MT:

“They pervade the whole film... they’re very mysterious and beautiful and positive things, crop circles.”

...and now a local film maker has just received huge acclaim at Cannes for his crop circle movie.

MT:

“My art director said, ‘well, you should do a movie about crop circles,’ and so I kinda looked a bit further down the Ridgeway and there was the landscape of... the magical landscape of Wiltshire and Stonehenge and white horses and crop circles and er...  Silbury mound.”


A Place To Stay filmed entirely on location in Wiltshire is a love story that follows Gypsy travellers who are persecuted by local people -  its Bristol-trained director believes the film will create yet more interest in crop circles:

MT

“Crop circles are going to be huge this summer -  not just because of the movies, but er... there seems to be a renewed interest in them from all sorts of different kinds of people, you know, I mean there are people who aren’t satisfied with the more established religions who are finding these things give them something to believe in.”

O’Hagan:

A Place To Stay could be on the big screen by the end of the summer, so crop circle lovers can enjoy them all over again - Patrick O’Hagan, HTV News

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CCC:   
Where did A Place To Stay  originally come from?

MT:   
I was over half way through the screen adaptation of Hardy’s ‘Jude The Obscure’, when the BBC announced they were going to produce a made for  TV version. I’d  walked every mile of every page of the novel, and I fell in love with the Ridgeway. It’s one of the oldest tracks in Europe and runs west across southern England. The views are stunning - really beautiful, a luxury of landscape. Hardy only wrote about real places, you can really live his novels.

CCC:   
So what happened to ‘Jude The Obscure’?

MT:   
I had to dump it and move on. But by then my heart was set on making an  epic love story. Hardy-esque - with little people in vast landscapes. Like the  paintings of John Constable and David Lean’s movies. Constable was a  story-painter. Story telling - It’s what the English are very good at. Look at  Shakespeare and Dickens.

CCC:   
Has David Lean influenced you?

MT:   
Absolutely. He was the master story-teller. I think it has a lot to do with his  background as an editor. Creating the illusion of events unfolding in logical  sequence... I think that’s Karel Reisz.

CCC:   
Editing is also your background - does it help you direct?

MT:   
It definitely helps, but being obsessed with film making for its own sake can  get in the way. Until recently I considered how a story was told more  important than the story itself. I think that  was a mistake, and led to self   indulgence on my part. I concentrated too much on the film making - camera   angles, editing, sound effects,  music etc., and not enough on the factors and the telling of the story. With this film, for the first time, I set out simply to tell the audience the story - no gimmicks, no flashy effects or camera angles - just the story. The way it’s told is still important, but it’s told in a completely functional way.

CCC:   
So how did you tackle the film making in A Place To Stay?

MT:   
Like a painter - a story painter - like Reubens or Titian. All landscape  painting goes back to Titian. So the canvas I chose was wide. I couldn’t  afford it, but I had to shoot in cinemascope, there wasn’t an alternative. Just as A4 is so suitable for a page of type - so ‘scope is for landscape  photography. The landscapes in this film have personalities of their own - they become characters, not just a background of scenery in a figure painting. And they change mood - there are no two more different landscapes than the same under altered skies, so we spent hours looking up at the movement of clouds across the sky. It’s like Constable said, ‘no two days are alike, nor even two hours’. We shot beautiful landscapes under  magnificent cloud formations.

CCC:   
So what is the story-line in A Place To Stay?

MT:
I wanted to tell the story of star-crossed lovers. Actually, it goes back further  than that. When ‘Jude’ fell through, I wanted to replace it with something that had the same of sense of place, and the same quota of tragedy. It all fell into place, once I had chosen the location for the story. I went further west along the Ridgeway, across to Wiltshire - the magical land of white horses and ancient burial sites.

CCC:
And crop circles.

MT:
That’s right. When ‘Jude’ fell through Peter King said - why don’t you make a film about crop circles? It was a subject that I knew nothing about, so I got a load of books out of the library. At the time, Colin Andrews and Busty and Terrence Meadon were the only people in print. For me, Colin was and still is the leading authority on the subject - that’s why I asked him to be a consultant on the movie. He also loves the landscape at Alton Barnes and knows it like the back of his hand.

CCC:
So how did the landscape help with the story?

MT:
Well, it was very straight forward. I asked myself - who lives there? Farmers, Villagers, Gypsies and Travelers, and city-slickers at weekends. Basically, they all hate each other. There’s a lack of trust and respect and understanding. That’s why I wrote Jessie’s lines “People think we’re dirty - ‘least I don’t shit in my own ‘ome.” I got to know some Gypsies. I shouldn’t think the Queen serves tea from cleaner or finer porcelain than I was offered by Gypsies I talked to. Anyway, once I established who lived  there, the story came quite quickly. I chose to tell it through the eyes of a local beat Bobby.

CCC:
Why?

MT:
Going back to Dickens, he said that a story-teller and a story-reader should  establish a mutual understanding as soon as possible, and that’s what I tried to do from the start by using the Bobby. I established early on that this man was honest, caring and broad-minded, with the welfare of the community as a whole as his main preoccupation. The audience can trust this guy, and in that way I get their trust, since I’m telling the story through him. The twist, ofcourse, is that he’s so old that his mind is on the blink, so I get a lot of artistic license as well.

CCC:
Do you mean with crop circles?

MT
I mean with everything that the movie touches on, and that’s a lot. Crop circles, religion, tea leaf reading, science fiction, the environment, the police, social services, central heating, the great outdoors... and death... and life after death.

CCC:
Do you believe in these things?

MT:
The film’s not about what I believe - it’s about what I see. Crop circles exist,  churches exist, some people feel closer to their God in a crop circle - either  way - we’re not alone. Tea leaf reading exists - in our film, as it happens, every word of a tea leaf reading comes to pass - for both the reader and   inquirer.

CCC:
And the Afterlife?

MT:
We’re all on a never ending journey, all part of the whole. It’s just like the  bobby says in the film: ‘it’s a big adventure’.

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