Richard Billing­ham: ​‘I want­ed to give a sense of what it was like to be there’

Fam­i­ly and domes­tic life fea­ture promi­nent­ly through­out the work of Turn­er Prize-nom­i­nat­ed pho­tog­ra­ph­er and artist Richard Billing­ham. In Ray & Liz, he uses the cin­e­mat­ic form to instil those still fig­ures – his alco­holic father, his moth­er and younger broth­er Jason – with move­ment to cap­ti­vat­ing effect.

It’s a deeply per­son­al and qui­et­ly pro­found film about Billingham’s expe­ri­ences grow­ing up on the mar­gins of soci­ety in the West Mid­lands. We caught up with the direc­tor recent­ly to talk about rein­ter­pret­ing the past, and the con­trast between mem­o­ry and actuality.

LWLies: Why pho­tog­ra­phy as an ini­tial means of cre­ative expression?

Billing­ham: I start­ed off as a painter, I’ve drawn ever since I was a kid. Back in the ​’70s you didn’t have com­put­er games, screens and lots of TV chan­nels, so you got bored easy and had to find things to do. My thing was draw­ing, and when I was 18 I did a foun­da­tion course at Bournville Col­lege of Art. My idea was then to go onto uni­ver­si­ty and study paint­ing, and I hadn’t picked a cam­era up at that point and dur­ing my foun­da­tion course.

I want­ed to make some paint­ings of my dad in his room, and it was at a point in his life where he stayed in his room drink­ing and he wouldn’t come out or go out­side. And it was quite hard to get him to sit still and to paint. I want­ed to make some paint­ings about the tragedy of that sit­u­a­tion, and I first start­ed tak­ing pho­tographs of my father to paint from, so the first pho­tographs that I did were research for some­thing else.

What was the gen­e­sis of Ray & Liz, and how do you see it inter­sect­ing with your pho­tog­ra­phy work?

It evolved slow­ly. That time I men­tioned, when my father was in his room drink­ing, I decid­ed a few years back that I want­ed to make a short gallery film about that sit­u­a­tion, because those ear­ly pho­tographs were research for some­thing else. I thought I’d like to recre­ate that space and use an actor and chart two to three days of Ray’s exis­tence, and I saw it as a sin­gle screen gallery instal­la­tion. I found a pro­duc­er and we made that film.

At the time of mak­ing it I decid­ed to write anoth­er script, about my uncle. I’d had that idea for a bit and I thought, ​‘Well, it wasn’t too dif­fi­cult to write that first one, let’s try to write anoth­er.’ So I did and then I had these two short films, one made and then one as a script. And I thought that if I could write anoth­er short one, I’d poten­tial­ly have a fea­ture-length movie. So it evolved from the bot­tom up rather than from the top down.

The tow­er block and the house give a real­ly strong sense of space, it almost suf­fo­cates the characters.

That’s what I was hop­ing to con­vey. As a pho­tog­ra­ph­er, it’s not real­ly about the sub­ject mat­ter in front of you, it’s about a rela­tion­ship to space – where you put the cam­era, where you posi­tion objects. When you say you’re see­ing some­one put flow­ers in a vase and they shuf­fle them around a lit­tle bit until they have the right sort of bal­ance, or peo­ple might draw the cur­tains to make sure they hang prop­er­ly, it’s con­nect­ed to that.

The way you posi­tion the cam­era draws atten­tion to very small, pre­cise details, such as a glass being filled. Can you talk about your fas­ci­na­tion with the spe­cif­ic focus of the human gaze?

Yes, I want­ed to give a sense of the envi­ron­ment, what it was like to be there, or what it’s like to be in those rooms. You know when you’re a kid, you might sit on the floor play­ing or rolling around, and you look close up at objects. You might stare at the elec­tric fire for fif­teen min­utes, and maybe that comes from that. But yes, there are spe­cif­ic things the cam­era does focus on, which were specif­i­cal­ly cho­sen in such a way that they all res­onate together.

Did the expe­ri­ence of mak­ing the film open up past mem­o­ries and reveal any­thing new to you about that time?

When I was mak­ing the film, I stuck as close to my mem­o­ry as pos­si­ble rather than try­ing to recre­ate the facts objec­tive­ly, how I knew they were. I gave my impres­sion of them accord­ing to my mem­o­ry. I’ll give you an exam­ple. There was a time when I want­ed to film my father in his room with­out the elec­tric light on, because I remem­ber going in there and some­times he’d be sit­ting on the bed and he’d have the elec­tric fire on. I remem­bered how the glow of the fire would light up the room and make it all orange and red. I want­ed to recre­ate that and con­vey that, those colours and the atmos­phere. So we set it all up, put the fire on, turned the light off and it didn’t look any­thing like it.

The way you remem­ber things is just dif­fer­ent and it can be much dif­fer­ent. The crew said, ​‘It’s fine, we can recre­ate it. We can put fil­ters, light things and make it look like it’s just the glow from the elec­tric fire.’ And they did that and it looked just how I remem­bered it. But obvi­ous­ly it must not have been like that in real life. It’s my interpretation.

Ray & Liz is released 8 March. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.