Greengrass

Greengrass has a lightness of touch and playful quality that acts as a counterpoint to the underlying darkness of the material. It’s a film that will surprise and entertain the audience with its characters and twists and turns. There have been many articles in the press over the years about children who kill, or attempt to kill family members; they are often labelled by press and public alike as ‘monsters’. I do not want to condone murder, but rather raise the question of responsibility, through a child that despite her actions is strangely loveable. To raise the question, but not answer it, the main character is neither the perpetrator nor the victim, yet she is both. At the heart of the film is Maggie McDuff, a young girl who has no plan, she acts each time with a spontaneous sense of morality, always in the moment. Over the course of the story she manages to reconnect her disconnected family; perversely she has started the process of bringing them back together and waking them up. It’s Maggie’s world, seen through her eyes; we become her, egg her on, laugh, perhaps a little guiltily, and feel as she feels. She’s a strong character and even in the end there’s a sense of hope and a feeling that Maggie will be all right. The story is set in the present day in an English seaside town, stylized yet familiar to us, beautiful and visually seductive, shot digitally in colour. English seaside towns have an old fashioned-seen-better-days feel and yet the light and the sea feel optimistic to me. Her territory is the small town, seafront and especially the pier. Blues, pinks, vast stretches of shingle with the odd splash of more vibrant colour. It’s outside that Maggie feels free, at least at first. The family home is dark, almost stuck in time, predominately browns, olives, a touch of 1950s blues and pinks. Untidy, jobs half done, items simply dropped and left. The space is transformed when the ‘new Mum’ arrives, colours are added, curtains opened and the light floods in. Maggie is in every scene and the camera is connected to and an extension of her. The camera is fluid but never hand held. The locations will be real, yet selected and photographed to form a very particular cinematic world. Sound design is important and as with the camera will be connected to Maggie, a subjective view into her world indicating how she is feeling in the moment.