When John (James Norton) comes home from a hard day of work at the start of “Nowhere Special,” he isn’t about to let it show to his son Michael (Daniel Lamont), bidding adieu to the caretaker he’s arranged to keep watch over him while he toils away as a window washer and reading him a bedtime story before tucking him in. It’s a bit of an illusion when John holds no others, recently diagnosed with a terminal illness and resolved to keep Michael healthy and happy after the child already lost his mother, though to do so means carrying on as if nothing’s amiss. Still, he can’t hide forever that he’s trying to find a new home for the four-year-old as he faces the inevitable, engaging with potential adoptive parents that all seem like reasonable options and dutifully keeping up his cleaning service to maintain stability in the present.
The sight of Michael and John walking down the street in the latter’s precious spare time is bound to remind some of another famed father/son tandem in desperate straits in “The Bicycle Thieves,” and despite taking place in Belfast, there’s more than a little of the Italian neorealist legacy in the film when its writer/director Uberto Pasolini has a direct connection to one of its greatest practitioners, Luchino Visconti, who was his uncle. Pasolini has carved out his own career path since coming into the film industry, building on the knowledge from his first career in investment banking to producing “The Full Monty” and creating the space in the marketplace and eventually on set as a director for sensitive dramas about the working class such as the tender Eddie Marsan character study “Still Life.”
“Nowhere Special” may suggest its humble origins in its title, but it has considerable ambition when it follows John from home to home that are not his own, either out of his work or his personal search for new parents for Michael, revealing all the various permutations of families that are out there with all the potential issues they face. The question of picking the right guardians for Michael may be a uniquely tragic one for John, but it’s seen as just one in a series of them that won’t feel unfamiliar to any parent who have to make decisions about what’s best for their children without knowing what impact it could ultimately have and the film crackles with the tension of every choice he makes, including having to absorb the pain of not being able to share what he’s going through with anyone. On the eve of the film’s U.S. release, Pasolini spoke about how he enabled such a beautiful relationship to unfold between his two stars Norton and Lamont, the movie’s true life inspiration and emphasizing the heart in a story of heartbreak.
How did this come about?
Yeah, I fell by chance on an article in an English newspaper that mentioned a single father who spent last month of his life looking for family for his son, this young, 35-year old man, who had a four-year-old child whose mother had left shortly after his birth and who was given a few months to live. I’m a parent myself and I tried to imagine how terrible it must have been to be in the father’s shoes and what would I have done? I contacted the social workers who had dealt with the case, but they couldn’t really tell me anything more for privacy reasons than what they had said to the journalists who had written the piece, but one of the things that the article said was that after the death of the father, neighbors gathered together to find some money for the funeral of the father, so we are talking about somebody who was certainly not a wealthy man. Because I couldn’t find anything more than that, I decided to spend a lot of time researching the world of adoption and I talked to many, many, many people who are trying to adopt or who have adopted or aid adoptions, and out of all those people I really created the various characters that our John and Michael, meet during the course of these few weeks we spend with them [in the film]. And then I talked to people who deal with child bereavement, who help children deal emotionally with situations like this one, whether they are about to or have already lost a dear one, and then I put some of my own experiences of fatherhood into the writing and I wrote the script.
In addition to the search for a new family, John’s profession of being a window washer is a fascinating one because it allows the film to peek into so many different people’s homes. Was that something that came about organically or really a driving force for the idea?
A bit of both, to be honest. What was natural is I wanted the child to be the only constant emotional presence in the father’s life, so I wanted a job for him that was a solitary job and a job that wasn’t paying very much, but where the father could be the boss of his own time. Window cleaning is all those things. You do it when you can, when you want, so you have flexibility to pick up or take your child to school or to the park and it’s a job that you do by yourself. And one of the things that I was very, very keen in doing is never to write a dramatic film. I thought the situation of the film was dramatic enough that the way to approach what I call this love story [with] these two individuals, was with a very, very low volume. In the script, there was never a scene where the father could unburden at length himself about what was going on in his head. I wanted to imagine what he was feeling, not to be told what he was feeling, so his daily life needed to be solitary.
The window cleaning has direct, natural, and also metaphoric qualities in terms of his connection with the outside world and with other people’s lives, with lives that are not being interrupted or disrupted in the way that his own life is, so it made sense for many different reasons. And as you said, looking into people’s lives, very often we introduce a new family through their window and then we go inside the home and we find them inside, so there was a connection between the search for a new family and his own job.
I only realized when it was over how it avoided cliche – you never go to a doctor’s office with John or overtly struggling with this illness that will likely take his life, but you feel the weight of it. What made you think a performance alone could that, let alone James’?
Again, it was important to me not to spell everything out at the very beginning, so the film doesn’t start in a doctor’s office with somebody being told that he’s got a few months to live. You discover that gradually and it was important to me not to have situations that would elicit explosions of frustration. A couple happen late, but they are signifiers of his general state of mind, not straight after a specific piece of news. But I needed an actor who could convey a great deal without the props of a lot of dialogue or a lot of acting, and I knew that James was a very talented, skilled actor, but also a great actor who can communicate a great deal just by being there with his eyes, with his demeanor. So I sent him the script and he saw a previous film I had made called “Still Life,” which is another quite film he loved, and he decided, “Yes, let’s do it. It was my good fortune that also before he became a successful actor, he did a lot of work entertaining children at children’s parties, so he was very comfortable working with children.
Is it true you had him carry a rock in his pocket?
Well, I wanted him to live the experience of the psychological and physical situation as a continuous presence in his life, but not on the surface, so I gave him a rock to keep in his pocket so that he would always feel something that wasn’t natural. And I had a little rock too, because I always had to remember that every scene that we were filming, even if death or the drama was not on the surface, it was always there, so I always make sure I was looking for moments or small things that reminded us or reminded me to remind the actors that there was this black rock in their lives, so yes, a rock for him and a little rock for me.
Once you get James in a room with Daniel, was there anything in their dynamic that got you excited that you may not have expected?
There are a couple of ways of looking at this. The first is that the project was a crazy idea. It’s a small movie. It wasn’t an expensive film, but the risk of making the film was betting on finding a child that not only would deliver what we were hoping for in terms of the performance, but also that he would be prepared to come back every day, day after day, over a six-week period, without at one point just saying, “Forget about it. I’m bored. I don’t want to do this. I want to be at school. I want to be with my friends.” We’re talking about a four-year-old. And in fact, we tried to get insurance for the possibility that the kid would quit on us and nobody would give us the insurance because they said, you know, “He might be gone in a week.” So that was the big gamble. We decided to accept the gamble and we saw something like a hundred kids between three-and-a-half and four-and-a half. I wanted to stick to the ages of the people in the original story, and Daniel was actually number seven of the hundred kids we saw and no one after number seven was as convincing as number seven.
So I got James to come over to meet Daniel. They just struck an amazing connection straight away, and James was very, very, very generous. He came over before we started filming and spent a lot of time with Daniel and his lovely family. He went playing at their house, went out to ice creams at the museums with Daniel, and really formed a wonderful bond with him and then continued being his friends when we were not actually filming, so that the affection between the two is really special and it’s real. None of this could have happened if it wasn’t for the generosity of James and he gave it all to make that relationship work on screen. Really, he should be credited for much of the special stuff that happens between the two of them.
When I started thinking about how to film this story, I also wanted everything very quiet, so there was never a question of fancy shots or music that would tell you what to feel at any one moment. There is a wonderful film by Jacques Doillon called “Ponette,” which actually [details] a similar situation. There is a child who has lost her mother, and there is a documentary that was made about how they made that film [where you see] they always had somebody off camera telling the girl what to do and to say throughout the take and then they edited those takes with reverses on the grown-ups. I thought we would need to do the same thing, so I was prepared to do that, but we didn’t need to do that at all. I told Daniel what to do before a take, but never during a take because it was just him and James. One of the things that I really appreciate in the film is that the most important moments between the father and the son, are captured in two shots. The two of them are there in real time, sharing those moments and that’s not constructed in the editing. Whether it’s the birthday candles on the cake, or the father talks about the death, or even the last moment when they read the book about dinosaurs, all those moments are held on two shots. I get moved just thinking about it now and they’re real, live moments. I think that’s one of the reasons why the audience feels that they’re watching something real, something special.
You really seem to do your best to protect that, and I wonder does your producer brain ever get in the way of your director brain when I know you’ve got a tight schedule to keep and you’re limited in the amount of time you can have a child on set and you’ve got so many locations in the film?
No, I think that what happens in a situation like that, you surround yourself with people that you trust and remind you of certain situations. Specifically, there was never a question of going over time because you couldn’t go over time with a child, and I had wonderful ADs who would tell me, “You have another five minutes, and then it’s better if we cut and give him his 10 minutes and then come back.” That was enormously helpful in concentrating my attention into scenes, but the film was not a particularly expensive film, so you couldn’t even go over budget by much anyway. It was a controlled situation from a producer’s point of view, except for the issue of making sure that Daniel would stick with us till the very end. And there, as I said, James was enormously helpful in creating this relationship. The family was very helpful and supportive. But more than anything else, it was Daniel himself who always was happy to come back. It was a joy for us, but we were fun for him. Somehow we managed to make the experience so much fun for him, and he was happy to come back every day and never quit on us.
“Nowhere Special” opens on April 26th in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Royal and New York at the Quad Cinema before expanding across the country. A full list of future cities and dates is here.
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