In competition in Orizzonti at Venice 82, Mark Jenkin’s new film brings back to life the Rose of Nevada, a vessel that resurfaces after thirty years in the waters of a fishing village. A tale suspended between the real and the unreal, where the sea becomes a place of memory and sacrifice, and cinema grapples with time and what it leaves behind.
The return of the boat Rose of Nevada seems tied not only to time but also to the idea of sacrifice. How do these two notions – time and sacrifice – intersect in your work and in your reflection on community?
The idea of sacrifice was something I thought a lot about during the pandemic, especially the sacrifices people made for the sake of community. Young people, in particular, were asked to protect the older generation, and I think that was extraordinary. It didn’t feel like everyone just falling in line with authority but rather a genuine sense of community. To me individual sacrifice is a profoundly generous act. We went through different stages of the Covid experience: grief for individuals, but also a collective grief for the world we lost. Slowly, we are coming to terms with that. Yet one of the positive things that emerged was precisely this sense of community. As for time, I’ve always been fascinated by it in filmmaking. Cinema is, at its core, about time and temporal dislocation. The moment you shoot something, you’re already playing with time. Even taking a photo creates a kind of ghost image, capturing something that no longer exists. That’s what draws me to film: the attempt to hold on to fleeting moments.
You handle almost every aspect of your films – writing, directing, cinematography, editing, music. How do you balance this hands-on approach with collaboration, and how do you keep space for your team and the actors to contribute?
I’ve got a very childish approach to making films. When I started out with a Super 8 camera, I would write a script or shot list, go out and film with a friend as an actor – or even myself – then send the roll off to be developed. When it came back, I’d splice it together, project it on a wall, record a soundtrack on a tape recorder, and sync it up as best I could. I’d be the only one watching it, and it felt like the most exciting thing in the world. I’ve tried to hold on to that feeling ever since. That’s why I still like to do so much myself. At the same time, I rely on brilliant collaborators. I work closely with Ian Wilson on sound design: I bring in my ideas, and if something doesn’t work, he’ll suggest alternatives and we build it together. The same goes for production design – on this film I worked with Flo Hickson, and all the design you see is hers. The cast are crucial too. Since I write the scripts alone, every character starts as a version of me. But I deliberately underwrite them – I never specify motivation, only physical actions and dialogue. The result is that the characters become half mine and half the actor’s. I don’t like scripts that dictate how a character should feel, because it shuts down the actor’s imagination. Leaving space for them makes the collaboration much richer.
In the suspended silence of a remote fishing village, a boat resurfaces from the depths and docks in the harbor: the Rose of Nevada, which had mysteriously vanished thirty years earlier along with its entire crew. For some villagers, it is a sign, a fragile hope that prosperit...
Cornwall appears in almost all your films. How important is it for you to capture a place authentically, and why does Cornwall, in particular, feel indispensable to your storytelling?
If I’m making a film about people from a specific place, it has to feel authentic. And the only place I can truly portray that way is Cornwall. I could come to Venice and make a film about an outsider arriving here, but if I tried to tell the story of a Venetian from the inside, it would be rubbish. I do want to make a road movie in America one day, but it will be about a British woman thrown into that landscape. The authenticity there will come from the outsider’s perspective, not from pretending I know the place intimately. When it comes to telling a story from within, Cornwall is the only place I trust myself to get right. My biggest fear isn’t criticism from Variety or the Hollywood Reporter – it’s showing the film back home and having a fisherman say “Nah, that’s not real.”
Hai collaborato con Thom Yorke per due videoclip dei The Smile. Come affronti la musica nel cinema e cosa rappresenta per te a livello creativo?
When Thom asked me, of course I said yes – he’s such a brilliant guy. But then they sent me Skirting on the Surface, and I thought: how do you add images to something that already feels complete? It’s like being handed Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and asked to write music for it – whatever you do can only diminish it. Because so much of my filmmaking revolves around sound, I struggle when the sound is already fixed. With Thom, I asked if I could add some of my own, so the video includes my sound design at the start and end, just to wrap the visuals around the music. For me, music and poetry are the purest art forms. I’m not strictly a poet or a musician, but filmmaking allows me to bring all those instincts together.
