Filmed performance is an odd duck in the art world. For many it’s an opportunity to avail of faraway or extravagantly expensive spectacles from the Met Opera or the National Theatre, or of André Rieu’s Christmassy Viennese extravaganzas. During recent lockdowns it also became a scrambling makeweight, as stages all over the world attempted to keep the lights on.
But even with the most famous hybrid ventures, such as the box-office breakthrough that was the National Theatre’s Frankenstein, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller in variously swapped roles as the creator and the monster, it’s difficult to escape the idea that we’re watching, well, a stage show. No matter how lavish the production or how many cleverly mounted cameras are involved, filmed theatre, filmed opera and filmed ballet look like beautifully made hand-me-downs.
Asif Kapadia’s Creature feels like an artistic breakthrough. The award-winning documentarian’s electrifying version of Akram Khan’s celebrated modern ballet moves as deftly between dance and film as any of the gifted performers on the stage.
“I like seeing theatre when it’s being rehearsed,” the Academy Award-winning director says. “I like shows when other people are creating and I’m not the one under the pressure! At first I didn’t know what the hell was going on. And then at one point, I realised, what happens is that, in the morning, Akram rehearses details, details, details. It’s very much like he’s just directing actors, and then they run with it in the afternoon and perform the ballet.
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“And I just sat on the floor, pretty much with the phone that I’m talking to you on, and I started filming. I immediately thought, I think this is a movie. I don’t know what the hell’s going on all of the time, because I am not someone who knows about ballet. I don’t know much about theatre. I have bad eyesight. I’m really bad at sitting still for hours. But I followed the lead actor, Jeffrey Cirio, and he was incredible. It was all very cinematic.”
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Kapadia emerged in the film world in 2001, with The Warrior, an epic Himalayan adventure. In recent years he has become best-known for his elegantly assembled archival documentaries Senna, Amy and Diego Maradona.
He has amassed an impressive series of credits since 2021, as the creator of 1971: The Year Music Changed Everything for Apple. He also codirected and executive-produced the mental-health series The Me You Can’t See, featuring Oprah, Prince Harry and Lady Gaga. He is currently fashioning a four-part series about Camden’s musical history for Disney. “The Warrior was my western,” the amiable film-maker says. “I’ve made a war film. Diego Maradona was my gangster film. Creature is my musical.”
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Kapadia had been hoping to collaborate with Khan, the award-winning creator of the English National Ballet’s reimagining of Giselle and the choreographer behind part of the London 2020 Olympic Games opening ceremony, ever since they met at the National Film Theatre in London in 2001. Creature is Khan’s third work for English National Ballet, following the equally lauded Dust and Giselle.
“I have thought that it would have been much easier for me to have just bloody interviewed Akram and made a doc,” Kapadia says. “But I said, no, this is not a doc, this is a film based on a dance with performers and music. It was never meant to be a film performance. I would never have done it if it was that, and Akram didn’t want to do that. It’s kind of pure cinema. I was thinking about Powell and Pressburger and The Red Shoes and films that have an extended dance sequence. And I started to wonder, What can I get away with? Can I get away with doing an entire movie like this?”
Creature opens with a fragment of a phone conversation between President Richard Nixon and the Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, an exchange that took place after the 1969 moon landing.
It’s an artefact from an annihilated world where surviving humans have apparently taken refuge at a mysterious Antarctic scientific station. Occasional announcements about outside air temperature and carbon-dioxide levels (as voiced by Andy Serkis) suggest a precarious existence.
The setting, like the title character, owes something to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, although Khan was equally inspired by Georg Büchner’s tragedy Woyzeck, about a cursed soldier stationed in a remote town.
When Creature, again played by Cirio, awakens a recorded Nixon playing a loop, his movements become increasingly distressed. He is subsequently captured and subjected to experiments at the behest of an overseeing Doctor (Stina Quagebeur). His only respite from an ordeal that both isolates him and exposes him to extreme temperatures is the kindness of a maid named Marie (Erina Takahashi). A pitiless Major (Fabian Reimair) compounds Creature’s distress by wooing Marie.
“We had 10 days to shoot, and we had no money,” Kapadia says. “It was made at a point where we were not able to see anything live. You know, there were no live shows, no live performances. They spent two years on this show, and at that moment no one was ever going to see it. So the only way this show may have existed was if we shot it. And we only had a tiny window.”
The logistics were daunting. Kapadia and his skeleton crew had to work around the dancers and their schedules without adding to the physical demands of their work. He cut somewhere between 20 and 25 minutes from the stage production so that Creature is a neat, movie-sized 90 minutes.
“We had two weeks,” he says. “So we shot act one on the first Monday and did pickups for the rest of the week. Same thing on week two. We didn’t have a lot of crew. I used my phone to shoot stuff because we just didn’t have the manpower or womanpower. I never met the editor, Sylvie Landra. She’s Luc Besson’s editor, and she was in Paris. She cut it because she was an Akram fan. That’s a thing I should mention. All of the crew that we managed to pull together for this absolutely no-budget film were all people that were into dance. Even our electricians went to the ballet. The person who pushed the track loved dance. So we managed to get this amazing group of people, and we had a really amazing experience of creating kind of a work of art based on the work of art which is, in turn, inspired by Woyzeck and Frankenstein.”
That amazing group of people includes the Oscar-winning costume designer Tim Yip (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), the composer Vincenzo Lamagna, the cinematographer Daniel Landin (Under the Skin, Sexy Beast) and the sound designer Stephen Griffiths (Tár).
Covid restrictions pushed Creature on from two prospective opening dates. But the shuttered Sadler’s Wells, the London theatre where English National Ballet often perform, inspired the film-maker to imagine and incorporate a new dimension that adds to the chilly vistas and dilapidated bunkers on stage.
“I loved the idea of telling a story in one location, kind of in a Polanski way,” the director says. “I was thinking of Lars von Trier’s Dogville and the idea of there’s a story but there’s no set: there is a black hole. And I remember everyone was worried when I said we should turn the camera around and look into the black sometimes and do a reverse shot. People said we could build a false wall or do the effects in post-production. No. I love the void, because there’s no audience. It felt right because of the authoritarian themes. All of that stuff just made it feel very much like a movie with really strong performances.”
In that spirit, Landin’s camera works in close-ups and details while strange flickers of discombobulating sound effects – all added in post-production – contribute to the unease of watching Creature.
“I had questions about what was going on,” Kapadia says. “Is this a group of aliens? Are they from the future? I liked it because it was really heavy and dark and scary. It was not my perception of what ballet looked like. I’m hoping that it’ll bring ballet people into the cinema and film people into a ballet.”
Asif Kapadia’s Creature opens on Friday, February 24th
