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ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.02 - MAY 2000
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The Surreal World of Simon Pummell HK: In Ray Gun Fun, the child is a monster! Is he a monster or is it his world that has made him a monster? Can you talk a little about the thematics of the piece?
SP: The child in Ray Gun Fun is no more a monster than any child. I am fascinated how kids test the boundaries of everything. Often when children play you can see them test the limit of the game. So often play violence can lead to real violence. It is this slippage between fantasy world and real world that continues throughout our lives. In the film the little boy is full of violence. I always imagine the crashing rooms to be in some way the inside of his head. Did his world make him like this? Or is it the original sin of little boys (and maybe girls)? HK: Your films mix live-action and animation in a number of interesting ways. What do you see is the relationship between the two mediums? SP: I see live-action and animation as part of a continuum. I promised myself when I started making films that I would try to run the film through the camera at exactly the best speed for each shot, each action. I have tried to stick to this in an imperfect and patchy way. One frame per hour or 1000 frames per second depend on the action and emotion. Having said this, when I made Temptation of Sainthood, I realized that for me the human face is incomparable. I decided the face conveys emotions with such richness that I never wanted to make a film without the human face, however baroque or unreal the rest of the world of the film is.
HK: Using live actors in animated surroundings is also rather rare. But you use the technique quite often with excellent results to submerge your characters in surreal and bizarre worlds. What special challenges does working with live actors possess and what is the draw to this method for you? SP: To work with actors in artificial worlds, which are created quite often separately from the action in the film, involves making great demands on the actor, and having great trust in the abilities of your performers. Usually the world of the film is created before the actor comes to perform, so he can see the world and understand the relation between his action and his environment. Nonetheless, the actor has to, to some extent, work in a void -- and that is very demanding. The lure of this method is to be able to literally put characters into very extreme dreamscapes. I have always wanted to make films where the world is a complete expression of the inner life of the character. In effect you are watching someone turned inside out. I think it is often this effect which people respond strongly to in my films. HK: The imagery you create is unsettling, disturbing in nature, sometimes even difficult to watch, but creates fascinating films that one can’t stop watching. What draws you to such unusual subject matter?
SP: The subject matter of my films has been intuitively created out of a desire to express feelings of uncanny anxiety which I, and I believe others, experience and often then want to express. In my shorts I have always felt I am exploring areas and film languages that later I might want to explore further and re-context more fully in stories. They are lyric poems, trying to record and explore some states of mind. HK: The average person hears "animation" and thinks of kids’ cartoons. What are your hopes of seeing this misperception corrected? Do you think it will ever happen and if so, how? SP: Animation has already broken out of the "Kids Ghetto." I see animation as rather like American Jazz. In its purest form it was of a particular historical moment. But its influence is so massive that now on one level everything you see is animated. With the explosion of digital technology, so many films now use frame by frame manipulation. Yet many of those films would never be called animated. A few years ago I was polled for my favourite animated films of the past couple of years; I chose Terminator 2 and Naked Lunch. Maybe I was just trying to make a point. HK: How do you support and fund your films? What is the status of being an independent in London? SP: For the last decade I have made animated films in London mainly for Channel 4 television. This has transformed what being independent meant in London. The situation is changing now, with the channel's priorities shifting to more populist and easily programmable work. This is a real shame. I am working more and more in a fiction and new media context. For example, I am currently completing finance on a feature film, Dogfight, based on a William Gibson short story, as well as developing several interactive projects. Heather Kenyon is editor-in-chief of Animation World Magazine. |
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Note: Readers may contact any Animation World Magazine contributor by sending an e-mail to editor@awn.com.
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