The West Wittering Affair See a scene from David Scheinmann's therapeutic comedy.

The West Wittering Affair is one of the unlikely success stories of 2006. A comedy/drama about the aftermath of one eventful night in which a man sleeps with two female friends, the film evolved from an actors' workshop and is now receiving a small cinematic release. It's the work of brothers David and Danny Scheinmann; David directed while Danny wrote and stars in the movie, alongside his wife (and co-writer) Sarah Sutcliffe. We tracked down David in Los Angeles to find out more about his long-running Affair...

Tell us about the unique way West Wittering came about...
David Scheinmann The West Wittering Affair happened while we [David and brother Danny] were on the eternal waiting line to receive finance for one of our projects. We created a step outline for this story and then let the actors run with it. We literally went to the south coast, to West Wittering, for a weekend with what was a back-of-envelope-sketch which we thought might possibly give us a short film. But what happened through improvisation was that the actors started to flesh out character qualities and depth, and that was compelling and fascinating for us as filmmakers.

When I tinkered with it in the edit it was about 20 minutes long, which was an odd length, because it had the grammar of a longer film but there wasn't any more story written. And then in the edit Karoline [Moser, editor] came up with an idea - through the combination of an amazing thought and having misheard me! - that the film's fourth character, who'd initially been left at home, would resurface as the shrink of the man who'd actually slept with his girlfriend. We didn't know it would provide us with so many funny moments, but then we didn't set out to make a comedy, to be honest with you.

You had 60 hours of improvised material to edit down for the final film. Presumably you shot this over the course of a few years?
It was shot on three occasions over three years, but the total shooting time over those three years was only ten days! In those early days, the takes... well, sometimes we'd run out of tape - we'd literally let the camera roll for half an hour or an hour and then think about what we'd done or achieved, and condense what the actors had done into, say, two minutes. When Sarah was filming the first part she was three months pregnant. And her daughter Poppy was in the film in the final section, when she was two.

So what were the biggest challenges for you as a director?
Realising at a certain point that it was a film and I had to finish it! A bigger challenge since then is dealing with the real world and finding an audience for the film. I thought all you had to do was make a film but, oh no, you have to live with the thing and get it out there. There's a certain point when the film has finished and you can't change it any more, but what does change is an audience's perceptions, and that's almost a campaign to embrace and be part of.

Because the story was free-form and developed as we went along, the other big challenge was finding the real film within all of that material, and then getting the tone of the film right. And then getting to the point where you could say it was finished.

I realised at a certain point that it was a film and I had to finish it!

You were working with your brother, your sister-in-law and your niece. What was that like?
Not just that, they also cast their friends because they had to find other actors who could work in this way. How was it working with them all? I just sat back and watched, really, and let them do what they do and vaguely steered it in the right direction. My job was to facilitate a comfort zone for the actors to go nuts within the film, which is what they did. Danny and Sarah were the two big catalysts for the film, really, because they said, "David, get off your arse. If you want to make films let's do this workshop and go somewhere for two days where we won't be distracted."

When you see the finished film can you chart your progress as a filmmaker?
I do, because the gear got better as we went on, and my feeling and responsibility grew towards the notion that there may be a finished product at the end of all this. I started to go, "We've got to have tripods, maybe the odd Steadicam shot." Or, "I must have two cameras, and they've got to be 850 lines instead of 250 lines," which is where we started. There's an appreciable jump in quality. When you're in West Wittering at the beginning of the film it's almost a bit fuzzy, because it's a very low grade mini-DV. And by the end it was broadcast quality. As the second and third parts of the film grew, the first diminished in its presence. In the end about 12 or so minutes of the first sequence remain.

The thing is, if you look at my photographic work it's very high quality, studio set ups, really made shots. And I almost deliberately threw away the visual crutches of image excellence in this film - it was about seeing if I could elicit an emotional response from the most basic of recording methods. I thought that if I could that, then maybe I was a filmmaker.

The West Wittering Affair is released in select UK cinemas - including the Everyman Cinema, Hampstead; Cambridge Arts Picturehouse; and New Park Cinema, Chichester - on Friday 15th December 2006.

Adrian Hennigan | Published 07 December 06

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