Feature
A Fond Farewell
Becky Bartlett chats to the cast and crew of EIFF's closing gala film, Third Star.
“I read the script in a hotel on holiday and started blubbing. So I gave it to someone else to read and they started blubbing and I thought, oh, there's something in that”, confides JJ Feild, one of the actors in Edinburgh International Film Festival's closing gala film, Third Star. “I shouldn't admit that, should I?”, he backtracks quickly, though his colleague Tom Burke endorses Feild's reaction by claiming that as Feild never usually cries, this speaks volumes for their film. “If I'd said that, it wouldn't mean anything, because I always cry”, Burke reveals.
Following James (Benedict Cumberbatch), a terminally ill young man and his three friends on their voyage to Barafundle Bay in Pembrokeshire, James' favourite place in the world, in the wrong hands Third Star could be a very bleak affair. Instead writer Vaughan Sivell has used the pre-existing relationships of many of the cast, and a clever script, to ensure this is a tale of friendship and adventure. The majority of the cast and crew knew each other prior to filming: Burke and Feild had already worked together (on Telstar: The Joe Meek Story) and were friendly with Cumberbatch also, while Sivell and Adam Robertson, the fourth lead actor, own the production company that can boast this as their first film, and have been friends for many years. In fact, Sivell incorporated Robertson's personality into Bill, the role he ended up playing. “So often I'd sit in a room listening to Adam reading Bill until it got to the point it was just ridiculous that he wasn't going to do it”, he says. “One of my favourite lines in the film is when he [Bill] dunks a biscuit in his tea and says 'biscuits, they're great on their own but dunk them in tea and it's a whole different journey'. I was playing with the script one day and Adam actually said that and I thought, well, you're a freak, but it's going in the script.”
With the exception of a few very brief cameos, Third Star is entirely a vehicle for the four mentioned actors, so it was crucial that their interactions on screen were believable. Luckily, it would appear the energy shared in the film is genuine. Director Hattie Dalton confirms this. “What was great about Vaughan's script was that it gave them [the actors] a really solid framework to understand their characters and then through rehearsal period you could see the natural rapport between them”, she says. Even throughout the interviews, Burke and Feild spend the majority of the time mocking each other, bouncing ideas off each other and discussing a wide range of topics including what it would be like to be a female fish, the possibility of entering into the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with a drag act, and describing themselves as a “menagerie of actors, like a zoo”.
It is undoubtedly a good thing that everyone got along so well. To achieve the film, the cast and crew shared a cottage together for four weeks (“with one bathtub”, Feild clarifies), and as the characters discover the physical exertion required to complete their journey, this became reflected in reality too. “It was such a challenge because we never had mobile signal or radio signal back to the base most of the time”, recalls Sivell. There was always something physical, every day, to deal with that caused us to rethink how the day of shooting was to go. I'll never forget driving in the Land Rover down a field, passing the actors notes of the new scene I'd written while watching them film the previous one.”
Although everyone hoped for a successful film, Sivell and Robertson had the most at stake. Their production company, Western Edge Pictures, was a fledgling company, and they had chosen to take the more challenging route of starting with a feature film instead of shorts. It was vital that they found a director who could create the vision they had accurately, and Dalton was the perfect choice. “We really loved her short films. They had exactly the right dark humour sensibility and we knew the script would need that because if it ever toppled into saccharine sweet it wouldn't work. It has to tread that tonal line so softly, and it was something that she, from looking at her previous work, seemed uniquely able to do. I also really liked her as a first time film-maker, which is something we all were”, said Sivell.
Luckily for everyone involved, their hard work was rewarded with EIFF director Hannah McGill's decision to make Third Star the closing gala film. It came as a surprise to everyone, but a good surprise. “Independent film-making is a tough, tough journey”, says Robertson. “You really have to be naïve or mental or a little bit of both to get involved in it. For us to set out and make our first feature – we did that. For it to be in the festival, just that alone and we'd have been chuffed, but we're closing night and that's an absolute dream.”
Becky Bartlett
