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Filmmaker Heli Kainulainen interviews Matt Hulse Scotland-based artist, filmmaker, animator about his work and current concerns.

Heli Kainulainen: First of all – the use of sound and music. According the end credits you compose much of the music yourself. I’d like to ask what is your background / relationship to music? Do you play music "anyway" or is it something you are doing just for films?

Matt Hulse: Years before I touched a camera, when I was about 11 years old, I spent a lot of time with a simple cassette recorder making tapes of my heartbeat, the toilet, the garden, my throat - I just thought it was amazing. I also enjoyed fixing screwed-up cassettes and I recall attempting some crude remixes using Sellotape splices. That kind of activity was somewhere between play, destruction and creation, and I've not moved on much since then.

Wee Three still

Music has always been important to me, it means more to me than films. It was my first love, as they say. There's a long, strong and proud tradition that's come out the UK art colleges - would-be artists / film-makers forming pop bands.

I'm on the flip side of that - a would-be pop star turned film-maker. I've played and recorded music since I was 13 and in the long run I hope that this is what I'm best remembered for. It's not my strongest hand, but it's my truest. Friends and family find it easier to accept a film maker than a pop star, and wanting to keep them close, I've thrown myself into film.

HK: In the process of filmmaking, does the sound develop at the same time with the image or do you leave it until the last?

MH: This really depends on the film in question. With 'Take Me Home' (1997), the sound designer Gerald Mair was asked to create a soundtrack without reference to any visual material whatsoever. I just gave him a bunch of audio material, a few points in time that he had to sync with and 'a bowl of words' - quite literally phrases and words on small slips of paper that he could select at random, an old Brian Eno device called 'Oblique Strategies'. And then Greg Allen and I edited the picture to that soundtrack, with the help of an excess of alcohol. The result is particularly forceful, the image and the sound would be impossible to separate.

'Hotel Central' however was cut by Holger Mohaupt without any reference to sound or music, and then Gerald and I worked on it later. I think this may account for the success of the film on the Deaf Film Festival circuit - it has the logic and coherence of a silent movie. In any case it's true to say that I give the soundtrack more attention than many film makers do. I think it's shocking how neglectful film-makers can be of what is actually 50% of their audiences' experience.

HK: Have you ever studied film sound theory, texts by Michael Chion from
example and if yes, has it influenced you any way?

MH: I'm a bit weird when it comes to reading. I'm so easily influenced that I have to be very careful what I absorb. I'm still trying to get over Carson McCuller's 'The Heart is a Lonely Hunter' which I read in 1986. I think many of my films are probably obliquely related to that book - is it a coincidence that I'm now developing a feature with a deaf character at its centre? I'm aware of this guy's name. I must have read some of his work because I attended the School of Sound and it's hard to avoid theory there. But I have to admit that I'm a bit ignorant - literally - in that my eyes and ears seal over when theory looms into view, I try hard to ignore it. I MAKE stuff if possible, not read and write about it.

HK: As a filmmaker who does sound work as well, how do you find it collaborating with sound designers and musicians in your films?

MH: It's fine as long as they are happy with the fact that it is a collaboration. They must accept that my experience in sound and music is equal, but different, to theirs. I collaborate because I know it's the healthy option and ultimately the best for the work, not because I prefer it to working alone! It's calculated and expedient. It might turn out to be fun, but that's secondary. People sometimes find this hard to accept, that I calculate like this, but hey - it's a serious game!

HK: Another aspect is the 'worry less' combination of live action and animation. Did you "find" one of these mediums later on than the other or have they always been obvious methods of filmmaking to you?

MH: I discovered them at the same time, with Svankmajer and early Jane Campion as key influences, and have been resistant to giving up either. Yes, to me the combination is an 'obvious' way of making films, but it's something I feel passionate about - it's a distinct choice. I despise the way that filmmakers are expected to 'specialize' - it's such an economy-driven approach to life. I want to keep up the experiments until I keel over. After all, these are simply tools, techniques and mediums we're talking about. The idea is paramount and you just have to use what suits it best, or what you can afford, what you have available.

MH: The fact that the combination comes across as 'worry less' is really down to the skill of the team involved. There's quite an art to combining Lightwave 3D computer animation and Tri X Super 8. It's not simply a case of running the animation through a Flame with loads of grain effects to make it 'fit'. You develop a feeling for it, as a painter might with a new kind of acrylic. That's art.

HK: What does animation mean to you, do you treat it same way as live action or do you find that with one medium you can express certain things better than with the other?

MH: The answer above covers this to some extent, but I would add that I 'feel' like an animator - it's my natural 'domain'. I'm more comfortable with a storyboard than a script. I tend to be precise in my work and have a clear 'minimalist' tendency, but this is thankfully offset by a basic need to challenge and cause trouble in one way or another. So maybe the answer is that I live on Planet Animation and send out my Revolutionary Pixellation Council to persuade, in the nicest possible way, our boring, odious, script-bound Gangster Movie making friends that they should stick to the reassuring world of commercials.

HK: Have you found that there would be any difference in the use of sound (or how the sound influences the image and the perception of the film) between live action and animation?

MH: This is a very big question. Simple answer is - yes! I guess that I like to bring the feel of 'animation soundtracks' into play with live action sequences. Something similar to what the Jacques Tati was doing, with elements of Len Lye and probably Benny Hill, who knows. Basically I don't like it when I have to finally 'pin down' the soundtrack - you can go on forever having fun, lining up sounds in different ways. It always gives you a different sense and reading of the visual, and to me they're invariably equally good in the long run. A democracy of possibilities.

HK: I watched the small QuickTime version of "The Plot" – it was a bit hard to make sense what was happening because of the small format, but I still found it intriguing, especially after visiting the website. Perhaps you could talk a little about this project? How did it all start? What kind of feedback have you got from it?

MH: It's early days for feedback, it's only just been finished. But the one thing folk say almost universally is that they 'cannot believe that it's computer generated', which is very good to hear - it's that 'worry less' combination again, perhaps in its most gracious form. The 'magic' is really there. Magic is very important.

Hotel Central still

For me it's a very exciting project, and something of a full circle from my Super 8 film of 1994 'Sine Die' via 'Wee Three' and 'Hotel Central'. It was commissioned by a C4 scheme called MESH, a scheme which is - on the surface at least - pretty conservative and cautious, but which actually allows for experiment if you're prepared to push for it and can work to the restriction of 3 minutes.

There's a partner web site for the film created by Lindsay Perth and Lennart Isacsson. It's 50% of the total 'experience', if you like - not just the usual 'online merchandising' outlet. It was also great to work with the talented 3D animator Garry Marshall. I think we've created something genuinely unusual, enigmatic, unsettling and - if only in a small way - ground-breaking.

Copyright © Matt Hulse & Heli Kainulainen 2002

See: channel4.com/mesh & thisistheplot.com (opens in new browser windows)

Films by Matt Hulse available from LUX:

As Good As A Nod (1992)
Take Me Home (1997)
Wee Three (1998)
Hotel Central (2000)
Now I Am Yours (2001)
Overheated 1991-2001: the undiminised intensity mix (2001)
Polski Buty (2002)
God Save the Queen (2002)