EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STOR
YUK | 1984 | colour | 82 mins
Credits:
Director: James Scott
Producer: Christine Oestreicher
Screenplay: Shane Connaughton
Editor: Chris Kelly
Music: Michael Storey
Director of Photography: Adam Barker-Mill
Production Designer: Louise Stjernsward
Cast:
Agnes Scott (Mother) - Phyllis Logan
William Scott (Father) - Alex Norton
William Scott, age 15-18 - Leonard O’Malley
William Scott, age 11-14 - John Docherty
William Scott, age 5-8 Mark Airlie
Miss Bridle - Natasha Richardson
After making a series of films on younger contemporary artists I was often asked why I did not make a film about my father, William Scott. The reason, I told people, was that his practice – the simplicity of his style, the painterliness of his surfaces – could never translate into film.
I have often thought of making a film about an artist as akin in some ways to working with an actor. They both demand that the director channel the creative process into a new form. Working with an actor, the director delves into the performer’s psyche and personality in order to create the fictional character as written in the script. In a film about an artist, the director is exploring or channeling the personality of the artist directly in relationship to their body of work.
Realizing that my father’s work was comprised of minimalistic still lifes or abstraction, I knew that I had to find an alternative approach. In order to understand the work through film, I needed to situate his work in the context of a narrative. And this narrative needed to grow from my father’s practice.
All my life I had been exposed to my father’s stories, told around the kitchen table. They generally divided into pre-war and post-war; the former dating from his birth in 1913 just before the First World War, up to 1939, the start of World War 2. I began to conceive of the project as a trilogy. The childhood, the war and the Cold War,ending in the early 1960s when he was invited by the Ford Foundation to take up a residence in West Berlin.
I have always loved the film Lust for Life (1956), directed by Vincent Minellii, starring Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh and Anthony Quinn as Gauguin. For me, this film is the best example of Hollywood’s take on an artist. The Americanisation of Van Gogh in the form of Kirk Douglas, set against a backdrop of the South of France with its incredible light, brings a sense of real drama to the story despite its clearly Hollywood approach. I admired the characterisation of the artists, as well as the decision to set the story in a fictional landscape.
With Every Picture Tells a Story (1984) I first found the writer, Shane Connaughton. He and I embarked on a series of recorded conversations with my father. These covered his early life up to the present. The recordings were incredibly important as my father was then on the cusp of Alzheimer’s disease and I knew that these memories would soon beforgotten. Soon after making the recordings, Shane went off with my father to Northern Ireland, where he was introduced to many of the friends and characters with whom my father grew up.In my mind, these stories were only half true and I sensed had been embellished after having been retold many times over the years. But that was their beauty. Having been brought up in England and sent to private boarding school at just eight years old, my experience of childhood had been diametrically opposed to his. In his stories there was a comic book type of experience where the poverty and grayness had become thrilling and exotic, set in a fantasy-land, a Billy Bunter world far away. My father once said, “I was brought up in a grey world, an austere world: the garden I knew was a cemetery and we had no fine furniture. The objects I painted were the symbols of the life I knew best and the pictures which looked most like mine were painted on walls a thousand years ago.”
In approaching the script and working with Shane I wanted these stories to counterpoint the minimalism of the art and somehow inform it. I wanted the image of the frying pan and the toasting fork to come directly out of the story, and while in some sense questioning it, they would also provide a parallel story.
Eventually we had the wonderful script by Shane Connaughton, which was to be Part One of the trilogy, taking the story of William Scott as a child to his arrival in London where a scholarship to the Royal Academy begins his career.I still have dreams of a second part where the coming of World War 2 and the rise of Fascism forces artists to take sides. My father, now married, escapes France as war is declared, and joins the British army…
— James Scott