Love Me Do arrives on digital platforms from Monday 14th November. The film follows the life-cycle of a relationship between a high-powered London banker, Antonia (Rebecca Calder), and an aspiring actor, Max (Jack Gordon). As their bond develops, they find themselves on a dark path. Directing the film is Martin Stitt.
Stitt has had quite the varied career. He’s worked in banking, the military and had a stint as a photo-journalist, eventually though he decided the trade he wanted to master was that of film-making. His first short, What Does Your Daddy Do?, earned him a BIFA nomination. Ahead of the release of Love Me Do we caught up with Martin to find out all about making an independent film in today’s climate. He also confessed to a secret love for Sharknado – “I do like European drama, but Sharknado – it’s hysterical, it’s brilliant, it’s really good film-making. People really enjoy it and that’s what films should be about.”
You’ve had a varied career, how did you come to settle on film?
Well I think without realising I’ve been really interested in human nature. The best thing about film is it explores human nature in an entertaining way. I think from an early age I’ve been interested in the world experience. I’ve been very experience driven. I think that’s partly because my dad died when I was young. It’s not the orthodox ‘I fell in love with Star Wars’ – though I do remember being bowled over by it. I think the world is a really fascinating place and its kinda really crazy what people get up to. As I travelled more and collected experiences I started realising that there are some amazing stories out there. Amazing people, amazing places, how can you put that all together? I did start by doing photo-journalism and I think that all the different careers were avenues to go see and experience different situations, settings and locations.
I did the photo-journalism bit, but a photo will only tell so much of the story. It always needed an article to go with it. People I were speaking to en route had these amazing stories, even some of the journeys I went on, if I wrote that as an act of fiction no one would believe that that’s what you did, that that was reality. I think finally after doing all this for a whole host of time I applied to a film school thinking I wouldn’t get in. I wanted to give it a shot so at least on my death bed I could say that I’d at least tried to follow my heart. Low and behold I got a place at London Film School. I almost did Cinematography at the National Film and Television School but the head of the department said ‘look I think you want to write and direct’. I thought that was a little grandiose at that stage as I knew very little about film-making. So in a round about way that’s how I’ve come into it.
How did you come up with the idea for Love Me Do?
I think it was an amalgamation of interests. I’ve always been interested in dark character traits. Mainly I think because I’ve been in the military, I’ve been in banking, one of the darkest worlds, the film industry has some really unsavoury types that do really well. The more I explored I found that sociopaths do really well in the banking and legal worlds. Narcissists do really well in the arts and the film world and Machiavellian types do really well in politics. These triangles of dark traits really fascinated me. The more I looked, the more I realised that the people that exhibit these are, when you first meet them, incredibly charming to be around, really lovely. It’s only later on that you feel manipulated or your use for them has run out that you actually realise what their ulterior motives are. I think that was definitely one of the bedrocks for it. The other was that I was really keen to do a piece about a female lead. I think with my dad dying young I was used to having a strong mother and sister. There just weren’t those types of role.
I really wanted to do something where – the convention is usually the nasty character is a guy or one-dimensional – I just went why can’t I fuse them together? Create a female character and make her much more rounded by having her be the heroine and the villain in the same piece. It was really fusing those two together. Then finally I wrote something that was on a budget scale that I could actually make. I’d written a whole load of other scripts for which I just needed more money than I was able to bring to the table, or through investors or through funding schemes. Finally I thought I’d better write something I can make. I want to be a filmmaker rather than a film talker and low and behold Love Me Do was the genesis of those three. Surprisingly Love Me Do was the one that attracted some money to get it made as well. I was thinking I could do it with friends and colleagues in the industry, but we did actually raise the money, ironically from the finance sector.
The film places the viewer in some very moral conflicts, was it fun to create these dark characters?
I think that’s the thing I found really fascinating when I wrote the script… I handed it round and the amount of people that said ‘I so hope they get away with it,’ and I was like ‘but you do understand what they’ve done?’ To me it’s actually the worst crime anybody could commit. I’ve got two children. Killing someone is pretty horrible, but taking a child and not knowing where that child is, like the Madeline Mccan scenario, it just sticks with the parents for the rest of their lives. That horrible thought of how is the child. To me that ‘s the scariest scenario you could get. It was almost a Hitchcockian desire of mine, I’m a big Hitchcock fan, I went well how I get an audience behind these two people who do the worst thing in the world. How can I get the audience to like them?
I was really lucky to go to the American Film Institute in LA; Terrence Malick went there. His first film Badlands was the first of that genre where they had serial killers who you actually related to on a very human level. It was fun to do. It was very duplicitous. I wanted to the audience to think about this. Human nature and dark traits, we don’t really understand them until we understand the outcome of their goal. We do admire a lot of people in society these days who actually if you understood their motives and understood what they really wanted are pretty nasty characters. I guess it was emulating what human life is really like. You only have to look at the current presidential campaign in the States. The idea that someone like Trump to be in that position. You wonder how on Earth it happened. In a minor way that’s what this film is about. We admire a lot of things in people which are not really understood because its a manipulative process.
How we pulled it off – I think the key thing was making sure that Rebecca wasn’t given a definite statement. I think if she’d have handled it less well she could have sign-posted it from the start. I think the whole point of it is we totally ignored what the final outcome was even though it was completely structured within the script. We never really discussed what the outcome was. That way it wasn’t sign-posted upfront. I think the fun bit of that was to just treat them as a human couple who wanted to achieve something. It just happens that what they want to achieve was beyond the convention of human norms.
They definitely feel real and grounded, even with all their darkness…
The thing about them when I wrote them, I was always surprised by a few people who read it in the industry whom in some respects showed how little some people know about character, about human nature. They were saying these are horrible characters and I was sat there going ‘Well they’re not’ They weren’t created that way. They’re actually very honest. When she asks what do you do when I’m not here, he doesn’t lie. He starts to fib to get out of the question, but in the end he admits ‘I snoop around, I do what you do, I look’. The same with her. In a world where she’s been scarred, she is very defensive. You can fully appreciate, okay slightly in the extremes to put cameras up, but you can appreciate that need to find out who you have let into your life. Once she’s honest about it and how she’s been hurt in the past, because of materialism, you start to emphasise. The two characters are remarkable honest to each other. Even in conflict and crisis.
To discover you’ve been spied upon must be shocking for the guy, but to understand the reasons behind you it can almost empathise with her. At all stages during the creation of the characters the aim was to make them very human. To make them willing to open up to each other and take the consequences, maybe get hurt. But also be strong enough to do what they want. I think they’re both very damaged but they exhibit some traits which you sit there and go ‘maybe I should be more honest with my partner’, or ‘maybe I should be more honest with what I can or can’t achieve’ to allow that bond and openness between a couple.
What was it about Rebecca and Jack that made you confident that they would be able to pull these characters off?
That was a real tough one. My time at the American Film Institute in LA I certainly realised how important casting was for a director. If you get casting right, literally your job becomes so much easier, it’s a nice and easy job. It’s basically 90% of your job. If you get it wrong then you’re really working. We were blessed to have a guy called Manuel Puro as our casting director. I had no idea what kind of actors we could attract with this sort of scale and budget, or how the script would come across to actors. Would it be something they would be interested in? He brought in a brilliant range of actors, some way higher profile than Jack and Rebecca and commercially probably would have been the heart of the film. But they just didn’t have that desire to commit the same sort of eagerness that Jack and Rebecca had. That willingness to really throw themselves in.
Why those two? It was a juggling act. We paired quite a few actors together to see if they would be compatible. I think the beauty of Jack and Rebecca is they do look good together. They look interesting together. Almost like brother and sister which is a little bit creepy. But you kinda believe that they would be a couple. Their acting styles are also very different. Rebecca was much more cerebral and still. Much more in her head. Jack is a much more physical actor. I liked that difference in their performances. I was aware that it was a big ask for them to be on screen for ninety minutes in a room with very few other people. If I’m totally honest, when I finally put them together there was a danger. Jack’s quite an unpredictable kind of guy, performance wise, and that’s lovely as a director. I like choices. I like people to take risks whether it works or not. I could see that there was a report between Rebecca and Jack but also there was danger between them. I just thought ‘well that’s what the characters need’. So yeah casting well and then trusting your actors.
It was amazing. I have to say as we started shooting it was a pleasure to work with those two. They really embraced it. We didn’t have a lot of time, but they surprised me. They were just really collaborative and really threw themselves in so credit to them. Thanks to Manuel for finding them.
Common trait in independents for a short shoot these days, how do you handle that?
It was three weeks, six day weeks. I think nowadays as a director you have to allows consider the budget and scale of what you can actually achieve. Studios just don’t give money out like they used to so you have to work within your means. Set realistic goals and stick to them. The joy of it is these days with indie film-making, you can do it on a low budget but you’ve got to embrace chaos, that’s one way to put it.
You have to be very flexible and adaptable. We had one of our locations drop out literally a week before we shot. We had to just run and find another location. As it worked out it worked out better, but you’ve got to be very malleable to be able to change very quickly on the spot. Eighteen days is not a long time to work, but if you work in a way that you can think very quickly on your feet, with the scale and the budget that we had , the resources we had, things would go wrong on a regular basis. You just had to problem solve. If you enjoy that and are able to still enjoy your story and get the crew to too it can go really well. Amazingly enough I hate to say this because you hear it all the time in Hollywood ‘Wow it was an amazing three weeks’ the shock for me was we didn’t fall out once in the three weeks. We made our days, we got to the pub once a week and we all got on. Even one of our gaffers mentioned part way through ‘no ones fallen out yet’, everybody was such a small crew that we could work collectively and support each other.
We weren’t cumbersome having to pick up egos. It was really nice to have this lovely collaborative environment. I very much wanted to have it so that anyone could contribute and figure out how to make it better. The crew from the runners upwards were brilliant. Everybody brought something to it. We had one production assistant who got us clearances for artefacts to put in the rooms, expensive watches etc. things I never, ever, ever envisaged getting but she was really into it.
I guess a positive is that there are more ways to self distribute with digital platforms etc.
I think so. I think it is still difficult. It’s been brilliant to make the film and on this scale and choosing the actors without thinking you’ve got to look at the commercial returns. But in the same breath it’s really hard to get yourself distinguished and stand out. The avenues are there for distribution you’ve just got to be realistic on how much its going to cost and what the returns are going to be. You can find an outlet.
The festival was very kind. We’ve been able to get distribution out in the States, UK digital distribution. The reality is I think most people are watching films on the small screen. We did consider doing a small theatrical release, but then I think it’s more about vanity. Everyone I’ve spoken to who has done a theatrical has said that it cost them a lot of money and hasn’t really helped the investors. It hasn’t really helped them other than we all set out to make movies for the big screen. I still hope that that’s the case. It’s been amazing seeing Love Me Do play with a collective audience because it has a very unsettling effect on people. They don’t know what’s going to happen in the film. But the reality is we watch so much on the tube, the train, at home on digital platforms. That proliferation of platforms has really helped us. I think with the release we’re getting it’ll certainly help with getting a second film made. Which is again, you get one film made it’s tough, getting a second seems tougher at times.
Do you have an idea for your next project?
I’ve got a short which I did quite a few years ago called What Does You Daddy Do?, which played at the Venice Film Festival. It got nominated for a British Independent Film Award. It’s certainly a scale above Love Me Do. That’s the one I really like. It’s about an undercover police man who cracks a child abuse paedophile ring. It’s a pretty tough subject. I also have another more self-contained film which I’d like to consider.
I think it’s just looking at the commercial reality these days of where the money can come from and how much people are prepared to risk. The platforms are there to release films, but the margins of return for an investor are getting finer and finer as people spend less and less on watching films. I’ve got two I’d really like to do, it’s just understanding the market place and how to get those to an audience. It’s a real shame, you can spend years making a film, but if an audience doesn’t see it, it becomes almost vanity.
What do you hope viewers will get out of viewing Love Me Do?
I hope it’s a Marmite film. I do hope either love it or hate it. Or it sparks conversations. It’s so easy to watch something these days, maybe enjoy the process of watching it, but at the end of it you can forget about it. I love films that stick with you and make you think about it later on. My ideal for Love Me Do is for people to find the experience of watching it fascinating. I’d like it to stick with them and make them think afterwards. Maybe causes a debate between couples in a pub, or they sit there and think were they good people or not? Open up that question about human nature. Why did you like these people for a moment? Why do you not like them at the end? What is it about them? So yeah, I hope it causes a bit of a debate and makes people think.
I also hope they enjoy the process of going through this experience as they try and problem-solve and unravel what the dynamic between this couple is and what are they going to do ultimately at the end. If I could come back to what drove me into film-making, it was exploring human nature in a way that is entertaining. If entertaining means debates or shock or horror, well I hope this achieves those goals. I love films where people have to be active when watching it. You know when you sit there saying ‘I know what’s going to happen’, unfortunately nine out of ten times these days you’re absolutely right. I love those ones that completely left foot you. I’ve had people turn around and say ‘I knew what this film was about at the start. She was going to use him for this reason, but then that didn’t happen. Then it was clear they were going to do this thing and it would get gory…but that didn’t happen either.’ But then when they get to the end they’re like ‘that made logical sense’. The whole way through they expected various things which didn’t happen. It wrong foots you. That way that you can keep ahead of the audience, but keep them active and participating in this.
I hope it’s satisfying for an audience. I suppose the question I’d like to leave with an audience is – did Antonia know this was going to happen? Had she manipulated it, or was it really an accident.
Love Me Do is available to download from Monday 14th November, 2016.
