Paul Risker chats with Jonnie Hurn, writer, producer and star of Do Elephants Pray...
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Ahead of the release of Do Elephants Pray? I had the opportunity to speak with the film’s multi-talented writer, producer and star Jonnie Hurn. He spoke to me about the film’s personal genesis, how writing and performance are complementary skills, his thoughts on the advantage of genre to first time filmmakers, and his preference to create films that offer his audiences something more than just escape amongst other things. Oh, and a recommendation that running naked through a French forest could be liberating for us all.
Paul Risker: What was the genesis of Do Elephants Pray?
Jonnie Hurn: After I met my now wife she took me to this forest in the north of France. Nobody knew who she was; she hadn’t met any of my friends or my family at this point. So I went to Paris and we drove out to this place. As we were hiking up through this forest in the middle of the night, which she knew and I didn’t, I just suddenly thought no one in the world knows where I am, and anything could happen.
I quite liked the idea of somebody being taken out of their comfort zone and being put into a place they don’t know, a place where they are uncomfortable and at the complete mercy of someone else. I liked the idea that it was a guy who was at the mercy of a woman as opposed to it being the other way round. Just as we were hiking through this forest on the way to the lake - it was about midnight - I had this idea of a film about two people lost in the forest.
Paul Risker: You are credited as producer, writer and star. When did you decide to play the lead role? Was it prior to or during the writing process?
Jonnie Hurn: When I first started out I just planned to write a very simple script, keeping it low key and something I could make with a group of friends. Therefore by default I thought I’d play the part, but when Paul read it he came up to me and he said, “I’ll direct it, you’ll play the lead and we’ll produce it between us.” If he had said to me at that point that he wanted to cast a certain actor in the role, I would have probably said fine. It was actually Paul who made the choice to cast me.
Though I’d originally based the character on me, it was a real life experience, in hindsight it would have probably been much easier on the practical level had I not played the part, and instead we had hired someone else. But it was Paul who said, “I think you should play this part” and I just went with it.
Paul Risker: In a recent interview with writer-director Dominga Sotomayor Castillo, she explained to me that when she writes she directs. How do your experiences as an actor impact or influence you the writer?
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Jonnie Hurn: For me the two help each other. The fact that I write helps me as an actor to be able to analyse screenplays, to try to discover what the writer means and to try and interpret it. At the same time when I am writing, I can view it from an actor’s point of view.
I do visualise it and act it out in places, and I use what I have learned as an actor in that character, in the creation of that character’s structure in the writing. The two of them are very much connected.
Also as a producer I made this decision at the beginning of 2007 that I was going to make a film that year no matter what happened. So I sat down and I listed all of the things that I could get hold of just by picking up the phone, all the people I knew, the equipment I could get and such. From there I looked through all the different story ideas I had and it just happened that this was the one that would fit all of the locations that I could get a hold of. For example, the Chi-Chi class that we film in is a Chi-Chi class that I used to go to every week, and so I knew that I could get shoot there. I tailored the script to work on a practical production level as well, so that I could maximise the resources that I had. When we were writing the script it was very much integrated with my experiences as an actor and also as a producer.
Paul Risker: What advice would you offer to other low budget filmmakers?
Jonnie Hurn: It has to be simple to film and it has to be character driven. I would say in all honesty the one thing that we did wrong was that our film was not a strong genre piece. For your first film, particularly on a low budget you need to have a strong genre, which is why a lot of people make horror films because it is easier to then go out and sell a horror movie.
Our film is more of a spiritual road movie which is not one of the more mainstream genres. So I would suggest choose a genre piece, but find something original within that. Find something that hasn’t already been done. One of the best examples of a low budget first time film is the Sci-Fi film Primer, a time travel film which was done on a very small budget but it was and still is a unique film. Or something like London to Brighton which influenced me, a gangster film but which is told from the perspective of two girls trying to get out of prostitution. It was a relationship story between two women. These are two examples of people who have taken strong genres and have found a new or different twist to it, and that is what you have to do. It has to be simple, easy to film, a small cast, not many locations, but if you can find a strong genre and do something different with it that will help you once you have made the film.
Paul Risker: Do Elephants Pray? is a unique film, so where do you stand on the issue of the influence of inspiration on individual creativity? There are those who are happy to be influenced and then there are those who prefer to keep a distance from anything that may influence them in order to preserve creative originality.
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Jonnie Hurn: There is an old quote; I don’t know who it is from but it says, “Everyone steals, you just have to steal from the best.” Do Elephants Pray? is a very unique film, but there are influences all of the way through it, everything from The Simpsons right through to French New Wave cinema. There are ridiculous influences in there.
Nobody is a writer, director, producer or even an actor who is going to be a complete island. Everybody is influenced by the films they have seen and the lives they have lived and so you have to take ideas. It is just the question of who you take them from and what you do with them. The originality and uniqueness comes in how you interpret the things around you and the influences that you have. So there are influences within it certainly, but it is just what you do with it that makes it unique and that’s why this film is different because of the combination of Paul and myself, and the way that Paul took the script and what he did with it. Also because it is based on events in my life it is a unique kind of story. You have to be influenced by people because people have been through things before and have learnt things. Otherwise you are just going to be starting right from the very beginning and learning every lesson and learning every mistake by yourself, in which case you would be a hundred before you make a film that is watchable.
Paul Risker: Was it 2007 when you first conceived Do Elephants Pray?
Jonnie Hurn: I started writing it at the beginning of 2007. We shot it in September and October of 2007.
Paul Risker: This strikes me as the English take on advertising folk comparable to American television’s Mad Men. It is a world which people like you and Matthew Weiner are showing to be a particularly crazy world, full of wild and absurd characters.
Jonnie Hurn: I chose advertising because I wanted to find the most soulless profession I could think of. My background was in radio and so I have worked in a crazy world and the Foosball table that gets used in the film is actually the one that is owned by the radio station where I worked. You can actually see the logo on the Foosball table.
Having worked in radio a lot, it is a crazy environment. You do get people like that. I sort of just transposed them into the world of advertising. I have never worked in advertising but I know people who have, and it is a pressured situation. Therefore people let off steam in different ways. I have been to a lot of companies, certainly media companies that have very relaxed office environments. I have been to places that have Foosball tables in the office, particularly in creative environments. In creative offices there are a lot of things that are like that. They are very open and flexible and so if you put some crazy and extreme characters in a very open environment, then what would they do? They would probably run riot until the last minute when they would have to sit down and do some work.
Paul Risker: How did Marc Warren become involved in the project?
Jonnie Hurn: Marc and Paul go back a long way, because Paul effectively discovered him for his film Boston Kickout, which he did back in 1995. So they have been very good friends for nearly twenty years now. When I was writing the script I didn’t know that Paul was going to be interested in making it. We were working on, developing different projects and I sort of had Marc in mind for the part, more as a guide for writing the character. I never for one second thought that he would do it. I hadn’t met him at that point. I used him to base the character on and then when Paul came on board he said, “Oh yeah, I think Marc would do this part.” That’s when I realised that they were very good friends and it was just one phone call and Marc was attached to it.
We had to shift the shooting schedule around to accommodate him because he had just come off one job and then he was going off to do something else and he had a week spare. He could give us three days in that week, and so we had to move everything around to accommodate him. I deliberately wrote that character so that it could be shot in one location over a couple of days, but would also be a character that would be seen throughout the film from the very beginning, until the very end. I deliberately wrote the character so that we could get someone well known to play it because then we would only need them for a few days. But Marc just happened to come along because he’s very good friends with Paul.
Paul Risker: I found Marc’s introduction to be quite intimidating. He starts off fairly quiet and passive before suddenly exploding into one his boisterous rants. Marrlen’s a powerful character within the film and in many ways he’s there to offset your characters journey; two journeys both of which end differently.
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Jonnie Hurn: Marrlen is actually an old Communist surname; a combination of Marx and Lenin. I always like to give characters a name that is relevant to who they are, and I thought he represents revolution in the office, and so that’s why I gave him an old Communist party name.
He’s naturally very boisterous and we shot those scenes after we had had a torturous three weeks filming in the forest. We were all completely shattered; emotionally and physically drained by the end of it and we came back and we then had the office scenes to do. As intimidating as he was in the film, it was quite a relief to be inside in the warm and have someone who was full of energy and full of life around us to do those scenes. They were the last scenes that we shot on the film.
I deliberately underwrote the character. I left a lot of free space for him to play around with because Paul said that Marc would like to bring his own interpretation into it. So a lot of what you see, of him riding around on his bicycle, taking his shirt off is Marc’s input. There is a lot of Marc in that character and because he’s playing against type he relished the opportunity to play a type of character that he doesn’t often get chance to play.
He’s the sort of person that you wind him up and then you let him go, and we filmed an awful lot of stuff we couldn’t use; a lot of extra footage we had to cut out for time restrictions. He was great in the sense that he just turns up and gets on with it, improvises all over the place and that sparks off on the other characters as well.
Paul Risker: The philosophy in the film is not particularly heavy handed, though you touch upon the idea of the importance of the journey in place of finding answers, alongside an exploration for the inner child represented by Malika.
Jonnie Hurn: That’s absolutely right and that’s a very good interpretation and understanding of it. It is very much about going on the journey and she does represent the inner child in a sense, the freedom that you can have if you just step away from the barriers and the restraints that we impose upon ourselves. That is why Callum’s world is very materialistic, which is why I chose a very soulless profession for him. But within him there is this searching for something new. He goes to Chi-Chi classes and he’s trying to find something a bit different. He isn’t the same as Marrlen and the other people in the office. He’s not even the same as Sark his business partner. He’s disillusioned with it because he knows that he is lacking something in his life; he just doesn’t know what it is. When he meets Malika she represents freedom to him, which is why he has these recurring nightmares of running naked through the forest. He says it is his worst nightmare. She says, “No that is your inner desire, you just don’t realise it.” It is about freeing yourself, which is why he comes up with the idea of “Lose your ego and enjoy your life.”
We build these walls and barriers around ourselves but we should allow ourselves more freedom. We should just give up our jobs for a few days and go and run around the forest naked in France. I think it is a wonderful liberating experience.
Paul Risker: Watching Do Elephants Pray? it makes you reflect on the claustrophobic nature of living from one day to the next. If there is one certainty in life: death. At the end of our lives we should be able to look back and see a life filled with special moments or as you say in the film “creating memories.”
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Jonnie Hurn: Absolutely and it is why she says to him just before they enter the forest, “What did you do this time last week?” He says, “Well I was at work.” “What did you do this time last year?” “I don’t know.” “That is because it wasn’t special.”
That is very true. We remember the special events in our lives, the things that are different. We don’t remember the mundane things that we do day after day after day. It is the magical events, the different things that we do, the new experiences that are the memories that we keep. That is why in the little notebook that she gives him he says, “Yeah, lets create memories.” That’s what they are doing. They are creating something that they will remember for the rest of their lives.
Paul Risker: Speaking with filmmakers, one of the ideologies that seem to be a common thread is the idea that films should be entertaining whilst meaning something or having a reason to exist. What are your feelings on this discussion?
Jonnie Hurn: I love films that have substance like that. I get very bored of films that are just mind pulp or whatever you call it. There are a lot of people who like to go to the cinema or put a DVD on and switch off, to not think about anything. They just want to see lots of guns and people running around shouting and blowing things up. And that’s fine if that’s what you like.
There are two types. There are movies and there are films. A movie is something like X-Men, the Iron Man series or something like Mamma Mia. Those sort of lightweight things I find are movies. A film is something that has substance. Apocalypse Now is a film because it is not just a great story but it has moral, depth and meaning to it. I prefer to watch what I call a film rather than a movie. I like things that can make you think, and that’s what I want to do as a filmmaker. I want to create films that not only entertain people but also make them think about the world and their lives in a slightly different way. If people can think about what they have seen for a day, week or a month later, then I feel that is job done for me. I like the idea that people will take something away from it rather than it just being a way of switching off from the world.
Paul Risker: What’s next for you?
Jonnie Hurn: I am just about to direct a short film which is prep for a feature I am going to direct in the summer. I grew up in Wiltshire, right in the heart of crop circles. So I am making a feature film about crop circles and the people who make them. Most people think they are aliens but I know a guy who makes them and so I am making a film about him essentially.
So that is what I am doing at the moment and just writing scripts. We have a couple of scripts of mine that we are developing with the casting people. We have just cast somebody very exciting for one of our projects which we are looking for the finance for. So Paul and me are working together on a few other projects, and again we are trying to make films that are a little bit different and have a deeper sort of message to them really; a deeper meaning.
Many thanks to Jonnie Hurn for taking the time for this interview.
This article first appeared on Wages of Film.
Paul Risker is co-editor in chief of Wages of Film, freelance writer and contributor to Flickering Myth and Scream The Horror Magazine.
Paul Risker: What was the genesis of Do Elephants Pray?
Jonnie Hurn: After I met my now wife she took me to this forest in the north of France. Nobody knew who she was; she hadn’t met any of my friends or my family at this point. So I went to Paris and we drove out to this place. As we were hiking up through this forest in the middle of the night, which she knew and I didn’t, I just suddenly thought no one in the world knows where I am, and anything could happen.
I quite liked the idea of somebody being taken out of their comfort zone and being put into a place they don’t know, a place where they are uncomfortable and at the complete mercy of someone else. I liked the idea that it was a guy who was at the mercy of a woman as opposed to it being the other way round. Just as we were hiking through this forest on the way to the lake - it was about midnight - I had this idea of a film about two people lost in the forest.
Paul Risker: You are credited as producer, writer and star. When did you decide to play the lead role? Was it prior to or during the writing process?
Jonnie Hurn: When I first started out I just planned to write a very simple script, keeping it low key and something I could make with a group of friends. Therefore by default I thought I’d play the part, but when Paul read it he came up to me and he said, “I’ll direct it, you’ll play the lead and we’ll produce it between us.” If he had said to me at that point that he wanted to cast a certain actor in the role, I would have probably said fine. It was actually Paul who made the choice to cast me.
Though I’d originally based the character on me, it was a real life experience, in hindsight it would have probably been much easier on the practical level had I not played the part, and instead we had hired someone else. But it was Paul who said, “I think you should play this part” and I just went with it.
Paul Risker: In a recent interview with writer-director Dominga Sotomayor Castillo, she explained to me that when she writes she directs. How do your experiences as an actor impact or influence you the writer?
I do visualise it and act it out in places, and I use what I have learned as an actor in that character, in the creation of that character’s structure in the writing. The two of them are very much connected.
Also as a producer I made this decision at the beginning of 2007 that I was going to make a film that year no matter what happened. So I sat down and I listed all of the things that I could get hold of just by picking up the phone, all the people I knew, the equipment I could get and such. From there I looked through all the different story ideas I had and it just happened that this was the one that would fit all of the locations that I could get a hold of. For example, the Chi-Chi class that we film in is a Chi-Chi class that I used to go to every week, and so I knew that I could get shoot there. I tailored the script to work on a practical production level as well, so that I could maximise the resources that I had. When we were writing the script it was very much integrated with my experiences as an actor and also as a producer.
Paul Risker: What advice would you offer to other low budget filmmakers?
Jonnie Hurn: It has to be simple to film and it has to be character driven. I would say in all honesty the one thing that we did wrong was that our film was not a strong genre piece. For your first film, particularly on a low budget you need to have a strong genre, which is why a lot of people make horror films because it is easier to then go out and sell a horror movie.
Our film is more of a spiritual road movie which is not one of the more mainstream genres. So I would suggest choose a genre piece, but find something original within that. Find something that hasn’t already been done. One of the best examples of a low budget first time film is the Sci-Fi film Primer, a time travel film which was done on a very small budget but it was and still is a unique film. Or something like London to Brighton which influenced me, a gangster film but which is told from the perspective of two girls trying to get out of prostitution. It was a relationship story between two women. These are two examples of people who have taken strong genres and have found a new or different twist to it, and that is what you have to do. It has to be simple, easy to film, a small cast, not many locations, but if you can find a strong genre and do something different with it that will help you once you have made the film.
Paul Risker: Do Elephants Pray? is a unique film, so where do you stand on the issue of the influence of inspiration on individual creativity? There are those who are happy to be influenced and then there are those who prefer to keep a distance from anything that may influence them in order to preserve creative originality.
Nobody is a writer, director, producer or even an actor who is going to be a complete island. Everybody is influenced by the films they have seen and the lives they have lived and so you have to take ideas. It is just the question of who you take them from and what you do with them. The originality and uniqueness comes in how you interpret the things around you and the influences that you have. So there are influences within it certainly, but it is just what you do with it that makes it unique and that’s why this film is different because of the combination of Paul and myself, and the way that Paul took the script and what he did with it. Also because it is based on events in my life it is a unique kind of story. You have to be influenced by people because people have been through things before and have learnt things. Otherwise you are just going to be starting right from the very beginning and learning every lesson and learning every mistake by yourself, in which case you would be a hundred before you make a film that is watchable.
Paul Risker: Was it 2007 when you first conceived Do Elephants Pray?
Jonnie Hurn: I started writing it at the beginning of 2007. We shot it in September and October of 2007.
Paul Risker: This strikes me as the English take on advertising folk comparable to American television’s Mad Men. It is a world which people like you and Matthew Weiner are showing to be a particularly crazy world, full of wild and absurd characters.
Jonnie Hurn: I chose advertising because I wanted to find the most soulless profession I could think of. My background was in radio and so I have worked in a crazy world and the Foosball table that gets used in the film is actually the one that is owned by the radio station where I worked. You can actually see the logo on the Foosball table.
Having worked in radio a lot, it is a crazy environment. You do get people like that. I sort of just transposed them into the world of advertising. I have never worked in advertising but I know people who have, and it is a pressured situation. Therefore people let off steam in different ways. I have been to a lot of companies, certainly media companies that have very relaxed office environments. I have been to places that have Foosball tables in the office, particularly in creative environments. In creative offices there are a lot of things that are like that. They are very open and flexible and so if you put some crazy and extreme characters in a very open environment, then what would they do? They would probably run riot until the last minute when they would have to sit down and do some work.
Paul Risker: How did Marc Warren become involved in the project?
Jonnie Hurn: Marc and Paul go back a long way, because Paul effectively discovered him for his film Boston Kickout, which he did back in 1995. So they have been very good friends for nearly twenty years now. When I was writing the script I didn’t know that Paul was going to be interested in making it. We were working on, developing different projects and I sort of had Marc in mind for the part, more as a guide for writing the character. I never for one second thought that he would do it. I hadn’t met him at that point. I used him to base the character on and then when Paul came on board he said, “Oh yeah, I think Marc would do this part.” That’s when I realised that they were very good friends and it was just one phone call and Marc was attached to it.
We had to shift the shooting schedule around to accommodate him because he had just come off one job and then he was going off to do something else and he had a week spare. He could give us three days in that week, and so we had to move everything around to accommodate him. I deliberately wrote that character so that it could be shot in one location over a couple of days, but would also be a character that would be seen throughout the film from the very beginning, until the very end. I deliberately wrote the character so that we could get someone well known to play it because then we would only need them for a few days. But Marc just happened to come along because he’s very good friends with Paul.
Paul Risker: I found Marc’s introduction to be quite intimidating. He starts off fairly quiet and passive before suddenly exploding into one his boisterous rants. Marrlen’s a powerful character within the film and in many ways he’s there to offset your characters journey; two journeys both of which end differently.
He’s naturally very boisterous and we shot those scenes after we had had a torturous three weeks filming in the forest. We were all completely shattered; emotionally and physically drained by the end of it and we came back and we then had the office scenes to do. As intimidating as he was in the film, it was quite a relief to be inside in the warm and have someone who was full of energy and full of life around us to do those scenes. They were the last scenes that we shot on the film.
I deliberately underwrote the character. I left a lot of free space for him to play around with because Paul said that Marc would like to bring his own interpretation into it. So a lot of what you see, of him riding around on his bicycle, taking his shirt off is Marc’s input. There is a lot of Marc in that character and because he’s playing against type he relished the opportunity to play a type of character that he doesn’t often get chance to play.
He’s the sort of person that you wind him up and then you let him go, and we filmed an awful lot of stuff we couldn’t use; a lot of extra footage we had to cut out for time restrictions. He was great in the sense that he just turns up and gets on with it, improvises all over the place and that sparks off on the other characters as well.
Paul Risker: The philosophy in the film is not particularly heavy handed, though you touch upon the idea of the importance of the journey in place of finding answers, alongside an exploration for the inner child represented by Malika.
Jonnie Hurn: That’s absolutely right and that’s a very good interpretation and understanding of it. It is very much about going on the journey and she does represent the inner child in a sense, the freedom that you can have if you just step away from the barriers and the restraints that we impose upon ourselves. That is why Callum’s world is very materialistic, which is why I chose a very soulless profession for him. But within him there is this searching for something new. He goes to Chi-Chi classes and he’s trying to find something a bit different. He isn’t the same as Marrlen and the other people in the office. He’s not even the same as Sark his business partner. He’s disillusioned with it because he knows that he is lacking something in his life; he just doesn’t know what it is. When he meets Malika she represents freedom to him, which is why he has these recurring nightmares of running naked through the forest. He says it is his worst nightmare. She says, “No that is your inner desire, you just don’t realise it.” It is about freeing yourself, which is why he comes up with the idea of “Lose your ego and enjoy your life.”
We build these walls and barriers around ourselves but we should allow ourselves more freedom. We should just give up our jobs for a few days and go and run around the forest naked in France. I think it is a wonderful liberating experience.
Paul Risker: Watching Do Elephants Pray? it makes you reflect on the claustrophobic nature of living from one day to the next. If there is one certainty in life: death. At the end of our lives we should be able to look back and see a life filled with special moments or as you say in the film “creating memories.”
Jonnie Hurn: Absolutely and it is why she says to him just before they enter the forest, “What did you do this time last week?” He says, “Well I was at work.” “What did you do this time last year?” “I don’t know.” “That is because it wasn’t special.”That is very true. We remember the special events in our lives, the things that are different. We don’t remember the mundane things that we do day after day after day. It is the magical events, the different things that we do, the new experiences that are the memories that we keep. That is why in the little notebook that she gives him he says, “Yeah, lets create memories.” That’s what they are doing. They are creating something that they will remember for the rest of their lives.
Paul Risker: Speaking with filmmakers, one of the ideologies that seem to be a common thread is the idea that films should be entertaining whilst meaning something or having a reason to exist. What are your feelings on this discussion?
Jonnie Hurn: I love films that have substance like that. I get very bored of films that are just mind pulp or whatever you call it. There are a lot of people who like to go to the cinema or put a DVD on and switch off, to not think about anything. They just want to see lots of guns and people running around shouting and blowing things up. And that’s fine if that’s what you like.
There are two types. There are movies and there are films. A movie is something like X-Men, the Iron Man series or something like Mamma Mia. Those sort of lightweight things I find are movies. A film is something that has substance. Apocalypse Now is a film because it is not just a great story but it has moral, depth and meaning to it. I prefer to watch what I call a film rather than a movie. I like things that can make you think, and that’s what I want to do as a filmmaker. I want to create films that not only entertain people but also make them think about the world and their lives in a slightly different way. If people can think about what they have seen for a day, week or a month later, then I feel that is job done for me. I like the idea that people will take something away from it rather than it just being a way of switching off from the world.
Paul Risker: What’s next for you?
Jonnie Hurn: I am just about to direct a short film which is prep for a feature I am going to direct in the summer. I grew up in Wiltshire, right in the heart of crop circles. So I am making a feature film about crop circles and the people who make them. Most people think they are aliens but I know a guy who makes them and so I am making a film about him essentially.
So that is what I am doing at the moment and just writing scripts. We have a couple of scripts of mine that we are developing with the casting people. We have just cast somebody very exciting for one of our projects which we are looking for the finance for. So Paul and me are working together on a few other projects, and again we are trying to make films that are a little bit different and have a deeper sort of message to them really; a deeper meaning.
Many thanks to Jonnie Hurn for taking the time for this interview.
This article first appeared on Wages of Film.
Paul Risker is co-editor in chief of Wages of Film, freelance writer and contributor to Flickering Myth and Scream The Horror Magazine.