AVC: So where are you driving to?
BM: I’m going over to Santa Monica for a fitting actually, which is the funny part about all of this. I don’t know, there are so many parts of doing this job. I really didn’t realise how much you need to commit to a nomadic nature, how you really don’t know where you’re gonna be a week from now. You can feel like you’ve really got your life really planned out; you’re gonna do this certain set of things, you’re gonna take the time to write, and then some project drops in your lap and all of a sudden you’re off in London for six months. I just got back from being in London for about… yeah, six months.

AVC: I can hear a tiny British accent in your voice.
BM: Oh my gosh, I’m sure I probably have. I’m too much of a sponge.

AVC: I like it.
BM: The more you start to do this work, the more adept you become at like peeling away all of your exoskeleton, you know? You try to be more and more open, to take things in, the way you used to when you were a kid, when somebody could say something to you and it would stay with you forever. I mean you want to get to that place of openness, but the more you do that the more you find yourself just absorbing things that you don’t even mean to be absorbing. Like a vaguely British accent, oh lord.

AVC: Well, as an actor, you have to be totally where you are when you’re there. Just totally in the relationships that are happening around you. You do a couple of movies and you’re like, “Well, I can’t stay in touch with whoever my best set friend was four movies ago, I’m somewhere else, I’ve got a new set of friends right now.” It’s weird.
BM: It is really hard, and it is particularly hard because you can’t really take your real friends with you into this imagined realm. You’re so immersed in this imagined world, there’s just no way to get someone else as invested in it as you are. How do you explain over Skype that for the last fourteen hours you were playing make-believe with a bunch of other grown-ups and you’ve all convinced yourselves that this fictitious story is the most important thing in the world? And you have to convince yourself that this story is the most important thing, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to survive the physical of duress of it, let alone the emotional and mental duress. I remember doing this movie about the Civil War. You get worked up into a place where you feel like you’re living through the Civil War, and then you call people at home and try to talk about the sort of quotidian every-day stuff, and you can’t, because you’re living in the Civil War… which is totally imagined. So, yeah, it’s strange.

AVC: Do you feel like everybody gets that immersed? That everybody ends up straddling that divide of real-life reality and movie reality? Because a movie set is also filled with everyday, quotidian stuff; people walking around with jeans on eating snacks.
BM: I think some people have an easier time of going back and forth. I don’t know why that is. Maybe because I’m sort of newer to this, I need to keep that sort of focus.

AVC: It’s so good to be that way. When you’re younger working on indie sets, you try and be cool… one of the crew. Like “I’m the writer too, oh I don’t need a special room,” you know, “Don’t worry about me guys,” but then you learn what you actually need to do the work.
BM: Yeah, it’s so funny – I think the more you do it, the more you learn that you ask people for what you need. And people can also start to tell. Like there are times where you go into a place where you can’t talk in between takes, you know? You’re just gone. And when everyone’s in sync with each other they start to respect each other’s process. Likewise, you can see when the DP [Director of Photography] is doing something challenging under a lot of pressure and you need to give them the space to turn around the lights really fast, and you can feel each other. You become this organism together, everything functioning like the parts of a cell.

AVC: I’d say that’s true only if everyone is trying to make the same thing. If everybody is not trying to make the same thing, then the cell explodes.
BM: Yeah, but you can always feel that moment on set when the story wins everyone over, like, “OK, we’re working on something good, I just got excited.” A scene that will happen where the lighting and the production design and the costume and the weather and the performance and the story will just sing through everybody. Everyone gets hypnotised. I love when that moment happens on set, because everything changes on the other side of that.

AVC: I know exactly what you’re talking about, and it’s so funny to talk about in the middle of your press tour, which I’m sure is filled with fittings and dresses and premieres. But that moment can justify everything. Not that it’s curing cancer or anything, but do you know what I’m talking about?
BM: No, no I know exactly what you’re talking about!

AVC: [laughs] It’s very hard to talk about seriously.
BM: That’s whats so strange about it! You convince yourself that this is all-important but you can’t ever take it seriously – it’s the strangest paradox. At the end of the day, even the greatest movie is just one little plastic DVD, one file on your computer out of hundreds. A handful of them of course really move you and change you and open your perspective, and that’s what you’re always hoping to make every time you set out to do something. But even then, you have to remind yourself it’s just storytelling. We’re just around the campfire, entertaining each other, trying to make sense of our lives. And the best narratives are just the narratives that make the most sense of our strange experiences, in the strange time we’re living in, you know?

Smythson 2014 Soho Diary with Slide £230

Read Next