Head space
ETERNAL BEAUTY I Craig Roberts climbs inside the mind of a paranoid schizophrenic…
For me, this is an origin story,” begins actor-turned-director Craig Roberts. “This is my Logan.” Watch his sophomore directorial effort Eternal Beauty and you might wonder what he’s on about. It is, after all, the tale of Jane (Sally Hawkins), a woman with paranoid schizophrenia whose relationships with her two sisters (Alice Lowe, Billie Piper) and mother (Penelope Wilton) threaten to break when she stops taking her medication and embarks on a whirlwind romance. There are shades of Polanski’s Repulsion, Bergman’s Cries And Whispers and PTA’s Punch-Drunk Love, perhaps. But Logan?
“Most movies that tackle mental health issues, the protagonists are victims, or they’re deranged and possessed and it’s a horror film,” explains Roberts. “I wanted to flip it. I’d rarely seen it where you’re like, ‘Oh, wait – she’s the normal one; everyone else is the one that’s not normal.’ I wanted to take this psychological element of it, and go, ‘This maybe isn’t a weakness. Maybe it’s a superpower.’”
Ah, now it starts to make sense. It should be said, though, that Roberts is talking figuratively. Don’t expect Jane to start leaping up buildings or catching bullets – having experienced paranoid schizophrenia in his own family, he was determined to honour the truth.
“I grew up around it, and we also had a professor, Paul Fletcher, who’s the Head of Neuroscience at Cambridge,” he says. “As a paranoid schizophrenic, you have voices talking to you throughout the day, and they will tell you stuff – sometimes it’s bad, sometimes it’s good. All the stuff that Jane talks about in the film are real thoughts.”
Hawkins signed on to play Jane before shooting The Shape Of Water, meaning that she and Roberts had three years to exchange pictures, music and ideas. The Oscar-nominated actress moved to Wales six weeks before the five-week shoot began to fully immerse herself in the character, and Roberts put an equal amount of work into honing techniques to allow viewers to see through Jane’s eyes. As her mental health seesaws, her very surroundings seem to ebb and flow: time shifts between present and past; the palette lightens and darkens; décor transitions from squalid and claustrophobic to neat and sunny; costumes change; and reality blooms into full-blown fantasy.
“At the beginning of the film, I was like, ‘Oh, shit, am I going to get away with this?’” says Roberts. “But Jane has such imagination. It’s a beautiful thing. I was like, ‘Fuck it, let’s go for it.’ Like in [Charlie] Kaufman’s films, having people like that allows you to go there.”
It makes for a giddily inventive, emotional romantic-drama… without an adamantium claw in sight. JG
ETA | 18 SEPTEMBER / ETERNAL BEAUTY IS OUT IN TWO MONTHS.