Carol Morley returns to the director's chair this week with her new movie Dreams of a Life - which was screened at the London Film Festival earlier this year.
I caught up with Carol to talk about what influenced the movie, which she chose to shoot the film the way she did and what lies ahead for her.
- Dreams of a Life is about to be released into cinemas so can you tell me a little bit about the movie?
The movie came about because I was travelling on the London Underground where I found a copy of The Sun newspaper and I started to turn through the pages.
I came across this headline ‘Woman dead in flat for three years. Skeleton found with TV still on' and there was so little personal information about Joyce that I just became sucked in to what lay behind this headline.
And I just thought how can this relatively young woman pass so unnoticed? So it just made me really curious as to who she was and what it says about our time really.
- Well you have touched on my next question really I was wondering what was it about this story of Joyce Carol Vincent that interested you into making this movie?
Well firstly there was very little information I didn't know if she was black or white but I did know that she was forty - so there was very little about her.
The things that attracted me to the story initially was the fact that she was a similar age to me and she had died with the television on and that image just really felt very profound in a way: for three years these voices from the television all over you as a filmmaker I just felt whoa.
She died at Shopping City where two hundred and fifty thousand people went every week to go shopping and I think those things, early one, made me think that it was a powerful story about contemporary times.
Then as I got into the story I just felt closer and closer to Joyce - she lost her mum when she was eleven and I lost my dad when I was eleven - and so I felt closer to her rather and her being someone in the distance that I was making a film about.
- The movie sets out to discover who Joyce was so what kind of picture did you build of her personally?
I wanted to celebrate her life and not focus on her death and I think what I built for her from in a sense, because you are sort of wondering how this can happen to someone and someone can be so forgotten, what I built up was this person who was incredibly immaculate - she presented herself immaculately and had her makeup perfect.
And all these things I think to why she wasn't discovered for so long as everyone just assumed that she was having a better life than they were.
I learnt that she never had arguments with people, she didn't like to shout, she was a very gentle person and very maternal to colleagues and friends. She had these amazing qualities and you just don't think that somebody like that would end up being so forgotten.
I remember the time when the story came out and obviously it went on the internet and there were bloggers writing 'she must have been a miserable bitch' and all these really horrible things were written because of her outcome and she really wasn't like that.
- The film mixes documentary with some staged scenes so why did you decide to shoot the movie in this way?
I think I was interested in the reconstruction scenes not being illustrative I was interested in doing something else - in the film I have Zawe Ashton singing a whole song; I wanted to give Joyce her voice back because she has been so silent.
She wanted to be a singer and she wanted to say something I suppose with the songs and I felt that was a way of doing that. I wanted to create sensations and feelings as well as a sense of the eras and the times and not just impose a kind of illustration of what someone was saying.
But nor did I just want the interviews and the testimonies to be all that stood for Joyce I wanted create other things I suppose.
- Zawe Ashton takes on the role of Joyce in the film so what was it about this actress that made you cast her in this role?
I had seen different people as we had done a casting session or two but the thing everyone said about Joyce was that she really lit up a room - she was very vibrant and people noticed her.
As soon as Zawe walked into the room I just sat, I really felt something about her, she really had a spirit and a charisma about her. Also Zawe is quite complex so could go into the darker and more internal extremes as well.
Also Zawe wanted to be physically more like Joyce, she had a gap in her teeth and so we had that filled, and she had extensions in her hair - so she tried to get as close to Joyce physically as she could.
- Dreams of a Life played at the London Film Festival earlier this year so you must have been delighted to be selected?
Yeah that was great. And I think that the initial responses have been fantastic. What is really powerful is that people haven't come away from the movie feeling unable to do something it seems to me that people have come away and they are on their phones and calling somebody or thinking about a friend.
And some people started having street parties for their neighbours after seeing the film and so I like that Joyce's legacy is about bring people together and notice people around them.
- Well you have touched on my next question I was wondering how you have found the reaction to the movie at the festival and since?
People seem to be finding it quite an important story without it being about social issues and banging on about what we should be doing - I think it touches in a much more complex way of what our lives are like now.
If you live in a city you are very busy and it is all about speed, you are constantly with people but not really knowing anybody, so I think it makes you think about what your life is and the kind of lives we are living.
- We keep hearing about how difficult it is to make a movie in this country at the moment with funding being slashed and so on so how difficult was it to get this project off the ground?
It was very difficult. Very few women make direct films and there are very few films that feature female protagonists, I can't think of a British film that features a black female protagonist in recent times, and so those kinds of things are difficult.
People were saying to me 'who would want to see this film?' and 'who would want to see a film about this story?' that was some of the initial responses.
And others were 'nobody would want to see it the way you want to make it' - I was adamant that I didn't want to make a straightforward documentary; it was very important to me to include music and certain moods.
So I think people didn't quite go there at first - in fact we went to the same organisations again and again before they said yes; once someone had left their job at a certain organisations we would go back. There was a determination to it from all involved.
- So how did you get into filmmaking in the first place - is it a career path that you had always wanted to follow?
No. I left school at sixteen and just hung around drinking and going out a lot. Later on, at the age of twenty one, I left Manchester and hung about London and worked in factories and shops.
When I was twenty three I went back to college and I did an A-Level film and photography course and then applied to St Martins where I studied fine art film.
After I left there I got some money together and made a film called The Alcohol Years, where I retraced my past in Manchester.
- You have also tackled a live action movie this year with Edge so how did you find the transition away from documentaries & shorts?
For me I just want to tell stories and I think that each story demands a different way of telling it.
With Dream of a Life and Joyce's story if you'd have made it as a full drama it would have had less impact because people would have thought 'well this didn't really happen' or 'they have invented these elements'.
I definitely want to make feature films and I want to be in cinemas and I want to make films that look at women's lives - Edge has a lot of female character of different ages in it and I think it's often hard for female actors over forty to get roles.
In the future I want to make sure that my films represent women, or represent more complex images of men, and show more complex images of women's lives. I want to offer roles that are interesting to actors but also looking at real stories too - so I hope to make movies in both documentary and drama.
- 2011 is coming to a close so what movies and performances have you been enjoying this year?
Oh I hate questions like that because I always go completely blank. I saw The Dish and the Spoon at the London Film Festival and I really enjoyed that.
I'm looking forward to Silk with Maxine Peake in it on the telly.
- Finally what's next for you?
I am developing different ideas and really looking at what to do next. I’ve been researching mass hysteria and thinking about a story that could have that phenomenon at its centre.
It would have some really good things in it like female sexuality and female adolescence and so it could be quite exciting to explore that.
Dreams of a Life is released 16th December.
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw