difficult!
 
Errr ok so do I want to know why they are technically difficult? 
 
Because you're dealing with something that is very personal and intimate so you need that (feeling) but you also have to reduce it.  You need to keep the spontaneity but at some level you have to reduce it to an exercise.  You'll see when you see the movie, it'll answer the question.... (laughs) and we weren't paying the actors enough to reveal too much.

 

 

Well there's this scene where Dali and Lorca are swimming in Cadaques which is just un-utterably beautiful. Though it wasn't beautiful to shoot (laughs) we shot a lot of it in a smelly tank in Madrid but it looks absolutely beautiful in the film, so that's one of my favourite scenes.  And actually the sex scene which I just described is one of my favourites - they have a rawness about them.

 

 

We had two weeks for rehearsal which wasn't bad for a movie.  I have a house in the South of France and I took Rob and Javier down, and my family was there, and they began to relate to their characters and the story.  And then we went back to Barcelona.  I don't really expect the performance to come together in rehearsal.  It's time for everyone to find out what each scene is about and look inside each character so when we get on the set the groundwork has been done for them to create the characters.  I don't expect them to be finished.

 

 

I'm doing one, Charlotta, about a Jewish woman who was exiled to the South of France.  It's about coming to terms with what happens to her.  She falls in love, so it's a story about a young woman finding herself.

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