Alice Lowe’s sophomore directorial feature, Timestalker, which she wrote, directed and stars in, is out now through Level 33 Entertainment. She made her screenwriting debut with Sightseers (2012), directed by Ben Wheatley, in which she also starred. Prevenge (2016) was Alice’s directorial feature debut; she wrote, starred in and directed it while heavily pregnant. The film opened Venice Critics’ Week and screened at Toronto, LFF, Sitges, Rotterdam, SXSW and AFI before going on general release in the U.K. and U.S. to critical and audience acclaim. Alice’s other work includes three series of her sketch show Alice’s Wunderland for BBC Radio 4, several short films, and TV and film appearances such as Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, Paddington, Hot Fuzz and Horrible Histories. More recently she has starred in BAFTA-nominated U.K. indie The Ghoul, Adult Life Skills and Locke. (Photo by Simon Webb.)
Three Great Things is Talkhouse’s series in which artists tell us about three things they absolutely love. To mark the current release in theaters of Alice Lowe’s new fantasy comedy Timestalker, starring Lowe, Aneurin Bernard and Nick Frost, the British writer-director-actor shared some of the things she loves most. — N.D.
Kate Bush
Is it too conventional to choose Kate Bush? Should I make it more experiential, like listening to Kate Bush while I’m stroking velvet or rubbing lycra? (Maybe in the noughties, when I was more likely to wear lycra?)
Anyway, when I was young, my sister bought the Kate Bush compilation album The Whole Story and we used to listen to it in the car. There was no YouTube or anything like that, so I didn’t know what she looked like or about all of her weird jumping around and stuff, I just liked the music. And then as I got older and I discovered her old music videos, I realized, Wow, she was a visual artist as well, and that had a huge impact on me. It was so refreshing to me as a young teenager to see this crazy woman from the ’70s who was incorporating movement and music and dance and theater and all these different things into her work. And as someone who considers myself a jack of no trades and a master of no trades, that was just so exciting to me! I do a little bit of everything and it appealed to me that you can dabble in all these different art forms.
Kate Bush is still an important part of my life, although she doesn’t phone as often as she used to! (Pick up the phone, Kate! Pick up the phone!) I don’t listen to her music all the time, because I think that you get too used to stuff when it’s been your constant companion for a while. But I will dip in, and I make my children listen to her music and watch her videos. I’m trying to force them to like what I like, to the point where they actually hate it! I’m always trying to make them watch Labyrinth, and they’re like, “No.” I tell them, “You’ll like it if you watch it properly.” To me, Kate Bush is like David Lynch. She’s a lighthouse artist: if I feel I’m losing my way a little bit and I need to be reminded of the original tenets about being an artist — that it’s not all about money and algorithms and cynical depressing things — then I will revisit her work.
Labyrinth and Dark Crystal
When I was a nerdy teen, I used to sit alone in my bedroom trying (and failing) to draw with a pencil like Brian Froud, who was the conceptual designer for the Jim Henson films Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. That was a big part of my growing up. I loved watching weird puppets on TV and how they were created; I watched all the Making Of featurettes for stuff like Labyrinth and was amazed how they did it and was just fascinated with the analog nature of the process. I’m so interested in things that have the imprint of a human hand on them, because no CGI creatures look as good as those puppets.
My love of this kind of film started with Dark Crystal, which I saw in the cinema at the age of about four, because my mum was a hippie chick who would take me to see weird, frightening fairy tales at a young age. I’m really glad that she did, though. I remember when I came out of the cinema, I was in awe. I could not believe what I had seen. Fairies were real and there was this incredible world I hadn’t known about before, so I became obsessed with Dark Crystal and had a hunger for more stuff like it.
I have always loved the fantasy genre, but I don’t think it has been properly revived. Part of the reason I made my new feature, Timestalker, is that it doesn’t seem like there are many fantasy films anymore, despite that genre being healthy in other mediums like comic books and graphic novels. There’s lots of obsessives out there, but there aren’t films being made to cater to them.
When I was young, those Brian Froud fantasy creatures really blew my mind, and I think they influenced me even in terms of performance. For a long time, I just wanted to play goblins and other mythical creatures. A few years ago, my agent told me, “They’re doing a TV series of Lord of the Rings and want to know if you are available.” I would have loved to be in it, but I’d just had a baby, so I couldn’t relocate to New Zealand. But I kept wondering, What role did they have me in mind for? I bet it was a female goblin. That would have been great. Or maybe it was an elf queen or a really ugly orc’s daughter. Except I’m too old to be an orc’s daughter, so I’d have to be an orc’s grandmother! My childhood self would have loved that. I was the only person at school who agreed to play the witch in Hansel and Gretel. All the other little girls said, “Oh no, I don’t want to play that,” but I was like, “Yeah, all right.” It was my destiny.
Layers
Sometimes I’ll get obsessed about one idea, and then I’ll talk and think about it a lot. At the moment, that thing is layers; I think layers are important. And for me, this comes back to David Lynch. When he died, I started looking back on his philosophy of art and his methodology and realized that I knew all this stuff, but I’d forgotten it and stopped applying it in my own work. There’s a video of him talking about how there is the surface … and then you get smaller and smaller and you go down and down — which all connects with transcendental meditation. It kind of blows my mind.
At the moment, I’m living in Stroud, where you can see the hills all the time. If you get mist in London, you look out of your window and you just see a grey that blocks everything else out, which is really depressing. But if it’s misty in Stroud and you look out of your window, you’ll see a hill, then some mist, you’ll see some houses, then some more mist, you’ll see some trees, then some birds, and then some other houses, and then you’ll see some gardens, and then you’ll see a train track. It’s all in layers, and the mist makes everything beautiful. You can see all the different layers of life and all the infrastructures and how everything works together, and it’s really beautiful. That was quite a deep observation! When I first had it, I thought, God, I’m so clever. (In 10 years time, I will read this and think, What a dick!)
But that perspective has helped me a lot, because storytelling is all about what’s beneath the surface, what’s under the layers. Timestalker is about a deluded person who has added a layer to her life, because she’s not interested in reality. Anyone with a romantic viewpoint doesn’t want to dig into reality. That’s too frightening. They want to lay some lace and frills and a pink filter on top; they don’t really want to see what’s underneath.
I’m writing a new film now and what’s interesting is this one’s going to involve digging, which is always a bit frightening. I’m not David Lynch and I don’t really want to make a David Lynch film, but I do want to make a film that’s truly layered. When you work in this industry, you start to conform a little bit. You’ll cater not to your own imagination – or your instincts or intuition – but to the pressures of the market. Those pressures are real, but I really want to keep making things that are completely my own.
