Academy Award winner James Marsh (“Man on Wire” and “The Theory of Everything”) chatted about directing his new film “Dance First.”
It stars Gabriel Byrne, Fionn O’Shea, Aidan Gillen, Maxine Peake, and Sandrine Bonnaire.
Synopsis of the new movie
The synopsis is: Literary genius Samuel Beckett lived a life of many parts: Parisian bon vivant, WWII Resistance fighter, Nobel Prize-winning playwright, philandering husband, recluse. Despite all the adulation that came his way, he was a man acutely aware of his own failings.
Titled after Beckett’s famous ethos Dance first, think later, the film is a sweeping account of the life of this 20th-century icon.
Magnolia Pictures is releasing the film in the United States on August 9th, and it will then premiere on VOD on August 16th.
‘Dance First’
On being a part of this project, he said, “It was a very interesting experience. For me, it started in the pandemic when I got the script.”
“So, the script came at a time when we were all cut off from each other, and we were all in our little bubbles, which is the condition of many of Beckett’s characters, so it felt interesting in that regard,” he explained.
“The experience of reading it at that time was interesting and then going back to Beckett’s work, it felt to me that Beckett had caught something that now felt even more true than it was when he wrote it, especially since he would put his characters in very absurd situations,” he elaborated.
“That’s the land I found myself in somewhat in the present zeitgeist with things that seemed so absurd, and yet nobody seemed to be regarding the absurdity,” he said.
“Beckett’s plays and work are premised on that idea, especially since the characters are put in situations without acknowledging how ridiculous the situations actually are, and they really spoke to me when I read the script in 2021,” he elaborated.
“Then, it became a question of finding the right actor to do this and pull this off,” he admitted. “Gabriel Byrne came to my mind very quickly when I read the script, and he was the only person I wanted to do this film with.”
“If Gabriel said ‘yes,’ I would do it, if he said ‘no,’ I would not do this project. It was either him or nobody. Eventually, I got Gabriel on a Zoom call and we talked for a long time. The right casting is key,” he said.
“We both committed at the same time,” he acknowledged. “Then, it became a dialogue between us to make this film work between us as collaborators. It was a very small budget, so we had to go to Budapest instead of Paris because we couldn’t afford to film it in Paris.”
“That had its own challenges, and it helped me decide on black and white. I felt I could sell the locations better in black and white in Budapest,” he noted.
“Also, the world of Beckett is black and white, and the famous portraits of him are black and white. I felt like the world should be in black and white somehow, so I chose to do it that way for those reasons,” he explained.
“Black and white is a very interesting medium,” he said. “It’s a medium that we rediscovered in the last 20 years. There have been some great black and white films.”
“That was a choice that I think helped the film look a bit more classy than it might have done with our low budget in color. It has an unusual feel to it for that reason,” he acknowledged.
“Then, we assembled a cast, that for me, was a wonderful cast to work with,” he said. “I’ve worked with Aidan Gillen before, who plays James Joyce in the film, and I’ve worked with Maxine Peake, who is a British actress, who plays Beckett’s mistress Barbara in the second half of the film.”
Marsh continued, “I also cast a brilliant French actress Sandrine Bonnaire, and I thought she was amazing as Suzanne. I was so utterly shocked, thrilled and delighted when she said ‘yes’ to do this. It became a very good ensemble cast, and then it was about making the film the best we could in Budapest on a really small budget.”
“The budget for this film was smaller than my first feature film, which I made in 2004,” he admitted. “Even though that was a low budget movie, this one had even less of a budget.”
‘The Theory of Everything’
Marsh directed British actor Eddie Redmayne in “The Theory of Everything,” which won him a “Best Actor” Oscar for playing Stephen Hawking.
On directing “The Theory of Everything,” Marsh said, “That was a biographical story about an iconic person. Steven’s life story was so interesting, and so emotionally complex.”
“In ‘The Theory of Everything,’ we couldn’t get into the Theoretical Physics part of his life because that would have been too abstract, and we wouldn’t have been able to understand it either,” he expressed.
“Also, we couldn’t use much of Beckett’s work in ‘Dance First’ because of copyright issues so we had to represent it in other kind of ways with shorthand and with a brief glimpse of a play in one part of the film,” he noted.
Success
Regarding his definition of the word success, Marsh said, “I’m not sure I would call myself successful. I am still waiting for it. Success for a filmmaker is being able to make a new film; it’s that simple.”
“If you make a film that people like and people go to to see, then you usually make another one; that’s success,” he said. “As a working filmmaker, success is being able to make the next film.”
Closing thoughts on ‘Dance First’
For viewers and fans, he remarked about “Dance First,” “Beckett’s ideas are very absurd, and he gets that very well. It’s not an intellectual film at all; it’s a dramatic film about a very interesting life of a writer who wrote these famous, monumental and radical plays but had a fascinating and adventurous life in parallel with his work.”
“The main thing is to tell a good story, and for people to enjoy that story of someone they might not know about, and also to enjoy the acting performances. There is some really good acting in this film from some great actors,” he acknowledged.
“I want people to be surprised and entertained with this film, and perhaps it gives them something to think about as well,” he concluded.
To learn more about British director and filmmaker James Marsh, check out his IMDb page.
