‘Enys Men’: Director Mark Jenkin Talks ‘Bait,’ Robert Bresson & His Upcoming Time Travel Movie - Page 2 of 2

Does your personal relationship with Mary strengthen the director-actor relationship in terms of knowing what the other wants?
Yeah. She knows exactly what I want, and I know exactly what she can do. And sometimes we have to remind each other of that. I have to remind her of what she’s capable of, and sometimes she has to remind me of how uncompromising I’m going to be. I might ask her to do something, and she’ll say, Are you sure? Is that too on the nose? Because she’s not afraid to question me. And so, yeah, it’s a really good relationship. I’ve always said that I could never have made this film if it wasn’t for Mary in that lead role. I can’t imagine anyone else playing that role anymore. But we couldn’t have made it without her. In the time and on the budget we worked within, there needed to be a shorthand. And I’ve got a shorthand between everybody on the crew because we work together all the time, and there’s a shorthand between me and Mary that’s partly because we work together, but partly because we’re partners as well. I’m quite happy to say that it’s not always easy because sometimes domestic things end up being brought onto the set, which obviously can be quite awkward for the rest of the crew if we’re having a bit of a barney about something. But then most of the rest of the cast and crew are very close friends or extended family anyway. It’s a bit of a family affair, which obviously has its positives and negatives, but the positives far outweigh the negatives. And I always said to Mary—because it’s her film, that performance carries the whole film—that what you’ve always got to remember is, if the film is successful, if the film works, it’ll be down to your performance; if the film doesn’t work, it’ll be down to me. I always feel that as a director the actors are not only exposing themselves emotionally in front of the camera, but they also carry the film, and it’s never the actor’s responsibility if the film doesn’t work. Ultimately, they’re not in charge of the destiny of the film. So I was really keen for Mary, as she was going to be right in the spotlight as this very singular central character, just let her know that she didn’t bear the responsibility of the success of the film; but if it did work, then it would be down to her, which is a bit of a paradox, but that makes sense to me.

You’ve mentioned before that Robert Bresson has influenced your work, and just hearing you talk about responsibility reminded me of one of his maxims in Notes on the Cinematographer: “Not artful, but agile”—the idea that there should be no pretense on the part of the artist, that the artistry emerges from the dynamism of the image—which is obviously up to you rather than Mary. Do you think editing is more expressive than any actor can be?
The power of filmmaking is in the edit. At the beginning of the last century, when the Lumières declared moving images dead, after a couple of years doing single shots, it was because no one had thought of cutting two shots together, and suddenly, as soon as that happened [makes an explosion with his hands], and then you add sound to it, and it’s just seismic. Films are always greater than the sum of their parts, but those parts are absolutely essential. You cannot make the film that you want to make unless the actor provides you with those building blocks. If they don’t provide you with those building blocks during the shoot and in the footage, you can make something else in the edit. You’ve heard numerous times about somebody not delivering a performance, so in the edit that character had all of their dialogue removed, and suddenly it made their character more interesting and more ambiguous and it became a much better film because of it. But you can’t plan for that. So if you want to make the version of the film in the edit that you wrote down originally on the paper, it’s essential that the actor gives you that performance; and it’s essential that you enable the actor to give you that performance. You can then elevate it and make it transcendent within the edit. I always think of the way Tarkovsky writes about Bresson and the adulation for Bresson, but then if you listen to what Tarkovsky’s thoughts were about the edit, it was completely at odds with what Bresson said. From what I understand, he thought you can’t create anything within the edit; it’s captured in the moment when you film.

It’s a much more spiritual approach. Bresson was very mechanical.
Yeah, and I think I’m mechanical. I like the spirituality and that transcendent moment within the film, but I think it comes within the edit; I don’t think it comes on the shoot. We had one moment on the shoot when we shot a scene between Ed’s character and Mary’s character, where they try to start the generator together, and it was a physical scene where they were both trying to start the generator and it was a power struggle, with Ed’s character trying to step in to help the little lady start the generator, and she blocks him and starts the generator and emasculates him in this one moment. It’s a sort of male-female power struggle. When we shot it, we all thought, That is brilliant; what a scene. Of course, predictably, it’s the one scene that never made it into the film because it just didn’t sit with the mosaic, fractured, fragmented feel of the rest of the film. It did feel like a bit of filmed theater. Actually, when I think back now, the note I had for Mary and Ed, who do act together and do theater stuff together, I said, You should do a silent play, a physical silent play. So I should’ve known at the time that it wasn’t a bit of film that I could watch; it was a bit of brilliant performance. Actually, I don’t want the complete performance within the shooting; I want to create the complete performance within the edit. And Mary knows what I’m doing. If I say to her when we are walking back to the unit base, Hold on, stop, look to the left of the camera, count to three in your head, then turn around and look over there to where that gatepost is—she won’t know why I’ve said that, but she’ll know that I’ve just had a thought to cut that into a sequence somewhere. Maybe some actors would think, I’m not doing that; there’s no skill, there’s no craft in it. But there are moments like that where it is incredibly mechanical in order to get from A to B, to create whatever atmosphere at the moment.

In an interview you gave a few months ago, you spoke about “power through passivity” in relation to Mary’s performance. That struck me as being, again, quite a Bressonian approach—that the actors are not doing any mimicry, vocal manipulations, or gesturing. Is there a type or degree of expression that you look for from actors, regardless of what character they’re playing?
I think you just see it in the moment; see it down the viewfinder. And for the camera I use, there’s no monitor, so the only person on the set who sees what’s actually going on in the film is me. This means there’s a big pressure on me, so I’m always really concentrating. And I think I always know whether I’ve got it at that moment. I can’t tell you what it is because it’s different for every moment, but I follow my gut on all of those things. Sometimes I’ll turn around to other people around the camera and say, Do you think we’ve got it, and they’ll just go [shrugs shoulders], No idea. Sometimes it’s too much. Trying not to do anything becomes self-conscious in itself and becomes performance. So there’s not a consistency to it. But then, I don’t think there’s a consistency to anything. Being inconsistent is very human. I strive for consistency, knowing that I’ll never get it. I don’t try to be inconsistent, but I don’t obsess about consistency. The other thing is that in Cornwall, we’ve got a real tradition of theater here, location theater, promenade theater, theater out in a landscape, which needs to be big; performance needs to be big; gesture needs to be big. So if you’ve got an actor like Mary, for example, or Ed, they’ve got it all going on in their head, they’re inhabiting those characters, and they want to communicate—and in theater,2w they do that physically. One of my mantras, which probably came from Bresson, is ‘Think of the camera as a magnifying glass’—so I get them to do less and less physically, knowing that the internal stuff is going on, and it has to come out. If you can’t get it out physically, it comes out the eyes; and if you’ve got that face filling a screen and it’s thirty feet tall, then suddenly that’s quite compelling.

Enys Men” has been compared to many films—“The Shining,” “The Wicker Man,” “Don’t Look Now,” “Meshes of the Afternoon”—but I thought it most closely resembled Tarkovsky’s “Solaris,” with the Volunteer as Kelvin and the island as the planet that realizes your innermost fantasies and traumas. But there’s one key difference: in “Solaris,” when the specter of Kelvin’s dead wife appears, his first action is to try and get rid of her; but in “Enys Men,” the Volunteer doesn’t seem to be as perturbed by her hallucinations. Do you see “Enys Men” as a counterpoint to Tarkovsky’s film in any way?
“Solaris” had a massive impact on me. “Solaris” was the first Tarkovsky film that I saw; but it’s probably the film of his that I’ve seen the least. But it was my sort of gateway into Tarkovsky. It’s like with Bresson: the first Bresson I saw was “Lancelot du Lac.” And I kind of forget about that film. The opening shot of “Enys Men,” with the radio, is a rip off of the beginning of “L’Argent,” with the cash dispenser—not in terms of subject or anything, but just the composition. So I always think “L’Argent” is my big influence. I don’t think there’s any other director—besides maybe Jean Vigo—who made their best film last. That’s the genius of Bresson: he was getting better and better and better. I do think that’s his best film, and I think that’s the one that always influences me. But then I think “Lancelot du Lac” is a massive influence because it was the first one of his that I saw. I have a really weird relationship with “The Shining” in that I love it, but I never enjoy watching it. The first time I saw it, the thing that scared the life out of me was the photo at the end—and there’s a nod to that in “Enys Men,” when she sees herself on the lifeboat; I think I was trying to evoke that feeling that I had at the end of “The Shining.” There’s no direct influence from “Don’t Look Now,” for example, but then Nic Roeg, just his existence, his body of work, influences me. And “Meshes of the Afternoon” and stuff like that—that’s just a seminal work. You can’t watch that without the baggage, hype, and reputation it’s got, so you watch those kinds of films in a very different way, so they become reference points.

What projects are you working on at the moment? Am I right in thinking your next film is set in the 1990s?
Yeah, it’s set twenty-five, thirty years ago. But as we go further on, without making it, the period comes with us. It’s not necessarily the period that’s significant; it’s the time distance that’s significant. When I started writing it during the first lockdown in 2020, it was set in 1990. And now, what are we, 2023? So I’m writing it now, and it’s set in ’93. By the time we make it, it might be ’95, ’96. But, yeah, it’s a time travel film. It’s set in the present day, and there’s a sort of time slip back to twenty-eight, twenty-nine years before. It’s almost like it sits somewhere between “Enys Men” and “Bait” in terms of form and content. It’s a much more linear narrative, but the linear narrative is complicated by a time slip. But it’s much more of an ensemble piece; it’s got a bigger cast; it’ll be a bigger endeavor.

Is the budget bigger?
Yeah. At the moment, I’m musing over how I work with a bigger cast, how we work, and what compromises might need to be made. I’m quite far on in the writing of it, so I’m beginning to write now while thinking about how it’s going to be made; whereas, in 2020, it was great because I got this commission to write the screenplay, and my agent said, Just write it as if you’re not even going to direct it, just write the film you want to see, don’t think about how it’s going to be made. And it was straightforward to do that because it was the pandemic, life was day-to-day; I never thought, Oh, this will get made soon—all the cinemas were closed. And so it was big, but it was a bit flabby because I didn’t have any restrictions. And now, the idea of actually getting around to shooting it—and probably shooting it this time next year—suddenly meant I had to cut all the flab out, and it’s becoming much leaner, and it feels much more like a film we’re going to make in a similar way, but with a bigger cast and bigger scale to it.

Have you given yourself the same amount of creative control over it?
The big thing that we won’t have is final cut. Through the process of having final cut on “Enys Men,” which was a rarity, I’ve realized that I’m not bothered about final cut. Ultimately, I had final cut, but I didn’t use that privilege because the financiers, execs, and everyone were on the same page and working in the same way. That’s a big difference. There’ll be more money, so there will be more responsibility to the funders, but I’m quite happy with that because we’ve got such a good relationship with the execs. I did think, Oh, I’m going to have to change the way I work, I’m going to have to use a DOP, get a script editor in, we’re going to have to work with an editor, I’m not going to be able to operate the camera and all that kind of stuff. But the thing is, the people who are investing in me and collaborating with me, they’ve not come to me fresh; they know how I make my films. So they are the ones who are saying, Why are you talking about changing the way you work? I said to Denzel, We’re going to have shoot sync sound, aren’t we? He said, No way are we going to shoot sync sound! And I was like, Really? And he said, That’s your thing, man! There’s pressure to change the way that I’m working, but what’s come as a surprise to me is that it’s come from me; it’s everybody else who is saying, Keep being weird.

“Enys Men” opens Friday, March 31, via Neon.