CAROL MORLEY INTERVIEW (DOP RESEARCH)

I have previously written up a review on the Documentary Dreams of a Life. After researching this documentary I tried to contact the creator Carol Morley through her agent. She replied and happily offered to answer 10 questions. With Carol being a Director, Producer and Self Shooter, me, Jemma and Victoria all put forward questions which we wanted to ask in relation to the documentary. Mine were:

- Why did you choose centre frame interviews all with the same background?
- What made you decide to use reconstruction in this documentary?
- How did you plan out all the visuals for this documentary including style of
interviews, archives and reconstruction

Carol explained that the choice of background was in relation to the story. She explained:

"The background is a map of London, taken from the AZ, and re-coloured. Joyce had lived all over London, and lived in London all her life, and eventually got “lost” in it.  Place felt like an important part of her story. Place, losing her place in the world, falling through the cracks perhaps, seemed a major component of the story that the film was going to tell." (Carol Morley)

The choice of background wasn't anything like I'd suggested in my initial write up on the documentary. However, I did get it right that it kept everyone connected, but the style of this being done really goes to how deep the story is. Carol explained that when you see an interviewee in their own environment you will read into the elements that surround them and this wasn't what she wanted, she wanted the main focus to be Joyce and their relationships with her as all you can go off is what they say and their body language.

I asked about the interviewees talking directly to the camera and why this was a choice. Carol explained

"They all talk directly to camera ( I positioned myself very close to the lens - unlike Errol Morris who uses a projection of himself on a mirror in front of the lens to get a similar effect) because I wanted them to have close eye lines to the camera, and therefore the people watching the film. I gave each participant a frame size in advance based on how well they knew Joyce. So the MP/ Journalists have the wider frame and Martin the close frame. The frame never changed during their interview. I didn’t want a sudden zoom in to accompany something emotional, thus signaling the emotional content, so I used prime lenses, with a fixed frame size." (Carol Morley)

Carol really looked into the relationships of these characters with Joyce and told that through the camera work. Journalists who would have only heard of Joyce via printing her story in the paper getting a wide shot as there's no real history together or emotional. Yet Martin gets the close frame as he was in a relationship with Joyce and there's more history together and much more emotion to his interview as well. Also the style of the interview is literally them telling the audience the story of Joyce which clearly is the main aim for this documentary as nothing was known about her when the story was released in the paper.

Finally, I questioned how Carol had planned out the visuals for this documentary. Carol first explained the choice of camera:

"I wanted a different feel to the various aspects of the film. So the reconstruction is shot on 16mm (very occasionally super-8), which in itself, because of the grain alone, carries with it the idea of how we are used to seeing the past. The interviews were shot on digital video, and then the Bedsit was shot on a high end RED camera to give almost a hyper real quality to it – so that in a way is the “realest”, in terms of being coded real, of the elements!" (Carol Morley)

Clearly the choice of camera had clearly been thought through. The choice of shooting on 16mm/Super-8 to fit with the style of showing the audience the past but then moving onto shooting digitally and giving each of the interviewee's a different frame size in relation to their relationship with Joyce when she was alive tells the story of their relationship without the audience realising 

Carols choice of visuals for this documentary clearly won't match with what I'm planning but she went into so much detail and really looked into the story of the characters she was interviewing but also who Joyce was and how she wanted to tell her story and being her back almost, through the documentary. This has really made me consider how I'm to do my own visuals in our documentary.