Q&A with Inna de Yard director Peter Webber

The film features such a charming cast of characters – from the lovable Cedric Myton to the inspiring Judy Mowatt. How did you manage to gain their confidence?

Yeah, it was a journey trying to build confidence with these guys. All of them have had long careers and there have been many ups and downs, and they’re weary because they’ve been exploited and ripped off over the years.

So some took longer than others – Judy in particular took a while. We made many visits to her house and many phone calls, finally persuading her to come up to the hills to see the guys at work, and after that it clicked and she made an amazing contribution. The trick with musicians or performers is to try and get beyond the set of things they always say to the press – try to get them to reveal something of themselves, or about where the music comes from.

What was your process for choosing which artists and stories to focus on?

There was already a collective of musicians involved in the [Inna de Yard album] project which had been running for a while before I became involved, so I spent quite a bit of time in Jamaica – hanging out with them, going to their homes, talking to them and trying to uncover what would work best.

It was very important to me that the film also touched on women’s contributions to music, and that it touched on certain historical and cultural aspects. Each of the stories, each of the guys, illuminates an aspect of the Jamaican experience and each of them is a very different and quite iconic character. And although not as well-known as Bob Marley, they’re in the top rank of the performers who worked beside him.

 

At Somerset House we’re committed to developing the next generation of creative professionals, with our Creative Job Studio initiative opening up the talent housed within our building to young people. Do you have any advice for young filmmakers wanting to make a successful career in the field?

I think filmmaking is one of those things you can learn by watching, you can learn by reading, but you really learn by doing it. Nowadays compared to when I started, it’s much easier to get hold of the means of production, with an iPhone or a laptop, and with a laptop you have all the basic tools. So the bar for entry is much lower than beforehand. There’s the possibility of distributing something you’ve made instantly through YouTube, whether people will watch it or not is something else with all the billions of videos that are out there.

I think the thing to do is to go out and start making stuff. Make a one-minute film. Make a two-minute film, make a five-minute film. But also to steep yourself in the history of the medium and go back and really uncover films by the greats. Go back and look at 1960s French New Wave films, go back and look at American film noir.

The business has seen enormous, enormous changes – with streaming, cinema seems to be changing and maybe fading away a little bit. It’s a very turbulent moment and that could be helpful in terms of breaking into an industry. Just look at what happened in America in the late 60s when Easy Rider came out and really disrupted the whole studio model. There was a generation of exciting new filmmakers, who broke into Hollywood at that time, the likes of Scorsese or Coppola or Bob Rafelson. So a bit of change, a bit of chaos can be good if you’re looking to get into this strange business.
 

Throughout your career you’ve directed both documentary and narrative films. In what way does your approach to your material and your process change when working on each?

It’s like using different kinds of muscles… but you’re doing the same thing, you’re telling a story using images and sound.

One main difference is that when you’re shooting a drama everything is controlled – you’ve made lots of decisions beforehand and everything that’s brought to set has already been asked for. The danger is that things can seem dead and lifeless as they don’t have the breath of reality in them. The problem with documentaries is that it’s chaotic and can be hard to keep an eye on what the story actually is from the events that you film.

So what I always think is that you have to find the documentary in the fiction when you’re making a movie, to make it feel as detailed and fully imagined and to make it have a breath of energy and reality. But when you’re working with documentary you have to do the opposite, find the story that’s there and craft a shape to it, so you have to interpret and interrogate your rushes and turn them into the building blocks of a film.