Car­ol Mor­ley: ​“I could tell straight away that Audrey Amiss was a com­plete­ly fas­ci­nat­ing person”

Con­vic­tion is some­thing the British writer/​director Car­ol Mor­ley pos­sess­es in abun­dance – cer­tain­ly on the evi­dence of her wild fil­mog­ra­phy. Deter­mined to use film to redis­cov­er or revis­it lost places, or to cre­ate a sort of cine-shrine to those she feels have fall­en through the cracks, hers is an excit­ing­ly idio­syn­crat­ic oeu­vre. From laud­ed, con­fes­sion­al debut The Alco­hol Years, to the haunt­ing Dreams of a Life and The Falling, and the plain barmy mys­tic polici­er, Out of Blue, she returns with one of her finest films, pos­si­bly a qua­si-auto­bi­og­ra­phy which explores the lat­ter years of the lit­tle-known north­ern artist, Audrey Amiss.

LWLies: How did you thread the nee­dle between get­ting this screen­writ­ing bur­sary from the Well­come Col­lec­tion to dis­cov­er­ing Audrey Amiss? 

Mor­ley: I got the Well­come screen­writ­ing fel­low­ship. First year it was Jonathan Glaz­er. Then it was Clio Barnard. It was a very open thing. They were encour­ag­ing peo­ple to go in and you didn’t have to have a result. You got mon­ey and you got time and you got access to peo­ple affil­i­at­ed with Well­come as well as the peo­ple at Well­come. In the ini­tial stages, they set up meet­ings with a few peo­ple who were in my area of interest.

And how did you describe that interest? 

Well, I met a psy­chi­a­trist who is based in Cam­bridge, Paul Fletch­er, who spe­cialis­es in Huntington’s Dis­ease but also what the mind is. I found it all very inter­est­ing. He’s actu­al­ly a con­sul­tant on the film. At that point, all I knew when I went into Well­come was that I want­ed to look at stuff. I was attend­ing gov­ern­ment things on facial recog­ni­tion and DNA and all that stuff. Prob­a­bly at some point in my film­mak­ing life, that will all emerge.

You feel you got mate­r­i­al enough for mul­ti­ple films? 

So much. Very lit­tle is known about the mind. Less that the uni­verse in fact. It’s real­ly that whole idea of who we are and what we are. At the time, Well­come said they were about bio­med­ical sci­ence, which I didn’t know what that was. But now they say health and every­thing that affects that. Any­way, what I real­ly want­ed was a first-per­son account of an expe­ri­ence with­in their archive. There was some­one there at the time called Gillian Scoth­ern, who’s now at the BFI, and she was some­one who would link film and TV mak­ers with what Well­come housed. It’s such a vast organ­i­sa­tion, with archive and so much. At one point she was just fir­ing pitch­es at me, and it was over­whelm­ing. And then sud­den­ly, she said, ​‘They have an archive here of a per­son who col­lect­ed the wrap­pers of every­thing she ate every day,’ and I was like, ​‘Hold on…’. She didn’t know her name, so she went to find out. Then, I went into the library and asked them, and they said it was Audrey Amiss. And I just said I would love to look at the scrap book with wrappers.

What did the archive look like when they first brought it to you? 

At that point, all the mate­ri­als were uncat­a­logued. It was all housed in deep stor­age in Cheshire. They bought two box­es of stuff and gave me two hours in a room. I was there all day. In the scrap­book, Audrey had anno­tat­ed the wrap­pers with details of her life and what had hap­pened that day.

How quick­ly did you get a sense that her work was actu­al­ly biographical? 

Straight away. I knew I want­ed to look at more. And I could tell she was com­plete­ly fas­ci­nat­ing as a per­son. So they brought me more stuff. I began to get very acquaint­ed with her and the mate­r­i­al. And at that point I said I’d like to meet the sur­viv­ing mem­bers of her fam­i­ly. I met her nephew and niece in King’s Cross. Those moments are so incred­i­ble, as you feel you’re get­ting clos­er to the per­son. And they were like, ​‘You prob­a­bly know more about Audrey than we do,’ because I’d read so much from a first-per­son account and looked at her paint­ings and pictures.

How did the Well­come come to Audrey’s archive? 

Her niece and nephew inher­it­ed Audrey’s flat in Clapham where she lived for 30 years. When they arrived to take a look, they dis­cov­ered the 50,000 sketch­es, the diaries, the paint­ings, every­thing. They had no idea how much she’d accu­mu­lat­ed or even what she did.

It’s crazy to think that if the wrong per­son had entered that flat, it could’ve all end­ed up in landfill. 

That might have hap­pened even with them who cared. They real­ly didn’t know what to do with all this stuff. At one point it was in a shed. They thought they’d have to throw it away. But then Kate, her niece, was at the school gates pick­ing up her kids, and she men­tioned to anoth­er par­ent about her aunt. And the per­son she was talk­ing to worked at Well­come. Not in any depart­ment that could take on the mate­r­i­al, but she said she’d have a word with a col­league. An archivist went to sur­vey the work to see if it was deemed impor­tant enough to take on. When I saw it in 2015, 2016, every­thing was in box­es and jum­bled up. I remem­ber one box was just every­thing tak­en off of Audrey’s cof­fee table. Her old pass­port was in there, and where you were sup­posed to put occu­pa­tion, she had writ­ten ​‘Typ­ist Artist Pirate King’. As soon as I saw it, I knew that was going to be the title.

Was there any video or film footage of her? 

Not real­ly. Even­tu­al­ly, I got hold of a reel of Super 8 from her sis­ter which was the wed­ding of her broth­er-in-law, John, and there was Audrey on the edge in a dress and a hat. It would have been about eight months after her first break­down, when she was diag­nosed with para­noid schizophrenia.

What about audio?

No audio. But Audrey had left so much of her per­son­al­i­ty behind in her scrap­books and diaries. When her fam­i­ly saw the film, they said it’s uncan­ny how much Mon­i­ca Dolan sounds like Audrey con­sid­er­ing she’d nev­er heard her.

Do you think that maybe this was free­ing for Mon­i­ca? It allowed her to build more of a char­ac­ter than she oth­er­wise would have.

A bit like Joyce Vin­cent from Dreams of a Life, we’ll nev­er know who they real­ly were. It is an inter­pre­ta­tion. But Audrey left so much behind. She was some­one peo­ple would lit­er­al­ly cross the road to avoid – her neigh­bours told me that. But she was also eru­dite, poet­ic and had a vast knowl­edge of things going on in the world. I want­ed to cap­ture that, as well as the per­son you would cross the road to avoid.

It’s refresh­ing to see a film about an artist which doesn’t fol­low the arche­typ­al nar­ra­tive arc.

That took time. I wrote a draft and my agent went, ​‘Car­ol, that’s unfi­nance­able.’ And that wasn’t because Audrey was unknown, it was because of the script. The first draft was where it entire­ly took place inside her flat and the walls would move and you would enter the stu­dio, and there would be these re-enact­ments. This was an idea where Audrey was very aware she was part of a film. That was the unfi­nance­able one. The sec­ond one was more about the process that I’d gone through, but also of the archivists that I was meet­ing. It was par­al­lel sto­ries, where on one side you have an archivist putting togeth­er Audrey’s life, and then Audrey liv­ing her life but being aware there’s some­thing going on. No one felt we could take that one the whole way, but for me, both treat­ments were ways to accom­mo­date Audrey’s mind and the way she saw the world.

When did you jump on this idea of Audrey’s love of travel?

I met a woman named Joyce, the wife of her broth­er-in-law John. She was 90 and has died since. She was like, ​‘err art were bloody awful!’ – from Red­car like. She said, ​‘We ​’ad the Mor­ris Minor and we’d go to the Lake Dis­trict togeth­er and Audrey would make me climb all these hills in this old car.’ I start­ed to envis­age this excite­ment she had for explor­ing the world, because she did go to Chi­na and South Amer­i­ca. She was very intre­pid. I began to exam­ine the notion of return and thought it would be inter­est­ing to con­struct some­thing around a know­able genre, as well as mess­ing with that genre.

The oth­er key role in the film is Kel­ly Mac­don­ald as Audrey’s psy­chi­atric nurse, San­dra. How did she fac­tor in? 

Audrey wrote a lot about her psy­chi­atric nurse. Over time, she had dif­fer­ent ones. Because I’d met the peo­ple around Audrey, I thought it was impor­tant to have that bat­tle that she had and that they had with her. Nurs­es, psy­chi­a­trists, psy­chol­o­gists, have such a dif­fi­cult time, because they’re often despised by the men­tal health user. But they also get very lit­tle fund­ing and sup­port. So I want­ed to make this a por­trait of Audrey, but con­nect­ed to the per­son who sup­port­ed her.

Typ­ist, Artist, Pirate, King opens in cin­e­mas on 27 October