Director's Statement

Survive. Create beauty. Tell the truth. I surround myself with Woolf, Plath, Fellini, Truffaut, Jodorowsky, Varda, Tarkovsky, Godard, Ken Russell, William Friedkin, Polanski, Antonioni, Bergman, Cassavetes, Herzog, and all the others. I live in a world of poetry, existentialism, art, music, and images, and without these things I do not live at all. I have always been stateless, outside of society, striving to live so that I might pursue the holy mountain, the divine image which can open the heart like a flower. Alchemy. Language. Geometry. Sound. Consciousness. Art is not optional. Art is not cultural journalism; the pursuit of symbolism is as essential to human existence as food or air. It is the basis of everything, from language to memory to our appreciation of a sunset or a kitten or a cup of coffee. It is the reason we have senses and emotions, it is even how our brains communicate our basic physical needs to us. We hunger for depth, but the mainstream dope peddlers offer us only shallowness, basking in the rays of their own mediocrity, endlessly regurgitating monomythic stories for sugar-addled brains. They entertain us for a while, but they stifle our revolutionary spirits, they starve us of the oxygen of originality. So be it. My mother always said if you want something done properly you’d better do it yourself.

Ten movies that influenced Little Johnny Jewel

Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini, 1957)
Mississippi Mermaid (Francois Truffaut, 1969)
Bande à Part (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964)
Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, 1974)
Cleo from 5 to 7 (Agnes Varda, 1962)
Starstruck (Gillian Armstrong, 1982)
It's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)
Jubilee (Derek Jarman, 1977)
Once Upon A Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)

Images (click on image to open hi-res JPEG)

FAQ -  A brief Q&A with Jude Rawlins

What is Little Johnny Jewel about?

Little Johnny Jewel is a funny and serious film about people. It’s full of music and comedy and poetry and dancing. It’s a film about love and redemption and second chances. 


What genre is it?

I don’t know really. I don’t really think in genres. Though I do think it’s the absolute definition of indie, in the real John Cassavetes sense. It doesn’t obey the rules of modern storytelling, but it doesn't break the rules of antiquity and fable either. It is ancient and modern. It is a film with a spirit. And it has the guts to be itself. I think it will resist easy categorization.


Why Iowa?

Because I want to make films with substance and depth, and there’s no point in bothering the mainstream film industry with that. So I just decided to create my own film industry somewhere far away from all of that, somewhere where we could just make up our own rules as we went along and break them whenever we felt like it. Iowa is the best place in the world to make films, as far as I’m concerned. You have time, space, really good light, it’s relatively inexpensive and there’s an amazing community of hugely talented people who are hungry to do something. Everyone’s really friendly as well. There’s no ego here, just endless enthusiasm. I feel really blessed to have discovered it.


Jean Seberg…

You can’t make a film in Iowa, and certainly not in Marshalltown without doing so under the shadow of Jean Seberg. I couldn’t even if I wanted to, we are surrounded by her legacy here. Her high school yearbook photo was taken in this room. And why would you want to anyway?

Jean is the thing that first brought me here. And I have absorbed her influences over a lifetime. Little Johnny Jewel is an direct result of that. Truffaut, Godard, Joan Littlewood, Shelagh Delaney, even Preminger, they are all in there.

I first discovered Jean through the scene in The Legend of Billie Jean where Billie Jean sees Saint Joan on TV. My friend Moon Chaplin discovered her the same way, and that’s the significance of the Billie Jean poster in Little Johnny Jewel. And obviously the newspaper logo on the t-shirt is a direct homage to her character in Breathless.


How did you get involved in film?

It was always there, alongside music. Where I grew up there was no cinema, so we just watched movies on TV. Usually with my mum, she’d even let me skip school if there was a good movie on she thought I’d appreciate. Then later my dad introduced me to the films of Ken Russell, and my world got a lot bigger. He also bought me my first 35mm camera for my ninth birthday. In my teens I spent all my money on buying records and renting VHS tapes from the local video store. I guess that's why I am less attached to the collective theatrical experience that a lot of my peers aspire to. My whole life since then has been about discovering art and music and films and literature and poetry. And of course finding my own voice and using it. Which is why I am not interested in making films the way others do. I met Kristin Hersh when I was 16 and Derek Jarman when I was 18 and their approaches to their work revolutionized my thinking. They taught me that being a total misfit outsider was actually a huge advantage, and that waiting for approval or permission was just a waste of time. I kind of knew that anyway, I’d long since read Blake and I’d discovered the Sex Pistols, but they showed me that it was practical and workable to have a take-it-or-leave-it attitude towards the powers that be. Derek told me that Sally Potter was going to make the impossible movie, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, my favorite book, with Tilda Swinton and Quentin Crisp, and Billy Zane from Twin Peaks. Everyone had rejected it, but Sally wouldn’t give up. And I just thought that’s going to be the most amazing film ever. And it was. It proved that anything was possible if you just hold your nerve. Derek also introduced me to Dudley Sutton, who became the first actor I ever worked with. When I was making my first film with a camera I’d bought for forty quid I had Dudley, and about twenty minutes into the first day I was asking him how Fellini and Joseph Losey might approach the scene. You couldn’t really ask for a better start than that.


How important was it that you photographed and edited the film yourself?

Well I have a very specific aesthetic and an entire philosophy behind that. You have to let the film tell you what it wants. Composition is more important to me than lighting, you can compose a great image in bad light if you really know what you are doing. The image should be memorable, it should linger so that the audience can take a mental photograph. That's why a lot of the key images recap in the end credits as photographic stills, the audience can replay the entire movie in their heads just from those images. You can't get there with a storyboard so how do you explain that to a DP? I don't know, so I just do it myself. And when you shoot like that there are really only very few ways you can then edit the scene. When you linger on a shot, you do it for a reason. Sometimes its a question of hanging in there until it becomes uncomfortable for the audience. When you're looking through the viewfinder on set you know when those moments are happening. If you don't respect those moments in the editing process then you're not obeying the material. How do you hand that off to someone else? And these days you see the same cutting techniques in zillion dollar movies that you see in coffee commercials. And the way I write, each scene is a non-submersible unit. Yes it deviates from the script, but because I am the writer as well, at every stage I know whether or not we are being true to the spirit of the film. And that is what guides me, and the whole process, more than the words. Besides, as Cassavetes established, if you've cast the film well you don't have to worry about the script at all, the actors do the heavy lifting there. That's why it's vital that the script must be bursting with energy. A good screenplay should feel as if the film inside is fighting to get out.


Who would you most like to work with?

That I haven’t worked with already? Denise Gough. I’ve met her several times, she is a genius. And Jill Halfpenny, who is just a wonderful, kind, warm person and a great, great actress. We’re friends but we’ve never worked together, and I’d love to. Other than that, I am more than happy to work with this bunch of reprobates again, any time. And Georgia Mackenzie, who was in my film Red. Working with her was a dream come true and she absolutely nailed it. So I really hope to work with her again, and in fact am developing something I hope to persuade her to do.


Do you have any screenwriting tips?

Study transactional analysis, watch Shakespeare, listen to the The Goon Show. Seriously, Spike Milligan could set up an entire character with a single sound. It trounces all these silly ideas about character development. And mostly just never hold back when you write, just go for it, hell for leather. Get that stream of consciousness, that sense of urgency into the words and on to the page, because your actors are seriously going to benefit from it later on. That's why I never put camera instructions or shots in the screenplay. No one needs the interruption. The director will figure out how to shoot it because that's their job. And if you are directing it yourself you already have the vision so there's no need anyway.

Trivia

The movie is named after a song by American band Television. There are multiple references to both the song and the band in the film, though the song itself is never heard because it would have added 15 minutes to the runtime of the movie, as the filmmakers felt it would be "blasphemy" to edit it. They encourage audiences to listen to the song before watching the film.

Leyland the lovestruck mechanic is named after the now-demolished British Leyland car factory in writer/director Jude Rawlins' hometown of Birmingham, England. Leyland's cap bears the insignia of Birmingham soccer team Aston Villa, and he dresses in the team colors of claret and blue. His denim dungarees are a nod to Birmingham pop group Dexy's Midnight Runners.

"Terimalicky bacon flavored beef sticks" are named after filmmaker Terrence Malick.

"Singing Jim Spriggs" is not a salami snack, but a character from 1950s British radio comedy The Goon Show.

"Ice Cream Kimono" was a musical project that writer/director Jude Rawlins had with former Associates singer Billy Mackenzie in the early 1990s.

Molly's t-shirt bears the logo of Marshalltown newspaper the Times Republican, and is a homage to Marshalltown actress Jean Seberg's performance in Jean-Luc Godard's legendary movie Breathless.

Pearl's Vive Le Rock t-shirt and "Rabbit" padlock and chain necklace are a homage to punk legend Sid Vicious.

The Legend of Billie Jean poster is "hugely significant" and the door it covers is the entrance to the filmmakers' studio and production office.

The character of record store guru Birdy is a German steampunk based on Tom Petty's Mad Hatter and the shopkeeper from 1970s British kids' TV show Mr. Benn.

When Ivy asks Birdy if he has the Brenda Lee album from the movie Out of Blue the record he hands her is the actual one from that film. It was gifted to Jude Rawlins by Out of Blue director Carol Morley, and her written message to him on the cover can be briefly glimpsed in the scene.

The movie was shot in the unusual 2.20:1 aspect ratio (the standard for old Todd AO and 65mm Cinerama single camera process in the 1960s.) An aesthetic choice, it was felt that the standard ratio of 1.85:1 was too close to television's 16:9 ratio, while the full widescreen ratios such as 2.35:1 Cinemascope lacked intimacy.

Jude Rawlins uses only vintage stills lenses made between the 1940s and early 1970s, which he has been collecting since the early 1980s. His cameras are all adapted to the vintage M42 lens mount. He shoots either with a tripod or handheld, He never uses unmotivated camera movements, pans, tilts, zooms or focus pulls.

The hit and run victim in the TV news report is named Paulene Manzarek in homage to The Doors' keyboard player Ray Manzarek and the X song "Johnny Hit and Run Paulene" which Manzarek produced. The report also references a line from the X song "Los Angeles." The pictures of Ms. Manzarek are actually of Rawlins' close friend and former bandmate Val Gwyther.

In one scene Bambi is drinking coffee from the cup that appeared in Rawlins' short film Tea with Judee Sill which he made as part of Werner Herzog's film course. 

Jinx refers to Lorenzo as "some kind of prevert" which is a homage to the Stanley Kubrick movie Dr. Strangelove.

The character of Ursula was inspired by the witch Odile in J. Lee Thompson's Eye of the Devil, played by Sharon Tate.

Isobel is a Medieval Scottish name, the most direct clue that the three women might be the witches from Macbeth.

The character of Jinx is named after Jinx Dawson from pioneering 60s American rock band Coven.

Lorenzo's license plate MOVE OVER is a reference to the opening song from Janis Joplin's album Pearl.

Johnny's teddy bear Bruno is actually Jude Rawlins' bear Little Ted, who has appeared in his films before.

Yevstushenko was the poet Jude Rawlins' father introduced him to at the age of eleven, when Jude complained he was "bored stupid" by the works of Tolkien.

Rawlins insists that the colours yellow and pink should appear together on screen because Battenburg cake is "the only color palette you need."

Technical Information

Runtime: 2hrs 26mins (146mins)
Aspect ratio: 2.2:1 matted to 1.85:1 (2K theatrical, flat) or 16:9 (HD)
Sound mix: Stereo
Frame rate: 24fps

Type: narrative feature film
Genre: comedy