The Unfilmables: how to score a film that doesn't actually exist
The Unfilmables is a curious audiovisual polyptych in which live scores have been created for a pair of films that don't actually exist. Mica Levi and electronic supergroup Wrangler are the composers putting their imaginations to the test
Film fans dream about the wild and wonderful movies that never quite made it to screen. There’s Tarkovsky's failed attempt to make Hamlet, Stanley Kubrick’s never-realised Napoleon, Darren Aronofsky's derailed take on Batman, and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unsuccessful stab at adapting science-fiction novel Dune, to name a few of the most tantalising 'what if?' films.
Another to add to this list is The Tourist. No, not the Johnny Depp-Angelina Jolie caper from 2010 – you only wish that didn’t exist – but Clair Noto’s wild script about a sex-charged alien underworld in the heart of Manhattan. Quadrophenia director Franc Roddam – inspired by concept art from HR Giger – attempted to make the film in the early 80s, with Francis Ford Coppola as producer. But when Coppola’s American Zoetrope Studio fell into financial trouble, The Tourist was lost to cinema history, until now.
As part of curious project The Unfilmables, electronic supergroup Wrangler (made up of Cabaret Voltaire’s Stephen Mallinder, Phil Winter from Tunng and Benge) have imagined a score for Noto’s dark sci-fi, with accompanying visuals coming from Tash Tung and Dan Conway.
Mallinder admits that the prospect of imagining a film that has never actually been made was both fascinating and a bit daunting. “It's not an attempt to make the film but rather abstract the ideas behind it; to reduce the original design and story to a series of visual and sonic cyphers – an alien lost among us,” he explains.
The Tourist appealed to Mallinder because sci-fi lent itself to Wrangler’s live 'electronic' sound. The imagined live audio-visual performance will be quite different to Noto’s version, however. “I loved the very sultry and eerie feel of Clair Noto's story,” says Mallinder, “but we've switched from a sweltering Manhattan in the 80s to dark dystopian London.”
The performance takes the form of a live visual mix with an improvised electronic soundtrack to complement what is happening on screen. Mallinder reckons The Tourist is a great choice for today’s Britain as Norto’s “intent to spotlight ‘corruption, humanity and xenophobia, of human vs alien struggling to co-exist on Earth' seemed very pertinent right now.”
The other half of this audiovisual polyptych comes from Mica Levi and her sister Francesca, although the Oscar-nominated composer has stretched the concept of the project even further than Mallinder and co. Instead of working from an unproduced script, the Levis have reimagined Sergei Parajanov’s masterpiece The Color of Pomegranates as The Colour of Chips – 'a lost British classic set in the North of England.'
“We felt that British life being depicted in such a way has not yet existed,” said Francesca Levi. “I was thinking of utilising the everyday rituals of modern urban life in the UK and using the tableaux technique deployed by Parajanov. I am always interested in the extraordinary in the ordinary.”
Wed 28 Feb, Saint Luke’s, 7pm
Read more about Glasgow Film Festival in The CineSkinny – in print at Glasgow Film Theatre and the CCA, and online at theskinny.co.uk/film/cineskinny