Nina Conti is a real-life ventriloquist and comedian. In her first narrative feature, she plays a woman who spends almost all of the film inside the kind of monkey costume a team mascot might wear. It also closely resembles the puppet Conti uses in her live performances. Conti’s co-screenwriter, Shenoah Allen, plays Roy, a man who is rescued by Monkey (as the character is called) after a suicide attempt, and who ends up driving through the desert with Monkey, having conversations and adventures.
In an interview with RogerEbert.com, Conti and Shenoah discussed improvising for (and as) their characters and why stories about journeys are so meaningful.
Watching this film made me think about how a movie is a form of ventriloquism, with characters saying dialogue created by screenwriters.
Shenoah Allen: We lived in this world for so long, and we developed a lot of the scenes and the script through improvising together. We really got to know these characters, and you start to be able to hear the characters in your head; either you’re saying it spontaneously on your feet or when you’re writing as the characters. So, in a way, I don’t know who was the ventriloquist—us or the characters.
Nina Conti: Yes, in a way we were providing voices for the characters, or they were doing the work for us. I think it’s the second one.
The conversations the two characters had seemed so spontaneous, a lot of riffing back and forth, that it felt improvised. How did that evolve from what you had written?
NC: Right from the beginning, Shenoah would come around to my house early in the morning. We’d go to a cafe around the corner called Chez Nous, which was the place where a lot of the magic happened. He would go there from maybe sometimes like 6 a.m. early till kind of 9, and then he’d come over with some scenes. And then we’d read them and we’d workshop them. We’d film them on my laptop. I’d be in a full monkey suit. We really entered this land of make-believe every day.
It always felt like a method of perfecting a scene would be to do it loosely, find what felt real. And that carried on right up until the shooting. even though we had a script. In the van, no one’s going to stop either of us if we go off script. We’re just going to follow it. And it was a great truth barometer. Because it’s hard to improvise fake. It’s like you’re suddenly walking through treacle.
One of the most enduring themes for movies or indeed any story is a journey. Why does that resonate so powerfully?
SA: I guess because when you’re on a journey, you always want to know what’s around the next bend, which is a real tricky thing when it comes to writing a screenplay. With a journey, you have a destination. For so long we didn’t; it was just like, “Okay, we wake up in the desert, we’re going somewhere, we don’t know where we’re going,” and that seemed fine for the characters just to live in the present tense of the unknown. But the journey ended up needing to be a little bit clearer for people to take the bait. Even if it was abstract as “We’re going to the lake,” it still provided um this ancient story structure of the quest.
I love the way both characters really have nothing left but the truth for each other. There’s no pretense. And they immediately connect. That creates such an intimacy in their conversations. They get right to it. And they appreciate that in each other.
NC: Having that mouthpiece [in the monkey mask] all the while, that barrier to reality, actually makes it tell the truth. I always find it a struggle to be myself, and I’ve taken the scenic route to that by this little character. You feel a lot less accountable when you’re in character, and so my character’s in character, and the gloves are off. That’s a really confused metaphor—the mask is on!
SA: It’s really funny when characters just say what’s on their mind. And that also provided a lot of challenges because you think, “All right, let’s build up to this and the scene will have this natural escalation that gets us from here to there in the story.” But when you’re dealing with the monkey that immediately says exactly the thing we expect at the end of the scene as the first line of the scene, we write from there. Instead of going from A to B, Monkey starts with B.
There’s a very significant shift at one point in the film where we’re literally seeing, if not through monkey’s eyes, through monkey’s eye holes.
NC: It seemed like the way to disappear fully. She’s stayed in it longer and longer. Her commitment to the monkey has become somewhat superstitious at that point, because she prefers it to herself. But then she’s kind of passed the point of no return. And it was also…a very handy way to shoot the car crash with a low budget.
It must have been unbearably hot in the monkey suit.
NC: Yes, and it was sometimes dangerous, I’m sure. It was such an obstacle in itself. And taking the head off to review footage on a monitor always seemed, for a short shoot, you know, where every minute counted, it always seemed like that’s going to be a waste of time. Instead of checking the shot, we’d just do another one. And so, what we got there was just like more performance hours, which I am grateful for because if we stopped, we wouldn’t have done the fun one that came next. There were gifts in the impediment all the way along.
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