Kaleidoscope
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STIGMA FILMS AND DIGNITY GROUP PRESENTS KALEIDOSCOPE DIRECTED BY RUPERT JONES STARRING TOBY JONES SINEAD MATTHEWS CECILIA NOBLE AND ANNE REID RUNNING TIME: 100 minutes INTERNATIONAL PUBLICITY Untitled Communications Laura Pettitt – [email protected] INTERNATIONAL SALES: Independent 195 Wardour Street, London W1F 8ZG, UK +44 2072578734 [email protected] SHORT SYNOPSIS A year after being released from prison, middle-aged CARL WOODS has done well to carve out a life for himself in the outside world. Having procured some work and a flat, he now embarks on his first date in fifteen years. The event coincides with his estranged mother’s reappearance in his life, and her subsequent attempts to mend the differences that so violently drove them apart many years before. As Carl tries to withstand the insidious influences of his past, so he finds himself increasingly drawn in to the dark imaginings of his own psychological vortex. LONG SYNOPSIS London, present day. A sparse empty living room in a cramped flat. Frantic knocking sounds set off a dog barking. Carl Woods (TOBY JONES), an ex-prisoner with dreams of starting a gardening business, emerges from sleeping on the sofa and checks the door — there is no-one there. Exploring the house — he notices lipstick traces on a glass, an ashtray full of cigarette butts — he goes upstairs and is shocked to discover a blonde woman lying dead in the bathroom. Quick subliminal cuts reveal hands strangling the woman, then a wooden chair crashing down the stairs. Carl returns home from shopping and begins to tidy up his flat and iron a shirt. In conversation with neighbour Monique (CECILIA NOBLE), it emerges Carl is prepping for an internet date with ‘Kittengloves35’, who will we come to know as Abby (SINEAD MATTHEWS). Dismayed by his dull white shirt, Cecilia lends Carl a sartorially colourful one (the same one he is wearing in the opening scene). About to leave the house, the phone rings. Carl answers but a woman’s voice leads him to hang up, agitated. He leaves the house and the phone goes again. This time the answer machine kicks in. The woman leaves a message announcing she is coming to visit. This is Aileen (ANNE REID), Carl’s mother. Later that night, Carl and Abby return to his flat. Carl fixes a drink and the couple chat. But, as Carl goes upstairs to treat a nose bleed, Abby reveals her true colours. She starts searching the flat, looking for stuff to steal while her husband Wesley (FREDERICK SCHMIDT) texts her for the address. She discovers a child’s kaleidoscope (which she places in her handbag), fills up their glasses with booze and thumbs through prison library books. Carl returns and Abby cajoles him into dancing and a drink. There seems to be an actual connection between the two until Abby falls and hits her head. She goes upstairs to the bathroom and vomits. In her absence, Carl picks up the blinking answer machine message. He calls Aileen back and angrily tells her he doesn’t want to see her. On Abby’s return, the pair start to open up to each other; Abby discusses her bad marriage, Carl reveals he got out of prison about a year ago. She ultimately comes clean about her ruse to clean him out. Carl agrees she can stay the night. On his own in the kitchen, he discovers the stolen kaleidoscope and just looking through it invokes images of his father sitting at the kitchen table. We hear banging noises and begin to cycle through the images from the opening; Carl waking up, no-one at the door, lipstick on a glass, a dead blonde — Abby. Carl wakes up in a state of shock. He imagines Abby is alive for a moment, then snaps back to the present. The phone ringing sends him to the answer machine message which goads him into action, Carl starts clearing up the evidence (glasses, her clothes, his loud shirt) and shoves it in his faulty washing machine. He disposes of Abby’s body (off-screen) on the Estate. When he returns, he discovers his mother Aileen in his flat with a cut leg, asking Carl for a plaster. Following a frosty exchange, Carl chucks her out for putting her clothes in the washing machine, then reluctantly agrees to let her stay. After taking Abby’s clothes to the laundrette (we see flashbacks of him strangling Abby), Carl returns to hear Abby’s phone buzzing. Sending Aileen to bed, he listens to a threatening message from Wesley who then turns up at Carl’s flat. Carl says he has no knowledge of Abby, faking a conversation with an imaginary wife to substantiate his alibi. Carl goes up stairs and sees Abby asleep. He gets into bed with her only for her to morph into Aileen. He finally throws her out in her nightdress. In the morning, Carl awakes to find Aileen is back in the flat. She announces she is leaving to meet someone but offers Carl reconciliation in the form of lottery money and a trip to Canada. Carl rejects but his actions begin to catch up with him; Cecilia asks him about the commotion, a figure was spotted in the gardens late at night, the police arrive at his house. Spotting this, Aileen knowingly begins to taunt him about his guilty status. Carl reconsiders about Canada. With his time running out, Carl’s relationship with his mother and the ramifications of his night with Abby now collide in dramatic, surprising, unforgettable ways. DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT For quite a while I had been wanting to write a story that opened with a dead body: a big question mark. The two narratives suggested by a murder scene seemed immediately obvious - what events precipitated the murder; and what events followed? Cause and consequence. The resulting script was my attempt to structure these two time-lines so that they managed to climax with the one missing piece of the jigsaw. Namely, the middle: the murder itself. Over several drafts, we started to find a more psychological dimension to the story, which radically transformed the existing narrative into something more layered and surprising. At our first meeting, Matt Wilkinson, the producer, asked if I might be interested in building the flat in a studio. Until that moment, I had not thought in great detail about the visual style of the piece, imagining that the budget and location would rather force the style into a loose, ‘catch all’ realism. The idea of building a set had never crossed my mind. Once we decided on this, I understood exactly the kind of film I wanted to make. I’ve always felt at home on film sets, an environment I visited often as a child (my father is an actor) and which always filled me with a sense of wonder. The artifice is so total. Everything has to be conjured out of nothing – light, space, colour. This allowed us to create a very deliberate and pronounced style of lighting and design that reflected the dark psychological themes of the film. Moreover, we could design a set that included camera traps and space enough to frame characters in full length as well as close-up (the size of the rooms were more generous than they might have been on location). We were keen that the light should have a clear shape to it, creating deep, hard-edged shadows in which, at times, we may lose the character’s features altogether. We also required a number of locations, including the exterior of the flat. Seeing a picture of the Dover Estate in an early mood board, it looked unique and striking enough to match the somewhat heightened style of the interior, and take it away from a more predictable estate aesthetic. The geometric frontage also chimed with the African shirt that features heavily, the repeating patterns of the kaleidoscope, and the patterns of the kitchen walls (though I have to confess to a recurring nervousness at the visual busy-ness of all these patterns!). While we admired the outside of the building, it was not until we walked in and saw the extraordinary spiral staircase that it proved unavoidable as a location. It is in these shots of the staircase, I think, that our filmmaking influences are made obvious. And happily so. As I was writing the film, I usually began the day by playing the Zabel harp music that accompanies the titles/credits. For me, it’s a piece that expresses sadness, regret and memory. It has something of the delicacy and haunting appeal of several Morricone themes. What was most important is that the music should evoke the sadness of Carl’s story, rather than the horror, which I think it does so beautifully. When I approached Mike Prestwood Smith to write the score, I asked that he use the Zabel as his inspiration and from it tease out a theme and variations thereof. Having put it through some software called ‘the mangle’, Mike pretty well restricted himself to four essential notes, from which all the rest of the written music is derived. Mike is a very sought after sound-mixer, but this was his first score. Like the music, I think Toby Jones’ performance brings to Carl a vulnerability that one can’t take for granted in the script. There were several occasions during the filming when he played a scene with a boldness or subtlety that I hadn’t imagined at all. In these instances, one is witness to the degree of scrutiny that the more rigorous actor brings to a part, especially when shooting out of order.