The evening’s inspiring line-up included Luca Guadagnino, Samantha Morton, Jack Lowden and Sam Taylor-Johnson.
On 12th March, A Rabbit’s Foot took over Curzon Mayfair in London for the second iteration of POWER OF FILM, a series of masterclasses dedicated to cinema and the performing arts with an illustrious line-up including Luca Guadagnino and his production designer Stefano Baisi, Sam Taylor-Johnson and Jack Lowden, Harriet Walter and director Phyllida Lloyd as well as Samantha Morton.
“We need to cherish the independent spirit,” declared A Rabbit’s Foot editor-in-chief Charles Finch as he introduced the evening—whose sponsors MUBI and StudioCanal—share the same cultural values. “Cinemas are closing down all the time,” he continued, addressing an audience that crossed industry, media, film enthusiasts and students. “So make sure you make the cinemas a part of your life, not just something you go to once a year.”
Kicking off the masterclasses was an intimate conversation between Walter and Lloyd. Entitled, ‘The Power of Stage Acting,’ the pair—who are friends as well as collaborators—analysed the impact of the landmark 2016 women-only trilogy of Shakespeare plays created while Lloyd was the director of the Donmar Warehouse. “It impacts how we tell stories about ourselves in an indelible way—a lot of the movies we see have a Shakespearean element—and it’s very much tipped in favour of the male story—so we thought we should change the world,” said Walter of the trilogy which was set in a women’s prison. The pair talked about the powerful impact of playing the filmed adaptation in prisons, as well as Judith Alice Clark the political prisoner who inspired her performance in The Tempest.
With ‘The Power of the Screen,’ Sam Taylor-Johnson teamed up with actor Jack Lowden to discuss the art of bringing a character to life. Both Taylor-Johnson and Lowden have been closely involved in biopics. “The direction that I work with—Aaron as Lennon and Marisa with Amy, the direction was not to impersonate but to inhabit, to really go into who that person was–not the fame that brought them there but the life around.” This extends to the director herself. “I had to live in the mind, body and spirit of each of those people,” she continued. “Aaron would ask me who I was talking to and I’d say… Amy?”
Star of Slow Horses Jack Lowden discussed the thrill of his work as an actor. “I chase the skill all the time. I chase how last minute I can make it. I do the work I’m supposed to do, but I enjoy the act of fannying about.” This high octane work is in contrast with the more contemplative, but no less challenging, process of producing—which Lowden started last year with The Outrun, in which his partner Saoirse Ronan stars. “The producing bug has got me—I really enjoy feeling useful.
Curzon Mayfair. Photography by Charlie Pike
In perhaps the most highly anticipated talk of the evening, Deputy Editor of A Rabbit’s Foot Chris Cotonou sat down to moderate a conversation between director Luca Guadagnino and his set designer Stefano Baisi—with whom he recently collaborated on Queer, an adaptation of William S. Burrough’s novel. Guadagnino, who described discovering the book as a “solitary” teenager who spent hours in bookshops. “He has been a companion, a friend and a lover of mine for the past 40 years,” Guadagnino said of the author. The director met Baisi, a former architect through his interior design practice, and knew he was the person to bring Burroughs’ world to life. “With Stefano there was a level of profundity and commitment to what we were doing that was remarkably unique to me.”
It was Luca Guadagnino himself who introduced the final slot of the evening. “Samantha I love you” said the director, “a legend.” In “The Power of Immersive Performance,” the acclaimed British actor Samantha Morton sat down for a conversation with A Rabbit’s Foot digital editor Kitty Grady for the most emotional talk of the evening. “My imagination was my world,” said Morton of her childhood in “abject poverty.” Beyond this, the BAFTA fellowship recipient described how she had never really acted, “I don’t know how to act, I didn’t go to drama school” but has always brought herself fully and literally to each role—from Morvern Callar to Myra Hindley. Most inspiringly of all, Morton spoke of how she cannot take a role if she does not “100% believe in it, or if I can tell the people making it don’t believe in it.”
