Pai Takavarasha talks to Will Sharpe about his BAFTA-nominated film Black Pond, making your first film and starting small…
How did you start off in filmmaking?
Tom (co-creator) and I met at uni. The only films we made at university were kind of trailers and sketches to put online to publicise stage shows. We mainly did comedy, comedy sketch shows and comedy plays and stuff and then after we’d graduated, Tom started off as a runner and then made his own music videos and gradually made his way up a production company till he was making his own music videos and commercials. I started getting work as an actor, we sort of stayed in touch, we had worked on projects together in particular this short film called ‘Cockroach’ which I think is on YouTube somewhere. Then from there we’d learnt a bit and moved onto working on a feature film which was shot the December before last.
You told me you started off doing trailers and short films. Was it your intention to start off small?
I guess, yeah. They were both experiments, Tom had the camera most of the time and I was in it a lot of the time. That was just to see what happens with basically nothing. We tried to make a short film and you know it took some work but at the end of it, it wasn’t too bad.
If I was watching it, it didn’t feel like I’d notice particularly that there was less that had gone into it than more expensive short films, and so we tried to transfer that philosophy to making a feature film and, with that, you need to make certain allowances. If you’re hiring professional actors you need to pay them; if you’re hiring crew you need to pay them. To a certain amount we called in some favours and we haggled but it was more about, ‘We don’t actually need this so let’s get rid of that, we don’t actually need that so let’s get rid of that’.
The script was really great and quite original. Where did that storyline come from?
It’s very, very loosely based off a play we wrote at uni. But as we sort of turned it into a film it changed so much, and the play had references to a castle and helicopters and all this stuff that we just would’ve never pulled off. Another reference we had that was quite useful, Tom found this story online about a guy who would mow his neighbour’s lawns and paint their sheds and stuff but without asking, so he was kind of being nice but it was really creepy and that was a really useful reference point for the character of Blake who is really polite. He’s very well spoken, he tries to be nice, but there’s just something about him that makes you feel a little bit uneasy. I guess it is a comedy.
If you were to tell someone your plans before you made the film do you think they would have agreed with the way you went about it?
No, no way. My advice would genuinely be… it sounds like the least helpful advice you can give but… just to do it yourself; just learn everything yourself. It’s the old cliché – you have to touch the frying pan to know not to touch a hot frying pan. If someone says don’t touch the frying pan you don’t know that you shouldn’t touch a frying pan until you’ve touched it. So you just learn so much from the job and you have to make your own mistakes. I think that’s how it works, if you wait around for someone to give you £1 million its probably not gonna to happen, to be honest.
Black Pond is a black comedy about a family accused of murder after a guest dies at their dinner table. It will be showing with a Q&A with directors Will Sharpe and Tom Kingsley, at the Future Film Festival on Sunday 19th, February at BFI Southbank.
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