The prolific director goes behind-the-scenes of some of his latest shorts.
Ben Mallaby is the BAFTA-nominated director of Island Queen, Battlecock!, Milk!, and a host of other shorts. Balancing an impressive array of short films - he’s promoting four new ones at the moment - with a film lecturing job at Ravensbourne College and commercial work with Hoot Commercials, Ben is one of the most prolific filmmakers working today.
Among his latest works are four new short films, each of them hilariously deadpan black comedies with ridiculous central plot elements. Stud, a three-minute “palette-cleanser” film, watches - mainly in one take - an awkward bedroom encounter between a woman (Rachel Stubbings) and a man (Toby Williams, who also wrote the film) who she’s hired to impregnate her.
While You Were Away, which will show at the Short Film Corner at Cannes this year, is a shocking - and shockingly funny - short centered on an absurd argument between a married couple, played by Stubbings (who appears in all four shorts) and legendary comedian Richard Herring.
Herring and Stubbings both also feature in Mosquito, along with Michael Spicer and Alice Lowe. That short, which deals with the unique idea of a mosquito bite transferring memories between people rather than disease, is an ambitious dark comedy that Ben aims to make into a feature.
The fourth short, One Tw*t, again stars Rachel Stubbings, who also wrote it. The lightest, most outright comic of the films, One Tw*t imagines a reality where Rachel’s character, Julie, and her brother (Mike Wozniak) are conjoined together, his head literally on her back. This only gets more ridiculous when Julie attempts to go out on a date with Bradley (Tom Meeten).
With such a wide range of ideas and creative techniques on display in these four films, I had a lot I wanted to ask Ben about. In our chat, we discussed some of the highlights and challenges behind-the-scenes of each of these films.
You seem to do an absolute ton of films - how do you manage to balance all these films with your other work?
I don’t write anything, which is a big help. So I’ve got these guys who hand stuff over to me, and so there’s not too much time required off me. And then there are producers who deal with the logistics and stuff, and the DoP takes care of their stuff, so I guess the advantage is there are enough people who are willing to do this for free, out of the passion of it. That means that it’s not very time-intensive at all, until the shoot comes closer, but maybe that just comes from the momentum of having enough people around you who are all sending you stuff all the time. But sometimes it just takes six months to finish a film. Like One Twat just took absolutely ages.
All of these four films seem to have a black comedy feel - what attracts you to this type of story?
It’s fun to be subversive, it’s fun to try and come up with an unexpected take on something, but it does always seem to go quite dark, and I guess that’s just a mischievous sense of humor - subjecting people to horrible things and me finding it funny. I tried doing dramas before I moved to comedies, and I only moved to comedies cause my flat-mate was a stand-up, and kinda introduced me to that world. And I wasn’t very good at making dramas.
It’s fun to be subversive, it’s fun to try and come up with an unexpected take on something.”
Why do you think you’re better at making comedies?
It would seem that it’s just a better fit for me, but I don’t know why, specifically. But in part it’s about, you can draw from a serious film as your inspiration, and you can do it with a silly concept, and now you’ve got a comedy; One Twat is shot very straight, there’s no visual gags, it’s all just, because it’s such a ridiculous situation.
With “One Tw*t”, was there anything difficult about actually putting the head of the guy on the back of Rachel?
The stuff in the bath, that’s effects, and thats Mike in the bath after Rachel, with a green screen behind him, and cut out and placed, and then skin merged, but the guys who did were just amazing, so it’s a mix. And you know just from reading film blogs and stuff that it’s important to mix the practical and the fake stuff, so sometimes he’s just in a really awkward position; sometimes we removed his arm, maybe, in post, sometimes…in one shot we had to move Rachel, so you can’t tell in the shot with the prostitute she’s actually been nudged to the right of the frame to cover Mike’s body. But for the most part we tried to stick his head through a jacket.
With “Mosquito”, what were the main ideas you were trying to explore with the motif of the mosquito?
It was one of those 2am ideas; I was looking for something weird. I’d been watching Roy Andersson a lot, and I just wanted something offbeat, and so the idea of mosquitoes is transmitting memories, it was one of those moments when you’re like “ok, let’s see if that still sounds good in the morning.” And I still liked it in the morning.
But theme-wise, it was actually something that’s been going round my head for years and years and years anyway. I was watching some of my friends change, and I thought I knew them, and but I’d not enjoy hanging out with them anymore, and they were being quite different, whatever they were they weren’t the people they were, because of jobs, because of girlfriends, because of work, whatever. Things change you, and you become kind of unrecognizable sometimes to the people you grew up with. But we accept it.
So that’s the gag, it’s like “people change, but that’s fine,” was the line I gave to Michael as the tagline, and he had to write a script where people changed completely, like they were now a woman in a man’s body, but no-one reacted, everyone was just like “Mike’s a bit weird now, isn’t he?” So that was the gag, and in the feature-length draft that’s explored, we just see all of their lives and everyone in their lives just completely treats them normally even though they’re not the same person anymore, because that’s what we do.
People have compared “Mosquito” to Yorgos Lanthimos - is he a particular influence?
Oh yeah, I love him. I hadn’t actually seen The Lobster when we were writing Mosquito, so there are some uncomfortably close parallels that unfortunately came from just loving Dogtooth and loving the idea of Alps. I loved the sources he draws from, too, you know, I love the Roy Andersson guys, and also Spike Jonze, and anyone who’s doing kinda offbeat, weird concepts. But definitely, the closest is Lanthimos, and to be compared to him, that’s great. Happy with that. But it used to be Edgar Wright, and that was fine, but my style has changed quite dramatically, and I think it was a reaction to “well, c’mon, who do I want to be?”
“While You Were Away” and “Stud” have ridiculous ideas central to them as well, but with a more serious tone. How did you make this balance work in your films?
It’s true, they’re ridiculous situations but they’re told quite straight, aren’t they? Stud’s a bit more out-there, but Rachel’s playing it straight, and Paul’s playing it straight, and Toby’s a bit broad, but it kind of suits the mental-ness of this human being’s life, if he’s going round impregnating women whose husbands can’t perform, so yeah, all it is is they play it straight - it’s the old airplane gag; Leslie Nielsen. They play ridiculous situations straight, and it’s funny. You’ve just gotta make sure that the situation is ridiculous enough that it’s made clear that you’re supposed to be laughing at this, which was, I think, the balance with Mosquito. But I think with Mosquito it gets to the point where you know that there’s something absurd going on.
Battlecock is all silly, Milk! too. Island Queen’s a gag about incest. Milk! is a gag about two guys who won’t leave the house to get some milk, and they end up cutting off their own fingers, you know, it gets really graphic and ridiculous. Milk! is a lot of fun to watch in a crowd. Battlecock is playing as part of LOCO in an IMAX screen. It’s funded in part by the BFI, and this year they’ve managed to blag an hour in the IMAX, and they’re playing some high-octane films.
“Stud” is shot mainly in one take - did it take long to perfect it?
I think it was take 9 or 10 that we went with, but it was just electrifying. I think the take before they fluffed it really early on and I interrupted them, maybe two or three lines in, and Toby was angry cause he thought it was going really well, so we started again, and from the first moment I was like [whispers] “oh, they hit a beat there, and that beat was hit,” and you don’t know, watching it as someone who hadn’t been through the rehearsals and all that stuff, but they were adding jokes that weren’t there before.
It was really magical to finally see it just work like that, and we just stopped after and we just cheered. Then we watched it, and we realized we could see some things we didn’t wanna see and we almost went back and tried to shoot it again, but then we thought nah, we’re never gonna get to replicate that. So yeah, it’s really fun, but I don’t think you save any time, I guess you don’t have to keep resetting, but you do have to do it so many times when it’s one shot.
Find out more about Ben’s work on his website at mallaby.uk, and check out his Vimeo.
