Ian MacKenzie speaks with "The Creeping Garden" co-director Tim Grabham in this interview for CP24.com.
Why did you make a film about slime molds?
My co-director Jasper Sharpe was someone I met with my last feature. It was a Japanese film about sound and the philosophy of sound. After he’d basically championed this film and got it in all these festivals in Europe he sat down with me and said that I had to learn about this thing called slime molds. And I had no idea what he was talking about. He started to involve me in this world of discovery that he’s found because he’s an amateur mushroom hunter, he found them by accident while he was walking around. We started to research all the people who are working with, all the people that are engaging with it as an organism and using it in science and very interesting new kind of bio-computing and unconventional computing. We realized this is actually going to be good because it’ll be a conduit for these people.
Why are they so visually compelling?
Well the thing about slime molds is that they move, they’re very active. It moves quite quickly. I’m an animator as well, so slime molds for me were the perfect animation material because it moves itself but it looks like a stop-motion object that you’ve made up, so it has this weird sci-fi thing. So it really lends itself well to all this stop-motion photography.
Tell me about the use of sound and music in the film.
Through Jasper we met Jim O’Rourke, he said he’d do this soundtrack for us. We wanted it to have this atonal, arrhythmic feel which was something that was evoking the ‘70s sci-fi films that we were in to. And he was just getting all these old synths out and making these crazy soundscapes for us, and it was really good. We wanted something that evoked a kind of science fiction atmosphere so the audience felt that it was ambiguous. Is this thing actually real? Is it made up? What am I watching? And giving it that science fiction skin that hopefully makes the film a bit more engaging for the audience. And the sound is a really contributing factor to that.
What do you think audiences will take away from this film?
We hope people will go away and they’ll find some surprises in the film and they’ll have received the information in a way they weren’t expecting. Hopefully they’ll go out in the forest and see some slime molds. What I think is important is that we’re surrounded by this magnificent environment full of life that’s instrumental in our being here. And we walk past it and disregard it all the time. And if you stop and you slow down and you tune in and you focus on this world around you it’s an incredible realm of discovery.
Screens on:
Saturday May 2 at 8:45 p.m. at TIFF Bell Lightbox
