The Pass Interview with filmmaker Ben A. Williams.
Arinze Kene and Russell Tovey in The Pass
Opening in cinemas this week is one of the most impressive British films of the year. The Pass is directed by celebrated British filmmaker Ben A. Williams, and opens on professional footballers Jason (Russell Tovey) and Ade (Arinzé Kene), who are holed up in a Romanian hotel room on the even of a huge Champion’s League football match. They are both over-excited, unable to sleep and spend the evening fighting, knowingly mocking each other, preparing their kit, and even watching a teammate’s sex tape. Then, one of them kisses the other and their lives are changed forever.
We caught up with director Ben A. Williams earlier this week to talk about his debut feature film.
The Hollywood News: Hi Ben, pleased to meet you and congratulations on the film.
Ben A. Williams: Thank you so much.
Can we kick off, so to speak and talk about the origins of the film from your point of view, and how the script came your way?
Yes. So The Pass started as a play which staged at the Royal Court. It’s written by John Donnelly, and in the original production was Russell Tovey, Lisa McGrillis and Nico Mirallegro, all of who appear in the film. Duncan Kenworthy, the producer, who is very well-known for having produced Notting Hill, Love Actually, Four Weddings and a Funeral, saw the plan when it was on stage at the Royal Court and was very intrigued by it, an started to consider it as a story that he’d like to take up, and it was at that point that he called me and told me about it, as Duncan and I had worked together in the past. He started describing the story and it really, really intrigued me. He sent me the play script and that was my first contact with the story as a text. It gave me the feeling that you get when you get to the end of a really dense novel – a very satisfying, emotional resolution, and you feel that you’ve gone on a great journey.
It’s ten years [covered in the story] and you feel those ten years, and that’s extremely rare, so immediately I was very, very interested and wanted to get on board. We then met, and we started meeting with John Donnelly and talked about converting it from the play-text into a screenplay and that was a really interesting process. We were figuring out what we wanted to get rid of, what you like, what you want to enhance, what you want more of and less of… The decision that we made, pretty much on day one, to not open it up, ended up being such a smart move because it forced us to confront a lot of the issues inside [Russell Tovey’s character] Jason, in a very direct and intense way. The longer we lived with it, the more excited I got by it; the notion of having to carry out the story in just three rooms. Once we’d developed it with John, it was a pretty straight forward process in bringing it to screen.
Russell Tovey as Jason in The Pass
Russell, as you said, was in the original play. How involved in the process of bringing it to the screen was he?
Russel was involved in the play before it was even on stage. They did a rehearsed ready of John’s work-in-progress, even before they started rehearsing it. Russell played Jason even at that point. He was on board [the film] before I was, which is great and it could have been a case of that I’m the director and I have all of these status issues about people who think that they know more about my vision that I do, but to have an actor who was so well-versed in his character, and so open to collaborating and doing things differently, was great and Russell was our sort of go-to point of reference for Jason as a character because I think there’s a lot about Jason that Russell finds accessible. He identifies with some elements of Jason – certainly not all of them because Jason can be a bit of a monster, but yes, it was very. very useful for me to have this pool of knowledge if I needed it. Russell, even when we decided that we wanted to turn it into a film, came in one and performed the play with the rest of the cast, basically for me and that just shows his generosity. He would pop in to the edit and do little ideas we had for him and was constantly in contact with us throughout. He’s very much in the DNA of the film. More so than you see on-screen.
I’ve just had the pleasure of seeing Arinzé [Kene] in the play ‘One Night In Miami’, which is also set in a hotel room weirdly enough…
Yes, exactly.
…and he is phenomenal in your film as well. Was he on board during that early process, or did he come on a little bit later?
He wasn’t obviously in the play. The original actor who played Ade on stage wasn’t available, so we cast Arinzé, and it was obvious from the moment I met him that he has something very special about him. Not only by glancing at his C.V. do you see that he’s done everything from musical theatre to writing his own plays at the Soho Theatre, to writing films, to commissioning through Film London to starring in TV dramas… He’s a multi-talented creative force, but as soon as he started reading for Ade, while we were testing for the role, it was obvious that he was clearly going to bring something interesting and fresh and intelligent to the role, I think.
That’s such a reassurance and a gift when you’re working. That’s without saying how easy he caught up with the other three actors who had lived their roles of a month of Royal Court rehearsals, a month of Royal Court shows… He has this computer brain that just absorbed the script; its subtext, its meaning; every comma and full-stop. He was there, fighting fit on the first day of our rehearsal period. and to match them is impressive. He’s someone that makes me very excited. With all great actors you feel rather selfishly that they you a list of great performances, and I certainly got that feeling about Arinzé. I’m not going to be satisfied until I see him in lots of other great performances. With what we put him through in the production; the weight loss; the intense filming schedule, he just never let up and he and I shared a bit of a bond because both of us were coming to it having not been involved in the play and we looked after each other and made sure that we were doing the right thing.
Arinze Kene in The Pas
In terms of that rehearsal period, because of his newness and your newness to the project, how long was that? Due to the nature of the film was the rehearsal for a longer period of time and then you shot it really quickly?
We wanted to rehearse at great length to make sure that… it’s such a layered piece of writing, and it’s such a very intense and I guess dense piece of work – there’s so much going on inside the dialogue, so we needed to make sure that we were serving all of the different layers via the performance, and also from my point of view that I was able to map out how we were going to shoot it and make best of these three rooms and build that intense sense of claustrophobia through the blocking, and how I was going to shoot it. We rehearsed for a week with them, which doesn’t sound long, but that’s quite an achievement to get a week’s rehearsal and have your cast. So, when it came to it, we were able to spend a disproportionate amount of time actually filming the film compared to other film shoots. So, the percentage of minutes of the day that we were filming was much higher compared to other shoots. That was because I knew that we had so much dialogue and I knew that I wanted to capture it from so many different angles that we just needed to avoid any on-set discussions and be confident and prepared and shoot it.
I’m not sure if I’m allowed to tell you [how long the shoot was]. You’ll have to ask Duncan, the producer. It was a realistic shooting schedule should we say. One that didn’t leave much room for error. Working in that way meant that, and this is particularly interesting for the actors, we sometimes shot for up to thirteen minutes in one go, but this wasn;t a kind of Steve McQueen, locked-off, single camera, single take shot, it was a thirteen minute long camera map that moved and wove around the performances. When in particular they get up on these very intense arguments with each other, they’ve had a ten minute, in some cases, run up to it, so they really, really feel it. Their pulses are racing and we were watching it while shooting and thinking ‘jeez’. Then we’d cut and everyone would exhale in sort of relief that we were able to take a quick break from the intensity of the action. I think that they really appreciated that as well. We could do that because we were so well rehearsed. If we needed to, we could do the film from end to end without stopping, which is great.
I guess its a fairly locked-down script, but did you find that there was a lot of improvisation sneaking in because of that free-ness?
John, to his credit was very open to people improvising or embellishing on and around his script, as was I and I think that the way I like to work is to create a sense that we have an agreed performance that we all know we’re going for but if, as they say, in the moment an actor wants to try something out, you plan to allow yourself to take those opportunities. There were a lot of those moments where Russell and Arinzé would come and say ‘can I do just one more please?’ The result of that one more was up on screen in a lot of cases. That wasn’t necessarily them ad-libbing dialogue, it was a new sub-textual motivation for it that they found. I mean, it was very tightly scripted as there was so much to learn and so many layers to give service to but at the same time, if there were flourishes that the performers wanted to put on things, we were all really up for them doing hat.
I’ve spend a little bit of time looking at your past work and a lot of your films take place in these confined space. I mean, there’s the tube in your shorts, and then this. Is that just a co-incidence or something that you quite enjoy playing with?
My focus has always been the characteristics of human performances. What I like about the stuff set on the tube is that there is this intensity of focus on these tiny moments. You get locked in to this small space where the drama gets pressurised and I think it’s really interesting when you’re filming people in locations that they can’t escape from. It is something that attracts me, yes, this notion that you have to just deal with whatever happens in that space and it was something that we dealt with in The Pass as well, this idea of not opening it up, and that felt very natural to me, I guess because of the work that I had done before. You enclose the drama in this very claustrophobic space and intensify the story by doing that. No one has picked up on that, but yes I do… I like putting people in pressure cookers [laughs].
The Pass
You’ve taken this around the world as well, playing no end of festivals. The talking points that it raises must be quite interesting from various different audiences from different countries.
Certainly. It’s no secret that it’s a British film and there’s particularly British humour in it, but what’s great is finding that an audience in Seattle will still laugh at jokes that you thought only someone who grew up in Britain in the eighties and nineties would get, but also it’s even more gratifying to do Q+As with people afterwards and having their voices still cracking with emotion having watched the last ten minutes of the film. The fact that a resident of Seattle can identify with a film we shot in Berkshire, and find it really moving, is fascinating to me. It just goes to show the quality of John’s writing and our cast’s performance really, that it travels so well.
The Pass interview with Ben A. Williams was conducted by Paul Heath, December 2016.
The Pass opens in UK cinemas on Friday 9th December, 2016. You can read our review here.
