BRAVE – THe MoVIe
How Marillion as the Cecil B. DeMilles of prog didn’t quite work…
If spending several months recording an album in a french chateau wasn’t grand enough, marillion decided to push the boat out even further by making a fulllength movie to accompany brave.
“we’d made three videos for the singles from holidays in eden, all of which cost 30 or 40 grand each,” says mark Kelly. “we thought, ‘why don’t we just take that money to make a movie?’ we had a story we thought would be good to tell. we’d all seen the wall, so we knew there were examples of good rock movies out there.”
armed with around £120,000 – “not a lot, really,” says Kelly
– the band began scouting for potential directors. they sounded out a few, but decided to go with cult filmmaker richard stanley.
the south african-born stanley had made his name directing videos for the likes of Public image ltd and flour-encrusted goths fields of the nephilim. but it was his two full-length films, the 1990 sci-fi movie hardware and 1992 horror dust devil, that impressed marillion.
“he had a dark streak that suited the subject matter of brave,” says Peter trewavas.
Kelly describes stanley as “unusual – he used to go around saying things like ‘hot diggity dog’. actually, he was a bit fucking weird.”
the band remained hands-off during the filming process. “he had a plan in his head and we knew bits of it, and other bits we didn’t,” says trewavas. “i think he would tell us what we thought we needed to know to get the job done. it was pretty similar to how we were treating the record company at the time, actually,” he adds with a laugh.
the film starred actress Josie ayers as the girl on the bridge. following the broad arc of the album, it told her stories as a series of flashbacks, related as part of a psychiatry session. marillion appeared as themselves in the film. but the band’s plan to use the movie as a lavish promotional tool for the album was scuppered when it got held up by the censors at the british board of film classification.
“there was a lot of stuff about children being influenced by films at the time, and because it was a music video, they were particularly strict,” says Kelly. “they weren’t even going to give it a certificate to start with – they were just going to shitcan the whole thing and not allow us to release it. in the end, they removed quite a few scenes.”
the band have mixed feelings about it today. “a lot of it works really well, and there’s some very interesting and disturbing imagery,” says steve rothery.
“but ultimately it was never going to have the full cinematic appeal for that budget.”
“it wasn’t a very good film to be honest,” says Kelly. “i’m not blaming richard stanley, because the budget he had to work with was minuscule. it could have worked really well with him making that movie. it just didn’t.”