'I wanted the spontaneity of improvisation, which creates a different kind of naturalism. It can be quite fragile, because things can go wrong, but it is much more realistic to look at.'
- Chris Cooke

Chris Cooke's filmmaking is as natural as he can get it, unfettered by the usual script-shoot-edit approach. He also relishes the humour of the absurd, so here's a film about alcoholic drivers that is darkly funny as it is spontaneous.

How did you get started on a filmmaking career?Long-term unemployment. There was this course, Headstart, run by Intermedia Film & Video in Nottingham. If you had been unemployed for a year and you lived in a certain area, you could get off the dole and for five days a week attend a media course that would teach you everything you needed to know about editing on a Steinbeck or editing non-linear, or three-machine SVHS, all this kind of stuff. It was brilliant, because you got paid, to be honest. Instead of getting the dole we were paid 100 a week. I never thought I would be praising Mrs Thatcher, but it really was weird, it was a fantastic course. Everyone I met there are all still mates, all filmmakers who network together. It was a really brilliant course. For me, it gave me the confidence to learn the basics and I learned how to talk to other filmmakers and it meant I could make stuff, on the weekend. Nottingham's always had a really vibrant filmmaking community, where every Saturday and Sunday people were just making shorts all the time. A Hi-8 culture had gradually developed into a DV culture over the years. Everyone would buy the cameras or the edit suites or the edit software for their computers. Someone would say "I'm making a film next weekend but I need someone to do the lighting," and you would go and do that, or hold the boom or record the sound or something like that. Everyone would network and everyone would swap skills.Tell us about your short films?I got involved with a course called The Northern Deal which Channel 4 was doing in conjunction with the local film agency. It was go on a course, learn a little bit about writing a script and get selected for making a ten-minute short that Channel 4 would screen.That led me to the BFI New Directors short Shifting Units and that led directly to this feature One For The Road. A crash course in on-the-dole directing then?Actually, I wasn't that much interested in rushing to direct film. I was much more interested in cameras and lighting and I was much more interested in other people's shorts - and still am!There are loads of filmmakers in Nottingham and we all work together. That's still happening. So I think I must have worked on about 15 shorts before I thought I might have a crack at directing anything.

What's the story of One For The Road?It's quite a dark black comedy about four men you meet on an alcohol management course, part of their probation for losing their driving licences following convictions for drink-driving.Three of them spend most of their time down the pub because one of the three has something to sell and they think this rich guy on the course might be worth pressing for a bit of cash. Essentially, it?s a black comedy about losers, where nobody learns anything and nothing changesDo you find it easy to write comedy about dark subjects like alcohol abuse - it's not really a fun subject is it?No, it isn't. Actually I do worry about that. It's not knockabout humour, its much more painful comedy - I hope! The films that were interesting me when I wrote it were things like The Treasure of Sierra Madre. It's about greed, but it's also about the inherent failure of people.The previous film I had done shouldn't have been a comedy. Shifting Units was about a salesman having a nervous breakdown. I wanted to listen to the way people describe themselves, without ever telling you how they feel.One reviewer said your film was funny like the best British TV comedy is funny - was TV humour something you were striving for?I was very flattered, because I had not set out to do anything like that, I set out to be just very character-driven, with an emphasis on the situation people are in, rather than a story. As a writer, I can't really address things in terms of big stories. They are not so everyday, the characters aren't right, wondering who they are, or becoming designed by events, learning lessons if you like, which I don't think we do, as human beings. We don't really learn from our failures, we tend to repeat them. I tend to want to make films reflecting that, more like the sort of black comedy you get on British television.You like both scripted drama and improvisation - what dictates the option you choose?Which ever one is working at the time! It is partly that. When I plan out the script, I plan out sections for improvisations. In this film, there are role-play exercises the characters have to do as part of their alcohol management course. I thought it was worth describing what these role-plays are and allowing Johnny Phillips, the actor who plays the course leader, to direct them. And I sat back and chipped in with some ideas. But they are quite literally, role-play exercises, where I describe to the actor the end point and allow them to take a life of their own and record them as documentary. We did that quite often throughout the film. The hard thing on a low budget film is finding space to afford a lot of improvisation without knocking things out of schedule. What I did not want, was improvise the way a lot of people do; to improvise, turn that into script and give that back to the actors and then record that. I wanted the spontaneity of improvisation, which creates a different kind of naturalism. It can be quite fragile, because things can go wrong, but it is much more realistic to look at, especially if we are talking, as this is, about a black comedy; about things you would not normally associate with laughter.But is the downside of improvisation that you don't control the time that it takes?You have to be really on it all the time, checking with your AD that you are not over-running. In terms of the balance of the film, I suppose it works out as a sixty-forty thing, with sixty percent scripted and forty percent impro.

What sort of budget level did you raise for your script?That was quite a generous one. We got half way through the writing and the development and things got quite ambitious. Film Four and everyone were all upping the ante- but by the time you get round to writing the real budget things have come down a bit. You've written out those big sequences that needed hundreds and hundreds of people for something more affordable. EM Media - the screen agency for the East Midlands, put in a third through their production fund EMMI, Film Four put in a third and the Film Council put in a third, so all in all, we managed to raise 600,000Even on that budget level you chose to shoot once again on DV - why was that?I have always shot on DV. I have been used to using DV going right back to its very beginning. Shifting Units was shot on DV using a PD 150 and the film I made before that was shot using a Cannon XL-1. I come from a filmmaking culture where even if I wanted to use a 16mm camera, no-one around here hired them out. People had Hi-8 cameras and then when DV came along DV cameras appeared. You could either hire one, or borrow one off your mates. The second reason was, you develop a technique working with actors which allows you to use a certain amount of improvisation; a certain structure of writing and working. I can't think of any other way to work to be honest. With my films there are three stages of writing; there's writing the script, then there's the shoot, where I start re-writing the script in terms of the improvisation. Finally, there's the edit, where working on DV means you can go out and get pickups or newsequences, which are not expensive to do if you structure and plan for them. The scale of a feature is a big jump up from shorts - how did you prepare for that?I prepared by getting an ulcer, my stomach was so shagged by the time we got around to doing the feature. I kept thinking to myself, how do you prepare for this at all? There was a point just before the shoot when I was thinking this was the most terrifying thing I had ever done in my life! So I finally had to resign myself to the fact that it was going to be truly, truly terrifying.Did you have good producer support?Totally, totally good. I have a really good working relationship with my producers. In film books people go on about them and you wonder - Why do they badmouth producers all the time? Mine were very supportive.How did your schedule look?We had five weeks and an absolutely brilliant editor who was editing the film as we shot. I really was daunted by the whole thing. I had never worked with such a big crew, never worked with such a big cast, a huge amount of locations, working really long nights on the night shoots part of it all. It totally, totally did my head in. It's not that you don't know what you want, its that you need to figure out how to actually let people know what you want, so they can start to trust you. I like the collaborative atmosphere that you can generate on a film, I think it is really important.

You used local actors and you also cast Hywel Bennett as the central character Bennett - how did that synergy work out?Hywel was a delight to work with and really brought out the best in other people and they brought out a different style in him. The way we work created an atmosphere that allows things to happen. I like to cast as naturalistically as possible. I had a brilliant casting director, who taught me loads of things about directing, even when we were doing the auditions. For me filmmaking is a fluid process that keeps on moving. I am learning masses of stuff all the time and casting was part of that. It was the casting director's idea to bring Hwyel Bennett in and that was absolutely right, he brought something special to the mix.Your lighting department's not overworked - you have a preference for natural light?It's a stylistic choice, isn't it? It's not a dogme thing, its more like a working practice. I like the effect that natural light has on video and I want to see that on the screen, but at the same time I don't necessarily go for the most naturalistic look, as people will know when they see the film. At the same time I wanted a kind of pissy and lagery and tobacco-stained kind of look rather like a pub, since it was mostly set in pubs. I wanted the whole film to have that feel, that kind of woozy, been drinking too much, kind of thing as well. Those are conscious, deliberate director choices, but the thing about natural light is, it has a much more documentary feel. But using it can induce a headache!You don't use much static camera - why do you like to keep the camera moving?I like the idea that the camera crew have got the freedom to improvise as much as the cast.Freedom of movement allows the audience to be involved in a different way. Instead of the camera leading the action, it has to follow it and that puts emphasis onto the characters instead of the story. You literally are catching up, to find out where characters are going. I prefer that to a very static, theatrical, style.You can get generous with a DV shooting ratio - what was yours like on this movie?We were shooting with two cameras and sometimes with three cameras. I like things to go on a little bit and improvise. I think a scene you have written should potentially be acted out in one go with some slack getting into and out of it. We ended up shooting about ninety hours for the film, which is excessive, which is why I am giving so much praise to my editor and edit assistant, who were tireless and brilliant at wading through all the work that I sent them and I would like to apologise to them now!You have said before that composition in DV really comes with the edit - what do you mean by that?It's down to choice isn't it? Ninety hours gives you lots more choice. It also gives you a bit of a headache going through it and finding takes and alternative versions. I like to think of the edit suite as a continuation of the writing of the script. One of the things I noticed in the edit, was that one of the characters was starting to lose focus. A significant and important character -. one of the central characters - was now drifting into the background. So immediately, it was great opportunity to get that actor, get a camera and go and film a lot of stuff that completely balanced thecharacter, brought him back into the story. I also decided to re-write a voiceover and got that actor back in and revoiced it. So in effect, you are constantly addressing the edit and letting that address the script, but at the same time you can actually do something about it.

You took to DV over 10 years ago - any camera preferences?I have stuck fairly consistently with Sony, with the PD150 and I'm going to have a look at how the PD175 works and I have also used Cannon XL1s. I like them both. They have both suited different films that I was making. I made a short film in Jersey, in the Channel Islands. I wanted something that looked incredibly bright, vibrant and summery and for me the Cannon XL1 - I wanted to shoot from the hip - worked really, really nicely. It has got beautiful reds, really lovely reds; maybe the chip has been biased that way. With the Sony chip it has been biased towards the green/blue side of things. I love that blue; I used it predominantly in One For The Road. The PD 150 is a much smaller kind of camera. It is not just discrete, it is so hands-on. The Cannon is a bit more "look-at-me I'm on candid camera"; it draws attention to itself. It has got good lenses, interchangeable and that is a really, really important thing. So different strokes for different folks, but also, different cameras for different films I think.Low budget Hi-Def is just around the corner - will you be going there?Yea, definitely, I'll have a look at that. I want to go in for the low-budget/camcorder 25 frames high definition thing. It will be a year before my next feature will be ready for production and who knows what camera I will be using? I will have a look at all of them. I looked at Dogville by Lars Von Trier, projected from high definition tape, which was shot on high definition cameras and also on low budget camcorder. It looks absolutely stunning projected off a 2K digital projector; really nice stuff. I definitely want to get that next time. It's a camcorder, you can drop a DV tape into it and you're away. It allows me to film in a style I have been developing for ten years. How can I go wrong?

The film has been out on the festival circuit - where has it played so far and what response?We have done a lot of UK and Irish festivals, but I don't have the long list in front of me. It has played quite well. All the audiences have been really generous. It went down very very well in Edinburgh - we got nominated for the Michael Powell award there and that is very flattering. All that exposure is quite helpful and led to us getting a distributor. It's going to be released by Tartan, in cinemas from July 2nd.Later on there will be a DVD/video release.Will the black humour of the film travel - overseas, for example?That's going to be interesting to find out. We have been overseas, we did the Dinard Festival in France. The French were kind of divided, which I was pleased to see, because I haven't made films to please every body. As long as some people stayed with it and liked it I'm happy. I am going to find out from Berlin how German audiences take to it, so I am looking forward to that one.