Duane Hopkins: Things Can Only Get Better

Many films have dealt with drug addiction and its repercussions, yet Duane Hopkins’ first feature film Better Things feels remarkably fresh. Hopkins’ minimalistic style gives a stark yet compassionate insight into the lives of several members of a rural community. Whilst at times bleak, the film shows great empathy for the lives of those it follows and marks Hopkins out as a promising new director.

How much was it your intention to approach this subject matter in a way that was visually different to what we might expect in, say, the films of Ken Loach and other British social realist directors?

It’s hard to say how much of that is a real intention and how much is just me and what I find interesting. We [in Britain] have a tradition of taking social realism and twisting it into something else which I think is along the lines of people like Bill Douglas, Alan Clark, Powell and Pressburger or Terence Davies. And I think it’s more that which I find interesting. I take the elements of social realism which are working class characters and subject matter but I want to try and find something which is more poetic or lyrical. I’m always aspiring to look at not necessarily their external circumstances but what their interior lives are like, the affect their exterior lives has on their psychology. So I think my films have more of a philosophical bent than a social realist element. But I do take these ingredients and I think visually as well that’s my starting point because I don’t hide anything, I try to show everything realistically, for example the drug use is heavily researched and I wanted to show it exactly how it is.

It’s interesting that you mention Terence Davies, because it struck me that the fragmentary approach that you take to the stories of the characters is quite similar to his film Distant Voices, Still Lives.

Yes, for me that’s possibly his best work and I like films like that which take elliptical kinds of narrative structures. For me, I like to work in sequences not necessarily scenes because I like to try and breakdown the dynamics of plot. I only like to use narrative in a way to get inside the characters and I find with sequences you can do that much better. What I wanted to do with this film was get rid of all the things I wasn’t interested in and try to get away from story and take a multi-narrative approach which made it so the film was only about themes. It’s more similar to how you listen to music because when you listen to music you’re not analysing it as you go along instead you interact with it on a much more subconscious level, and I much more interested in films which do that.

How did you come to develop the themes in the film?

To give you some background, the way that I wrote the film is that I knew that there were certain images and scenes and juxtapositions that I wanted to create. So I wrote 150 completely unconnected scenes, things that I wanted to see and characters that I was interested in. Then I went back through the 150 scenes to see if there was some kind of thematic unity. Most of them seemed to be about love or loss or the wish for security or safety so then I thought, ok, I can make a film about these themes. Around that same time there was quite a big subculture in the area of very heavy drug use so I became interested in that because a lot of my friends moved into that subculture. When I talked to people who had been using heroin quite heavily for two or three years they would refer to it like it was a lover or a confidant. I became very interested in that because I thought all the films I’ve seen about heroin are normally in an urban environment and they’re normally socio-political. What was interesting to me was this psychological approach. Why does someone actually take a drug, what’s the reason? If you think of it in terms of a relationship, someone has a relationship with someone because they are in love with them and this person makes them feel a certain way. So you get up in the morning and you need this drug and you want that drug because you know you’ll feel a certain way when you get it. I saw then that I could draw lines between drug use and relationships. I was interested in the different ways of looking at love. Not in a Hollywood way where love solves everything, I saw it as a much more complex emotion than that which has this amazing capacity for beauty but it is also extremely cruel. So I was interested in those things in the film and building up an atmosphere of that.

How did you go about sourcing the actors (almost all of whom are non professionals)?

It’s a very long process. I find all the actors myself. I would go everywhere, I would go to old people’s homes, theatre productions, to youth clubs, to rehab centre, to towns which I new had a large drug subculture and I would walk around and look for people. For example, how I found the girl who plays Rachel, I was on a rough estate on Cheltenham and this girl walked past and she had her hood up and she was crying and trying to light a cigarette and it was just to do with the way that she was walking and the purpose that she had. I knew immediately. There are 21 speaking roles in the film and 18 of them had never acted before. It took me about 9 months to find everyone.

You use very little music in Better Things, what are you thoughts about the use of music in film?

We do use score in Better Things but it’s very subtle and we only use things like tones. I don’t like things which are two emotional which tells me ‘ok, you should be feeling this at this point’. I want that to be done in the filmmaking and not have to rely on the music to make it obvious as to what I should be feeling. A good film for me should always be a meeting place between the artist, the film itself and the audience and it should be a dialogue that happens between the three. And when you have this overt emotional music it’s no longer a dialogue.