Mark Jenkin: ​‘I like looking backwards in order to move forwards’

The devil is in the details for Mark Jenkin. His DIY approach to cinema is consistent across many short films, his breakout feature Bait, its follow-up Enys Men and his new film, the absurd and melancholy, George MacKay and Callum Turner-starring, Cornish time-travel yarn Rose of Nevada. Jenkin is his own cameraman, shooting on a hand-cranked Bolex, and takes charge of sound, recording all dialogue, sound design and music from scratch in post-production. He is – likewise – a generous interviewee and much gold had to be thrown overboard to safely dock Rose of Nevada in this landing bay we call a page.

LWLies: To what extent did George and Callum have tutorials in the art of fishing and seamanship? 

Jenkin: Very little, actually, because they were both playing greenhorns. They didn’t need to convince in the first instance, whereas Francis [Magee], who plays Murgey, or Denver, depending on where you are in the film, needed to look like he was born on a boat and able to walk across the deck in a storm as if he was just walking down the street on a quiet summer’s day. But then Francis worked as a fisherman before he became an actor, so he also didn’t need any kind of instruction.

We had an amazing skipper-owner of the boat, Lee Carter, who was de facto fishing consultant as well. Everything’s shown in close-up so often the hands that are doing stuff aren’t George and Callum’s hands. They both did learn to gut fish. Cal had to then gut fish very proficiently on the deck. And then George had to learn how to gut and then unlearn it to look like he wasn’t very good. We shot hardly anything at sea. We shot two four-hour shifts during the day to get the wide establishers of the boat at sea. The rest of it was shot in a harbor in a controlled environment. The one person who got sick at sea was me because I was looking through a viewfinder all the time. I knew that was going to happen because it happened before. On Bait I wasn’t particularly well.

I saw that you tend to only do one take with one as safety. Is that true? 

Yeah, so it’s two takes, really. Often when people do more than one take, the other takes are to get some variation in performance, or camera movement, or whatever it is. I tend to decide what the shot is going to be very definitely, and then we shoot that.

Do you storyboard? 

No, I shot list, but it’s a very uncomprehensive process. Quite often, when I get into the edit, I realise that I haven’t quite got all of the shots that I need, which is where the more non-linear editing practices come in. I set deliberate traps for myself not to have enough coverage, and then have to reinvent the scenes in the edit. I don’t shoot master shots and then go in and get the close-ups. I go straight in and get the close-ups and build it from there. This film was slightly different because it had a much bigger cast. Some actors are happy to try things while we’re blocking and rehearsing and then settle on a way of doing it, so we still just do one. But sometimes an actor will have an idea during the take of a different way of doing it and then I explore the other ideas they’ve got. Callum was often pushing for an extra one and so my nickname for him during the shoot was always ​‘Three Takes Turner’.

Oh, what a diva. 

He always wanted the third one. Quite often, I would say, ​‘No, I don’t want any more options. I want to carry on.’ We’d spar a little bit over that. One day there was a scene where Cal wasn’t on set. It was just George. And it was a shot of George walking across the road and going into the pub when they first go back in time. He walks into the frame and walks into the pub so there’s no dialogue. You don’t even see his face. I did one take, and I think there was some slight issue with the camera, so I thought, ​‘I’ll do the technical safety.’ So we did another take, but because the first take might have been faulty, the second take was the first take. So then I did another take, and something went wrong, like a car went through the frame. So then I did a fourth take, and I wasn’t sure about that, and I did a fifth take, and then I did a sixth take, and then I did a seventh take. So seven takes of the back of George’s head. I actually messaged Cal that night and said, ​‘You won’t believe this, but I gave George seven takes of the back of his head walking into a pub.’ He just messaged saying, ​‘Are you fucking joking, mate?’ It probably took me a long time to cut together that scene of George going into the pub because I had too many choices, which is what I don’t want in the edit. I want endless choices of how the stuff can fit together. But I don’t want endless choices in terms of footage.

I heard that originally George was going to play Callum’s character? 

I wanted George to look at the character of Liam, that’s the original role I offered him based on very superficial things like age. I knew how old George was, and I knew how old I wanted Liam to be in the film, and I knew that Nick needed to be significantly younger than Liam. Then I met George – everything changes when you meet somebody – and I looked into his eyes while he was talking and thought, ​‘He’s Nick, he’s got that face.’ A lot of these things that you think are wrong end up being right. The idea that they are the same age is perfect, because they’re kind of two halves of the same person, or a mirror image of each other. I didn’t realise that until the edit.

What came first for you: an interest in image-making, or an interest in sound? 

I think they happened at the same time but completely separately. When I got into making films, I was a teenager and, as a teenager, I also wanted to be in a band and to be a rock star.

What was your role in the bands? 

Singing, shouting, trying to play the guitar. We were posers rather than anything else. But I was obsessed with music, and back then, music was very tribal. We wouldn’t have anything to do with people our own age who didn’t like exactly the same music as us. And so making music was a logical thing to do, but we didn’t have the resources or, more importantly, the talent, to do it. At the same time, I got into photography, into making film, but I didn’t really see the link between the two things until I started working with film again 15 years ago. Working with cameras that didn’t record sound, I suddenly had to do the sound myself and it brought me back to those days when I was a teenager where we dreamt of having a four-track Tascam Portastudio to record ourselves on.

Through my film career, I’ve been able to really embrace working in handmade analogue soundscapes as I always wanted to do when I was younger. I’m very lucky in that I’ve managed to not only distil a working practice that leans into everything that I’m excited by, but also to sustain a career out of it. You know, I pinch myself that I go to bed on Sunday night, excited about waking up for work on a Monday morning. I don’t think I’ve developed much since I was about 15 or 16 in terms of what I’m interested in. I’ve been able to sort of go back to my first love, which is cameras and tape.

Everything loops back to the past in the film, and in your psychology too, it seems. 

I’m a classic Cornish person in that I suffer from a thing called hireth. It’s got no exact translation in the English language. Roughly it means a longing for home, or a search for something that’s gone. Almost like nostalgia. It’s linked to the Cornish diaspora, and the Welsh language has got a similar word but theirs is hiraeth. A longing for home but you can define home as a place or a time or an atmosphere or a person. A longing for something that was lost, but there’s always a little asterisk that says the thing that you’re longing for may not have existed in the first place. I like looking backwards in order to move forwards.

That’s very beautiful. My theory is that the longing is to return to the womb, a place of total safety. 

There is a refrain in the film that Murgey says at any point where there’s a moment of respite – it’s ​‘home to mother’. So maybe that’s the womb.

I was very happy to see David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone being watched on TV. And you can see the echoes with the theme of personal sacrifice that benefits the community. Do you remember the first time you watched it? 

I clearly remember the first time I watched it. It’s maybe a false memory, and my mum has contested this, but I remember watching it on Christmas Eve when I was far too young. But because it was Christmas Eve I was allowed to stay up and watch TV with my mum. It completely haunted me. I hadn’t seen lots of scary films at that age and I suppose it isn’t necessarily a horror film, but there are elements that are absolutely horrifying – the scenes that play out in the daylight when that character is witnessing horrific events with no ability to interact and stop the horror from happening. It was later on that I realised there was something thematic in the film that I was interested in beyond the joy of being terrified by it, and in the writing of Rose of Nevada I wrote that they were watching The Dead Zone and it was the actual scene where the doctor explains to Christopher Walken, ​“You have a dead zone.” Luckily, we couldn’t get the rights to that scene because of the actor who plays the doctor. His estate wouldn’t clear it so we weren’t able to use that very exposition-heavy scene. So I had to use something that was really not linked to anything about the film. But for those who know, they know