Mutual Admiration Society – Berlin Screening

Mutual Admiration Society – Berlin Screening

Mutual Admiration Society, the minimalist hitman feature film I co-created with Rouzbeh Rashidi last year, will make it’s German debut this month, with a screening at Lichtblick Kino in Berlin – I will be attending.

“Surreal and mysterious, in equal parts absurd and intense, Mutual Admiration Society is part of the noted multi-film collaboration between actor James Devereaux and experimental filmmaker Rouzbeh Rashidi. Based entirely around a silent, tour-de-force one-man performance by Devereaux as a man who appears to be haunting and threatening himself, Mutual Admiration Society uses startling visual techniques and editing rhythms to create a claustrophobic hall of mirrors with Devereaux’s tormented protagonist at its centre.”

I wrote a blogpost about the unusual production methods we used to make the film. Originally posted on the Rashidi-Devereaux Cinema blog, I have re-produced it in full below….

“Mutual Admiration Society is the coolest, coldest, emptiest, flattest, most minimalist, most ruthless, most bizarre hitman man film ever made. It came about because Rouzbeh Rashidi and I decided to make a feature film in seven days. There was no script, no planning, we didn’t even have any ideas, we simply allowed the weirdness from our subconscious to burble to the surface of our minds, and acted on the messages it sent to us. At the start of production, all we knew was the film’s title and that it was going to be in black and white. And then we worked round the clock to make it happen. I would shoot improvised scenes in London by day, and send the material, via the internet, to Rouzbeh, who, by night, would take it through his post-production process, giving it a form and refining the aesthetic.

While shooting, I deliberately repressed the instinct of the human mind to create order and make sense of things. I fought to keep myself stupid, naive and innocent – I simply improvised scenes in response to the locations I encountered, the weather, the mood of the moment, and by making visual associations with the previous day’s work. I knew that I didn’t need to worry about what the material would become, I knew that Rouzbeh, locked away in an editing suite in another country, would fashion it into something cinematic. After all, we had, together, already made five feature films and eight short films in the preceding three years, and they had played to audiences all over the world, so it’s fair to say that we have a reasonable understanding of what the other is capable of, not to mention the high levels of trust we have built up. By the seventh day though, I was in pieces. I felt creatively drained with very little left to give, and collapsed onto my armchair with a bottle of Chianti after handing the baton over to Rouzbeh for the final time.

The making of Mutual Admiration Society was driven by our passion for the work, by a craving to see the world in new ways and capture certain segments of it within the camera’s frame, and then doctor and arrange the resultant images to suit our own vision, creating a new world in the process. Of course, the making of Mutual Admiration Society is a testament to the power of action, to getting the work done, to closing out a project and sending the finished film into the world. In fact, that is the only way to build a new cinema, a cinema we can be proud of, one we can believe in, one which is strong enough to carry our passions and all that we have to offer, a cinema which offers dignity and respect to artists and audiences, and where the power of the imagination is unleashed without apology.

Mutual Admiration Society is dedicated to Alain Delon, and I like to think it is a film worthy of the great man.”