It's Only a Movie

by Mark Kermode

  ‘Nyet.’

  ‘I have my passport, and the correct money in roubles.’

  ‘Nyet.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Nyet.’

  I had the horrible feeling that I’d been here before.

  ‘Nyet?’ I said, pathetically.

  ‘Nyet,’ he replied, firmly.

  ‘I see. So is the next plane full?’

  ‘Nyet.’

  ‘It’s not full?’

  ‘Nyet.’

  ‘Then I can buy a ticket?’

  ‘Nyet.’

  ‘I can’t buy a ticket?’

  ‘Nyet.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Silence.

  I turned to the Dark Waters production assistant who had accompanied us to the airport, having been ordered to make sure that Nige and I got safely on to the plane.’What am I doing wrong?’ I asked him.’I have money. I have my passport. I can see that there’s a plane to Moscow in two hours and he says it’s not full. But he won’t sell me a ticket. Why not?’

  ‘Let me ask,’ he said encouragingly. So he asked, and got some terse reply which included words other than ‘nyet’. Clearly he had the knack.

  ‘You have to bribe him,’ he said, briskly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You have to bribe him. To sell you the ticket. He knows you’re English and he wants a bribe.’

  ‘Oh, OK, fine. How much?’

  ‘Hang on, I’ll ask.’

  So he did. Then he reported back.

  ‘Ten dollars, apparently. Each.’

  ‘So that’s twenty dollars? Plus the ticket price – in roubles?’

  ‘That sounds right.’

  ‘OK, great. Thanks.’

  I took ten dollars out of my wallet, and placed it on the counter in front of the teller. He took it. I tried again.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.’I’d like to buy a ticket to Moscow. I have my passport and—’

  I didn’t even finish the sentence. He took the money, didn’t glance at the passport, and slapped a white and blue ticket on the counter. Interestingly, it was almost entirely blank, with a series of unfilled-in spaces where all the usual relevant information would be. Airline? Blank. Flight number? Blank. Seat number? Blank. Departure time? Blank. Destination? Blank. I looked at it, unimpressed.

  ‘So this is the ticket is it?

  ‘Da.’

  ‘Shouldn’t it be filled in?’

  ‘Nyet.’

  ‘So I can get on the plane with it like this? All not filled in?’

  ‘Da.’

  ‘You’re quite sure?’

  ‘Da.’

  ‘You can’t fill it in just to humour me?’

  ‘Nyet.’

  This was clearly all I was going to get. I stepped away from the counter and turned to Nige.’Your turn …’

  Nige stepped up to the window, put down his ten dollars, watched it disappear under the counter, then went through the same ritual involving roubles, tickets, and an utter lack of flight-specific information. Simple.

  ‘There’s just one thing,’ said Nige, turning back towards the sales window with a look in his eye that I had come to recognise as a sign that his buttons had been pushed.’I don’t mind bribing you,’ he said to the stony-faced stooge, who gazed back unblinking.’It’s just that it would be a lot more efficient if you put the price of the bribe on the price list. Right next to where it says how much the ticket costs in roubles, you just add “plus bribe of ten dollars”. That way, we would know how much to bribe you so that we could buy a ticket and the whole procedure would take less time. And be a lot less irritating.’

  With which he strolled off toward the departure gates, with me scurrying along in his wake.

  When we got to the gate, it became clear exactly why there was no information on the ticket. There was a plane on the tarmac which was allegedly bound for Moscow, and a ragtag group of people in the departure lounge (or ‘holding pen’) all of whom had similarly unmarked tickets, and whose total number seemed surprisingly large for such a comparatively small vehicle. After waiting for an indeterminate period of time, the plane was declared ready for boarding, at which point an official opened a glass door facing the tarmac and the entire assembled crowd ran like a pack of rampaging hyenas out on to the runway and up the shuddering gantry in a desperate attempt to snag a seat – any seat. I was pretty sure that there were more people on the plane than was customary, but the doors weren’t closed until we were crammed to busting and the last few stragglers were left waiting on the tarmac before being herded back into the cattle-yard to wait for the next plane.

  If there were any safety announcements I missed them, as presumably did the people who were still standing in the aisle and therefore unable to fasten their seatbelts. Instead, the plane lurched off down the runway and up into the air with its human cargo merrily rattling around like the milk bottles in Ernie’s ghostly crate. Interestingly, although most aeroplanes tend to level out after completing their ascent, our flight seemed to be somewhat rear-end heavy and flew the entire distance from Kiev to Moscow at an angle which meant that if you dropped anything on the floor it would roll all the way back to the inevitably out-of-order toilets. As for our landing – we flew in a straight line until we were directly above Moscow airport at which point the plane simply dropped like a stone out of the sky, heading downwards in an almost vertical descent which caused your brain to attempt to crawl out through your eardrums, and making young children and adults alike scream in agony at the vomit-inducing pressure drop. When we were about a hundred feet above ground, the plane levelled out before smashing on to the Moscow tarmac, the doors popping open almost instantly to allow the suffering hordes to stagger shell-shocked out on to the runway and scurry for the safety of the arrivals hall.

  Blimey.

  From Moscow we flew to Vienna, a gleaming capitalist paradise where Nige and I celebrated our escape from Russia by smothering ourselves in consumer durables purchased with infinitely flexible credit cards (I bought a Rick Astley CD, because I could!) and making long-distance phone calls without the handicap of a two-day wait. Another sixteen hours later and we were home, back in the arms of our respective loved ones, neither of whom had much sympathy for the ordeal we claimed to have endured. They had both been busy with real jobs while we had been arsing around in the former USSR, and neither of them were in the mood to feel very sorry for us. Within hours of returning home, the Russian jaunt had effectively ceased to have any ‘real’ meaning whatsoever, morphing swiftly into a near-mythical amusing anecdote which Nige and I would roll out at dinner parties for years to come, a story which people would listen to and laugh at (if we were lucky), without experiencing any of the pain, the pain, the pain …

  But ah, I hear you say, what about the set report, the raison d’être of the whole trip? What about the fabulously newsworthy coverage of ‘the first Western feature film to be shot in Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union’? What happened when we finally got to Feodosiya?

  The short answer is … nothing.

  Nada.

  Niente.

  Nul points.

  Nyet.

  Oh, we did interviews – loads of them, with the cast, the crew, and the director Mariano himself. And the interviews were pretty good. But you can do interviews anywhere. The key thing about set reports is that the journalist is meant to report from the set, observing and recording the actual filming actually happening. This is what makes set reports special. Moreover, it is what makes them ‘set reports’.

  The night that Nige and I finally arrived in Feodosiya, Mariano had been out filming, shooting into the early hours of the morning on the beach, returning back to base camp about the same time that we shipped up, ready for action. Unfortunately, this was also the exact same moment that Mariano and his team ran out of film – literally. Apparently, most of the film stock available in Russia and Ukraine had the perforations on the wrong side, and thus it had been necessary to purchase vast
quantities of Western-compatible stock in advance and import it. However, once inside the former Soviet Union the Western stock commanded a high market value, which had inevitably led to someone selling it off at a handsome profit, thus leaving the Dark Waters production team temporarily stranded, with nothing to run through the camera other than the cold Ukranian air.

  And so the awful truth is that, after having travelled for four days to get to Feodosiya, Nige and I didn’t see one single frame of film exposed. Not one. Hell, we never even got to the location – what would have been the point? There was nothing happening out there because nobody had any film. It was a film without film. It was, in effect, an anti-film, at least for the forty-eight hours that we were there. In this respect, the slog to Feodosiya to file a ‘location report’ on Dark Waters had been the single most pointless journey I have ever made.

  There – I’ve said it. I feel better now.

  Dark Waters did finally get finished – a miracle of which Mariano should be rightly proud. And despite its hideous production history, the movie turned out to be a pretty decent calling card which won several international awards, and garnered solidly appreciative reviews from the mainstream and genre press. At the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal, Dark Waters won the Prix du Public, while at the Fantafestival in Rome it was awarded the Special Vincent Price Award for ‘outstanding contribution to Fantastic Cinema’. In 1995 it played at the Fantasporto Film Festival in Portugal where it was nominated for the Best Film Award, losing out (very respectably) to Danny Boyle’s debut feature Shallow Grave. At some point a version of the film seems to have become available in the US under the somewhat more gaudy title Dead Waters – although Mariano apparently had no role in either the retitling or the frankly scruffy packaging of this release. As recently as 2006, a company called No Shame issued a digitally restored director’s cut of Dark Waters on DVD, solving many of the technical problems of the original cut, and tightening up the running time by around seven minutes to produce what Mariano proudly calls ‘the best-looking version of the film I’ve ever seen’.

  Over the years Dark Waters’ reputation has grown, drawing praise for its moody atmosphere, haunting visuals, and lack of on-screen gore (which of course annoyed the Fangoria readers no end). All in all, it was an arresting first feature for Mariano who is still making movies, and from whom I confidently expect great things in the future.

  As for me, I filed an encouragingly upbeat report for Fango and did some follow-up interviews for the BBC. I even got Mariano on Radio One where he was interviewed by Emma Freud who said that she had found Dark Waters ‘absolutely terrifying’. Mariano was speechless.

  A year or so later, I collapsed and was hospitalised in Southampton where I was diagnosed as having two ruptured discs in the lower part of my spine. At first I was told that I would have to have titanium rods inserted into my back which would prevent any movement in the lower lumber area and make me walk upright like a man with a chair leg up his arse. Later, I was lucky to have extensive microsurgery which simply picked the insides out of the ruptured discs and left me with two ‘flat tyres’ as they are known in the trade. The official diagnosis was that the discs had probably been deformed from birth and I had no one to blame but my ancestors and their genetic imperfections.

  That’s the official version.

  But I know the truth. I know what really happened to my back. I know why I spent six weeks off work, two of them in hospital, staring at the ceiling and cursing the day that I decided there could be nothing worse than travelling across Ukraine in the back of a van.

  I know what was to blame. But I’m saying nothing. Nada.

  Nul points.

  Nyet.

  Chapter 6

  RADIO RADIO

  ‘What is my role in all of this?’ Simon Mayo asked me recently, as well he might. After all, we’re into the sixth reel of this damned movie and so far my illustrious radio mentor has been notable by his absence. If things carry on this way much longer it’ll be like Marlon Brando only showing up (fat and unrehearsed) for the last twenty minutes of Apocalypse Now, or Dame Judi Dench bagging an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love after having been on screen for less than nine minutes. In fact I’m sure there’s plenty of you out there who are only reading this because you know that I’m Mayo’s irritating 5 Live sidekick and you were secretly hoping this book would really be about him rather than me me me in the same way that everyone really wanted that movie Factory Girl to be about exciting art innovator Andy Warhol rather than self-obsessed clothes horse Edie Sedgwick (a role for which Sienna Miller was, incidentally, perfectly cast). So ladies and gentlemen, for your viewing pleasure, please welcome to the screen SIMON MAYO, who will be played neither by Mr Brando nor Dame Judi, but rather by Charles Hawtrey.

  As I mentioned briefly in the Prologue, Mayo has no one to blame for this apparently unkind piece of casting but himself. In the early summer of 2009, Simon and I were interviewed by the Independent newspaper for a regular feature entitled ‘How We Met’ and the piece was accompanied by a photograph of us standing back to back in which (as Simon correctly pointed out) we did not look at our best.’You look like an Orc!’ he told me with his customary frankness when the paper showed up on the news-stands.’And I look like Charles Hawtrey.’ He was right on both counts, although luckily for me an Orc is a fictional character rather than a real-life actor and anyway Jason Isaacs was already in rehearsal (in my head) for the role which he was surely born to play. As for Hawtrey, he may be dead but nowadays that’s no impediment – Oliver Reed posthumously completed his scenes for Gladiator thanks to whizzo CGI trickery, and Brando even turned up in Superman Returns several years after shuffling off his ever-expanding mortal coil. Plus I’ve seen loads of movies starring people who appear to be dead – think of anything Val Kilmer made between dying on his feet in The Saint and experiencing an unlikely career resurrection in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Or any of the Mickey Rourke ‘wilderness years’ movies (Another 9 1/2 Weeks, Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man) in which he even looked like a reanimated corpse.

  So, can Jason Isaacs and the late Charles Hawtrey make their collective way to the set, please, and Charles let’s take it from your line: ‘What is my role in all of this?’

  The scene we are shooting here (which features this timeless line) is an interview for yet another popular London newspaper of which I had never heard. (Mayo claims that this is because I have only heard of two publications – the Guardian and Fangoria – which is clearly untrue because I have also heard of Sight & Sound. And Hair Products Monthly. So there.)

  In the wake of my absurd Russian escapade I had concluded definitively that travel in general and set reports in particular were not for me and had concentrated instead on carving a much more comfortable career niche for myself as a stay-at-home radio film critic. In this endeavour I had been aided incalculably by Mayo with whom I had been bickering about movies from the comfort and safety of various BBC studios for well over a decade. Now we were branching out into television, on which we would continue to bicker like cinema’s answer to Hinge and Bracket, only with pictures. Progress!

  ‘Your role is essential,’ I replied, ‘crucial, inexplicable, and indefinable. Or, to put it another way, easy. I do all the hard work and you take all the glory. Just like on the radio, except that now everyone will be able to see how much better dressed than you I am, and how much nicer my hair looks.’

  Sadly, the paper opted not to run the interview on the grounds that my answers were too short (a first!) and also that we didn’t really say anything about the programme which we were meant to be promoting. Instead (they claimed) we just descended into petty insults and personal sniping which didn’t really give the reader much of an insight into how we worked. On the contrary, I think that shelved interview said it all, neatly summing up our on-air relationship which has remained essentially unchanged since we first met at Radio One back in the mid-nineties. Simon is polite if somewhat irritable with me, and I am r
ude and opinionated with him – together, we sound increasingly as though we are going to strangle each other. Several people (some of them quite intelligent) have concluded that Mayo and I really don’t like each other, and that our on-air animosity is too ‘real’ to be faked. Indeed, there are endless internet discussions about the ‘barely suppressed’ tensions between us. Here’s a typical thread from the always engaging and entertaining forums of the Internet Movie Database.

  ‘I wonder if Simon and Mark really hate each other’ wrote ‘Fork Q’ on 15 February 2009 after hearing an altercation between us on 5 Live which ended in an ominous ‘dead silence’.

  ‘I don’t think they hate each other’ replied ‘Tweekums’ the next day ‘though that certainly was an “uncomfortable silence”.’

  ‘No no no!’ chipped in ‘HF Fan’ on 23 February.’They clearly like each other very much … In fact I think they love each other in that non-yucky, non-Brokebacky “we’re both married to women and happy with that thank you very much” kind of way.’

  ‘They absolutely loathe each other’ concluded ‘thunderroad90’, as was ‘confirmed on the radio show today’.

  And so on …

  For me, the phrase ‘old married couple’ gets closer to the truth of our radio relationship than the ‘do they/don’t they’ debate which seems set to rattle on forever. I do believe that in the same way everyone has a soulmate in ‘real life’ there is also a professional partner for everyone who, in the words of Jerry Maguire, ‘completes me’ (or ‘you’, as the case may be).

  In broadcasting terms, Simon ‘had me at “Hello”’. Being clearly the best broadcaster in the country (and having the awards to prove it) he plays the knowledgeably open-minded Everyman with ease, a voice with whom audiences can identify and in whose company they feel interested, entertained and informed. If the trick of radio broadcasting is to make it sound as though you are talking to one single listener (so that each individual listener feels that you are talking directly to them) then Simon must have the biggest audience of ‘single listeners’ in the country. Everyone warms to him, listeners and interviewees alike, and for this reason he manages to get the best out of both. If you put a donkey in a radio studio with Simon Mayo he could make it sound good.