“I can think of nothing more boring than a live concert film”: Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard and Emiliana Torrini on The Extraordinary Miss Flower

After Zoe Flower’s mother Geraldine died, she and her partner Simon Byrt discovered a case of treasured letters, photographs and memorabilia from Geraldine’s life in the 1960s and 70s: heartfelt correspondences from a life of travel and adventure, secrets and passionate love affairs, some even suggesting liaisons with spies… Sharing these with Byrt’s longtime musical collaborator, Icelandic-Italian songwriter Emiliana Torrini, provided the inspiration for an entire new album based on Geraldine’s extraordinary life.

The album has now evolved into a striking audiovisual piece – “Part film, part theatre, part fever dream” – produced by Zoe (herself a veteran film publicist) and directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, whose track record with musical performers on screen encompasses work with artists as diverse as Scott Walker, Gil Scott-Heron, Jarvis Cocker and, perhaps most famously, their Sundance and BIFA award-winning documentary on Nick Cave, 20,000 Days on Earth (2014)

Here, however, Forsyth, Pollard and Torrini aim for something more than a straight performance film. This is a highly stylised, fantasised, playful reinterpretation of moments from Geraldine’s past, with actress Caroline Catz gamely portraying her. These scenes are interspersed and sometimes interact with intimate scenes of Torrini and her band playing their songs, often backed with evocative visuals and choreography. Alice Lowe appears as a vintage TV broadcaster outlining some of Geraldine’s story; and some of her most ardent admirers’ letters are read by the likes of Richard Ayoade and Nick Cave. The combination is certainly out of the ordinary.

This is such a distinctive, playful film. How did you pitch it to others initially?

Jane Pollard: For us, this piece came out of work that we’d done with musicians, recording sessions over the years, some Nick [Cave] stuff, and a recent piece with Jarvis [Cocker] – performance films. But each time we’d been frustrated that we weren’t able to do something in-between the music, something that operated more in a storytelling way.

Iain Forsyth: There were a few templates that we held on to: The Strange World of Gurney Slade [1960], with Anthony Newley. It was made in the early 60s for British television, and it’s just the most sort of surreal, postmodern, yet weirdly kind of accessible concept.

Pollard: There’s also a passage in Stop Making Sense [1984] near the beginning, placing down the tape player, turning it on. That was another good way of saying, okay, this is how the songs are going to operate inside here. 

It’s not your typical concert film. Here we feel like we’re intimately inside the performance…

Forsyth: I love live music, and I love film, but I can think of nothing more boring than a live concert film the way they exist now. When you watch Taylor Swift or whoever, 1,000 miles away on a big screen, filmed with all these beautiful drone and crane shots, it’s such an alienating experience.

Emiliana, how did the filming process come together with your songs?

Emiliana Torrini: We had already done the record, and I met Iain and Jane and they just got it. I had some visual ideas for ‘Let’s Keep Dancing’; then when we met, Iain said, “I’ve got these visuals,“ for instance, for ‘Let’s Keep Dancing’ – and they were almost identical to mine. And we just looked at each other… They involved us so much all the time.

Pollard: We worked really closely with [musical director] Simon [Byrt] on adapting the shape of the songs for the film. Often on the album versions, the readings or elements of the letter are embedded in the middle of the song, and we needed them at the beginning. And ET, didn’t they become some of the ways you played them live on the tour? 

Torrini: We just really liked what you did! So, yeah, we did some of them like that on the tour. You’re such music fans, you got it.

Emiliana, you’re not just performing your songs in the film, there’s some acting involved too – how was that experience?

Torrini: I was in a total state of mortification the whole time! It was like stepping into someone else’s work, but also such good practice to just let go completely. I use it now still. I’m much braver now with everything. Also, there was no time to be a drama queen or prima donna.

Forsyth: That was key, we gave her no time…

Pollard: You’re a natural storyteller. When we first met you over dinner in Reykjavik, and you were telling us about the box of letters being found, in that moment you were already doing the thing we then wanted you to do on film, which was enthuse and weave a story.

Caroline Catz is an inspired choice to play Geraldine Flower, especially when you see photos of young Geraldine.

Torrini: It was uncanny. She’d only heard, like, a phone message of [Geraldine’s] voice, and then just listened to stories, but she just embodied her, you know, her body language and everything. It was incredible to see.

Forsyth: We’ve known her for a long time and there was no plan B in our mind. It was Caroline or bust, really. This project is very playful; it needed somebody that would be able to run with it.

How did you get the letter readers involved? There are some very well-known faces in there…

Pollard: They were all done in [different] snatches of time, and they had no context! The important thing is that all of those were chosen through existing relationships, either ours or Zoe’s. There was a lot of serendipity.

Forsyth: Angus (Sampson), growing up his best mate was [Geraldine’s brother] Paddy’s son, so the letter he reads from Geraldine was sent to his best friend’s dad in Australia years earlier! With Nick, we got 20 minutes at the end of a long press day for the last Bad Seeds album. Everyone was on the same kind of goodwill page.

Emiliana says in the film, “Letters open people up in a way that nothing else does,” yet they feel like a relic in the digital age. So, I’m interested in your own connections with writing or receiving them.

Pollard: Probably the last letter we received might’ve been about 20,000 Days, people talking about what it meant to them. It’s sad in a way, because even though it’s only 10 years ago, it was at a point where it wasn’t as easy to just DM someone.

Torrini: My letter writing to my best friend, we didn’t speak at all about each other. We just made up supernatural stories, you know, “I’m here on this glacier, and we found a frozen man…” And this story would go on for the whole summer, back and forth. [laughs]

The film and the songs posit a wonderfully exotic past for Geraldine and her lovers.

Forsyth: It was really important that this wasn’t ‘biography’. The Geraldine that we portray is really the Geraldine that’s been churned through the mill of Emiliana’s imagination. So, those guesses, flights of fancy and imagination are all absolutely fair game as far as the film world is concerned.

Pollard: And in terms of whether this or this man was a spy, when she was working for the [Daily] Express, her address was Dolphin Square, where a lot of MPs were based… [everyone laughs]

Ultimately, though, who wouldn’t want such an imaginative, creative tribute – a love letter, actually – to their life?

Torrini: Yes, but you also have to be a person that earns it. You know, we fell upon a muse. It’s a very rare kind of human.

The Extraordinary Miss Flower is in cinemas from 9 May.