Phil’s Take

From the interview by Make It In Brixton’s Charlie Waterhouse & Margherita Poggiali, Make It Move: Phil Dunn

Charlie: So, what is About about?

Phil: Ha ha! Well, that’s kind of part of it. One of my other things is writing poetry and like Box Office Smash is a play on words, About is a similar thing. The title unlocks some of what we’re trying to do in the film, which is looking at a word, and the various meanings of it. It’s a taxi ride home, and the word Uber in German means  ‘getting around’. So there’s a sense of ‘getting about’ in that. But more importantly, it’s this conversation in the back of the car, and who has the full picture between two women and a person they know in common. It turns out they have a very different idea of who the host of this party is that they’ve just been to. Who has the full picture? That’s the tagline for the film because they both know him, and they both have experience of him, and yet it’s very different. 

So, they’re talking about this guy and yet their views about him are very different. 
…
Margherita: I was reminded of Jim Jarmusch’s Nights on Earth. Was it an inspiration? Also how important is Brixton to you as a filmmaker? 

Phil: Actually the main inspiration was Taxi Driver with DeNiro – it was those late-night streetlights, the dark goings-on, the late-night jazz vibes of the streets. For me, that’s kind of what I looked at a lot looking when looking at the visual treatment of it and directing it. 

Brixton? For me it’s in Taxi Driver when you hear him talking about the streets and all the people are out at night and all the things that are going on and Brixton can feel like that. Like at night you drive down Coldharbour Lane, and there’s people having some of the best nights of their lives and there’s people having some of the worst nights of their lives and everything in between, and I wanted some of that to be in the film.

Margherita: I know this is just a short film, but it seemed to me that it gave quite a strong view of women in a sense of being constantly sort of misinterpreting men one way or another? Or being swayed by them?

Phil: Well, I wanted to have female leads in it. And those two actors, Ellie and Tash, are friends of mine and they’re very good so I just thought it would be great to work with them, so that was in the mix. I wasn’t trying necessarily to say something about female relationships with men. It felt like more of a general human point. I mean, even as we look ourselves in the mirror we still don’t understand or see ourselves as other people see us, because it’s the wrong way round. 

So, you know, who actually knows anybody really that well? And then it comes back to how much do you know yourself really?