PULL has taken quite some time to make its way out into the world. It was filmed over three days in July 2009, but the idea for the film had been in my mind, and sitting within a stack of notebooks, for about four years. This was not a case of a slow, gradual development -- it was instead a spark, followed by a block, then followed many years later by an unblock.
My original idea for the film, the spark, came pretty fast, and like a lot of my ideas it was born out of a handful of personal experiences and observations that coalesced at a certain point and clicked—held together by enough tension and possibility to feel like a film. So pretty quickly I had an outline, a sense of the characters and a few key moments and key images. What I felt I didn't have was the ability to turn that into a fully fleshed script, filled with the kind of details, evasive dialogue and subtle interactions that the idea seemed to demand. Being in the middle of a degree at Ireland's National Film School at the time, where the orthodoxy of the script-to-screen procedure was hegemonic, this perceived inability seemed insurmountable. How could I dive into making a film when I wasn't even sure what the characters would say?
What developed over the next four years was not so much the idea for the film but my belief in it. After graduating from the National Film School in 2008, I started to experiment more with improvisational processes -- something I had dipped into in my last two college shorts, Each Other and You're Only What I See Sometimes, but within a pretty safe and structured framework. I had played around with improv in rehearsals and within certain scenes but the demands of the college's process meant that there was always a detailed script to fall back on. In other words, there was little risk of total collapse.
In May last year I shot a short called Let’s as a small-scale attempt to risk exactly that. Filmed from 8pm to 4am in Dublin’s Temple Bar, with a bare two-page outline for a script and no rehearsal, the film was an exhilarating, liberating exercise, forcing me to explore what creative resources I could draw upon working on the spot, on location and within a tight schedule and all the pressures that come with that.
Bolstered from that experience, I soon started preparing for Pull, something I knew was, even on a base practical level, a much bigger, more ambitious project: it had five or six substantial characters, multiple locations and one pivotal party scene requiring thirty or forty people. Let's had been shot completely on the fly on a HDV prosumer camera, with a few scouted locations but no real shot-listing or visual preparation -- and with actors experienced in improv. This time we would be working on my cinematographer Piers McGrail's Red Camera, which required a bit more consideration technically -- but we also had a cast of mostly non-actors, who were in danger of freezing up if they were given too much consideration -- that is, I needed to back off to a certain extent, giving them space to be themselves and act spontaneously, without having to worry about hitting narrative or spatial "marks" in a scene.
In many ways Pull marked a return to the spirit of filmmaking I had explored in my teenage years, where filmmaking had emerged for me as intuitively collaborative, playful and exploratory process worked out with my friends--albeit now armed with greater technical experience and (relatively) more mature aesthetic ambitions. It is, in other words, a key film for me, and that is why I wanted this website to exist and why I (along with a few of my collaborators) will be occasionally posting bits and pieces reflecting on the making of the film here in this blog; going into some more detail about how it developed, along with noting screenings or responses to the film as they come up.
