Anatomy of a scene

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0:46That's O-D-O-O dot com. You're listening to In The Studio from the BBC World Service, closely following the various stages of a creative project on its way to a global audience. For over 25 years, I've made programmes for the BBC about film, speaking to directors, actors and screenwriters, and also reviewing films. But I never thought that one day I would be following my own experience of being in a film. What you are going to do is possibly shock yourself because you're going to see a side to yourself and you don't know where this came from. That's really interesting. We've all got it. Everybody has a breaking point.

1:28And I certainly never thought I'd wind up on the red carpet in Venice during the film festival, not as a journalist, but as an actor, in a very small part, in a movie set in the Highlands of Scotland and directed by one of the instigators of the surreal and often discomfortingly comic cinema movement known as the Greek Weird Wave. In so many ways the whole thing felt like a battle Independent, arthouse filmmaking in a remote location With a largely non-professional cast An unconventional costume drama with a tight budget Shot on vanishingly rare 60mm film rather than digital During some of the worst weather ever to hit the west coast of Scotland Ten people have been rescued from their cars by helicopter after landslides blocked roads in Argyll and Butte.

2:19Weather warnings for heavy and disruptive rain cover much of Scotland. The experience made me question a lifelong fascination with the process of acting. And I warn you, this programme contains descriptions of movie violence, one of them committed on screen by me. It all started with an innocent question.

2:43One Friday afternoon in 2021, I interviewed film producer Rebecca O 'Brien for BBC Radio 4 in a studio in London. Rebecca worked for decades with the celebrated British director Ken Loach on films like I, Daniel Blake and Landon Freedom. After the interview, I casually asked her, so what are you doing this weekend? I'm going to Oban on the west coast of Scotland, she said. I'm hoping to make a movie there if I can find the right location. I live in Oban, I said. You should speak to my friend Paul. He was born there. He knows it like the back of his hand. Within days, I was in a car with him in Argyle as he scouted for locations.

3:23We're driving into Highland now. Yeah, and this is a... I've only driven this road once before past these waterfalls and it's a dead end, which is a farm. Yes. It's kind of like a compound away that the farm sits in amongst... It's just this dead-end road. It really does feel remote, doesn't it? The film was to be an adaptation of the British novel Harvest by Jim Crace and directed by Greek filmmaker Athena Rachel Sangari. Her award-winning movies like Attenberg and Chevalier have an anti-capitalist subtext and a really deadpan kind of wit. Harvest is her first English-language film, and it's set in the distant past in an isolated, poor, close-knit island village where strangers appear, bringing ruin with them.

4:20Oban does become the location. A set of the village is built in a haunting glen three miles from the coast. Before filming starts in August 2023, there are open auditions in town and all sorts of people turn up. Landowners, sheep shearers, sleepy teenagers from the high school, the twin girls with flaming red hair from the supermarket, and Paul, and me, some 65 of us in the end, joining that great cinema tradition of non-professional actors in films, cast as background villagers in Harvest, or in small parts with the occasional line.

5:00Between dance rehearsals and Gallic song lessons, the costume department winds me into a kilt and dirty apron. So this is like a brown, another brown woolen. Oh, is that linen, actually? Yeah, so it's... We just love, like, interesting knits that look like they could be hand-woven and handmade. OK, cool. So I think we're done with the kilt for Chris and I. OK, but then what we can do is add things to it. My character is Agnes Carr. She's a strong, tenacious woman, it says in the script, protective mother of three daughters, especially her youngest, Lizzie, who is nine years old and the village darling.

5:43This is like another kind of... Wow, that's quite heavy. Isn't it? It's like a... It feels like a wax. OK, so this is, like, very heavy. Blue and brown skirt. Two plus decades writing about film, I thought. About time I saw it from the other side. But Agnes, she's not a glamorous part. I think it's nice that it's... No, I think we'd definitely be tied, otherwise it's going to end up falling. It'll fall off in the mud, yeah.

6:17One, two, one, two, one, two. Voice memo. It is the 13th of August and it's the night before the first day of shooting for Harvest. And I'm just going through the script and the makeup lady said that she'd had a note from the director about the character that I'm playing. And the note was, she is fierce. She is ferocious. Life has dealt her a hard blow. Life hasn't been easy for her. the makeup artist says to her assistant bring me the bruise palette and then her assistant brings out this palette of makeup colors of okra and dark reds and browns and and she gets out a little brush and expertly starts to give me really dark circles under my eyes and broken veins and and shadows, and...

7:18Look, I'm under no illusion that I look like Tuesday Weld to begin with, but still, you know, here I am, being made to look by a really talented make-up artist, like the worst you could ever imagine yourself looking. And all the time I'm thinking, what am I actually going to have to do?

7:42First day of filming is a shock. Ten plus hours, countless takes, running, shouting, pigs, chickens, mud. Athena in a waterproof cape and cowboy boots. The cinematographer, his curly hair wild, moving amongst us with a handheld camera as we commit the ultimate rookie mistake. Let's start again. No one looks at the camera, OK? Because if you look at the camera, then you have to cut... Looking at the camera, ruining the shot. You'd think it would be the easiest thing in the world to remember to not do, but it is weirdly difficult. There are professional actors in the film, like the Texan actor Caleb Landry-Jones, who's worked with the Kern brothers and Martin McDonagh.

8:30But the majority of the cast in this part of the movie are basically my neighbours in clogs. So, Logan, tell me, are you enjoying all this? Oh, I think it's still not fully hit me that I'm in a film. That's not really hit yet. It's definitely a unique experience, and even more so not doing it in a studio, actually doing it on... Where are we again? OK, ladies and gentlemen. Bring the label down, please. Let's get ready to shoot. Time and place take on a disorientating, woozy quality, especially during night shoots as rain hammers the landscape. Did I mention the weather yet? I'm action! West Coast rain.

9:24It starts in September and it doesn't stop. But still, we all get really deeply into village life. I talked about it one day to the film's editor, Matthew Johnson. There was an amazing moment, actually, during one shoot quite early on. It was sort of a week into it. And we're all running down a slope. And there's this moment where I turned and I saw all the sort of friends and neighbours running at me with their pitchforks or what have you. And it was just the expression on all of their faces. Every single person was in that moment, had given into this big game that we were. This sincerity, with total sincerity, They were playing, fully immersed in it.

10:08You could see there was nobody thinking, this is a bit nuts. They were all in it. Yeah, you really need that where nobody looks around and goes, wait, this is ridiculous. So you guys have to feel like a tight unit, you know, that you've lived together and you fight the outside world together. This is Jim Kreish, who is the writer of the book. One night, during the filming of a feasting scene in a barn, Jim Crace visits the set. He wrote the novel the film is based on, and the wild weather outside stuns him. All too wet and all too muddy. But it looks wonderful and I'm really thrilled with all the effort and, honestly, the determination that has gone into making this film.

10:56It's five years ago that I let go of the novel to be turned into a film. It's taken all that time and a lot of secret effort to bring us all here tonight on this dreadful evening. Thank you very much.

11:22Agnes Carr, her children are everything to her. She harvests with them, she chides and she chivvies them. and in one scene she savagely protects them. The filming of that scene is coming up and I am nervous about it because it actually features a physical fight. Agnes and a handful of other villagers attack a villainous new character, a groom, who has abducted Lizzie and threatens to burn her at the stake for witchcraft. But when an unexpected script rewrite comes through, I spot an addition to the scene that makes my hair stand on end and perhaps might shock you too. Don't say I didn't warn you.

12:06I'm just going through this script rewrite.

12:13Page 66. The groom shrugs but doesn't turn. It's Lizzie Carr I'm talking of. You've seen her, haven't you? She's just a little twig of a girl. she's owned up to all her wickedness Lizzie's mother Agnes Carr is on him first and twists him viciously by the ear there's a rush forward her booted foot kicks him in the face he's out cold the villagers pummel the groom a pruning blade is brought out blood sprays out across the villagers the groom howls the villagers back away Agnes Carr darts back she drops to her knees beside the groom She seizes him firmly by the face with her knife. What she does next is unseen but provokes redoubled howls.

13:01She cuts out his tongue. What? I want to make one thing really clear. I hadn't done any kind of acting since youth theatre productions aged 17. In real life, I don't have children, so I can't use my own maternal feelings here. What I have is 25 years of watching and writing about and making programmes about films. I rack my brains of all the movie performances I've admired and the actor's memoirs and diaries that I've read. Thousands of films, probably, screeds of advice. And two things come to mind. Michael Caine, in one of his books, talking about the importance of stillness on screen. Try to not blink too much, he says.

13:49It diminishes your power. And Kate Winslet in the 1998 movie Hideous Kinky, playing a mother whose children go missing at one point. And Winslet manages to make her face go a completely different colour with panic. How did she do that? How did Kane not blink? Neil, given that Logan and Gregor and I are about to do the scene where we brutally attack a groom. What is your tip? You know when you grow up and you see people that do your nutting and you have flashes of just ripping them apart? You don't follow through with it, obviously, because we're nice people. Tap into that after the youngsters.

14:31This is Neil Leeper. He's one of the professional actors amongst the villagers and he's appeared in Ken Loach's films The Old Oak and The Angel's Share. Because it's fake, it's pretend, so you won't get arrested. That's the upside. None of us are going to get arrested. None of you are going to get arrested, but what you are going to do is possibly shock yourself because you're going to see a side to yourself and you don't know where it came from. That's really interesting. We've all got it. Everybody has a breaking point. It'll exhaust you. Don't overthink it because it's just an illusion. We're all pretending.

15:07So don't go, I must be a lunatic because you're not. OK. Thanks. Be courageous. Try it. Go for it. See what comes up in terms of your feelings. Make sure you have ideas about what you want, why your character's doing this, and then trust it. And even if you make a mistake, learn from it. Actor Noor Dylan Knight plays one of the incomers to the village that everybody is suspicious about and punishes. He spends the whole movie in the stocks, shackled outdoors in the most painful of positions. And not to be self-conscious. Don't let yourself be inhibited. For this job, losing the inhibitions was easy because being out in the open and exposed like this, it feels like everyone has nowhere to hide.

15:56And so it feels like we're all on the same boat together. So you're basically saying be prepared, but be open to being completely surprised and unprepared. This is probably a craft that has the greatest contradiction. Be prepared for, to be unprepared. Be in the moment, just go for it. Hi, Antonio. It's your mum here. Good luck today. It's really quite exciting. But one thing I have to say, and you just keep this in the front of your mind. Don't forget, overacting can ruin the film. Just bear that in mind. Okay. Right. And lots of luck thinking of you all day. Have a good time. Bye.

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17:42You're listening to In The Studio from the BBC World Service. I'm Antonia Quirk and all my professional life I've made programmes about films. But this time I'm following my own experience of being in a film. A career one-off.

18:00The morning of the scene dawns grey and with a glowering low drizzle. And I wish I hadn't picked up a voice message from my mother just before heading to the set.

18:14First, a heavy dose of the bruise palette with the make-up artist Anita Broly. And then again, around the creases around your mouth, just accentuating tiredness. It's the mask in German. A make-up artist is called Maske. That's the German word for make-up. And that's what it's like. It's a mask, really, isn't it?

18:42Picture the set. Rough cottages around a village square. Inside my cottage are Logan, Jackie, Loopy, Tom and Gregor. And we're gearing up for our fight with the groom, who has horribly threatened to burn Lizzie, Agnes' youngest daughter for witchcraft. The fight starts with a frenzied scrum in the square and I talked to a stunt coordinator about how to really yank a human ear, which is what Agnes has to do, without actually pulling it off. Apparently that can happen very easily. If you think, if you hold up my ear and if you clear it a little bit so you can see that you've got the ear and you put your hand against my head, so grab the top of the ear so we know you've got the ear because we can see the bottom part of it.

19:27If you've covered it, you won't know you've got it. If you keep that pressure there, if I go this way, because you've got pressure on it, it just goes that way anyway. Yeah, OK, wait, so it's just... OK, let me try that then. So if you're not pulling the ear... If you're not pulling the ear, you're putting pressure on the head. You're just holding it and putting... OK, great.

19:45Athena likes to rehearse in the moment, on the set. Rehearse, repeat, shoot, rehearse, repeat, shoot. Everything kept very mobile and intense.

20:01Eight of us descend on the groom, reeling about in the mud in a chaotic and brutal melee.

20:11Rehearse, rehearse, shoot, repeat the actions. Athena stands in a red felt fedora, raindrops hanging off the brim like stalactites. Again, she says, and again. Repeat the actions. Repeat the actions. Until they are automatic, reflexive, but not slick. Still gritty. Still coarse. OK, here we go. Where were you? Shall we all understand? Listen. Take this from the grooms, just hit the deck. And three, two, one, the boys will do the pullover as before. And then everyone comes in, thank you. Once we get everyone in position, we'll end rehearsal. Here we go. The cinematographer, Sean Price-Williams, is operating his own camera.

20:59Handheld, snaking around us with his assistant, literally holding onto the belt of his trousers, supporting him and keeping him standing sometimes as he negotiates the mud. Rehearse, discuss, adjust, shoot, rehearse. Athena wants starkness here. High drama, but no theatrics. I hear my mother's voice in my ear. Overacting can ruin a film. Yes, I know it can. But I have no technique, no method I can use to help me calibrate any kind of subtlety now. Do actors always know what they're doing? We certainly don't as human beings. Should they? Shoot, repeat, try again, and again, and again. It's exhausting, huh?

21:47Just one more, just go, all out. Hello?

22:04Agnes Carr, what are you doing? I think of my niece, Robin. She's Lizzie's age. I imagine her in danger. And Noor telling me, use the rain, use the mud, use the cold. And Neil daring me to go for it. You won't get arrested. Still, the sounds that come out of my mouth shock me. You're crazy! You're crazy! We're not in the name! We are crazy! Give us! You're crazy! You're crazy! Give us! Right. That's the... See, that's... ...therapy group. Yeah, yeah.

22:46Rain and rain. The village square looks like the village pond. Sheltering in the cottage between yet more takes, all our minds throb with the mad and the comfortingly mundane. I can't believe that back in these days there was no coffee or tea. I know, Logan. How did anyone get? I cannot imagine. It's not a good thing. The light's fading. Athen is only using natural light, so this final moment of the scene has to be shot now. The villagers flee the injured groom, but Agnes turns back and staggers towards him with her knife as the rain pelts down. Or I stagger towards, rather. It all seems very unlikely now when I think back on it.

23:33Frankly, it's an out-of-body experience. The cinematographer is lying back in the mud, holding his camera as if it's the groom's face. Having been told to avoid looking at the camera since the beginning of filming, now I'm looking directly into it. The lens is my victim. I reach towards it as if it had a mouth and a tongue, and I hold up my blade, which is made of rubber, by the way, although you'd never believe it.

24:09After which I thought everything would calm down a bit In Argyle, ten people had to be airlifted to safety after two separate landslips blocked roads Some roads are flooded and motorists are being advised not to travel

24:27But on the last day of the shoot The film was literally washed out of Argyle during a record-breaking storm, cast and crew stranded in different villages. The cinematographer had to be evacuated by boat. Sometimes life can be like a movie you'd much rather not be in.