WORDS BY ALEX GODFREY, PHOTOS COURTESY OF MOMENTUM.
Dominic Murphy is a British commercials director. He met Vice co-founder Shane Smith a decade ago, and together they’ve made a great film called White Lightnin’, which is just out on DVD and totally deserves your attention. Set in West Virginia, it’s a story about a very troubled man, Jecso White, “The Dancing Outlaw”. He is an impulsive force of nature who lives life to its fullest, whether he’s dancing, drinking, fucking or fighting. Budding directors take note: here are Dominic’s top five filmmaking tips.

LET YOUR IDEA BOIL
Dominic and Shane developed the story for years before being satisfied enough to begin production. Dominic Murphy: This all came about because Shane had got fascinated by Jesco through documentary material, and he went down and met him and they bonded. Shane was excited about this guy, interested in his extreme personality and his whole culture. He reimagined Jesco’s story and came up with a more extreme version of what might have happened to him. Shane sent me this monologue, the story of Jesco White. At first I thought he was a fictional character, but the story had an integrity and made sense to me.

BE PERSONAL
Dominic went to West Virginia to meet Jesco himself, but was determined not to let him influence their own ideas too heavily. Meeting Jesco didn’t make us change the script much, we were pretty faithful to our original idea. There was this short story that we had that was a narration of his life and we had to build it into a screenplay, and we kept faithful to that. As a director, or creative person, writer, whatever, you’re kind of writing about yourself as much as anything else. There’s an emotional dynamic or awareness going on in the story, and that in a way is the most important thing.

USE CREATIVE LICENCE
The filmmakers never intended White Lightnin’ to be a straight life story, and much of it is fictionalised. We were never trying to portray him directly – it’s not a biopic, it’s a kind of dark fantasy inspired by him. The important things are the same: he was in and out of reform schools, his father did teach him the dancing to try to keep him out of trouble, and his father was murdered, although the scenario was different. Jesco was actually there, this fight broke out and these guys went off and got a shotgun and shot his father. There was tragedy in that the family found it very difficult to stay together after that, but essentially nothing really happened after that to Jesco. Our story is a kind of “What if…”, taking the key themes of his life and projecting them forward, taking it as far as it could go.

CREATE YOUR REALITY
Jesco’s own interpretation of events is dubious. Yeah, the unreliable narrator… Who knows what parts of Jesco’s story are true? There’s an element to storytelling, to memory, that’s unreliable, and I think we tried to build that into the film. There are portions of the film that don’t really add up and that was something we wanted to do, because our Jesco is telling the story, and he doesn’t
know what really happened – he’s
struggling to interpret the reality of
the situation.

MAKE SURE YOUR LEAD ACTOR HAS GOOD EYES
Jesco is portrayed amazingly by Edward Hogg, who despite coming from Doncaster, has the charisma and raw energy to be utterly convincing. His eyes are amazing, they pop off the screen. The UK Film Council, who funded the film, loved the script. But one thing they do, if they’re unsure about any element of it, is they ask filmmakers to make a pilot based on something they’re not 100 percent confident about. With us, they were confident about my filmmaking but they wanted to know who we could get to play this incredible, charismatic yet psychotic character and pull it off. So they gave us some money and we did a pilot and made a documentary of the casting process. We saw hundreds of people, and then I did workshops with about a dozen shortlisted actors. Some of them were bigger
names, but Ed just stood out. For the closing shot of this documentary the camera closed in on his eyes and he looked up. The Film Council watched it and they went: “Wow. You’ve got the money. Go ahead.”

Tagged: how to, movies, white lightnin
November 4th, 2009 @ 06:56