I had the pleasure of sitting down with filmmaker and retired teacher Martin Nichols to discuss his film, ‘THERE’S ANOTHER COUNTRY’, and its influences. This film looks at post Brexit Britain through the eyes of Martin’s father, telling the story of a country’s decline through a personal lens. Tickets for this film’s Brighton Fringe shows are available here:
Interview Conducted and Written By Tom Read.
How did you get the idea for your current film? Where did the inspiration come from?
Well I don’t really think in a very logical way. It all started in the pandemic. We’re all locked in our houses and I’m sitting at my kitchen table and getting very angry at Boris Johnson and the government and this culture of lies and gaslighting that was developing. I was doing a lot of reading to try and understand why the world was going crazy. I ended up with a monologue, by what was originally going to be someone working on a cash register which turned out to be a nurse, about the sense of entitlement some people had, and then I just started filming not really knowing why I was filming.
I knew I wanted to do something about Preston Park, I knew I wanted to film the story of the breakdown of my parents’ marriage. I knew I wanted to look at where my dad was born because it’s the place where, as I discovered in making the film, the largest industrial accident ever in the UK happened, and no one’s ever heard of it. Initially it was going to be called Into Thin Air and it was going to be about mortality, and then it changed to ‘THERE’S ANOTHER COUNTRY’, which is a quote from a hymn called I Vow To Thee My Country. The last verse starts “And there’s another country.” I was lucky enough to be born in 1958 so I benefited from the post war consensus. I was from a very normal, basically working class background. I was born in a council house, a three bedroom house, I went to university for free and became a teacher , the NHS wasn’t on its last legs and in fact it was the envy of the world.
So I was born in a completely different society. A different country. I think the times are awful. They’ve never been this bad. I genuinely think people feel blocked and confused as well as being depressed, me included. This is where the film came from and from the showings of the film so far I’d say a lot of people resonate with this feeling.
How did your experience as a teacher influence your making this film?
This was a really, really strong impetus in the film. One of the actors in the film is an ex-student who’s now a professor at Oxford, and another is an ex-teaching colleague who plays two characters. I still keep in touch with a handful of the people that I taught who are in their 20s or 30s, and they have literally no conception of a society which is not based around money, but one which is organised around meeting people’s real needs, whether it be through providing houses or providing health care.
It was a strong impetus in making the film, to say to people their age, ‘look, when I was your age, it was completely different’. It’s only latterly looking back that I realise this because I took it for granted then. I was literally born in a council house and my childhood was spent in that council house. It had a big garden with three bedrooms. For many this is a dream now, right? My parents paid a peppercorn rent and Nye Bevan had insisted that council houses needed to be built to the highest standards – equivalent to the private sector – because people deserved good housing.
Back then we took having a decent, modern home for granted. It was just part of the air we breathed. And housing has now become a kind of luxury or something that half your salary goes towards.You could argue this is entirely because of the Thatcher revolution the selling off council houses and so on. But it wasn’t like that then, and we can change things. There is “another country”.
So, morally you can’t properly switch off because you need to be aware of issues that are coming out?
You can either engage and be driven mad or not engage and not be in touch. One of my friends said the film’s a bit bleak. And I find myself thinking “look around you man!” I mean, I hope it’s not ultimately bleak though. One of the guiding stars of the film was a tweet I came across in 2020. It was Philip Pullman saying hope is a moral duty. And I think that’s true. And so that’s why the film ends as it does, with hope. But I think hope doesn’t mean not looking at the worst. And in fact, I think this you get great strength from looking at the worst.
What was it like shooting on a super 8 camera for the whole production?
I’ve sort of rationalised that choice by saying that I used it because I wanted to capture the visual aesthetic of the post war consensus which ended with Thatcher. Coincidentally, that’s when digital as opposed to analogue filmmaking took off really. So super 8 as a popular gauge you could argue ended pretty much with the rise of Thatcher. You could a get a Super 8 sound cartridge, which would last three minutes and would cost you five quid or you could get a digital camera with one tape that you could forever re-record for almost nothing. And you saw the results straight away. So Super 8 virtually died. But it’s been kept alive by a small band of enthusiasts, and since I made 8mm films when I was a kid I wanted to make them again. And that was really why I did it. I did it because I think film is a beautiful medium.
I bought three cameras, which have a combined age of 150 years, all made in the 70s. One of the inherent risks of shooting on Super 8 is that cameras are half a century old. So a lot of work in editing was spent deleting camera noise, correcting exposure and so on. The digital editing software is brilliant. So the film is a hopefully interesting mixture of old and new technology.
I may well be some kind of weirdo but to me there is nothing more exciting than filming stuff, and in my case sending it to Finland for processing and scanning. It takes two or more weeks from shooting to getting the scanned version back. And it’s nerve-wracking! Sometimes the film didn’t come out, there was an obstruction in the gate – and, of course, you’ve largely forgotten the details of what you shot. So rather than the instantaneousness of video, which you can play back literally seconds after shooting, you have to wait nearly a month to get your stuff back. It’s just terribly exciting.
