Gypo Watch a clip from the UK's first - and only - Dogme movie.

Jan Dunn spent ten years as a classical actor before deciding to change careers and become a film director. Her first films were shorts and included the documentary The Lumber-Jills (1998), about the work of The Women's Timber Corps during the Second World War. Seven years later she broke into features with Gypo, the UK's first Dogme95 movie. Dunn follows Gypo with Ruby Blue, starring Bob Hoskins as an elderly man who befriends an eight-year-old girl. It's due to be released later this year...



"I accidentally stumbled into acting when I was about 15. I got heavily involved in amateur dramatics and joined a youth theatre. But it was later, when I was in drama school, that I began to start thinking about film directing. I'd always been really interested in film and I have quite a wide knowledge of film but I've never studied it officially. So throughout my career as an actress - which lasted about ten years, doing classical theatre - I kept thinking about how I could get to be a director. I joined a London Filmmakers Co-Op in the early 90s, teaching myself how to use a camera, all that technical stuff. I'd had years of experience with scripts and acting but I was completely unaware of the technical side of things."

"After teaching myself the basics, I slowly started to make short films using a cine-camera and a tiny little editing system. It was really just compiling images and putting soundtracks on them. I played about with that for a couple of years until I eventually pitched a documentary idea to Southern Screen. That must have been in 1995. That became my first short film - it was a 20-minute documentary called The Lumber-Jills, about women in the Second World War who took over the Forestry Commission's work and chopped down trees."



"Creatively I don't think the transition from shorts to features was a big leap at all. But trying to raise the finance was something else. I have quite good producing skills, at least on an organisational level, but I can't fathom money at all, the gathering of it and all the complications and legalities that come with it. I had a couple of feature films that I was trying to raise the finance on. One of them was a film called New York To LA, which was a comedy-drama. It was fully financed twice but because of various tax schemes collapsing and other problems it kept falling apart. It was around about then that I met Elaine Wickham at Screen South. She saw my short films and couldn't believe that I'd shot them for virtually nothing. They'd been screened all over the world and had national distribution in cinemas alongside feature films - they'd actually made money, which is so rare for short films. She made this crazy suggestion that maybe I should just go out and shoot a feature like that, just gather all the money I could and try and make something as a calling card. The result was Gypo and what we didn't really expect was that this calling card would become our first proper feature."



"When you're actually there on the set or on location, with the actors and your crew and coming up with stuff and inventing and rehearsing stuff. When we get to that stage I feel like I'm on holiday! You spend so much of the year dealing with admin, and trying to organise things, that the weeks leading up to the shoot and the shoot itself and the editing are the best part. There aren't really many perks in the job the rest of the year. It's a really, really, really hard life. From what I hear from highly regarded film directors that I meet, it's always really hard to get your next film off the ground. Our company Medb Films is a small, independent company, it's just me and Elaine. We work seven days a week and have done for two and a half years."

"We actually took Christmas Day off last year, which we haven't for the last two years, and we didn't know what to do with ourselves! But we've had pay offs; I've had pay offs with the short films, and Gypo being highly successful is really amazing. In one sense it's launched us but we still have to graft to stay autonomous as a small independent company. So actually shooting is wonderful. And working with really good actors is very, very exciting. To get to work with someone like Bob Hoskins or French actress Josiane Balasko (for whom I wrote the female lead in Ruby Blue) on dialogue, language and drama is wonderful."



"The only thing I'm really obsessive about is logical story structure. I'm very economical - cut anything you don't need. We shot efficiently on Gypo. In a 13-day shoot there isn't much leeway and we couldn't shoot any extra material. So we needed really good actors who were used to improvisation."



"With the shorts it was very traditional - rehearse it, block it, shoot it. I had a whole new experience with Gypo because I'd written the script and I'd written all the dialogue in prose; I'm very physically engaged with the actors on the set. I think that's because of my acting background, I speak their language."

"So I suppose my style at the moment is tied in with the fact that I've written the scripts so I can be very flexible with the actors. I write all the dialogue in a prose format, the dialogue is in the script but it's much more spontaneous for the actors."



"Almodóvar is the first one. Then all the traditional ones: Michael Powell, Hitchcock... I haven't studied films so I'm probably not the best person to ask. European filmmakers like Bergman. Somebody told me that they'd read a book about John Cassavetes and apparently he worked very similarly to the way I do. So I should probably watch some of his films."



"When Gypo became successful we realised that we'd become part of a club that we weren't really aware of before. Once you've got a foot in the door and start being taken more seriously, you become part of this small group of British filmmakers. We've met some wonderful directors recently but, to be honest, I'm more interested in thinking about the next film I want to make and how we're going to finance it. So far we haven't particularly been financed or supported by the UK Film Industry. It would be great to have industry money one day. But we're currently being approached much more by people in LA than London!"



"I'd say always, always be realistic. Test your talent, find out if you have a skill for it otherwise you'll spend 20 years wasting your life. I've consistently made stuff and it's consistently done reasonably well."

Jamie Russell | Published 04 Apr 07

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