Deceive yourself. It works.
MILE END director Graham Higgins on working with Mark Arnold
MILE END Mark Arnold as John

MILE END Mark Arnold as John

What’s it like to work with Mark Arnold?

 

Mark’s a consummate professional. He’s very highly regarded in the States and he brings a great presence to the set because of the experience he has. He’s very well known for his roles in American films like Teen Wolf with Michael J. Fox, and we were very lucky to get him onboard because he’d relocated to London. On his showreel there’s a clip from a US TV series of Mark playing opposite James Caan, who was Sonny in The Godfather. As soon as I saw that, I just knew we had to try and get him to do MILE END.

 

MILE END Alex Humes as Paul and Mark Arnold as John MILE END Alex Humes as Paul and Mark Arnold as John

 

What did Mark bring to the film?

 

The character of John is very challenging to play because he’s essentially a sociopath, but he has to be charming too. Mark’s got a remarkable ability for portraying characters who are on the edge between serenity and psychosis, and somehow he makes it really funny as well. He has a very light touch he can bring, which is crucial for making such a dark character believable.

 

As an actor Mark’s very precise. He really gets scripts, really understands character, and then when he’s interpreting the character he knows exactly what he wants to do. All actors are unique. Some actors will give you something different each time, but with Mark there’s never any guesswork, he’s incredibly consistent. He’s also very attuned to the director. We discussed the character a lot in advance of the shoot, so when we were on set we really understood each other, and I think Mark’s performance is very nuanced as a result.

 

MILE END Mark Arnold as John MILE END Mark Arnold as John

 

What’s it like having Mark on set?

 

He’s a very gracious and sociable guy. Brilliant company member. He’s also really funny. We had a lot of fun with cultural references, the American/British differences. I’d get him to explain American slang to me. Mark, myself and Alex Humes, who plays Paul, had a great time joking about that on set.

 

Did you plan for John’s character to be an American?

 

When we held the audition, I had never thought of John as an American. It was Mark who sold me on the idea, that it would give John an extra dimension. And the more I thought about it, I thought, “yeah”. There are things John says that are British traits. It’s the chip on the shoulder, the self-lacerating thing that we Brits can do, we can often be hypercritical of ourselves.

 

So to have an American say those things is really interesting, it brings a universal quality to the character. I really liked that about it, and it extended across the film because we ended up with quite an international cast – Heidi Agerholm Balle who plays Kate is Danish, and Adrian was played by the Trinidad-born British actor Valmike Rampersad.

 

MILE END premieres exclusively on Flix Premiere in the UK on Saturday 15 April from 7PM and in the USA on Friday 28 April flixpremiere.com/film/mile-end

 

MILE END – the stranger dynamic

 

MILE END_Mark Arnold as John and Alex Humes as PaulJohn (Mark Arnold) and Paul (Alex Humes), still from MILE END  

 

Since MILE END premiered at Raindance in October 2015, where it was nominated for Best UK Feature, there has been a lot of praise for the film.

 

One of the most pleasing things for me was when an industry contact remarked on the ‘fantastic energy’ between the two leads Alex Humes (Paul) and Mark Arnold (John). You could tell the dynamic between the two actors was something special from the start of rehearsals, and it’s satisfying to see that being acknowledged in the final film.

The stranger dynamic 

Many of us will have had a point in our life when we were young, when we met someone older and they became a mentor to us. It lasts a few years and then the young person moves on and the friendship drifts. So I was interested in the idea that you could be at a point of uncertainty in your life, and you might turn to a stranger who offers sympathy and support.  

Confiding in strangers

There are some things that you don’t want to share with the people closest to you – your innermost thoughts; and it’s easier to reveal them to a stranger. So John becomes an outlet where Paul can say all these things that he’s got inside him, moments of darkness or weakness or honesty, when the truth is too much to bear. 

 

Graham Higgins, writer-director, MILE END

 

 

MILE END screens at the New York City Independent Film Festival on Thursday 28 April (click her for tickets) and at the Derby Film Festival on Friday 29 April and Sunday 1 May (click here for tickets).

 

Plot tears that rip, but don’t make you cry

 

Last September, MILE END editor John Weeks told me he was concerned about something. It was a structural thing. He felt some deliberate ambiguities in the script might not work as planned on screen. I wanted the audience to suspect a character of doing something malign, but the story had them in a different place geographically at the time. The way John summed it up was “maybe they’re not plot holes, maybe they’re just plot tears” – as in a rip, not tears that you cry. I thought that was a great way to put it, and I think what John meant was, they’re things to be concerned about, but they’re not going to break the film.

 

 

Sound Mixer Andrej Bako, Director Graham Higgins, Director of Photography Anna Valdez Hanks - photo by Jon-Paul Washington

MILE END Sound Mixer & Sound Designer Andrej Bako, Director Graham Higgins, Director of Photography Anna Valdez Hanks on location in East London – photo by Jon-Paul Washington.

To be honest, my first reaction to these sort of things is usually a kind of mild panic, but that’s a natural feeling when you’ve invested a lot of energy in something and you find out it’s flawed. First of all, you’ve got to keep the faith. You’ve planned a thing, given it your rigorous attention, done your best to make it work. Trust the process. Then you’ve got to give yourself a break; nothing is perfect, sometimes it’s going to feel ragged. And then you have to see these things as creative opportunities. You have to say, “OK, it doesn’t work in the way we planned, so what else can we do with it? Or maybe it’s actually better this way.”

 

MILE END editor John Weeks

MILE END editor John Weeks

What I said to John was, “I’m not worried,” because I genuinely wasn’t. The ambiguity is in the spirit of the film, it’s not in the literal details. Unless something violates all believability, audiences are very forgiving of minor details. When I watch a film, if I can’t put it together in my head, I don’t think “What a badly made film!” (Well, OK, sometimes, maybe). I think, “Oh, it’s me, I don’t understand it.” And so for me that’s where the line is. As long as the audience feels that the film is ahead of them and they’re not ahead of the film, they’ll assume that anything that doesn’t quite add up is their fault, that they didn’t get it.

 

Mark Arnold (John), Alex Humes (Paul Kerr), 2nd Assistant Camera Ellis Doig (working title 'Something Changed') - photo by Jon-Paul Washington — at Greenwich Thames Path, London SE10.

Mark Arnold (John), Alex Humes (Paul Kerr), 2nd Assistant Camera Ellis Doig (working title ‘Something Changed’) – photo by Jon-Paul Washington — at Greenwich Thames Path.

Editing is challenging because you can’t just magic up new material, you can only work with the limited palette of what you’ve created in the shoot. But I firmly believe that the faults in what you’ve done – which are inevitable – can be opportunities. In this case, I think the “tear” in the logic of the film’s world actually adds to the mood of paranoia and uncertainty, the feeling that something doesn’t add up. And paradoxically there’s something satisfying in that.

 

Posted by Graham Higgins, writer-director MILE END
 

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