AMOROUSFILMS: Why is the film called Taken? 

JASON BROWN: We tried on several titles. First it was called The Uses of Enchantment after the Bruno Bettleheim book that analyzes fairy tales but it was too long. I liked that title as it described what the film is about essentially. Looking closely at myth, maybe too closely, and having a close encounter with it. We decided on Taken as it is more in keeping with the spirit of the story - losing oneself to a bigger reality.

AF: What’s the film about?

JB: What comes up first is Nature conversing with humanity in the form of mystery. It's also about Keats, Nietzsche, psychology and sudden insight. Nature is constantly speaking to us and she can appear strange and mysterious at times. Mystery informs us that there’s something more to life than our limited thinking and we’re happy for it. Our perception of life can freeze our growth as the character Andrew says in the film. An enigmatic woman visits a powerful and persuasive psychologist in this story and changes his life. Thaws it out. It can happen suddenly and quickly as it does in this short piece. Is she real or a manifestation of his repressed imagination or both? These encounters happen all the time in life and that’s what this film explores.

AF: What exactly is this woman supposed to be?

JB: That’s the mystery. She is inherently and dynamically linked to Gerald the psychologist but we’re not sure how. Gerald’s co-worker Andrew touches on it when he mentions Animal Magnetism which is a theory developed by Franz Anton Mesmer in 1775 involving the use of rapport. Emily has a mesmerizing effect on Gerald in the film as Mesmer did with all those who witnessed his work. He also had a key influence on the Romantic poets. Romanticism, according to Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious, is the foundation of psychology and the conversation between Gerald and Andrew about Keats explores this. Emily is representing the Romantics to Gerald's Age of Enlightenment where Romanticism was oppressed. Emily is Nature in it’s full force and Gerald is really confronting “primordial nature” as the true romantics did such as Keats, Goethe,Wordsworth, Novalis and Shelley. We see how Gerald experiences this as a psychologist.

AF: Is that the inspiration for the film?

JB:There are a few. I had wanted to do a film involving two Author friends of mine, Christopher Bamford and Richard Smoley who are experts on esotericism. To hear them converse is an experience I wanted to capture. Passages from Chris’s new book, Green Hermeticism, I literally pasted into the script with his permission. It’s about alchemy and nature and I thought what if a figure arose from this tradition and transformed the world? I was also working with actress Julie Webster on an audiobook of romantic nature poetry who had a facility with lyric verse. She mentioned she wanted to do more film and she did have an otherworldly quality so I started thinking. I wanted to do an MTV version of some of the poems for the website anyway with classical music and my friend Rick Sands, brilliant DP, was also near by. It occurred to me – it’s summer, let’s have some fun and create something extraordinary. The script fell out of my head one morning.

AF: Are you still going to do the MTV poems?

JB: Yes. It's stuck in my mind unfortunately. The nature poems on that CD are full of beautiful imagery. Some of that is in the film.

AF: The film’s theme you mentioned sounds pretty big for a short.

JB: It is but I am amazed at what we squeezed in. Director John Hadden did an astounding job at trimming the script and getting the point across as well as bringing in the audience’s imagination. I wouldn’t have known how to do that. As a result I think between the writing,directing, acting and DP work there’s a timelessness to the film. In that sense it doesn’t matter how long it is.  

AF: What’s next?

JB: There are several scripts already being developed. One of them is a continuation of where TUOE left off.

AF: Will films take over audiobooks at Berkshire Media Aritists?

JB: I don’t see it as either or. Film is more limited verbally as audiences prefer the visual element over exposition in that medium. But film for the most part lacks the abundance of artistic use of words that a brilliant poem or novel displays in an audiobook. It's great doing both. I attempted to combine both forms in Enchantment. A superb team of gaffers, ACs, sound techs were formed for this project not to mention actors, directors and camera techs. Getting talented people to make a good product has always been the vision of BMA Studios. 

 

AMOROUSFILMS: Your background is mostly theater. What did you bring from that world to work on the film?

JOHN HADDEN: I was lucky to spend many years working with Shakespeare, here in the Berkshires. Shakespeare’s game, to quote a title by the wonderful Stockbridge playwright William Gibson, is a good one to watch close up. One of his lessons is to do your own work, with the materials of your time. He didn’t spend time putting on Euripides, for instance, with masks. But we’re slow learners, we theater types. I don’t know what I brought from theater—maybe something about how to enjoy the actors’ work, which is the most effective thing a director can do with actors. Maybe a sense of the importance of rhythm, the relation of silence to sound, or stillness to movement.

AF: Mike Nichols and David Mamet come from theatre backgrounds as well and their films reflect that. Does this film contain theatrical elements?

JH: I’m not sure their films reflect that, to their credit. Alan Ball’s films (American Beauty) do, to his credit. A film is a different animal than a play, in essential ways, though they both usually use actors to tell a story. The film is by no means a play, so we didn’t have the difficulty of adapting a theater piece into a film. The strength of the script lies in the simplicity of the story, which carries all kinds of ambiguities that can be implied by purely cinematic means.

AF: This film has more dialogue than most. A theater director might handle that better than a director who, for example, is used to crime dramas or slasher movies.

JH: That’s true, there is more dialogue in this than in many films. But we cut every word we could out of the early drafts, which were much longer than the eventual script. In film, as opposed to theater, the frame directs the viewer’s awareness to the background, the soundscape, the light, the movement of the camera and the rhythms of the edit. The silent reaction of the opposite character. These carry as much information as the dialogue. All must tell the same story, but each should do something the other does not. What is shown does not have to be spoken, and vice versa. The elements complement, rather than imitate, one another. In a good slasher movie, to follow your lead, one might use gentle music in a terrible slashing scene, for instance, to give it dimension. And as in our little film, I hope, you don’t really know what’s going to happen, but you want to find out.

AF: How did you approach integrating stage and screen?

JH: First of all, the direction was more than shared by Rick Sands, the cinematographer. We had worked on several theatrical projects together, and had developed a great deal of trust in each other’s approach. So the finished piece is a result of like minds working together in mostly unspoken agreement.

AF: The film contains a lot of mysterious and enigmatic elements.  One gets the sense that there is enormous subtext and much unsaid. Was it a challenge to maintain a mysterious quality and also make the story clear?

JH: Yes. It was an interesting project.

AF: Did what you see in the rushes reflect what you envisioned during the shoot or was there a difference?

JH: We got pretty much what we were looking for. Our terrific crew was alert and the actors were accurate, spontaneous—we got each shot in three takes or less. In the editing room, though, there was plenty of room for invention, and some necessity for it. In the last scene, when Gerald and Emily sit out on the greensward drinking wine, there was a technical glitch that forced us to cut away to something, anything, to let us use that particular take. So Ariel Rubinoff, our master editor, who is quick and intuitive, found a shot of the riffling stream, drifting away, and inserted it where the glitch was. Not only did it work, but we needed the cutaway to get us to follow the stages of Emily’s departure. To complete the rhythm of the dying chords. It was a reminder that the film had its own mysterious guidance.

AF: What part of the film did you enjoy directing the most?

JH: I enjoyed it all. One high point was Julie Webster giving a perfect reading of the Yeats poem “Stolen Child.” It was simple and unmistakable, as though something else had come through her to speak it. I wept with gratitude, literally. My knees were weak. But the gods give and they taketh away. We lost that recording to some mischievous force of the digital universe. Just as Gerald loses Emily, come to think of it.