Benny Loves Killing is a film about many things: it's about those who are lost, about how obsession with cinema bleeds into everything, dreams, desires, family, aspirations, and about the single-minded pursuit of a goal above all else. In many ways the film plays out like a Rorschach print, and each viewer brings their own meaning to everything. Previously we've been very clear about who the good and who the bad people are, but I think we're less sure of this now. Or it's more difficult to answer this confidently. I think we see both good and bad qualities inside ourselves, and this question of 'what kind of person are we?' is currently very difficult to answer. At least, it should be. In the Pre-Production of the film the Producer, Nick Jones, put an interesting question to me: what if you were judged for one day of your life, in isolation, outside of everything else you did? That was something that very much came to the fore in Benny Loves Killing. We only see Benny for the running time of the film, and yet we make a number of judgement calls about her. We make these judgement calls all the time, without knowing the whole story, and that's perhaps something we ought to think about more carefully.
I was writing a number of
films for other clients, all with male leads, and I asked one client
what he thought of the idea of changing the lead in his script into a
woman. I thought it could give everything a freshness
that I was looking for. He came at me with a number of reductive
reasons: she'd have to get pregnant at some stage, have problems with
her boyfriend, etc. I didn't understand this. The idea that a woman in a
story is controlled by her biology. As a result I
decided to create a drama with a woman at the centre where she has as
much freedom as a male character. Once the first step was made it was
easy to start populating the entire world with women who break the norm
of what female characters are allowed to do in
cinema.
As well as that, we decided
to rewrite the rules of cinematic grammar. If we were going to address
gender and ask people to rethink their assumptions, then it seemed
necessary to shoot and edit the film in a way that
was also against the norm.
The manifesto is just what we
need right now. Access to filmmaking has never been easier, but it
would be a mistake to take this and to continue the same style that has
been followed for the last 100 years. What we
need now is an underground that puts freshness, spontaneity, and
difference at the centre of what it does.
