Pick up where it all started with you and the band and... just go from there the floor is very much yours

well i mean it's a relatively kind of well well known story it's also slightly just disputed in a way it was early 1993 i was uh a mere how old was i i was 24 and i was working with derek jarman with whom i'd worked since i was 21 which was actually simultaneously one of the the most incredible few years of my life and and life change this extraordinary British film director, avant-garde, incredibly prolific in all sorts of art forms, books, paintings, films.

And somebody I discovered when he made some videos for the Smiths.

And I suspect that... uh brett and possibly other members of suede might have discovered him the same way yes more than likely that question and it was very sort of randomly through a kind of political group in 1991 we met and ended up working together and um he was incredibly kind of empowering guy and um and it was it was as i said a life-changing experience so spring of 93 that the debbie suede album was coming out and um they'd made some videos and and they approached derek jarman uh through his production company or one of the production companies you work with to do a video for so young and derek wasn't well enough he died less than a year later yes and this is the bit where

brett and i have different

recollections of it but my recollection is of it is is that derrick suggested david lewis and andy crab uh work on the video and they and they made that video and and i wasn't involved in that video um but i did work and knew david and andy and the producer james mckay obviously through through derrick And at the same time, I'd been doing some concerts with Derek and the Pet Shop Boys, where we'd been doing sort of some interesting kind of experimental concerts, really.

We're using some of Derek's Super 8 films.

Yeah, I know.

Whoa

... 40 years old.

No one knew if there was gonna be dust, [laughs] you know? Are they gonna find kind of George Michael's toothbrush? Um, you know, who knew? So it was a, it was, uh, it took months and months and months for the footage to kind of, you know, be resurrected and kind of brought in, and it was really astonishing.

It was kinda like, um, it was kinda like archeology, basically.

You know, you're kinda digging stuff up.

And, um, so even though we knew the different layers of narratives and what the different stories would be, we didn't really know how it would all fit together, and it was a very, very, very long process in the edit, as you can imagine, and it, it was a journey of discovery, frank- frankly.

Right.

So, you know, they're changing a kinda reel every 10 or 11 minutes.

That's environment again, though.

It is.

A lot of it is environmental.

And I certainly experience sort of space and the feeling and a vibe in a particular way.

But I also... you know, I, I, it's, I talked with my therapist about this, but I'll talk to you about it.

I find that, you know, walking through a space and I can almost feel like every version of me that ever walked through that space, you know, kind of, I have a kind of, I think there's something about how my brain works that kind of suits this sort of filmmaking.

And, uh, and so, you know, and part of the reason why the one film came about was because I'd been to China a few times.

So how does time change the meaning of this trip?

And also, do you use a handheld as well when you're filming them? So that's quite an unusual thing, is it?

Well, there's a few things to say about that.

I am really allergic to the typical look of things.

Yeah, like the static kind of.

I remember the moment, Alice remembers that.

me reacting to it, but the first time we sat down and watched a sequence, the fact that the original footage was on the hoof, it was constantly roving, which for film is really unusual.

They had more money than sense, basically.

And also how much it's changed since the 80s, looking back at that footage to now.