Creative Cape Town

We chat to the director of the short film Sweetheart

CCT: You’ve mentioned a ’dry spell’ preceding the shooting of Sweetheart . How did the sudden opportunity to be freely creative affect your professional decisions on set?

Michael : It was a dry spell in terms of shooting a project I really wanted to. I had been doing jobs for money and doing a lot of development with Sean Drummond on feature film projects, but I was just getting tired of playing so many films through my head and doing all the development work without actually shooting them. So at the beginning of the year we had some money and I had a lot of energy ready to burn, so I did. Sweetheart is quite a creative mix-up for me. It was important to make it stylized and conceptual, because there was nobody to stop us, but at the same time, it’s important to us that people see us as storytellers and filmmakers. So basically finding the medium between rad ideas, and a film people can watch, relate to and go on a journey with.
Also with a film like this (or how I am in general), I didn’t want the creative side to jump out too much. It’s easy to make it flashy and throw crazy ideas in, where the audience is going ‘wow, that’s clever/cool’, but that’s not what a films about.
‘Freely creative’, for me is just making something I’d really want to watch. The hard part about directing for me, is that there are a lot of ideas flying around from all the people you work with on a project, and that’s so important, but you can’t end up with a jumble of ideas that dilute what the film needs to be. The difference between something that works in the film and something that doesn’t, can be very small.

CCT : Film making is collaborative, yet the director’s role is .. well.. directive! How did you find interpreting a screenplay still in process (when you first started shooting)? Did it free you up, or were you concerned about the ultimate outcome of working with a solid idea that hadn’t been concluded yet?

Michael : Well it was definitely concluded, just not detailed yet (because Sean had to do it very quickly). It was only a section of the final scene that wasn’t written (We would never shoot that much in the dark). I knew what was going to happen, but the finer details that Sean was still working on hadn’t been finalized. The dialogue and beats/moments in the scene weren’t there, so I couldn’t shot list it and the actors couldn’t rehearse. So no it doesn’t ‘free me up’, it stresses me out, because I like to plan things out well, even if it’s just in my head. Once I’ve figured out what I think is important about the scene for me, then it can change from there, be it the way we are going to shoot it or the way the scene plays.
You could never start making a film without knowing what the conclusion is, or all the important story points for that matter. Sean would never start writing a script before he was clear what the importance of everything he wrote was. The point of your story has to weave through the whole film.

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We also chatted to the rest of the Sweetheart team. The main story will show you the way.