Night Movies: Daniel Warren on Whatever Gets You Through the Night

Glasgow Film Festival and Whatever Gets You Through the Night, the hugely ambitious multi-arts endeavor created by award-winning director Cora Bissett in collaboration with Swimmer One, are kindred spirits. Both celebrate creativity across a myriad of media. Great movies are GFF’s bread and butter, but its unique flavour is achieved through the manner in which it has embraced other art forms – artists' videos, comic books, live scores and, in this year’s edition, video games. So too Whatever Gets You Through the Night, which exist as a concept album, a play combining song, dance and spoken word, and as a film comprising music videos of the performers and bands who contributed to the project.

The moving image element screens tomorrow at the Arches. It’s an inventive portmanteau that uses a dizzying array of styles, reflecting the eclectic nature of the performers involved. Emma Pollock’s melancholic ballad Dark Skies is presented simply, with the former Delgado performing to some of the show’s actors in a bare rehearsal space; Eugene Kelly’s jaunty celebration of Glasgow’s favourite post-club stodge, Chips and Cheese, meanwhile, blends footage of Kelly recording the song with woozy vignettes of Sauchiehall Street revelers; and Bigg Taj and Wounded Knee performed their collaboration in front of a crowd of half-cut ravers at the much missed Bongo Club.

“There’s a Peter Greenaway film called The Falls; it’s 80-odd chapters and it can be played in any order and it still has a sort of grand narrative over its two or three hours that works no matter what order you play it in,” director Daniel Warren tells me ahead of GFF’s screening. “So that was a kind of trigger for how the film was put together.”

The play and album tell a series of stories that take place across Scotland between the hours of midnight and 4am. Warren, too, took the film’s artists across the country to perform in the nocturnal hours. “Wounded Knee, he was working on a scene about Loch Lomond, so we took him there one night to get him to play the music from the show," Warren explains, “and with Withered Hand we wanted to get out of the city and into the Highlands and Islands, so we took him on a tour up to Orkney where we had organised a gig, and went on a bit of a road trip.” Warren found that these unique locations helped enrich the music. “It fascinated me how everything sounded so different in all these places. We got [Withered Hand] to play some songs at Hoxa Head and Italian Chapel, then he played the gig and on the ferry. The songs he played were the final recorded versions that are on the album, but very stripped back, and it was all recorded live on the cliffs, with the wind and the rain. It makes it a bit more immediate.”

This intimacy is palpable; it makes the film feel alive, like we’re witnessing a celebration of the creative process itself. This is most keenly felt in the section featuring Kelly recording at the Green Door Studio. “You don’t usually see how a song is put together,” he explains. “It was great for me to be able to film the drums, and the bass guitar, and the organ, and him singing. I was almost able to edit it together like you would on a mixing desk: bring different sounds and levels out and strip it back.”

Not every element is as playful as the one featuring Kelly, however. The film closes on a more sinister note, with a nightmarish collage featuring images of war and CCTV footage of street dramas playing out in cities around the world. It’s a bold move that pays off. “Those images started as research on YouTube but I think it’s good to have an element in the film that was quite dark, because night time's still quite frightening for people; bad things happen at night, nefarious activities. It also makes it a way of making the film global, not just a film about Scotland.”