DELIRIUM, the concluding film in Gareth Jones’s Desire Trilogy, has now wrapped after a 25-day shoot at the historic Founder’s Building of Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, Surrey.
Starring Clare Grogan (Gregory’s Girl, The Penalty King, Skins), Timothy West (Brass, Churchill and the Generals, Eastenders), Mamta Kaash (Shalom Salaam, Casualty), international cellist Alisa Liubarskaya and writer-director Gareth Jones in his first leading role, DELIRIUM follows an atheist composer struggling to deliver a Requiem to celebrate his college centenary. A natural rebel flying in the face of academic authority, he’s inspired and compromised by the arrival of a young musician carrying secrets from his colourful past.
Photo by Nune Arakelyan © 2015
Jones’s D-Trilogy puts the artist under the microscope and examines the chemical fusion of creativity and libido, through a highly charged sexual relationship with an inappropriate object of desire:
DESIRE (Nominated, Best UK Feature, Raindance 2009), with its intimate, claustrophobic setting, delves into the mind of a blocked screenplay writer liberated by a predatory muse.
DELIGHT (Nominated, Golden St George, Best Film, Moscow International Film Festival, 2013) plays through the eyes of a traumatised war photographer, her affair with three closely related men exposed in landscape, memory and confession.
DELIRIUM tunes into the loneliness of the composer isolated in an institutional setting, the striving for immortality and the erotic coupling of creator and performer.
“My protagonist is anything but celibate and certainly no saint,” Jones explains. “Freighted in to lead his struggling alma mater the fictional St Jude’s through the rising tide of university fees, student unrest and political correctness – not to mention migrant workers below stairs – the wayward pop star turned composer neglects his hypochondriac wife and ungovernable teenage kids to turn upside down the institution he’s meant to rescue.”
Despite the resemblance, Jones strenuously denies this story of an impenitent sinner is autobiographical. The part chose him. Ten days from principal photography, the loss of an actor thrust him into a role he had never expected. It was tough, Jones admits, directing on set with other cast. “Without their support I couldn’t have done it. Clare, Tim, Mamta and a host of actors and musicians were generous to a fault.”
Photo by Nune Arakelyan © 2015
Shot by D-Trilogy Director of Photography Alex Ryle on the Arri Amira within the confines of Royal Holloway’s miraculous Victorian college, DELIRIUM boasts an architectural unity combining voluptuous with phantasmagoric, a dream world to get lost in and rediscover forgotten lives, not quite Marienbad but with haunting echoes.
With a specially commissioned Requiem by D-Trilogy composer Fiona Howe dramatised on screen throughout its composition, rehearsal and performance, DELIRIUM’s sound picture matches its visual glory, one of the rare films since Death in Venice dedicated to the inner world of musical composition and the creative-erotic torment of the embattled composer.
“Finishing a Requiem while prepping production was quite an ask,” says Fiona Howe. “But an ovation from Royal Holloway’s terrific choir after our first rehearsal in their magnificent chapel told me we were in with a shout and with the pre-record I knew we had something special. Working with Royal Holloway’s creative departments under the guidance of our top professional HoD’s was a treat. It’s hard to imagine a more liberal-minded and generous co-producer.”
DELIRIUM is currently in post-production for completion in early 2016.
