Our reporter Deamma Turnbull chats with STEVE SULLIVAN, director of the forthcoming biographical film, 'Being Frank: The Chris Sievey Story' which is due to be released in cinemas from March 29th., and showing at HOME, Manchester at various times that day and beyond.
How have the screenings being so far?
Amazing. Great in a way I didn’t even expect to be honest. It seems to be going really well and people are just excited to finally find out who that guy was.
What have people been taking away from the film so far?
I mean it’s different depending on the person. You’ve got Frank Sidebottom fans who’ve waited thirty odd years to find out who he really was and why he was doing it. But then you’ve also got people coming to see it now who know nothing about the subject at all and they’re taking away from it an emotional story of an artist’s entire life. And that’s been brilliant as well, he’s been finding new fans long after this death.
Your background is in short films, did you need to approach this feature differently?
There was no real difference in the approach just a difference in the journey, I think. Not that much difference in the approach though there probably should have been. But in my naiveté, when I started this film, I didn’t really know much about Chris Sievey because he was such a mysterious figure. It was impossible to know how much there was to know. It’s like you’re running a 100m race only to find out you’re running an ultra-marathon because this guy’s life just extended and extended and extended in all directions to the point where you’ve got Chris Sievey’s entire life, you’ve got Frank Sidebottom’s entire life, it just became this enormous, unexpected police procedural where we’re trying to track down everyone who ever knew him; what have they got to say about him, what do they think is important, and we’ve got Chris’s entire archive.
I wouldn’t ever have expected he would have had hundreds of hours of videotape and hundreds of hours of audio cassettes. He taped everything, he kept all his works in progress, he did so many projects that he never put out there or that people didn’t really remember or had heard of; albums that were limited edition so there were like 25 copies. It was this whole universe that he had created that just unfurled before us and it just became a bigger and bigger job. So no matter what my expectations were at the start, they were shattered within a few months of talking to people.
This was so much of a bigger story than I ever expected it to be. I thought Frank Sidebottom would be mainly what it was and that he wouldn’t have done that much but the guy underneath did so much. Just an epic amount in a life that was tragically cut short at 54. God knows how much he would have achieved if he’d lived to be the world’s oldest person. He would have just kept going and kept cranking out more and more creativity.
So I read that you started with 400 hours of content, that you then cut down to 11 hours, that you then cut down to under two hours…
At least 400. We shot 150 hours worth of interviews. And then some of Frank’s fans sent me hard drives; at least two fans sent me separate drives that had at least 50 shows on them and each one of those shows is about two hours long. No one will ever really get, I don’t think, how much he made. You might see a show [in the film] for about five seconds and that represents a
two hour show. It’s just vast. There must be hundreds of hours of his radio work, none of which makes the film at all. He just did so much. The first edit of the film was 11 hours and we watched it in shifts over a weekend. The first person to speak was Dave Arnold, who was Chris’s roadie, who just said ‘is that all there is?’ That first edit was only what I thought was essential about the man and his work and his psychology and his life story in order to fully get him. So I thought everything in that was essential. Then we realized that no one else, apart from his biggest fans, is going to want to spend a weekend watching a film. The whole purpose was to get his legacy out to a bigger audience so it had to be accessible for people coming to the story for the first time. So it then took another year or two to just whittle it down from 11 hours to 100 minutes.
Do you think you’ll ever, in any form, release that 11 hour ‘Director’s Cut’ of the film?
No, I shouldn’t think so. Mainly because it would cost so much more money to release that; you’d have to license tonnes more stuff. And it’d be a smaller audience for that than for the shorter version of the film so there would be no way to pay for it probably. There may one day be a longer version of the film because there is a really solid 4 hours in there and that’s still accessible I’d say. And now people are used to watching those longer format things.
Is there a particular story that didn’t make it into the final film that was difficult for you to cut?
Lots. Just lots. Sometimes it came down to ‘does the point he’s making with that brilliant piece of work make the same artistic point as something else in the film?’ and picking which illustrates it best. But there were so many. There was a beautiful story about Frank Sidebottom. He used to do half-time entertainment and pre-match entertainment at football grounds, and there’s loads of brilliant stories but he did Manchester City and he went out there and he did close-up magic card tricks. In a stadium. Where the nearest audience member is 70 yards away. He’d hold up a card to the Home end going ‘Is that your card?’ and people can’t see what he’s doing, they don’t know what he’s doing, they can’t hear it so it’s an atrocious act where he’s deliberately leaving 70,000 people utterly baffled and confused and annoyed. And he’s loving it. It’s perfect Frank Sidebottom; leaving everybody baffled and, really, only the guy in the head knowing what’s going on. It’s a beautiful bit of performance that we couldn’t squeeze into the film.
Do you think that could have been pulled off by anyone other than Frank?
I don’t think any other performer would want to attract that level of bafflement, anger, confusion… normal people would worry ‘they don’t like me if I’m doing that’ or ‘they won’t come and see me live if I confuse them’. Everything you do, normally, is to sell for the next thing you want to do. That’s the professional way of going about your entertainment career but for Chris those factors never entered his head at all. It’s just ‘what would be the funniest thing to do with a big crowd?’ ‘oh completely confuse them with something close up that they can’t see’ but that’s what makes him unique.
And you worked with him on the Magic Timperley Open-Top Bus Tour…
Yeah. I wrote to him. I was a filmmaker at the time and this was back in 2006, and Frank was doing his comeback; he hadn’t been around for years. When I heard he was having a comeback
I sent him my showreel and said ‘this is the work that I do and if you ever want to collaborate on anything please let me know’. I sent him letter on a Tuesday, he’d got it on the Wednesday and by Thursday I had a reply. He must have written back straight away and he just said ‘come on Sunday, bring a fantastic film crew’. With no explanation as to what he was doing. I’m the kind of the person that I don’t need inviting like that twice to come and meet a living cartoon character in a village in Manchester. So I turned up with a fantastic film crew and Frank was showing a hundred of his closest fans an open-top bus tour of the village of Timperley where Frank was from. And he wanted to cram as many people as he could into the chip shop to try and set the world record for people in a chippy. He wanted to show off the two post boxes outside the post office; one for left-handed people, one for right-handed people. Just show you everything that he thought was fantastic and magical in a village, I mean, it’s a lovely village Timperley but it’s the same as every village. That was the point. And to him it was where he lived and it was this fantastic, magical place that he could turn into something other than reality. He did one the next year where he took people for a lock-in in the pet shop and they got a snake out at one point. And there’s this footage of a snake just going up Frank’s arm and it’s just about to go under the head when the camera stops filming. There’s a snake going into Frank’s head but even that he could just make seem totally normal.
It seems ‘Agent of Chaos’ may be a good way to describe him
Yes, I think Chris was an agent of chaos and he used Frank very much for that purpose: ‘what’s the biggest laugh I can have on the world today’. And people have said to me that if Frank ended up causing chaos that angered people then Chris’s response was ‘well it wasn't me, it was Frank’.
One of the people you interviewed [for the film] mentioned [his] ‘endless optimism’, do you think that and the ability to stay completely true to yourself is something that people could learn from?
Yes, I think everybody should learn from that. The thing that I hope people take away from the film is that they are as unique as he is. He knew that was the case and everybody, if they want to, should explore their own voice and their own creativity and do their own thing. The world would be more interesting if everybody did that. I think too many people think ‘I can’t do it. I haven’t got the money to do it. I haven’t got any connections’. But Chris was a kid who came out of nowhere. Just a suburban Manchester home and just thought ‘well my voice is as good as anybody’s and I can say and do what I want without compromise for the rest of my life and no one can stop me.’ And that’s exactly what he did.
Do you think working on this film changed you and the way you look at your work and your life?
It certainly gave me the encouragement that I could just make this film. But I’ve always been an independent filmmaker and I’ve always been in the situation where I finish a film and I think what do I need to make next, and that’s what I’m going to make. And if there’s funding for that, that’s brilliant but if there’s not then make it anyway. I think [Chris and I] have that in common anyway and I think it’s part of what I looked up to about him and why I respected him. I wouldn’t have claimed ever to understood what he was doing but the fact that he was doing it without ever seeking anyone’s permission, just getting on with it; I have total respect for that and it gives
me the encouragement that I can just carry on doing my own thing. And for the last seven years doing my own thing has been actually doing his film.
We’re coming to the end of our time, is there anything in particular you would like to say to anyone, or about the film?
I mean, how grateful I am that so many thousands of people [supported us]. It’s been a crowdfunded and crowdsourced film, that’s a large part of how it’s been made and the trust and patience that people have put into it has been legendary. The trust that the family put into me as a filmmaker to go through all of their dad’s private, personal stuff has been epic. And I hope that in future when people think about Frank Sidebottom, and they should certainly go on celebrating Frank for as long as people remember him as a creation but I hope they remember Chris, the creator, as well. Not only was he capable of doing all the Frank Sidebottom stuff, which was genius but also he was capable of doing great work as Chris Sievey.
I think you absolutely succeeded, it’s a tremendous film. And even though he ends up as something of a tragic character, there’s so much joy and optimism in how he lived his life that it offsets that a little.
I think part of the tragedy is that people come to love him during the film and are sorry to see that his life comes to end. But it does for us all and it’s about what do you do in the time that you have. He never ever ever stopped making the work or the statement that he thought was appropriate to make and that makes him an artist in my eyes. What I never wanted to do was make a hagiography. The film is called ‘Being Frank’ for a reason because it was about saying to the interviewee ‘it’s time to be honest about this guy’ and I already knew that there were flaws in his character and there was a darker side and all of that had to be in the film. It was about celebrating him for the great that he did and about being honest about who he was as well.
Before we finish I would like to ask about the exhibition, ‘Bobbins’, at Manchester Central Library, how much do we get to see of all the things found in Chris’s cellar?
There’s really key things from the film, we made sure they’re in the exhibition because they seemed central to the film and central to Chris’s life. For example, we’ve had a great enormous blow-up photograph done of Chris with the red and black face, that he’s painted with house paint. That’s a really key image from the film but it’s also just a key image for his life so it had to be there. Frank’s head is in the exhibition. There’s all kind of things that are in the film, just glimpsed, that whole versions of are in the exhibition like some of the real key performances that Frank did, or that Chris did, or the Freshies did. You might have 10 seconds of it in the film but if you go into the video viewing booths in the exhibition the whole concerts are in there to watch. And these haven’t seen by virtually anybody ever some of these. His earliest videos he ever did of Frank are glimpsed in the film but are there in their entirety in the exhibition. So we wanted to make it an exhibition that people would return to, it’s the first time ever to really see a lot of this stuff. It’s on for two months, it’s completely free, you can go back as many times as you want, spend as much time as you want digging through it, so it’s something to totally complement the experience of the film. And expanding on it in some ways, just to make it a real multimedia thing. And it seems to be going down great, people seem to really loving it which is really nice to see. It’s actually great to see people laughing out loud in a library.
Sounds fantastic.
Check out te film's website www.beingfrank,film to find a showing near you!
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