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Confetti: Debbie Issit Interview
Director Debbie Issit made her directorial film debut with 'Nasty Neighbours' a British comedy starring Ricky Tomlinson in 2000. She's back this week with Confetti, a wedding rom-com starring a whole host of British talent including Martin Freeman and Jessica Stevenson. Based entirely on improvisation the film follows three couples fighting it out to win the most 'original wedding' competition for fictional magazine 'Confetti'. LOVEFiLM: It's a mammoth undertaking to do a film without a script? Debbie Isitt: Some would say stupid! But yeah mammoth is another word… It was the only way I wanted to do it. I'd quite recently done a little experiment where I'd got a couple of actors from Coventry to create a tribute act. The idea was that they would be set an impossible task: to get on Stars in their Eyes, and I would just film them over a period of a couple of months. They didn't get on Stars in their Eyes, but they did drive to Granada Studios though and tracked down Matthew Kelly - he allowed them to sing their song to an empty stage! When we cut it together it was such a lovely little film, I thought: "Yeah I want to do that again!" but I wanted to do it on a much bigger scale. LF: There must be huge risks involved in not having a script; did you plan much before you started shooting? DI: Well we obviously planned the characters themselves and their relationships. But when I cast the wedding planners I knew I'd struck gold because they really did want to plan their weddings for them! We had a production designer who was wonderful and it was his job really to take direction from the wedding planners, which was kind of easy for me in a way! There was always the danger, and the risk I suppose, that things wouldn't work out. But I knew that I was there as a fall back if people got really stuck I could come up with an idea but on the whole they really grabbed it by the horns and went for it. 
LF: Was there ever a time when you thought, "God, I wish I'd written a script"? DI: There wasn't really, not for me. I think there probably was for the producers at times! And sometimes I think the actors thought like that too. But I think because of that other experience I'd had; I just completely trusted the process. You've got to really decide you believe in it and go for it really, 100%. And everybody was so positive; I have to say, there was no freaking out by anyone. I mean, people scratched their heads a bit but they went for it. Nobody had any real major expectations for the film, let's be honest. It wasn't until the initial screenings of bits of material that they got quite excited! They thought: "Oh my God, actually, this is good!" LF: Was it easy to get the cast on board? You do seem to have the current cream of British TV acting talent involved? DI: I was really, really lucky to have Rachel Freck as my casting director. She'd cast the first series of The Office and a lot of TV comedy. She knows all the good improvisers, all the actors with funny bones and all the people that will be brave. So actually there was a really large pool that she presented me with; brilliant people. Although each one of the actors, I suppose, had reservations about the process that had to be talked through. It was a bit leap of faith for everyone to come onboard, but it just has a little bit of a buzz about it I think, people just thought it sounded fun. LF: The pairings of each couple are so good, Jessica Stevenson and Martin Freeman just look like they're getting married! DI: I'm going to take credit for that! I had watched Spaced and been a fan of Jessica's for years; I just thought "She is wonderful." When I first started thinking about the project I contacted her through her agent, she met me periodically over a couple years on and off, because she was so engaged with the idea. I was obviously a fan of The Office and loved Martin and in my head, they were the ideal couple! So in a way, even though Rachel definitely got me a meeting with Martin and Martin was brave enough to do it; them as the perfect couple, I'd imagined that! And I do think they'd make a brilliant couple. They're just perfectly matched aren't they? 
LF: I thought that the whole way through! DI: They're both kind of boy/girl-next-door but they're both really attractive and they're lovely, warm people. Match made in heaven in my opinion! LF: And the other couple, Olivia and Rob, were they always going to be naked from the beginning? DI: They knew they were going to play naturists from the beginning. None of us knew exactly how that would pan out because we didn't know what their story was going to be because everything was made up on the spot. I think they're fabulous, I mean really brave but also just really brilliant and quite touching. LF: Did you plan much before each scene or was it really quite organic? DI: We did do some talking but they had activities to preoccupy themselves with in a way. They had to plan these wedding, everything you see on that wedding day, none of that was pre-designed or pre-ordered. So when the wedding planners came up with the presentation of the ball boys for the tennis couple - that's where the ideas of ball boys came from. There was only four weeks left so then it was a case of people saying: "Right, we've got to find some ball boys," and reacting to it. LF: So on the final wedding day, was it all filmed at the same time? DI: It was a live event, so it was a real audience with proper judges. The weddings went one after the other. It was a very long evening, but it was as if it was a proper competition, a real happening thing. Which was pretty nerve-wracking and incredibly draining, but also very exciting. We had five cameras that day so that everybody was covered all day. 
LF: That's what I would worry about when there's so much going on, that you would miss something important? DI: I had to miss lots of things, but I knew it was being filmed, I just didn't know what was going on. There were noises coming from the dressing rooms of the couples all day and I was running between them, and I kept hearing stories and I thought: "I'll just have to watch the rushes along with everybody else!" By that time though - because we'd been going for six weeks -I knew they were completing inhabiting those characters. LF: Did you know which wedding couple was going to win the competition? DI: Absolutely not, honestly. I didn't even know what the weddings would look like, I really didn't! I wasn't even privy to the rehearsals. It was as much a surprise to me as what they'd look like as to everybody else. I knew all the elements obviously and I'd been party to lots of the planning but I'd never seen them run through. I had no idea who should win, I allowed the judges to pick, but then I thought with all of the material and not having a particularly clear view of which elements of each couple's story we would select in the edit, I covered myself by shooting the other two winning as well, I thought it would be ludicrous not to, so I had those options and I felt safe. LF: How long did it take to edit because obviously it must have come together in the edit suite? DI: It took a year. Partly it took that long because we had so much material, my partner edited, we edited it in our home in our bedroom and we did it 24/7, it was like a complete obsession. It just blew the rest of our lives away; it was a labour of love for a year. I sometimes wonder if left to our own devices whether it would have been a shorter edit, maybe it would and maybe we would have got to the same place, we're not unhappy about the end product or anything, it's just that the more people that become involved, then obviously that slowed things down. 
LF: You do get a sense in the film of the complexity of each couple - they all seem to have a clear past? DI: Yes they've all got a heart and they've all got a history. And a lot of that is in the footage but we couldn't fit it in. Some of those decisions were quite painful because you think: "That moment there where they tell you everything about their background, it's wonderful, and definitely enhances their journey, but if we put that in then we've got to do that for everybody and that's the whole 90 minutes gone, forget it." So you kind of have to learn to leave a lot of it behind. LF: Good for the DVD! DI: Yeah good for the DVD! I hope they let us at least get some of it on, because there is some really great stuff. Confetti opens nationwide on the 5th May Helen Cowley |