Striking A Chord
BALANCE, NOT SYMMETRY I Why director Jamie Adams set out to make this generation’s Quadrophenia…
Writer/director Jamie Adams has made a niche for himself shooting heavily improvised movies in just five days for only $50,000. Balance, Not Symmetry, however, represents a step up – it was shot over 17 days with a budget of more than $1 million, and the 39-year-old filmmaker has been planning it since he was 19.
“I knew it was going to be Quadrophenia-esque, because music plays a huge part in my life,” says Adams, pointing out that he was in a band when he was younger. “Quadrophenia was a huge help to get through the angst of losing my mum when I was 19. I was lost and I didn’t know how to express myself, and it was like, ‘This is what I need to do. I need to make my Quadrophenia.’” Fast-forward 18 years, to when Adams lost his dad. This time it was going to happen, and he knew just the band. “Friends of mine had gone on the road with Biffy Clyro. I reached out to them in a very personal, honest way, and Simon Neil [guitar, lead vocals] was like, ‘This is great, because I really want to get into movies.’”
And so Neil wrote the music that forms the backbone of the film, acting almost as a narrator, while Adams composed a 40-page ‘scriptment’ – no dialogue, just scenarios – about a New Yorker, Caitlin (BlacKkKlansman’s Laura Harrier), who pours the pain of losing her father into her work at the Glasgow School of Art.
“I wanted to tell a story of loss and the way you go down a rabbit hole,” Adams shrugs. “The film is about trying to express that sense of being lost and lonely. Millennials are feeling alienated and distressed, so I wanted to make a film about this generation, in the way that Quadrophenia was about that generation.”
ETA | 2 AUGUST / BALANCE, NOT SYMMETRY OPENS THIS SUMMER.