William Fowler: With their rough 16mm textures, image burn-out and unusual framing, I’ve often thought of your films as being like the off-cuts from a documentary shot after an apocalyptic event. Slow Action, which is about the investigation of a series of lone, isolated islands by someone called ‘the curator’, feels very fractured and dismantled – like these other works – but then the use of narration gives it a kind of loose, moody continuity too. What was its background? 

Ben Rivers: The film was instigated as a commission for the Darwin anniversary, so I began thinking about the importance of islands to Darwin’s thinking, and how these were the perfect model for showing evolutionary change among a species. I had wanted to make a sci-fi film for sometime, so decided to set the film in the far future, after a time when sea levels have risen, land masses have changed and new islands and archipelagos have formed. I imagined these places would then be isolated from outside influence and their societies had then developed in very different ways, and within this what would constitute the idea of a utopia. The curator is an unseen head librarian of an archive of reports about these utopias, collected from around the world. It is an important point that the accounts are not wholly reliable, but rather have had to rely on a certain amount of imagination to fill the gaps in the reports that have made it back to the curator, which is why sometimes the image and narration don't quite correlate. The idea was that the film is a small fragment of a much larger set of accounts, so I could maybe make a sequel...

WF: The film has a strong sense of sadness and distance to it. Is that distance important and what do you think it does? A lot of your films are about peripheries and lone individuals.

BR: I think this film and the one preceding it – I Know Where I’m Going – both have a fairly healthy dose of melancholia and distance, though in IKWIG the film moves between closeness to the three characters met along the road, and the extreme distance of the geologist's narration about the Earth in one-hundred million years and what traces might be left of human civilization in the strata. With Slow Action the distance became more pronounced, because this film was meant to play more on the idea of a scientific or ethnographic document. I wanted this distance to alter with the narration, which is why there are two different voices, one very cool and professional, much like a traditional TV documentary narrator, while the other is much harder to place tonally and geographically, who I took to be the present Curator. At the end of the film the more distanced narrator then starts to speak in the first person, which I hoped would throw the position of the narrator again.

WF: The islands are quite incredible and mysterious and, subsequent to your shooting of it, one turned up in the James Bond movie Skyfall. How did you find these places and did the discoveries lead to the film or vice versa?

BR: I was looking for four islands that were significantly different from one another - so that the development of the human society was also related to the geography, climate, flora and fauna etc. It took me quite some time to decide upon the four and longer still to get to them. Lanzarote (Eleven) was the first – it is one of the driest places on Earth, so the strange volcanic landscape has not eroded away, resulting in huge planes of solidified lava streams. Dotted around the island are large sculptures, gardens and buildings designed by César Manrique, which also play a large part in creating the sci-fi atmosphere of the film. Tuvalu (Hiva – The Society Islands) was somewhere I had wanted to go since I read about it as a child, and when researching this film I read that it was in severe danger of being swallowed up by the rising Pacific. The fact that I had been thinking about this sad danger made it the right choice for a location. When I got there I found there was another depressing aspect of humans highlighted on the islands, which was plastics. Not so long ago Tuvalu started getting imported goods with plastic packaging from Fiji and other parts of the globe – but the landmass is so tiny, and hundreds of miles from anywhere, that the plastic heaps have built up to become a new colourful and toxic landscape – this then became entwined in the account. The third island, Gunkanjima (Kanzennashima) I’d seen on the really great architectural blog http://bldgblog.blogspot.co.uk/. I've always liked roaming around abandoned buildings, some of which have ended up in films, and Gunkanjima is something like the ultimate in abandoned spaces – a city for 5000 people on an island. For this space I wanted there to be an account within the account, from an even more unreliable narrator – so this island became home to one Tadashi Harai, a self-proclaimed madman. I haven’t seen Skyfall yet but I have a team of lawyers working on this case! For the last island I was going to go to Svalbard, an icy wonder halfway between the North of Norway and the North Pole. Just before I booked the flight I realised this was too easy, maybe not physically but conceptually – I wanted the camera to get closer to people in this last part, to get closer to the ethnographic I mentioned before. Somerset, my home, then became the fictional island – cut off and drifted apart from the rest of Britain somewhere in the very distant future. Various Somerset locations were then peopled with ‘Clades’, covered in mud and paint, wearing strange garb and holding remnants of objects whose original use has been forgotten and have transformed to talismans or weaponry. A place of permanent renewal.

Credits

Written by Mark von Schlegell

Slow Action has been commissioned by Picture This and Animate Projects. Supported by Bristol City Council, Elephant Trust, Arts Council England, Daiwa Japan Foundation and the British Council.