I say, tell everyone everything. Why cover anything up...
right?
UPBEAT MUSIC
'How to describe Frank?'
When I read it first, it was one of those things you are just
laughing and laughing and laughing, and then you finish reading it,
and you say, I know this is hilarious,
but I've no idea how to translate it from page to screen.
I don't know how to go about the character,
I don't know how to go about telling the story,
cos it's all really funny on paper, but I just can't see how you do it.
And then I met Lenny, and we talked about that very thing.
And we both... I just got really excited talking to him about it.
And the possibilities started opening up, you just think,
man, this is going to be a huge challenge,
but if we can do it, it'll just be mad.
I find this inspiring.
This sort of iconic character in Frank who is so...
There is something of that, like the way you look at Chaplin.
It's just... It's an image.
That image of Frank at the centre of the story
mixed with that tonal kind of territory just made me feel like...
And really against many voices in my head which were going,
you are making a desperate mistake,
this is a funny way to hand in your notice as a film-maker.
I said to somebody recently,
there are so many ways in which Frank could be bad as a film.
And there are only a few ways that you can kind of make it really work.
But that thing was the thing that grabbed me and held me.
Frank, people should know about you, you should be famous.
Flattered grin followed by bashful half smile.
Stop saying your facial expressions out loud. It's extremely annoying.
I wrote about 30 or 40 pages over a couple of months which was
really true to life, about me joining Frank's band,
and I sent it to Peter Straughan,
and actually he was the first person,
he was the very first person to say, let's fictionalise this slightly.
All the wind started moving towards it being fictional to some degree.
And then, if you're going to have, like, a sort of half biopic,
why don't you just go the whole way and just take
the spirit of Frank but completely fictionalise it?
And then you're free to do what you want.
And what we did with that was brought in these other great outsider artists,
Daniel Johnston and Captain Beefheart, you know,
and then sort of created this parallel-universe Frank
that drew from all of those different people.
RADIO WHINES, STRINGS PLUCK, RASPING NOISE
For me, it was finding character.
Like, the film goes from really outrageous comedy at some points,
like physical, kind of, Dumb And Dumber/Will Ferrell ridiculousness
for some of it in terms of the physical humour and outlandishness,
to kind of Coen brother strange territory
to pathos, to big musical numbers.
So the challenge for me was finding a character who can do all of those
in the same movie and still feel like the same man
and kind of go like that.
So that was for me the challenge,
and that's what really got me excited about it.
The mask I always just assumed would work,
and I think it does, cos you've got Michael behind it.
He never takes it off. Do you think it's weird?
Would it help if I said my facial expressions out loud?
Welcoming smile.
It didn't seem like that crazy a thing to me either, you know,
because, erm...
People are strange and individual
and unique in so many different ways with what sort of body tattoos
people put on and various masks,
so wearing a mask didn't seem that unrealistic
as somebody who would be living their life like that.
It's... You know, it's...
There's also extensions that can be told through wearing a mask.
People say, you are worried about your face not being able to
express what's going on, but the mask can become an extension anyway.
Normal faces are weird, too. The way they're smooth, smooth, smooth...
and then - bleurgh!
Michael is so active, you know? He's so buzzy...
..that when he went still, or his head would cock slightly, you know,
this thing would just go like that, and you would just get terrified.
Like, I don't know if Michael is doing his million-tooth grin
underneath there, or if he's closed his eyes,
or if he's laughing at me or if he's just bored by what I'm doing.
You don't know, and, erm, it just kept it alive in a totally
different way than when he was really, you know, buzzing off you.
A lot of things can be told with just a great stillness, you know?
Sometimes I thought it would be more physical
and then try different things.
Sometimes check in the monitor, conferring with Lenny.
And, you know, that's it. Just sort of feeling your way through it.
The head - take it off.
There's a sort of freeing element to wearing the mask, as well.
Getting over the initial feeling of claustrophobia,
then it just becomes kind of fun, really.
Other than, again, sort of figuring out where my blind spots were,
and there are was quite a few of them.
Frank! Come back! TYRES SCREECH
Then it's just... You just sort of give yourself over to the head.
HE CHUCKLES
My instinct was to make it all quite upbeat and all quite funny,
but Peter and Lenny are both quite a lot more melancholic than I am,
and so they were bringing, sort of, melancholia into it.
And it was sort of weird.
I suddenly realised we're very different personalities,
the three of us, and yet, we were all working together towards this thing.
And so it began to feel like the three of us were
in a bag being shaken up.
But it really came from the shared experience of all of us
with very different personalities and very different views of the film
sort of coming together and creating this discordant thing.
Which might have been a disaster, but, you know, luckily,
it turned out to be really good.
Someone needs to punch you in the face.
It's a big mistake as a director not to allow the actors that you cast
to influence the characters.
if you're too rigid about it and you think, I have this square hole,
and whatever the shape of the actor I'm going to beat them into that,
you never get as natural a result,
and you're missing all the possibilities that this real person brings.
So even though I had this very strong sense of how Frank would work,
Michael brought all sorts of aspects,
much more muscular aspects to Frank than I had thought about.
It was obviously very comedic at times,
but then, of course, we are dealing with somebody who is suffering from
mental illness which is obviously a very serious thing, and so, erm...
doing service to that
and not making a mockery of that was very important to me,
that was the only thing that I was really focused on in that respect.
WAILING AND SCREECHING SOUND EFFECTS
Such pain.
In the case of Dom, I think more than any other part, the idea of Jon
and the feeling of Jon came alive really only after I cast Domhnall.
Jon on the page was much less three-dimensional than
the Jon that Domhnall brought to life.
You know, Jon is, you know, huge with ambition and tiny with talent.
So some might say we have a lot in common.
But it felt like everybody wants to be the best at what they do,
everybody wants to be excited to go to work in the morning,
and to feel like you're valued at what you do.
That's universal. Unfortunately, his chosen path,
he just has absolutely zero talent for
and is blind to that fact.
And I guess that was the way in, but like I say,
you know, you are playing a very untalented man,
you just hope you have the talent to do it, it's a strange combination.
You should go home.
Frank picked me to join the band.
You are fingers being told which keys to push.
I...push my own keys.
And I'm perfectly capable of going to my furthest corners and composing music.
There's quite a lot of stuff in parts of Frank where it just came out,
you know, they'd riff on something that was happening in a scene,
it would go somewhere much better and we'd use that,
and that actually emerged from the relationships that existed.
'Frank finds inspiration in everything. How does he do this?'
There was huge dynamism in the room whenever any of us
were together because there was always the possibility of music.
Because everybody there is musical and there were instruments
lying around, and so there was always this threat that
some kind of weird thing was going to begin, which was wonderful.
For Frank, you know, you see so much of his personality coming out
through his music, which should be the necessity of the character.
He needs to make music. It's not like he's doing it for...
You know, Domhnall's character, Jon,
the same sort of wants that he has in terms of fame and recognition, you know?
It's just a necessity for Frank and he needs to do it.
It's very much part of his voice and his expression,
so the music was absolutely integral.
Here it is - my most likeable song, ever.
# Go, go, go, lipstick ring
# Go dance all night Dance all night
# Kiss me, kiss me Kiss me, Nephrodite. #
This is your most likeable song ever?
Yeah!
I think the film has an edge to it which is unusual,
and you don't know what's going to happen.
I think the film absolutely has that in its blood.
You know, it's just totally in there.
We got to the stage where we can tell the story in a mad, mad, crazy way,
and yet, to me, the film feels sure-footed
despite its insanity, and I think that's a pretty...
That's a fantastic combination.