LoveEast.53

| Culture
We catch up with Mark A. C. Brown, writer/director of
the award-winning feature film, Guardians
This is your first feature film - and congratulations;
it's bagged numerous awards. Was the making
experience for this different from making shorts
and, if so, in what way?
Thanks. My experience in making shorts, in
particular my last one, Corinthian, is what led me
to believing I could do Guardians. I, quite naively,
decided that, as I’d shot Corinthian in a day and
had some success, then it should follow that I just
do that for 10 days and, voilà, I’ve got a feature.
The odd thing is that is sort of how it worked out. I
used most of the
same crew and
went in with the
same attitude
to timekeeping
and budget and
by the end we
had a feature
film. What I did
find out along
the way is that
you get a lot less
shooting time
per minute on
screen when
doing a feature
compared with
a short. So the
pace was a lot
faster and we
couldn’t be as
flamboyant as
we had been on
Corinthian. But
ultimately I think my naivety is what got Guardians
over the line. If I’d known the differences and
difficulties jumping from shorts to features then
I might have not have jumped into doing it in the
first place.
Tell us what inspired the story.
The story was inspired by my moving to the East
End from North London. I live down by the river in
Limehouse and it’s a very interesting place with a
very different feel from Crouch End. The East End’s
chequered past is written all over the place from
the Georgian townhouses next to council blocks,
16 LOVEEAST
old boozers dwarfed by the skyscrapers of Canary
Wharf, the riverside warehouses and mills turned
into executive apartments, the canals meeting at
the Thames. I found it quite inspiring and I’d had
several ideas for films that I could set around there.
But Guardians, through necessity, got over the line
first. I had access to one of the aforementioned
townhouses and a great old boozer. So I wrote a
story centred around what I had to hand. And the
Guardianship scheme, which essentially employs
actors and normal humans as low-level security
for large
properties, was
a good way
into putting
disparate
characters
together in
an unusual
situation.
Have you had
any experience
of being a
property
guardian
yourself?
No but I know
a few who
have. So I
filtered a few
of the stories
I’d heard into
the plot of my
film. But I had
to downsize the house as our house is relatively
small in comparison to a lot of these places that
people get to look after. Mansions and all sorts.
And I liked the metaphor of an empty house. I
thought it was something that worked for both the
lead characters. For one it represents them as a
person, empty. For the other, it is a fairly salubrious
vessel waiting to be filled with their fantasies of a
life they could never have in reality.
The film is billed as a dark comedy thriller and it's
certainly that. From a viewer perspective, do you
have a favourite scene?