We asked Aidan Gillen to pen something for Culture about his new film Pickups, directed by frequent collaborator Jamie Thraves, which premieres at the Audi Dublin International Film Festival this weekend.
Pickups is my third collaboration with director Jamie Thraves after The Low Down and Treacle Jr. Both these films had decent lives, still do I suppose, they’re kind of odd misfit films but there was stuff still further back in Jamie’s back catalogue that was even more out there without being over-arty, such as The Take Out, which i always really liked and I hoped one day to convince him to make something along those lines again, not working under the assumption that anyone was going to come and see it, so then there’d be no worries about whether they got it or not, but it’d be fun to do and daring, etc... So we agreed to do that, but weren’t sure what it might be about, or what kind of shape it might take.
That wasn’t particularly alarming as when we were working on Treacle Jr. there were several stories rolling along at one point - one concerning a man who walked out on his family one day, went to London and was latched onto by an optimistic man-child (that made the cut). But there was also the one concerning a Liverpool squaddie who was just back from Afghanistan and was channeling his PTSD through violent alcohol-fuelled outbursts and racist rants that probably were well primed pre the traumatic stress, if truth be told (didn’t make the cut). And of course, there was the down-at-heel psychic in the park who could unleash all your negative energy and convert it into a dot (didn’t make the cut either).
The working method had always been a bit loose and organic, and so it would continue. In the interim between The Low Down and Treacle Jr. and from Treacle onwards I'd been playing a wide array of roles, mostly creeps and killers, or at best dysfunctional fools, and I was starting to wonder if there was something wrong with me. We’d done Treacle as a comedy and thought it'd be great to do an upbeat story about a downbeat musician next, or maybe it was the other way round... We’re both well into music, and Jamie has worked as much in the music promo field as anything else, and done really well in it, with some really highly regarded videos for (among others) Radiohead and Coldplay under his belt.
Yes - we would make something about a musician. Our minds whirred. He would have black fingernails. His playing would be so indescribably good we must never be able to hear it because it would actually KILL us if we did. So we started off with that, and of course soon some other characters started to knock on the door and mess us round: groupies, massage therapists, Jehovah's witnesses, vampires etc, etc…
Now the upshot of making something off your own bat with no budget is, of course, you're denied certain luxuries like being able to lock-off locations - or even let anyone know you're even filming in the location in the first place - so inevitably you end up having conversations with people on camera 'cos the camera's hidden across the road in a car but the problem is that they kind of know you (as much as you might think you know someone you've seen on TV) and they want to talk to you about that stuff.
Maybe we have to include all that too - but then that's been done before... So you change tack, and start on a story about a serial killer ('cos you've only played ordinary killers before) and then maybe it could be a fan who's stalking the previous musician character waiting for his chance to Mark Chapman him in front of an adoring crowd. OK - so now you’re playing the guy who’s stalking the character that you started out as, but hey - why not make a documentary about all this, because that might be easier or more interesting? But try and make it look dreamy and expensive. Or maybe make a snuff movie. Or not do anything, just pretend to be yourself, wait for bad things to happen and film it.
Pickups screens at the Audi Dublin Film Festival this Saturday, February 18th, with Aidan Gillen and Director Jame Thraves in attendance - details here.
