
Annoncering

Duane Hopkins: I spent about six months researching the film before I started drafting. Part of the point of doing this project was to broaden my experience of what life is now like in these working class towns, because it seems to have changed so much from when I was growing up. What struck me was how generous these people are in telling you what they're up to. It felt like they didn’t really have any outlet to discuss these things. One kid in particular, who'd recently been released from prison, talked me through his career as a car thief. He reckoned he'd stolen 300 cars and, at one point, was doing three cars a night.
Annoncering
The narrative came quite naturally because I heard so many similar stories. It was amazing how many kids I met who were between 17 to 21 years old and were responsible for holding their family together. What I’ve made isn’t a documentary, but at the same time everything I’ve used in the film comes from the research. I wanted to make a film that showed what these kids’ lives were like in a sensitive but also a compelling way.Do you see Bypass as a work of social realism?
No, I wouldn’t say so. My work needs to be extremely authentic, but it has to be emotionally and narratively honest. Even though I use ingredients of social realism, I want to make something more poetic, more lyrical, with them. Those ingredients are just a starting point.The camerawork in the film is almost intensely intimate. Is that a way of bringing out this lyricism?
It’s way of trying to put some beauty onto the top of the hardness of what you're seeing, because all the characters have internal lives and their internal lives are very different from their external lives. Even though their circumstances are tough, there’s still hope for them. Tim and Lilly are characters trying incredibly hard. I wanted to try and articulate that as much as possible and move away from the realist register.
An excerpt from BypassThe intensity of the soundtrack plays a big role in suggesting this interior life. How closely did you work with the guys who scored the film, Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans?
They were involved with the last third of the editing, which is quite unusual. I wanted the composing to be part of the editing itself and for it to shape the narrative.
Annoncering
I actually don’t find my films that bleak. I find them sort of romantic in the same kind of way as the Romantic art movement. For me, the most interesting thing about film is the same as what's interesting about music: you can experience an emotion without actually having to go through it. The dark in cinema space is a safe place to go in order to see how other people live and what their experiences are like.I’m not sure why Brits have the tendency to go to this place, though. In some way it must be a reflection of what our society is like and something that needs to be shown. It always surprises me that people in London will react to these types of films by questioning if this is really what the rest of this country is like. And you have to say: “Yes, there are these people leading these other lives.”Yeah, the lack of a specific location for Bypass struck me as positioning the town to be anywhere that isn’t London.
Yeah, I’ve lived in and out of London, and when you’re in it there is this idea that it's only London that exists. The film is basically set anywhere that manufacturing has disappeared and the communities still haven’t recovered. What's developed there is a new class of people and a new kind of identity.
Annoncering
I made Better Things because some of my friends started dying through drug use and I needed to find out why my other friends were still doing heroin when they could see the mortal end of it. I found that their drug use was a way of providing themselves with continuity, like being in a relationship. So within Better Things the younger and older generation are after the same thing, they just have different avenues to get to it.The attitudes of the older people in Bypass are a reflection of what I found when I spoke to people during my research. The older generation often said they had had a job for life, but their grandkids now have a job for a few weeks on some shitty zero-hour contract. They all have sympathy for these kids because they don’t have the stability they had.Even in the past few days we’ve seen more cuts to benefits, and to justify this politicians attempt to ascribe agency to people, suggesting a life of crime or a life on benefits is a choice. Do you see your film as working against that falsity?
The thing is that these guys in power know that these kids are depoliticised. So the politicians know there’s no reason to appeal to them because it won’t get them votes. I don’t think it’s conspiratorial to discuss these things; it’s just actually how it is. I hope my film shows this reality.
Annoncering