Simon Chambers Interview
Much Ado About Dying documents filmmaker Simon Chambers when he is called back to the UK to care for his ailing uncle, the long-retired actor David Newlyn Gale. What follows is an intimate, funny and powerful portrait of aging, death and family. Cinema For All sat down with Simon to discuss the evolution of the film, making art about your own family, and receiving letters from Sir Ian McKellan.
For people who haven’t seen the film, could you discuss its inception and when you decided to turn the camera on as it were.
I had no intention of making a film about my uncle. I was asked to come and look after him, I thought I’ll come and look after him and then move back to India again. But people had said to me “Simon, your uncle is amazing you should really make a film about him” and I said “no way”. I do a lot of teaching documentary and often people want to make films about family members, and I think it’s a great thing to do but they’re really difficult to make, because your idea of your uncle or your mum are very different to other people’s ideas about them. So, I just wasn’t sure… Then he burnt the house down and there was too much drama coming at me from all sides. That’s when I realised there was a film there. It was very clear; it’s a film about looking after someone else, trying to look after an older person. It’s a story about me. Even though he’s on screen the whole time, it’s the story of me being a carer. That’s when I thought I’d carry on filming. I didn’t have much time to do it because I was looking after him more than anything else, so it was 80% caring and 20% filmmaking.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen the complexities of that caring dynamic explored in this way, where you have the joys and the frustrations exist together. Was that a motivation, to capture that dynamic?
It was all Uncle David who said, “you’re a filmmaker and I’m an actor, why don’t you bring your camera round?” […] There was no intention there, but I thought that would be a useful film to make, about being a carer. What I realised was that it’s not all doom and gloom. It's hard: you’re working, you’re rushing over to the shops, taking it there and then the batteries have gone on the hearing aid… Two hours later you’re still there. It’s a rollercoaster... At the time it’s something you don’t really want to be doing because you’re thinking “I’m missing that” or “I’m not doing that” but afterwards you think I’m really glad I did that.
There are moments in the film that are incredibly powerful and at times tough to watch, sat alongside real laugh out loud, heart warming moments. Could you talk about striking that balance between the two?
It wasn’t a tricky balance. The kinds of films I’ve made before, I’ve three or four other feature films, and the thing I always want to do, which may be what makes me different to some documentary filmmakers, is that I always think about my audience. I play with the audience all the time because I want to entertain them. I have a pathological need to make people laugh and cry and to move people. You’d have to talk to my therapist about that… That’s what excites me, to move people and make them think about things in a different way.
The film has had an amazing run at festivals, it’s played at places like HotDocs and Doc/Fest here in Sheffield, and deservedly got rave reviews… How do you think David would have responded to that?
Well, you’re the first person I’ve told this to, but this morning I went to get the mail and I’ve got a letter from Sir Ian McKellen.
Oh wow!
I know! It says that he hopes Uncle David would be pleased with his portrayal of King Lear. That’s pretty amazing, isn’t it? But I think David would have watched the film and said, “oh yeah, that’s good but that should have been different” or “no, take that out, people don’t want to see me try and put a hearing aid in!”. He’d have been like that. It got rejected from lots of festivals and then suddenly it got into IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam) and won the prize for best directed film and then after that it got into loads of festivals that it got rejected for, and I think then, when David saw how it got received by other people... Well, he would have been supportive, because he’s always been very supportive of me. I think he would have been in absolute heaven seeing this response. It’s such a shame in a way that he’s not around to see this. I think he would have been thrilled. We might have all suffered a bit because he would have said: “My film! We need to do another film! We’ve done Lear, now we need to do Hamlet!”.
Here at Cinema For All we really believe in the power of seeing films together in a dark room, sharing that communal experience…
Oh me too!
What do you hope the communal experience of seeing your film will be bring to an audience?
I’ve done a UK and Ireland tour of this film, so I’ve done about 35 Q&As. It was more a less a night in each town. I felt like a sort of C grade rock band, living the dream. The brilliant thing is that when you see a film with other people, even if you don’t know those people, you do have a shared experience with them. It’s particularly useful, or strong, with this film, because David is dying and when the lights come up, people say “wow, we’ve all experienced something that we know we are all going to experience”. So there is a real bonding. Sometimes the cinemas didn’t tell the audience there was going to be a Q&A, so I’d sort of turn up at the front when the lights came up and people would be like “oh my god you were in the movie!”. We had just incredible conversations after the film, where it wasn’t like a Q&A where there is two people going “so tell us a little bit about…”, it was just people wanting to say, “what do you think about your own mortality?” and you think “bloody hell that’s a big one”. People wanted to say, “I’ve been looking after my mother now for 10 years and nobody has ever recognised that, nobody’s interested in that, and you’ve shown my experience”. When I heard people talking like that, I thought it really was worth making this film.
Much Ado About Dying is available for community cinemas to screen now.