Marc Isaacs: In His Own Words

Someday My Prince Will Come is set in an isolated former coal-mining village in Cumbria and Philip and His Seven Wives in a suburban house in West Sussex. These films are two of the very few I’ve made that feature single individuals as the main ‘protagonists’. I spent over 18 months immersed in the lives of Laura Anne and Philip, exploring the nature of love and power and the loss of innocence. My approach in Someday My Prince Will Come was to capture (and create) moments that expressed the trials and tribulations of childhood as it was nearing its end and, in Philip and His Seven Wives, to probe and question a man who believed he was a Hebrew king.

Laura Anne still lives on the same street and now has children of her own. Philip’s attempt to create a godly family ended in tragedy when he committed suicide last year. I attended his funeral and met all of his 18 children and was reacquainted with some of his former ‘wives’. When I think back to the lives of the children in Someday My Prince Will Come, I am reminded of the toughness of their existence but also their free-spirited innocence. This is something Philip and his wives were also searching for through religion. In both cases, the innocence and hope was in a constant struggle with the harsh reality of life.

I didn’t return to making short films after Lift (2001) for a long time as I was always fortunate enough to have funding for longer films. Despite this, short works have always interested me because you can really push the form in an innovative way. I have been inspired by the shorts of Krzysztof Kieślowski, Herz Frank, Zelimir Zilnik and many others.

With films like, The Old Man and His Bed, Outsiders and When Night Falls, I was trying to unify time and space by allowing the action to unfold in a single location, on a single ‘stage’. I set myself limitations which allowed me to distill the essence of the stories. Out of Time was my first attempt at an installation.

The four pieces exhibited were created at a time when I was struggling to conceive of my next feature project. There was something very reflective about working with material that had been filmed many years previously but never edited. Sometimes these moments of reflection and looking back are needed in order to move forward.

Outside The Court and The Road: A Story of Life and Death are two quite different films. In Outside The Court, I stand in one place and rely mainly on serendipity to determine the shape of the film, whilst in The Road, I actively seek out protagonists and mould their stories in the hope that the work becomes something more than the sum of its’ parts. In both films however, chance comes to the fore.

When Michel, the French man arrested for branding a knife, turned up at the court I knew an extraordinary character had come into my camera. His story is the backbone of the film. When both Peggy and Billy passed away during the shooting of The Road, all of my efforts to shape and control the narrative were suddenly rendered futile.

The Filmmaker’s House was born out of a desire to retain complete independence. As the traditional funders of these kind of films became more and more conservative and risk-averse, I decided to go it “alone”. Determined to risk something myself, I opened the doors to my home in order to explore our relationship to ‘strangers’ and interrogate notions of hospitality and generosity.

I invited people connected to my own life to become the film’s protagonists and set about improvising a structure that would offer a timely reflection on the act of filmmaking itself. I wanted to ‘wake’ myself (and my audience) up with an act of provocation designed to question notions of truth and performance.

Finding the balance between control and chance or planning and spontaneity is a constant challenge. Leave too much to chance and everything is in danger of unravelling. Exercise too much control and you will strangle the life out of the film.” Marc Isaacs

The ‘Marc Isaacs – Up Close’ retrospective is available to watch on True Story.