Road Movies
Situation is key to my conception of film, in both a poetic and physical sense. I am drawn to ideas that exist as their own “theatres”, showing a slice of the world within a defined frame. Place is also a “provocation to reality”: how we encounter the world shapes our perception of it, and the construction of situations can act as a catalyst to revealing character, both in front of and behind the camera.
The car is a paradoxical space for situationist intervention - both confined yet embodied in a landscape, fixed yet transient and holding its own social dynamics in microcosm. It acts as a metaphorical container for interior and exterior “journeying”: through psyches, landscapes, and cultures. In two new films I explore the transience of life through the car.
The below films are currently in production, and also constitute part of my ongoing research exploring the car as a provocative documentary situation.

Image: The Brown Bunny (Vincent Gallo)
A Japanese Ghost Story
A year ago, I heard that in the north eastern reaches of Japan, taxi drivers were picking up passengers that turned-out to be non-existent - ghosts or imaginings, perhaps due to the grief felt almost a decade on from the tsunami. Regardless of the reason, no one wants to talk openly about it. A Japanese Ghost Story is an inquiry into memory, myth, life and death using fixed cameras in the taxi cabs of the small port town
of Kamaishi. Three drivers, Toru, Goto and Chikako, weave their way
through the streets picking up occasional passengers and conversing with an
unseen stranger about their lives.

Image: Keith, still from The Divide
Keith & I
Around the same time I received a letter from Keith, one of the participants in my previous film, The Divide. Keith is nearing the end of a 30 year sentence for a minor drugs offence, imprisoned in the Texan desert in 1996 as part of the US’ “three strikes” law. I had continued writing to him after our initial meeting in the film. Keith’s letter delivered an additional blow I wasn’t expecting. He was incensed that what I had thought was a sympathetic film had “got [him] so wrong”. I agreed with him to try and set it right, and planned to meet him on his release at the prison gates, to drive from Texas to his hometown in the Appalachian mountains.
Last month, after 8 years of writing, I set out to meet again the man who had become my friend, to talk about what the film might be.
Last month, after 8 years of writing, I set out to meet again the man who had become my friend, to talk about what the film might be.