The Impro Film Club Podcast Richard West

Lucy Cash is an artist who has taught a course on film and improvisation. Her own work has taken inspiration from dance, performance and film traditions. In particular she is interested in the ethos of improvisation and the way in engenders a collaborative approach and an attentive state of mind.

Andrew Kötting is a film maker and artist. His work has encompassed many different approaches from Klipperty Klöpp (1984) an 8mm film and installation, to journey films like Gallivant (1996) and Edith Walks (2016) to feature length fiction films like This Filthy Earth (2001) and Ivul (2009). The films often employ experimentation and welcome happy accidents so improvisation is a key part of his work.

Hutch Demouilpied is a musician, a composer and runs the Horse Improv Club. She has made film scores in different genres including for the feature film The Levelling in 2016 and runs her own podcast in which she speaks to improvisatory musicians. In this conversation we talk about making music without limitations, what values are applied to improvising (is there 'good' or 'bad' improvised music) and if it's OK to laugh.

Maryam Goormaghtigh is the director of the film Before Summer Ends. Hossein Rad is one of the three protagonists in the film. The film is about three Iranian men who live in France and go on holiday in the hope the experience will convince one of them not to return to Iran. Maryam and Hossein talk about how they improvised the film to tell a story that was closely related to their own.

John Smith is an artist filmmaker. After leaving the Royal College of Art in 1977 he became involved in the London Filmmaker’s Co-op, a centre for avant-guard experimentation in the UK. His film The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) involved an apparently simple conceit (that a narrator was directing the events in the street) and showed that it had far reaching consequences for the way we understood cinema. It was also funny. In subsequent films like the Black Tower (1987), Slow Glass (1991) and the Hotel Diaries (2001-2007) he has continued to explore the way film and video reveal the world but are also bound up in conventions. He is a sophisticated and skilled artist, also not afraid of a bad pun.

Film and TV director talk about how to direct improvising actors.