Influences on ‘Living with Ronnie’

At the start of the course, with one of our teaches,  we studied ‘French new wave’ in brief, looking at the work of Jean-Luc Godard in particular. This was a good starting place as it showed us a different take on film making, other than the typical Hollywood style of modern films, and emphasized the existents you can go to with a minimalistic budget. We learned that by using the camera in interesting ways and holding our shots a few seconds longer it can become a really interning way of film making.

We then moved on to look at other film makers that interested us. This included films about schizophrenia from film makers such as David Fincher, Alfred Hitchcock, Richard Kelly and lastly David Lynch. Firstly looking at Fincher, we watched the legendary, ‘Fight Club’. This was an incredibly helpful film to watch when studying ideas on how to translate schizophrenia on to the screen. We kept returning to this film for inspiration, and this lead to us having a flash back scene at the end in order not to leave the audience in confusion, but to leave enough up to debate.

After this we looked at the work of Alfred Hitchcock, and psycho in particular. This once again showed us how to film schizophrenia, but in a totally different way. It showed us how to build suspense and the importance of a mysterious element. This re-enforced our understanding that when filming schizophrenia, we should leave the audience in confusion, until the end. We also looked at a few scenes from other Hitchcock films such as vertigo, and this gave us the idea to use a crash zoom or ‘Hitchcock zoom’.

One of the later films we watched was Richard Kelly’s ‘Donnie Darko’. This was a completely different take on schizophrenia and showed us the pain and suffering that the illness can have on the person. However this film also gave the condition a Sci-fi element that we didn’t necessarily want. The main thing we took from this film was the fact that Frank’s voice was in Donnie’s head, and how you could shoot this affectively.

Finally, we looked at David Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead’. This helped us develop the style we wanted and lead us to put the film in black and white in the editing stage of the process. We loved the nightmarish feel the film had and felt in some ways we wanted to emulate that. This lead to use trying to leave corners of the room covered by shadows in cretin situations, creating a mysterious atmosphere.

     

Eraserhead Trailer: