Wild Hon­ey Pie! direc­tor Jamie Adams on the art of improvisation

On a sun­ny day in Cardiff, 20 peo­ple are hud­dled togeth­er in a park, mov­ing cam­eras and trucks when nec­es­sary to make way for bikes and jog­gers between each take. The qui­et micro-com­mu­ni­ty is try­ing to deci­pher the con­ver­sa­tions tak­ing place five feet away, as Tom Cullen directs a scene for his first fea­ture-length film, Pink Wall, star­ring Tatiana Maslany and Jay Duplass. Cap­tur­ing the frag­ment­ed and flu­id dynam­ic of a rela­tion­ship, the film delves into the raw moments that shape and define a cou­ple over sev­er­al years.

From a script with no writ­ten dia­logue, Cullen is shap­ing the dynam­ic of the sto­ry with his actors through impro­vi­sa­tion. Pink Wall is being pro­duced by Jamie Adams, a fel­low Welsh film­mak­er and improv afi­ciona­do. Since direct­ing his Mod­ern Romance tril­o­gy (Ben­ny & Jolene, A Won­der­ful Christ­mas Time, Black Moun­tain Poets), Adams has made three more ful­ly impro­vised fea­tures in the space of a sin­gle year (Song­bird, Wild Hon­ey Pie!, Bit­ter­sweet Sym­pho­ny). Maybe this promise of spon­ta­neous actor­ly action is how he con­vinced Hol­ly­wood star Cobie Smul­ders to shoot a fea­ture film over five days in south Wales.

“Tom con­cep­tu­alised the sto­ry, but real­ly involved Jay [Duplass] and I in cre­at­ing the char­ac­ters and find­ing the right dynam­ic”, Maslany explains. A week into the shoot, she is enthu­si­as­tic about the uncon­ven­tion­al prac­tice where dia­logue is cre­at­ed in a rehearsal room. ​“It feels like we’re mak­ing the movie with our hands,” she says. ​“You feel a con­nec­tion to it per­son­al­ly, just through the process alone.” Impro­vi­sa­tion helps Cullen build dia­logue and char­ac­ter depth with the actors in rehearsal, which is then chan­nelled into the shoot.

It took the involve­ment of Adams, Cullen’s long­time col­lab­o­ra­tor and now pro­duc­er, to set the ball rolling on Pink Wall. The pair first worked togeth­er on Adams’ third fea­ture, Black Moun­tain Poets, in which Cullen stars along­side bick­er­ing sis­ters played by Dol­ly Wells and Alice Lowe. It’s an impro­vised com­e­dy set against the back­drop of a poet­ry retreat in the Black Moun­tains in Wales. Where impro­vi­sa­tion helps Cullen cap­ture the cred­i­bil­i­ty and strength of sin­cere emo­tion for his upcom­ing dra­ma, Adams uses it to reveal the unpre­dictable humour and imper­fect­ness of every­day life.

Adams worked with scripts on sev­er­al projects before real­is­ing that some­thing felt wrong. ​“I wasn’t par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in what was on the page,” he reveals. ​“To be hon­est, I don’t remem­ber what was on the page. Read­ing the lines, block­ing – it didn’t feel like film to me.” In let­ting go of a pin­point­ed plan imposed by a script, Adams cre­ates an on-set atmos­phere that mir­rors the humour he sees in his favourite films. ​“Peo­ple might call it ​‘reck­less’, but I think it’s just being in the moment, being actu­al­ly true to what’s going on around, and that’s what I real­ly like.”

Adams relies on the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty of his actors to cre­ate a believ­able sit­u­a­tion that mir­rors real­i­ty. ​“The actors don’t have a chance to hide,” he says. ​“I’ve put them in a ridicu­lous sit­u­a­tion, so some­thing nat­u­ral­ly fun­ny will hap­pen.” Cast­ing is espe­cial­ly impor­tant in this sense, as Adams explains. ​“You need a lynch­pin: every­one has a lot of free­dom, but it all goes back to the lynch­pin. The film is seen through their eyes.” Adams’ cur­rent anchor is British actor, mod­el and musi­cian, Suki Water­house, who leads the cast of Bit­ter­sweet Sym­pho­ny as Iris, a strug­gling but pas­sion­ate musician.

When asked what attract­ed her to the project, Water­house instinc­tive­ly replies: ​“fear”. Elab­o­rat­ing, she says, ​“Jamie will cre­ate sce­nar­ios so that you have no idea what’s going on. You’re so uncom­fort­able that you’re actu­al­ly out of your head.” Through impro­vi­sa­tion, Adams is giv­ing actors the cre­ative con­trol that some projects on a big­ger scale don’t allow for. Each per­former is a col­lab­o­ra­tor, shap­ing the film and tak­ing as many risks as every oth­er per­son on set. ​“Despite there being a lot of lim­i­ta­tions, in some weird way you feel incred­i­bly free,” Water­house says.

Smul­ders echoes this sen­ti­ment. ​“It’s ter­ri­fy­ing, but it’s also extreme­ly lib­er­at­ing,” she says of her expe­ri­ence play­ing rock star Joanne in Song­bird, which was shot in Porth­cawl on a shoe­string bud­get using a skele­ton crew and just a basic script out­line. ​“There’s some­thing of a script in place,” she con­tin­ues, ​“but every­thing is up for inter­pre­ta­tion. It was such an amaz­ing expe­ri­ence because you very rarely get the free­dom to do and say what you want, and to be such a part of the cre­ative process.”

Song­bird is avail­able now; Wild Hon­ey Pie! is released in cin­e­mas on 14 June; Bit­ter­sweet Sym­pho­ny is released in cin­e­mas on 28 June.