Writer-director Debbie Isitt talks about Confetti.

Debbie Isitt has worked on numerous theatre, television and feature film productions to great acclaim. She recently won the Best Writer award for her adapted teleplay for the children's drama "The Illustrated Mum" at the prestigious British Academy Children's Film and Television Awards (BAFTA) where the series also won Best School Drama. CONFETTI is Isitt's second feature film as writer and director, following her 2000 black comedy "Nasty Neighbours" starring Ricky Tomlinson. She also directed the comedy "Tribute", starring Matthew Kelly (as himself) and the short films "Wasps" in 1997 and "Johnny Watkins Walks in Water" for the BBC's "10x10" series.
Her theatre work with the highly acclaimed Snarling Beasties has garnered Isitt several awards, including three consecutive Perrier awards for 'Pick of the Fringe' at the Edinburgh Festival, the Independent Theatre Award and the Time Out Theatre Award. Her plays include "The Woman Who Cooked Her Husband", which had a successful recent run at the New Ambassadors Theatre in London starring Alison Steadman and Daisy Donovan, the black comedy "Matilda Liar!" and a multi-media production of "A Hundred and One Dalmatians" for the Belgrade Theatre Company.

How did you come up with the idea for CONFETTI?
My sister had just got married and she'd spent an extortionate amount of money on her wedding. She was feeling really stressed about the whole thing. On the morning of the big day, she put some eye drops in her eyes to make them sparkle and during the course of the day, she went steadily blind. Her eyes swelled up and by the end of her wedding day, she couldn't see a thing. The next day, she and her husband were going on their honeymoon to Mexico and she had to take a stick with her.
It was the most beautiful, poetic story and I just thought, "Oh my God, the stress somehow got into those eye drops!" It was obviously an allergic reaction, but it made me realize there's something really hot about this getting married business. I became more and more interested in the whole subject of weddings.
I thought I'd do some research so I hit the internet and typed in 'weddings' and a whole new world opened up to me. I didn't get out of that world for about two years!
I just completely fell in love with the whole industry, got on the chat rooms with all the brides and had such a good time. Out of that I wrote a synopsis for something about weddings which metamorphosed into CONFETTI. By the time I met the guys at Wasted Talent, I'd decided that I wanted to do something completely improvised.
I thought that weddings and the wedding industry would be something we could do something fresh with and the rest, as they say, is history…

How did the specifics of the story and the three couples develop?
I'm a massive fan of reality shows like 'X-Factor' and it didn't take a huge leap of the imagination for me to wonder what it would be like if people competed for their weddings. Once I'd landed that concept, the most original wedding seemed the most delightful idea.
I'm not sure where the tennis players came from - I just thought there must be a couple of tennis players who want a Wimbledon-style wedding. I've always been interested in naturism and what it's all about, but most importantly, I think it's hilarious. Let's face it, when you think about a naturist wedding, the first thing you do is laugh. And I think a musical wedding is probably my own secret dream wedding!
I wasn't particularly interested in people just having their kind of odd wedding; it was the nature of the competition that really appealed to me. It was the idea that you're already stressed trying to plan your wedding and you've got to have a really original idea and compete with other couples. I knew that I had to create a situation where the stakes were very high for everyone so that things would happen.

Why did you choose to improvise the entire film?
When people ask me now, "Why improvisation?" my answer is: "Stupidity!" But improvisation is something that's always been very dear to my heart. I trained as an actor and obviously learnt a lot about improvisation while training. I had my own theatre company with which I wrote, directed and performed. We toured for years with the same group of people and discovered that you cannot keep a play alive for that length of time unless you bring something new to it - a new energy and new ideas. We were constantly playing with the material, and out of that came this desire to have spontaneous truth wherever I could find it.
That's not to say I don't believe in scripts - of course I do and I write screenplays and adaptations - but there's really no point in going on a massive journey like making a feature film without ensuring that you're going to have lots of spontaneous fun.
In my experience, filmmaking is an extremely technical operation. Everyone's very concerned with where the camera is and the lighting, and there's a lot of waiting around for actors. I have to have danger and chaos and that's what I created on the shoot of CONFETTI.
I decided to ask the actors if they would pretend to be their characters and plan their weddings over the course of about two months. I would observe them and try to interfere as little as possible. Naturally, as things went on, I did have to interfere at times, but the premise was that they would be 'real'.
The actors had no rehearsals, they had nothing written down. They couldn't plan to come up with a clever or funny idea because they didn't know what I was going to ask them to do. On a given day, they'd know what aspect of planning their wedding they were engaged in but everything that happened between them was up to them, just as if it were a real documentary.
Sometimes people got a bit over the top or carried away and if I sensed that that wasn't a character thing but an actor thing, I would intervene. Other times, I could see something cooking in an improvisation so during a break I'd whisper to one of the actors "Tell them this" or "Do that," knowing that it would create a different response. Otherwise, I was just observing the action, trying to manipulate and paint it in a way that I thought would make a really good scene. I was trying to structure it from the outside as much as I could.
What I was looking for at all times was the truth. As long as I felt that they were being emotionally honest and real, I was happy.

Given the improvisational nature of the production, presumably the casting process was a tough one?
The casting process was much lengthier than the shoot, in fact. We wanted to make sure the actors knew what they were letting themselves in for and wouldn't struggle. We saw lots of people: some were brilliant actors but struggled without a script; other people were brilliant without a script but just weren't right for these characters. In the end, I think we got just the right group. Martin Freeman was initially resistant because he didn't think he could do improvisation, but I knew from watching his acting that he could and I somehow managed to persuade him. I thought Martin and Jessica Stevenson would be a brilliant double act. I was a big fan of Jessica in "Spaced", and Martin in "The Office". I put them together in my head and thought they'd make a really lovely couple.
Rachel Freck, the casting director, was instrumental in gathering the ensemble together because she completely understood what I was trying to do. She's done a lot of casting for improvisation and comedy. She knew who would be up for it and who wouldn't.

In a similar way to the casting process, was crewing up also a challenge?
We knew that we needed the crew to be as interested as the actors in the whole process because they were going to be following them constantly. We needed a very flexible, adaptable crew. We found a brilliant cameraman, Dewald Aukema who's very experienced shooting on HD and has filmed a lot of documentaries.
The people we gathered were very excited by this extraordinary thing that was about to happen. And they were all nervous about it, too! For example, the production designer, Chris Roope, had to work in close collaboration with our wedding planners, Heron and Hough. He didn't speak to Jason and Vincent as actors but in character, and the three of them designed what ultimately became the wedding sets together in workshops. For Chris to be prepared to work with actors in that way, to follow their lead and run with their ideas, was fantastic. Everyone was committed to the process.
None more so that the editor, Nicky Ager, who had to cut down hours of footage into a feature film.
When we began the edit, there were 150 hours of rushes, and I had to view every single hour with the editor. We started making selections based on loose story ideas but at that stage, we didn't go for great jokes or brilliant moments. We just tried to determine what might be the best storyline for the various characters because they went off in all manner of different directions. It was a matter of working our way through the sea of possibilities and it was challenging beyond anything I've ever done, a real feat of editing.
The editor happens to be my partner, which is really lucky, because if he wasn't someone who completely loved me, he would definitely have left me or killed me…
It was such an obsessive undertaking! We edited it in our bedroom for over a year and hardly ever came up for air. There had to be love there, because nothing else would have survived it.
The improvisation also made the edit very difficult. When there's a script, the actors know when to cut but in improvisation, the actors can just keep rolling with their ideas - one conversation keeps becoming another. You can't get the scissors in where you need to - you actually have to roll on with their other ideas. So you're really relying on the editor to find a way out each time. Nicky's so good that he actually made proper scenes where they really didn't exist before - it was like watching a magician.

So in effect, you were creating the story in the edit?
Yes - it was like writing a script from scratch. People often talk about making the story in the edit and everyone knows that that's a real mistake. But in this case, with 150 hours of rushes, we felt confident that we could make a story out of it. It's a bit like writing your autobiography - you know it so well, but you've still got to write it.

In what ways did the film overlap with real life?
It was important to us that all of the locations were as real as possible because we were asking the actors to become their characters and live like them. We booked the tennis players into a dodgy hotel, and Sam and Matt moved into somebody's house. The naturists had to be in their natural environment so we contacted Spielplatz, a real naturist community in Hertfordshire. We had a wonderful workshop day there, where we all took our clothes off to help the actors get into character. It was one of the most embarrassing things I've ever done, but I'm glad I did it.

And it wasn't just the locations that were real?
No, many of the cast are, too. For example, Jesus [de Miguel] is a professional tennis coach we hired to help the actors improve their tennis skills. I turned up for one of their practice sections, took one look at him and thought, "He's gorgeous".
He had this Colgate smile and this lovely accent. So I just walked up to him and said, "Do you want to be in my film?"
I thought he had a nice chemistry going with Meredith MacNeill and that it would be quite interesting for her tennis coach to be part of her story. It was brilliant, because the actors were trying to be real people and he was a real person who knew his job. Jesus had coached lots of couples before and he understood all of the jealousies. He needed very little direction from me to be totally convincing.
One day on the court there was genuine competitive tension between Jesus and Steve Mangan, who plays Josef. Jesus came over to me, and said "He's winding me up - do you mind if I attack him?" I said "Go for it!" Steve had no idea it was coming. Meanwhile, over in the dining bus, I know that everyone was thinking "We're going to be sued! They shouldn't be fighting for real, it's a nightmare!" But I thought it was great and it's a brilliant scene.
Similarly, the editor's assistant, Kate Smallwood, had been an assistant fashion editor for many bridal magazines over the years and was working for a big wedding website. She came in to help Felicity Montagu and Jimmy Carr get into character and ended up staying on as their assistant in the film.
All of the people who came in to help us in workshops struck up real relationships with the actors and it just seemed right to let them carry through. The nose job consultant is real as well. May Chu, the co-producer, and I went to meet him to see if he would be prepared to be in the film and he started giving us ideas about our own noses…He wants to give everyone a nose job so he was more than happy to be in the film.
The lawyer is an interesting one because I needed to know what the legal position would be if the competition was really happening and if, for example, the naturists backed out after signing a contract. A real lawyer would obviously give us the most insightful response so we invited him in to participate in the scene.

On the day of the actual weddings, how did you manage to direct the film as well as stage a full-scale event?
It was an enormous undertaking. Right at the beginning I decided that I wanted it to be a live event because that was the nature of the whole film. We knew that there would have to be an arena where we could fit three huge sets for the three different weddings; we needed an audience and judges; we needed to cover all of the weddings as they were happening, live in front of the audience, so that meant we needed five cameras.
We also wanted to capture the backstage tension. We decided to put a camera operator and a sound guy on each set of characters, and from 9.00am to 9.00pm, the cameras constantly followed them around.
I did very little directing that day. Many of the scenes backstage where the characters are getting ready to go on happened without me even knowing they were happening. I couldn't be in five places at once. It was a huge arena so I was running between characters and cameras checking what was going on.
All the actors knew what to do and where they had to be - everything was timed. It was production managed by my first assistant director so in a way, the event ran itself. It was simply the most magnificent, exciting evening.

Was the outcome of the competition decided in advance?
I really didn't want to decide who was going to win. I trusted that during the edit we'd make that decision. So I had no option, in my own mind, but to shoot three endings with each couple getting a chance to win on camera so that we had the choice. The judges, on the day, made an actual decision which I then shot. Then we shot the other two. Nobody to this day, knows which wedding was chosen by the real judges. But it wasn't the one that's in the film…

Was CONFETTI ever going to be an out and out comedy or was there an emotional level present from the start?
I think the film was always going to have all the facets of life. It wasn't about making sure we got the gags in. I was going for reality in the knowledge that it would be funny. We trusted that the actors had comic sensibility but with reality, as we know, come comedy and tragedy and everything in between.
I'm really glad that all of those things are in the film. Some people just want to laugh every 30 seconds; they don't want to think or feel anything else. But for me, those other elements make it a much richer experience. I really like to be on an emotional roller coaster when I go to the movies which is why I love "Goodfellas" for example. For me, "Goodfellas" is really funny. You wouldn't call it a comedy, but there are some hilarious things in it. It's the emotional roller coaster that thrills me. And that's what I hope CONFETTI has to offer people.

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