Heres an interview I did with Annie Ridout for the Hackney Citizen recently.
Cavan Clerkin talks about his independently-made crime drama which recently premiered at the East End Film Festival
Filmmaker Cavan Clerkin at Arthur’s Cafe, Dalston. Photograph: Annie Ridout
Nice Guy, an independent gangster film shot in Hackney, recently premiered at the East End Film Festival. Starring Cavan Clerkin (Pierrepoint, The Shadowline), it documents the demise of David, a middle-aged man whose faltering relationship with his wife and general lack of motivation sends him spiraling into a dangerous criminal underworld.
Written by Clerkin and directed by Pascal Bergamin, the film is a ‘byproduct’ of the Sunday Film Club: a group of professional actors, directors, editors and camera operators who form a democratic ‘ego-free’ filmmaking collective.
I met Clerkin at Arthur’s Cafe, an old school Hackney haunt on Dalston’s Kingsland Road that he used to frequent with his grandad (he was born and bred in the area) to talk about the the film, which is based on his own life experience.
After moving to the Canary Islands with his wife a few years back, Clerkin was commuting to London to do acting jobs and suffered “a bit of a mid-life crisis.”
“I was coming back to London and getting pretty drunk,” he says, “it was about having my first son, feeling guilty about leaving my wife alone a lot…”
When Martin Askew, his old friend, and a writer who is part of the Sunday Film Club, came up with the idea for a short film about a night in the life of a man who has committed a terrible act of violence, Clerkin played the main part.
“We shot that, got back and it looked so beautiful and the colours were so rich, we decided to go away and write about who this guy was and what got him into these circumstances,” explains Clerkin.
Able to relate to the character, Clerkin came up with a detailed plot and he and Bergamin decided to extend the short to a feature film. They had a budget of £8,000 which, Bergamin says, means “you get quite inventive. It was liberating and inspiring.”
In Nice Guy, the central character David has a close relationship with his son. They cast Kiko, Clerkin’s 3-year-old son, as Ray: his son in the film. “We wanted the audience to feel that closeness.”
Bergamin says that working with a mix of professional and non-professional actors, as well as Kiko, was a challenge. “Every actor has different needs or ways of working but I have never had such a mix of individual needs before,” explains Bergamin, “this variety made the film very interesting to direct.”
David gets embroiled in a seedy after-dark world of strip clubs and criminals and though he didn’t slip into such darkness himself – Clerkin can see how easy it could be for things to go that way.
“Growing up in Hackney, we aspired to be like these gangsters around us – but acting saved me. We met these amazing guys at Hoxton Hall, went in to nick their camera and they gave us one – we couldn’t believe it.”
The 18 year-olds used it to make a “gangster, ninja epic feature film,” and this is what later drove Clerkin to make Nice Guy. “I knew if we could do it then – we could do it now.”
The aim was to produce an anti-gangster film. “We didn’t want to glamourise gangsters. It is a cautionary tale – I mean, people really suffer and that’s what we wanted to say.”
“We wanted a real rawness,” he explains, “so I wrote the plot and then we did workshops and the actors mostly wrote their own lines. Some of them chose their own names – they really ‘owned’ their characters.”
Halfway through filming, Clerkin realised that the crew thought his wife in the film, Hanna, must be based on his wife in real life, Ana Monzon, who produced the film.
“It suddenly dawned on me and I was like, I’m really sorry, I didn’t even think about that. And she was like, yeah – didn’t you wonder how I felt?”
At one point, post-filming and after the birth of his second son, Clerkin suddenly felt that he’d overcome his period of darkness and he wanted to change the ending.
“I needed there to be light. It could never be a really happy ending but I tried this new ending and Pascal was like, are you joking? It just doesn’t work. He was right. We had to use the first ending.”
With his usual roles being comedy-based, Clerkin was keen to venture into something more “dark and serious” but said that at the premiere “I was gripping onto my seat thinking, oh my God, what have I done; this is so dark.”
They have yet to secure a distribution deal and continue to plug Nice Guy for screenings at festivals. “You have no idea how much goes on behind the scenes with filmmaking – you make the film and it’s only then that you have to really start working hard.”
Clerkin and Monzon are, at the same time, quite keen to leave the film behind. “It’s dark,” says Clerkin, “and now that period is over so we just want to get on with our lives.”
For more go to Nice Guy The Movie.
http://hackneycitizen.co.uk/2012/07/13/interview-filmmaker-cavan-clerkin-nice-guy-the-movie/
Gazette
Writer and actor of Nice Guy, Cavan Clerkin, with his son Kiko who also stars in the film
Emma Bartholomew, Senior Reporter Monday, July 2, 2012 4:08 PM
Cavan Clerkin is the brains behind Nice Guy, which premieres at the East End Film Festival this Saturday, July 7.
In the film, Clerkin feels emasculated by his role as a father, and begins venturing out at night, soon getting entangled in the web of a group of vicious criminals.
“He obviously loves his family, but he’s craving the adventure of his past, and in making that choice he gets drawn into this dark world,” said Clerkin, who has been an actor for 12 years.
“I do a lot of comedy acting and it was an opportunity to do something dark, it was darker than I anticipated, there’s not many laughs in it to be honest,” said Clerkin, whose real-life son Kiko plays his son in the film.
The film is influenced by what Clerkin witnessed growing up in Hoxton, as well as films like Martin Scorcese’s Mean Streets.
Cavan who lives in Kingsland Road, was inspired to write the movie after starting up a film club. “I got together a collective of professional film makers and we’d make these shorts, we would make a film a month, we got to a point where we wanted to be more ambitious and made a feature,” he said.
“We had an £8,000 budget so very little money, but had an amazing bunch of people who really believed in the project,” he added.
He hopes the film will get recognition when it shows at the Genesis Cinema in Tower Hamlets at 7pm on Saturday.
The East End Film Festival runs until Sunday July 8.
DISORDER
Interview with Nice Guy Cavan Clerkin by Matthew Townend
Its ten o’clock Thursday morning and for one brief hour the sun is out during
this bleakest of springs. I tuck my self into a quite corner and wait to meet actor Cavan Clerkin who I’ve come to talk to about his new feature film Nice Guy, a self financed, ultra low budget British crime drama which has been mostly filmed in the Eastend, especially Stoke Newington.
When he does walk in, Clerkin is instantly recognizable from his years as a
character actor in TV and film roles, roles that have seen him slipping into UK
comedy shows like the IT Crowd, Pulling, Sean Lock’s Fifteen Stories High,
Smack the Pony and 2001′s Los Dos Bros.
Introduction aside I ask him how he started acting and he jumps in by
explaining how it began as a teenager just round the corner in Hoxton Hall,
where he and his friends were granted open access to the video equipment
and allowed to run riot with the cameras.
“We use to make these mad gangster, ninja epics. We had no idea about film
making, we would just shoot stuff and hack it together” he enthuses, clearly
still excited by the buzz of these early ventures into film making. Sadly the
world wasn’t ready for these sensitive coming of age tales but Clerkin stuck
with acting, carving out a career that has now kept him off the streets and out
of a life of imaginable delinquency, (just a little creative license employed
here), for almost fourteen years.
In 2009 and keen to return to developing film projects, Clerkin became one of
the founding members of The Sunday Film Club, a collective of actors and film
makers who would meet up weekly to band around ideas for film projects.
Determined to work democratically they began by pulling words out of a hat, these
would form the initial genesis for a short film that the group would then all
work on.
As Cavan explains, “You’d have two weeks to write it, one day to shoot and
then two weeks to edit it and at the end you had to show the film to the group.”
With each new short the members would swap roles, for example the director
of one film becoming perhaps the soundman on the next. After a period of
seventeen months, and having produced nineteen shorts the club had
developed into a cohesive and increasingly ambitious unit.
Taking a pitch for a short film by member Martin Askew as the starting point the club decided to embark on their most adventurous idea to date, a full-length feature, Nice Guy, to be written by Cavan and directed by feature first timer Pascal Bergamin. When I ask Cavan what made the club feel they were ready to make a feature length film, he grins and admits that they never did, but that they finally
agreed that the only way to answer that question would be from trying.
The script was written using a series of workshops and rewrites but with the aim to
continually improvise throughout the intense three week shoot with director
Bergamin encouraging the actors, both professional and amateur, to help flesh
out the characters as they saw fit. Clerkin himself plays the main character of
David a househusband and father who’s marriage begins to fall apart leading
him to booze, strip joints and when he witness a brutal murder, into a world of
lowlife criminals and violence, a world that threatens to engulf his family.
Clerkin is keen to stress how they wished to avoid the hackneyed tropes of the cockney gangster, instead concentrating on David’s role as a father to his son, who
is convincingly played by Cavan’s real life flesh and blood Kiko, who was
often blissfully unaware of the film being made around him as many of the
crew were already regular house guests.
The money for the film, a mere £8,000 was mostly put up by Clerkin and
Bergamin themselves who opted to shoot on High Def video DSLR’s, to
help keep costs down. The cast, including recognizable faces likes Andrew
Brooke, (PhoneShop, Pulling) and Juliet Cowan (Pulling, This Life) as well as
the crew all worked for points in the film, a commitment without which the film could not
have been made.
“This industry is amazing!” Beams Clerkin, “if people believe in a project they
will do incredible things, for example our set designer Jonathan Paul Green turning
up with a huge van full of stuff to dress our sets. …In some ways with a
project like this your almost better off having no money, people pull together, everyone is in it for the love of the film.”
Yet it was the post production which proved to be the most grueling part of the
process with the film makers having to out source certain tasks to whomever
was willing to get involved, with things like the sound editing eventually being
completed in Switzerland by recording engineer Greg Skerman in his spare
time simply because he loved the film.
Considering the totally affordable budget I ask Cavan if he thinks that he could
make one of these films a year? “I could,” he quips, “but it would probably end
in me getting a divorce”, and he is certain that any future film projects will
probably require more funding.
“Currently we’re self-distributing, when we started we had no idea about distribution, so we’ve learned the tough way,” With an extra £2000 rapidly swallowed for publicity, but the film is out there and available to watch on Google’s new movie streaming service, Google Play and You Tube rental. It is perhaps these services that are the answer for films of this nature, Super low production costs coupled with super low cost online streaming.
Despite the difficulties, Clerkin is still optimistic when talking of the film making
process, “If I could do this every day I would…” he meditates, “I can only
recommend that every one goes out and tries it, especially in this day and age
where you can actually do it. I started out making my own work and I feel I’ve
come full circle and now that’s all I want to do.”