Fugue

"We were able to achieve FUGUE through a perfect synergy of actors, musicians and filmmakers. With old friends (I'd worked with DP Ryan Kilbourne on MAGPIES LOVE MIRRORS, a series for Cambridge Footlights), and new, we found a creative, determined and reckless synchronicity during our shoot in London, that brought together live music performance, acting and filming all in the same, glorious moment. The initial idea for FUGUE came to me listening to Bach and all of his modern interpreters through the covid crisis, considering humans who make such sacrifices for their art, and which probably leaves them much better communicators through music than through speaking. A fugue is a piece of one or two simple themes that repeat, harmonize and spiral throughout multiple voices, and to have a vision of life as ordered and yet as chaotic as a fugue struck me as a thoroughly unique, queer and probably tormenting idea for a short. I had other projects on but Tatiana Clarke sat beside me every day at breakfast and told me off for not making her film. Eventually I agreed with her.

Tatiana isn't religious, but she believes in god. Her sacrifice--weeks of hours of practice, for concerts that never near selling out--is faith in the ritual slaughter of ourselves, our time, our concentration as a human service to creations and to creativity. Tatiana is also love: to her daughter, to her massive collection of potted plants, to her violin and bow, and bumping into Sam one day near the Barbican she sends out love and gets love in return. In this way I don't feel she'd call herself 'lesbian', or 'bisexual'--but she would be comfortable being 'loving' or 'queer' (with an eye-twinkling wink). Tatiana, then, is god's gift to JS Bach, the living continuity his relentless sonatas deserve, and Sam--a grieving grown-up daughter with an empty flat in central London--is god's gift to Tatiana. Tatiana Clarke is a lesson in non-compromise: practice, practice, practice, and love it all."