One of my favourite British films of the last decade is Medusa Deluxe, a single-take hairdressing murder-mystery, the feature directorial debut by Tom Hardiman. It is a film that I have been preaching about since I saw it a few years ago at Manchester Film Festival, to anyone who will listen (it is currently on BBC iPlayer so there’s no excuse not to watch it right now). Largely because I am just a big fan of his, I reached out to ask if he would give an interview - we sat for two pretty long chats about his career and work, as well as a lot of general film-related topics.
We started off by discussing how he got into filmmaking. Rather than going the film school route, Hardiman tells me he comes from an art school background, getting his start working on film and TV in art departments for Children’s TV. Learning art history is a particularly formative experience in his approach to filmmaking - “It starts to make you think about what's new in your particular time and how you can develop that… I think that's what most art school kind of directors bring to cinema. They're the kind of crazy experimental ones who are willing to go head long into the furnace slightly.”
This is perhaps reflected by the massive amount of diversity in styles that Hardiman has approached already in his relatively small filmography. Prior to his feature film debut, Hardiman directed Radical Hardcore, a great short which blends the world of techno and that of carpets, music videos for the likes of Mura Masa and Peggy Gou, as well as a 30s styled, Fleischer Brothers-esque animated short called Pitch Black Panacea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAktlvno5xE
I ask him about the difference between directing animation and live-action, something he tells me that, for him at least, “is not actually very different.” “You're doing exactly the same things in terms of like, What's this supposed to do, What am I trying to communicate with this line? What's the rhythm here? All that kind of stuff. It's not that dissimilar.”
For Hardiman, it’s all about collaboration - “making the animation in collaboration with Chris Cornwell, who's a brilliant animator. And obviously, Eugene Souleiman did the hairdressing on Medusa Deluxe, and I was relying on his skill because I can't do hair. He's a genius. And it's the same with Chris on animation. There's certain people on every single project you're more reliant on.”
It strikes me that outside of big names like Brad Bird, there are few directors who work across both mediums. Perhaps presumptively, I ask if this is just due to industry pressures, but Hardiman offers an alternative explanation. “Trying to make ends meet as a director, it's intense. You know, you've kind of got to do projects to pay your rent and people are going to give you projects when you're doing something they know you can do.”
Rather than any conspiratorial effort from the industry, Hardiman explains that it just makes sense to work in areas that you are proven in to keep getting work in a tumultuous industry. “If you're doing a lot of things for the first time, you're kind of making life very hard for yourself to actually kind of make a living.” Of course this is the route that Hardiman is taking himself - “I like to try different things too much,” he jokingly tells me.
On the subject of animation, the conversation takes a turn to talk about some of our favourite works of animation, one of which for Hardiman, is Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Hardiman (rightfully in my opinion) cites the film as existing on “the edge of the mainstream or experimental. That kind of amazingly interesting side of mainstream where it's like, it's not pure mainstream because it's got a little bit of weirdness, but it does appeal to a wide audience while still being experimental. I feel like they (Directors Chris Lord and Phil Miller) are the most experimental mainstream directors I've almost ever seen, actually. I think they're remarkable.”
This is an area of art that Hardiman is particularly drawn to and I can see why. Medusa Deluxe is a film that is so remarkably watchable that you can almost forget quite how odd it can be at times, both textually and formally. We discuss what other filmmakers would fit into this category. The obvious one for me would be the Wachowski’s; The Matrix for example, as Hardiman puts it, “is always trying crazy stuff” and has the combination of mainstream and sub-cultures that Hardiman cites as being key to this category of film.
We also talk about Speed Racer (a film I love), the Wachowski’s much maligned follow up to The Matrix Trilogy. “I said Speed Racer was an interesting film to someone the other day and they looked at me like I was completely mad,” Hardiman tells me, “I think it's quite obviously an interesting film, I'm not sure if it's successful, but it is and they [The Wachowski’s] are so obviously interesting."
He also cites Yorgos Lanthimos and Paul Thomas Anderson as interesting examples of this working at the moment, but also says that “sometimes it’s just one work, or even one aspect of a work... even if you're talking about the shot that goes through the entire building in Panic Room. That's a pretty crazy shot and it's this weird push and pull. I think that's the thing I find specifically interesting, is trying to work out where the people pushing the boundaries are."
This conversation continued for quite some time with many other examples coming up, Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia and Paul Schrader’s Mishima being big ones. Hardiman was incredibly game to join me in some very film nerdy conversations, both on this topic and many others, which I enjoyed immensely but are perhaps too numerous for this piece.
The subject turns back to Hardiman’s own work, in particular Medusa Deluxe. As mentioned, the film is presented as entirely one take, but unlike some uses around the same time, take 1917 for example, there are no flashy set-pieces, instead following a feature-length uncut sequence of dialogue. “I'm not into the big epics, that kind of like sci-fi action type thing, they're not really the thing I go to cinemas for."
“I'm more wowed by conversation and the way you can get to understand people through the things that they say.” The use of the flashy one-take technique employed in this way places the emphasis on how special Hardiman feels good, witty dialogue is. “I think probably the real answer is; how do you adapt big mainstream filming techniques to lesser moments? But like, let's say, if they're going to use bullet time, someone dodging a bullet, how do you use those kind of techniques for people talking around the table?”
One of the things I love so much about Medusa Deluxe is the weight that is given to so much of the conversation. The analogy to using bullet-time is one I find incredibly apt, Hardiman’s film is one where an exchange about hair styling can feel as tense and heavy as a shoot-out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FImiVecy6sQ
Comedy is also vital to why the film works, something Hardiman feels very strongly about. “It allows you to do quite a lot in a storytelling sense because a joke can do multiple things, it can at the same time make someone laugh as well as telling them about the character, all while leading you on to the next moment. It’s quite a deft thing for a storyteller." Once again Paul Thomas Anderson is mentioned as a master of this.
But Hardiman feels writing comedy into film isn't just useful for storytelling. “Comedy is a really important part of realism. Everyone's been through bad times in their life, and not every time involves a laugh, but a lot of times, even when things get really bad someone cracks a joke just to break the tension, and maybe it doesn't work, but like, I just think humour and comedy are like an extremely important part of life, and I don't think realism works without it.”
This is a sentiment I think is very easy to agree with, I tell him that I think this is why so many texts that have an unrelenting grimness to them often feel inauthentic. However, Hardiman makes it clear this is just a personal thing for him, “I don’t want to criticise anyone else’s filmmaking,” he tells me in a very endearing and humble manner.
It is also, to Hardiman, a way of “trying to make slightly more experimental cinema more accessible.” This speaks to texts that Hardiman cites as key influences, spanning as wide as the post-modernist writing of Donald Barthelme to Richard Linklater’s Slacker, in particular “the daisy-chain conversation of it.”
Beyond this however, we also touch on the subject of films that you might love but do not particularly see as influences on his own work. Hardiman talks about his love of French filmmaker Claire Denis as foundational to his early film watching, “but when I started to make films, I realised I was quite a different person, and even though I love her films, I'm never gonna make anything like her.”
In a similar vein, we talk about the New Hollywood era of the 70s and despite loving certain films of the period feeling that, “certain cultural conversations are overdone a little bit - I don't need to see another film about a man struggling with, like, his place in the world in his mid-20s and going a little bit mad, I've seen that film, it's been a hundred times between 1970 and 85 and so you can like those films but it's hard to take a lot from them because the conversations are so radically different - now we're dealing with very different form of toxic masculinity.”
Specifically on the best films of this year, Hardiman told me "I can't pick a fave". "One Battle After Another, Misericordia, Pillion, Sorry Baby and I'm sure Marty Supreme, when it's out. Great Year for films."
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