Danielle:

Today, I am thrilled to have Ben and Chris Blaine with me, otherwise known as the Blaine Brothers. They are fabulous filmmakers with tons of expertise in directing comedy, which I’m very excited to dig into. But before we dive in, is there anything else that we should know about you and your work and connections to comedy?

Ben Blaine:

I don’t think so, particularly. Chris, what do you think? We do more than comedy, I suppose is sort of the first thing to flag. Yeah, we started out being silly. And I think that we do have a kind of natural tendency, we make each other laugh. And we are quite silly. So that is often, I think it’s always there in our work. But one of the problems actually that we had over the years, we started out making short films. And I think if you’ve ever been to a short film screening.

Danielle:

Mm.

Ben Blaine:

They’re painful, aren’t they? And so after, you know, sitting through a couple of these, where you go for an hour and you sort of, they squash…, you don’t do this to normal films. You don’t force people to watch seven films on a trot, but because they’re only kind of 10 minutes, it’s all kind of like cramming them all together. But they’re all really intense.

And so you’d sit there watching, you know, a film about how awful war is, followed by a film about child abuse, followed by a film about how awful racism is. And it would just be really kind of like, oh God, this is… I just can’t breathe. And so we always liked popping up with something that was silly. And often we would use our silliness to hide, deeper, significant, powerful meanings. And sometimes we’d just be silly. But yeah, we very much started out enjoying. giving the audience a breather from trauma. When we were doing longer stuff we wanted to give people trauma.

Chris Blaine:

Yeah.

Ben Blaine:

So yeah, and we found at the same time as doing the shorts and we were writing things, it’s like we often struggled, I think, to kind of really do justice to the big messy, more serious thoughts that we had in five minutes. And I think we watched a lot of short films that equally struggled to do justice to those themes in the space that they allowed themselves.

Chris Blaine:

Yeah and a short is great for jokes. You know you’re going set up, pay off. That’s a wonderful thing to do in a short space of time. So we’ve always really enjoyed doing that.

Danielle:

Fabulous. And at what point did directing come into your careers? Was it right from the beginning with the shorts? And what do you think people underestimate about directing, particularly comedy?

Chris Blaine:

I think directing is the bit that everybody understands exists in making films and most other jobs people don’t really know they exist. So, you know, like you spend most of your time going, actually, there are carpenters over there. There’s actually there’s electricians, a lot of electricians. They get paid better than us, actually, and do less hours because they unionized. And, you know.

Ben Blaine:

But it’s rare that you sort of fall in love with going to the cinema and sit there thinking, I love this movie. I am definitely going to be a key grip. That is me. That is me a key grip, you know.

Chris Blaine:

Until you meet Phil, and then Phil just loves pushing people up and down.

Ben Blaine:

He’s a master.

Chris Blaine:

An absolute master at it. Exactly. And yeah, so in terms of when we started out, I’d bought a camera, I wanted to do animation and Ben had written a script with his mate Keith and was like, do you want to make this over the summer with us? And, um, I did because animation takes ages. And, so we shot a thing. And when you’re making it all yourself, you just think, all right, well then I’m a filmmaker. I guess we kind of always think of ourselves more as filmmakers than

directors necessarily because we write, we direct, we edit. I do lots of VFX, Ben does lots of sound. I love colouring in at the end and yeah, everything in between. So you’re kind of, yeah, the first point of call, I think for most people is director.

And then a lot of what we had to learn was, in terms of what the other jobs were and what you’re supposed to ask them to do. Because you don’t know from the outside.

Ben Blaine:

Yeah, and I think also, again, we very much come from a kind of, as Chris says, a filmmaker background. And so directing is part of our process in terms of making a film.

And there’s a difference in being a director on someone else’s project. The subtle role of actually just being director. You’re actually there as the conductor of all of these elements, but when it’s not your thing to make, you’re not the final creative say-so on it. And I think, yeah, it took us a long time to really see that magic of being… in control, but also out of control, but also surprised by what is happening around you in a good way. You know, by the people that you’re working with answering not in exactly the way that you wanted, but in a way that’s better. That, I think, is probably the thing that took us longest to get around to understanding as directors, isn’t it?

Chris Blaine:

Yeah, and enjoying it. You know, it’s the most enjoyable part of the whole process is having everyone chipping in and making the ideas better and coming up with stuff that no one had thought of before and that expresses the idea better and funnier and that’s definitely the bit that is why you want to keep doing it really.

Ben Blaine:

Yeah, especially when that’s happening live in the moment, you know, which is often the hardest thing about it. But the most exciting thing about it is that it’s not often a convenient process. You know, it’s not a thing where you gather all the actors and heads of department around the table and you sit down and you discuss how a scene’s going to work out and everyone goes away and thinks about it. And then they come back with their ideas. Like that’s… That’s not how it is, you know. It’s always a chaos of people having inspirations and frustrations, you know, and people going, I can’t do this, I don’t know what, this doesn’t work for me. No, can’t say it, don’t like this, what is it? And it’s when you work through that and suddenly in the moment it comes together and you find the thing that does work and you find the other way through, that’s when it’s really exciting.

Chris Blaine:

Yeah, that’s the common misconception I think as well that Ben’s picked up on in terms of directing is that sense of everybody knows a director as a filmmaker and they know it from films and that’s oh yeah this person is the auteur. Is the only person that counts and everyone has to do exactly what they say. And then you know you get into television and you’re kind of like… no you’re not, the writer is the more important one than you. And then you get into commercials and you’re like…. I mean why are we here? I’m not quite sure.

So you know, you think that you’ve got ultimate control and you’re walking into a lot of jobs thinking well that’s what you’re going to do, but in reality you are there to help shepherd other people’s ideas and you know that’s actually the most enjoyable part of it.

Ben Blaine:

It’s actually the same in film as well. I think film still gives more space to directors and more credence to directors. But if you’re doing it right, you’re still letting other people in, you know, it’s kind of like if you can’t do that, it’s not going to be as good.

Danielle:

That’s brilliant. There’s so much to think about there. And one of the high-profile projects that you’ve been involved with is Sara Pascoe’s Out of Her Mind, a series for BBC Two and also Sony TV. And although most people would be familiar with the term director, actually, I think from the outside, the process is quite opaque with regards to how people actually get asked to do projects and attached to projects. And I’m sure it’s different for different things, but using that as an example…. How did you go from whatever you were doing prior to that to actually then being involved with that project? What was that process like?

Chris Blaine:

It’s just entirely down to our shining brilliance.

Danielle:

I know.

Ben Blaine:

So, yeah, so before Out of Her Mind, we’d just made our feature film, Nina Forever. And so we were in quite a different headspace at that point. But we’ve known Sara for years. In fact, Sara’s first on-screen job, I think, was, I think her first on-screen appearance is in the back of a Take That interview when she was about 14. But then her first kind of acting thing was with us in a short film that we made with Film 4 called Hello Panda where idiots that we are, we gave her a non-speaking part. She was still very funny in it but yeah, you know, looking back you go… we could have written her up a bit more…we could have given that genius a bit more scope to run with. But yeah, so we’ve known her for years. And she came to us.

She initially was commissioned for a comedy short which was very much done with the view of selecting scripts to do a kind of 15-20 minute pilot, with an eye to turning them into a series. And she came to us with her one and said… you know let’s do this together. And I think she wanted people with a film background. You know, she wanted people with an avant-garde background. You know, our work is not that conventional. And I think she also… there had been plenty of people she had known, who had been given similar opportunities and in that situation been paired up with more established TV names. And those people weren’t necessarily happy with the outcome. And that sense of which TV can feel like of kind of dropping into a sausage factory. And particularly as a standup, even more so than as an avant-garde independent filmmaker, you know, as a standup, it’s just you. There’s no one else that you have to answer to, you know, and that’s very lonely, but it’s also very freeing.

And I think for anybody moving from that space where you’ve spent years in complete control of your work, and it’s just you in direct communication with the audience, moving to television is an incredible shift. It’s incredibly hard because suddenly, you absolutely do have to let all these other voices into the mix. And that alone, I think, is a big step up. And then everyone comes to that process with their own agendas and egos and ambitions. And I think that Sara was… very aware that, you know, creatively we matched, but also she trusted us that we wouldn’t come to this project and kind of go, well, what do we get out of it? How do we make this feel like us so that we can move on and do the next thing that’s us? Like, how do we use Sara for our benefit? She knew that because we’re idiots, our only interest was following where she was going creatively and having fun with it, you know.

Danielle:

Wonderful. And this is not an easy question, but given that Sara’s a standup and has, you know, that live response and is used to that. And you’re also having the experience of what’s live on set….do you have any checks and balances that you find really useful for calibrating for the viewer? And the reason that I asked this, and I don’t think it’s an easy question at all, is I feel like I’m so much more willing to laugh in real life. I laugh at so much stuff that my friends do, messing around, but the bar’s quite low and I’ll find it really funny. And then something weird happens as soon as it’s on a screen, where I don’t mean to be mean, but my tolerance or how I engage with it…the bar just goes way up. So I always wonder about that from behind the scenes of how you do it. Because I feel like if I was making something with my friends or people that I knew I’d be so much more willing to laugh in the room than I would as a viewer. I’m just curious.

Ben Blaine:

Yeah, yeah, I mean, wow, that’s a huge question. I mean, our preferred working method as filmmakers is very audience-focused and always has been in different ways. And we, maybe I’ll get onto the Mobile Cinema at another point, but when we made our feature film Nina Forever,… initially we thought… well, we’ve got to a cut that we’re happy with and we thought well we’ll have a test screening just to check that we’re the geniuses that we know that we are, and it was it was a complete disaster. Except it wasn’t a disaster, it was the best thing that happened to us because we sat there in the room and the incredible thing about watching something, watching your own work with an audience is that you can’t help but see it through their eyes and feel it through their emotions. And this was a film that by this point, we’d spent what, a year, 18 months, playing with and working with. And we knew every frame of it backwards. And then suddenly we were in this room and we were like… What is this?

Chris turned to me afterwards. It was kind of like, I didn’t know when it was gonna end. I didn’t know what…it was so revelatory because it was so useful. Cause it was kind of like, you know, the audience say things to you afterwards, like….oh, it’s beautifully shot. Have you thought of cutting it in half? And it doesn’t really matter what they say because you just have this visceral feeling and kind of like, okay, that doesn’t work. That did work. That got me. That I hated. get rid, get rid, change this. And we actually ended up doing, what was it, four screenings, five screenings. And by the last screening. the energy in the room carried us all the way through to the blackout after the last frame and the credits. And you were like, that’s the film, like now, you could feel the excitement. And yeah, it was brilliant. But it came through shaping it with the audience. So that was such a learning experience for us that has absolutely become our ideal way of working. And that was something that we wanted to do with Out of Her Mind. It’s very hard to do things like that in television anyway.

Chris Blaine:

And then in the middle of lockdown, in pandemic times, it was weirdly hard to get lots of people in a room.

Ben Blaine:

Genuinely illegal.

Danielle:

Yeah.

Ben Blaine:

So yeah, sadly that wasn’t a process that we got to go through. And I think, you know, like in TV, we would have had to have fought tooth and nail to get that kind of… audience access anyway. So without that you then fall back on the next audience that you have which is you know the audience of the people that you’re working with. The producer and we were very closely involved in the edit on a day-to-day basis, and then Sara would have distance and you know come in and watch it and go what the fuck have you done. Please go back to how I wrote it don’t make those changes. And then we discussed that, you know, and, you find a happy medium. But yeah, so that was kind of the audience, the audience that we ended up sort of relying on, which is the more normal process. The audience of the people that you’re working with.

Chris Blaine:

Yeah, but when you’re on set, you’ve obviously got the crew to start off with. You’ve got us, you know, they genuinely will be laughing at the stuff that we find funny. The takes that you love the most are the ones where people are having to stop themselves from laughing during the take. So, you know, that side of it can be really enjoyable.

There’s definitely a thing that… we’re still wrestling with a little bit in terms of crew shows or a thing where basically you’ve rehearsed the scene with the actors before you’re going to shoot anything. So you worked that out and you’ve worked out where you’re going to probably be placing the camera with the DOP. They might have been there as well watching it. And then you bring in the entire crew and they all watch it one go round. And on the one hand that’s lovely and it means everybody knows exactly what’s happening and exactly what is you know going on. But sometimes you’re sat there going, yeah, but you’ve just done the comedy genius now, and we haven’t filmed it. We’ve had the camera turned off whilst they’re really enjoying the magical thing that you’ve done that you won’t ever quite do exactly the same again in future takes. And I would always be sat there going…if only we had the camera rolling.

I can remember when we made Hello Panda, the short that Sara was in the background of. Steve would come up with ideas on the rehearsal and follow them through and you’d be like, yeah, that brilliant, do that. And then he’d never be able to nail it again. And yeah, Adrian Edmondson, likewise, he loves an audience response and plays so well to an audience, yeah.

Yeah. And so, you know, you’d be sat there going, okay, this is just wonderful watching him do it. And sometimes it’s like, yeah, I just wish we could just do that straight on camera. And then Clint Eastwood style would be like, yeah, we’re moving on. We’ve already done it. Thank you very much.

Ben Blaine:

To be fair there are a couple like that where we did just move straight on because we were so pressed for time that we had no alternative. But the other thing about it is also the difference in editing which was something that definitely holds and I think it’s interesting that we went from comedy into making what turned out to be a horror movie that we didn’t expect at the time but I think there’s a shared kind of tension in the audience that you want to create with both. And again, there’s a very definite thing of often that a take will be amazing in the room. And even then when you watch it back, that take is brilliant. And then you start editing it and you start cutting it in the way you expect, and you watch it back and you’re like, Oh, why is this not? This was magical a moment ago. And now I’ve worked on it. I’ve Oh, I’ve killed it. That’s what’s happened. I have come in here and I have ruined it.

And there’s something about that tension of what happens in a take. And sometimes when you look at a scene, you go, no, okay, this is great. It’s kind of like the individual bits of this weren’t hysterically funny, but we can glue that together. And the timing of the edit will make that become much, much funnier than it felt like at the moment. And then other things you go, kind of like, no, this we can’t cut. We don’t want to be cutting this. And I think we’ve got… again, much better at sensing those moments of kind of like, okay, this is, we don’t want to give ourselves any chance to cut this. Like this, we’re going to shoot in one take and it has to be one take and this is how it’s going to be. And that is actually going to be intrinsic to creating the comedy in it.

Chris Blaine:

Yeah, when you’re sitting in the edit, different producers that you’re working with have different ideas of how to, you know, know that the thing is still funny by the time you’re getting towards the end. There’s a wonderful producer that we work with called Spencer Millman who genuinely laughs at the jokes that he finds funny as if it’s the first time he’s heard it, even though it’s…

Ben Blaine:

He cannot help himself.

Chris Blaine:

…the 64th time.

Ben Blaine:

It is such an astonishing gift for a comedy producer. Every time this thing, he found it funny when he thought of it. He’s now seen it 64, 6,000 times. It’s still funny. And it is so easy to lose that. Like normal people lose that. And he is such, it’s so wonderful to have him in the edit. You go kind of like, okay, that’s still funny. That’s still funny. We haven’t killed that one yet.

Chris Blaine:

Whereas on the other end of the scale, we were editors on a show, on one particular show with a producer who basically definitely got to the point where he’s like…okay, well, I’ve seen this too many times. I don’t know whether it’s funny or not. What we should do is we’ll watch it through one more time. And every time that there’s something that I think people will laugh at, I will say, laugh.

Danielle:

Oh no.

Chris Blaine:

And we’ll count them up. And literally we watched it entirely stony-faced with him just going,

Ben Blaine:

Laugh.

Chris Blaine:

Laugh.

Danielle:

Oh.

Chris Blaine:

Laugh. laugh. Anyway, a good half-hour of…

Ben Blaine:

To be fair, that was funny. And it was a huge hit. So, you know, everyone has their method, you know.

Danielle:

Oh my goodness, I love it. And what do you think are some of the benefits or challenges of working as a pair?

Ben Blaine:

Well, no one wants to pay you two wages.

Danielle:

Mm, I did wonder about that.

Ben Blaine:

That’s a definite downside. Yeah, so yeah, normally we manage to…editing is actually a bit easier because editors normally come kind mob handed anyway. So we usually go, well, look, pay us an editor rate and an assistant editor rate and we’ll sort it out between us. But yeah, with directing, we’ve usually had to individually take less money than everyone else in the industry does, but you know, it’s all right.

Chris Blaine:

Yeah, but the benefit is actually, the thing that’s most enjoyable, which is always having somebody else’s input and always trying to help them do that thing better. So most of the thing that we enjoy is with loads of other people doing that, but it’s partly born of the fact that we’ve always done that with each other.

Ben Blaine:

And when you’re sharing the job title, you’re both there, with people looking at you and it’s kind of like…oh, you’re both directing. And one of you has an idea, the other one can’t go…no, I’m the director, we’re not doing that. Once you get into that habit, you sort of, as Chris says, it becomes much easier to do that with everyone else’s ideas. And I think that can, again, I should say, you know, we’ve worked with producers who actually are a bit challenged by the fact that either they’re used to their ideas being accepted or rejected. And rather than that, we kind of naturally go, I like this bit or I don’t understand, explain it more, you know, like get involved in a roll your sleeves up and get dirty in this process. It’s kind of like, let’s try this in the edit. How does this work? And some absolutely adore that. And some it takes a while because they think they’re just so used to…no, I’ve given you my note, I’m leaving now. But it’s more fun when you get involved. Sorry, Chris, I interrupted you.

Chris Blaine:

No, not at all. Yeah, the bit that I always enjoy is whenever we’re watching an edit and Ben’s cutting the stuff, that you’re like, why have you used these takes? This doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. And every single time, Ben goes like, oh, it’s that bit. It’s that bit, and just in the frame over there. And I’m like, I never looked at that. No one will ever look at that. And then you go, well, OK, how do I actually make it so that everyone’s going to look at that? The bit that he’s definitely pointing out, that you go, that’s going to make that really funny. That’s going to make that really amazing. And then it’s… just a wonderful journey to figure out how to get people’s eyes where he wants them to be. And yeah, I love doing that, youn know, and it’s kind of…

Ben Blaine:

I’m something of an imperfectionist. It’s kind of like, there’s the things that we know that we want, and then something will go wrong. And it’s kind of like, oh, that’s what I want now. Yeah, I want the bit that went wrong. Chris, can we have the bit that went wrong? How do we keep the mistakes in?

Chris Blaine:

Yeah, I mean, editing in large part is… The best edits always feel like you intended them. And in most cases, you never did. Sure there’s the plan that you had, but there’s the thing that has come out at and the thing that it comes out at. As long as it feels like, yeah, I did mean to do that in the first place, even though I have cut out 75% of the lines and the ones that are there are all in a completely different order. As long as it feels like, yeah, now that’s exactly what we meant… then great, it works. You know, and you feel like you’re in capable hands when you’re watching something like that. So yeah, trying to figure out how to make those mistakes feel intended is great.

Ben Blaine:

Yeah, I think that very much is one of the strengths of our rogue background, making random shit, because you know we’re very used to kind of scrapping our way through a shoot, you know, because we’ve got no time and no money, and so you kind of make… that kind of creates two kind of… there are two essentials to working in that way. One is that you have to plan everything down to the last possible…this is what we need. Why do we need it? This is why we need that. If we don’t get it, this is, you know, you’ve got to be completely focused.

And then when all of that nevertheless goes wrong anyway, you then have to get really good at embracing the mistakes and not being scared of mistakes and not being thrown by them and not being like…. Oh, it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. It’s all ruined. When you start out and you’re just working with your mates, that feels like the limitation of working with your mates. And then, as you get so much further down the line and you go…oh, actually, no matter how much budget you get given, it’s… it’s always less than you actually need to do the thing that people are asking you to do. And you are always in the situation where it’s kind of like, here are all the vans, here’s all the everything, but still we actually need to get this shot in the next 20 minutes. And really, we need two hours. Okay.

Chris Blaine:

Yeah, even Titanic, you know, the ship wasn’t a full-size Titanic. He wasn’t allowed that.

Ben Blaine:

No.

Danielle:

That’s perfect. And what have you developed to stop you from bringing that sense of pressure in, in a way that’s not helpful? Because for example, the trailer for Out of Her Mind, really takes its time in terms of the shot and the way that the tension’s filled. So I’m just trying to think, how do you…, are there things that you have to do purposefully, or is it just that you’re so seasoned now that you know how to keep that time rush and pressure out of the places where it shouldn’t be?

Ben Blaine:

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of that is, I think a lot of that actually is our glee. You know, I think that at the onset, we have a very clear enjoyment of those things. And it’s very clear, you know. Everything gets pressured, everything is kind of like, can we do this quicker? Can we not bother with this? I think our delight in…you know, that bit that you’re talking about is kind of like our delight in extending jokes and of dragging things out. So it’s painful. I think that kind of communicates to everyone else. And then they know, okay, this is the fun bit. Let’s not ruin this.

Chris Blaine:

I absolutely love not calling cut.

Ben Blaine:

Yeah.

Danielle:

Oh, do you?

Chris Blaine:

It’s the best bit. It’s the best bit where you just say… okay, we’re just going to keep that going. Sometimes people come up with genius bits at the end after the scene’s meant to have ended. A lot of the time they do eventually turn to you and be like, what the hell are you doing? But you’re kind of like, yeah, it helps if you are… Yeah, you’re trying to be a bit playful rather than smack bang, okay, just keep moving.

Ben Blaine:

Yeah, I think one of the key relationships to making that work is actually with the first AD. And I think that was one of the key learning moments earlier on in our career… not really knowing what a first AD was and then meeting and working with standard TV first ADs who, you know, are… are some of the worst people on earth. Because it always makes me laugh that the term is Assistant Director, because if you get the wrong first AD who’s not in sync with you as a director, then they are not your assistant. They are your worst enemy, and they are your biggest creative obstacle. And they seem to be their purely… sort of on the producers behest to spoil everything and stop you having fun and stop you getting the thing that you wanted.

And it’s this process of going…have they said the words, was the camera rolling at that time? Brilliant, move on, because we’ve got to crack through this so quickly. And then when you either meet the first AD who you really connect with and who understands you, or sometimes you have to go through that process, you know, and you have to really fight those battles and come together as a team and work through it…kind of like, look…this is, this is what we’re after. This is the thing that we really are trying to get hold of. So don’t stamp on that. You can stamp on…here are the things that you can hurry us up on. Here are the things that are indulgent and call us on those things. But this, this element is what this show is. So don’t cancel that. Actually have those conversations constructively and you know not calling them the worst people in the world…things like that… then you end up building that kind of relationship that you need. And then they do become your assistant and they become your ally and they become that person who is there going… okay I know that this text is going to run and run and run and don’t spoil it you know. And they get in on the joke. But that’s not, I don’t think that’s anyone’s first instinct you know.

Danielle:

Yeah, that makes sense. And when you think of…it sounds like you’ve done so much that you figured out yourselves and really practically and from a really early stage in your career, which is wonderful…you’ve used words like rogue and it sounds like you’ve got this lovely, gleeful way of working. So when you think about outward sources that have contributed to that, that aren’t from within the pair of you. What kind of comedy creators or trainings or professionals or people do you think have influenced you in helpful ways, particularly when it comes to comedy?

Ben Blaine:

Influenced us in helpful ways is interesting. I think people have influenced us in unhelpful ways

Danielle:

Yeah, you can do that as well. But maybe we shouldn’t name check them.

Chris Blaine:

Hahaha

Ben Blaine:

I mean, I suppose we both have a love of Terry Gilliam and i think that he’s a really bad influence in that sense…he absolutely just makes hell for himself and sometimes gets away with it and that’s just the worst lesson that you can ever learn. Like the worst thing you can do is to watch something like The Hamster Factor, the making of documentary behind the behind 12 Monkeys and just be kind of like… oh wow that looks really chaotic, really difficult and really good fun. Let’s try and work in that way because it’s just not good lessons to learn you know it’s like similarly…just before, like six months I guess before we shot our feature film, Nina Forever, we watched, and this is not a comedy, except it is for us, but yeah, we watched…

Chris Blaine:

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.

Ben Blaine:

Which is an amazing…sublime, difficult, long film.

Chris Blaine:

When you’re watching it, you’re just basically like, oh my God, this is gonna go on forever. What is this about?

Ben Blaine:

And then it does. And there’s this incredible sequence in it where the main character, it’s set in Turkey and the main character is this sort of crumbling detective guy. And this kind of… petty criminal has come to him and says that he knows that where there’s a body. And basically the first two hours of the movie is him driving around Turkey at night, looking for this body that no one is sure is even there. And, it’s already gone on for about an hour at this point and he gets out the car and the spot that the headlights of the car are over here. And they’re kind of like, everyone’s looking in this direction. And the camera leaves them and the camera finds an apple tree. and an apple falls off the tree into a stream and the camera follows this apple down the stream and it goes and it goes, it goes some more and it goes some more…

Chris Blaine:

And then it gets stuck in the water for a moment.

Ben Blaine:

You’re like, oh, and then it moves, and then it goes some more, and then it goes out of the frame and it ends… and it means absolutely fucking nothing and you’re sat there all the way through this shot being like… oh, they’re gonna find the body. It’s gonna be the, no, what, what? And it absolutely, the kind of gleeful stubbornness of that sort of filmmaking absolutely entranced and delighted us. And we very stupidly attempted to copy that when we made our first feature film. And that is why the first cut of that movie was over three hours and the final cut is 90 minutes. So lots of takes that we let run and run and run. And it was a good lesson because it’s kind of like sometimes that is really powerful for comedy. Sometimes that’s really powerful for drama. Sometimes it’s vacuous and empty. You know, it’s good to learn these lessons.

Chris Blaine:

Yeah, in terms of very long performance, still one of my main regrets in our editing career is Kevin Eldon in a show called The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff and another waterside scene, this one, where somebody has fallen into the docks and he runs up to the docks and starts shouting, nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Ben Blaine:

Yeah, he can do circular breathing.

Chris Blaine:

It literally goes on for I think it was no word of a lie two minutes long

Ben Blaine:

Yeah.

Chris Blaine:

And it was incredibly funny because you know it starts out and you’re like… okay that’s really funny…. and then it stops being funny… and then it’s still going… and then it gets funny again… and then it stops being funny… and then it gets even funnier because it’s still bloody going. It was meant to be the last shot of the show and you’re kind of like well obviously for a half hour show to just be two minutes on something that’s literally meant to be just a five second shot. That was impossible for us to be able to put into the edit, which was always such a shame

Ben Blaine:

Yeah.

Chris Blaine:

Because it was genuinely, genuinely the funniest thing.

Ben Blaine:

And again, classically, as soon as we started kind of cutting that and making it, cut to this shot and cut to this shot, it just wasn’t funny. Run that across three shots and it’s long. It’s just long. It’s only when it’s the single shot for two minutes, that’s when it becomes hysterically funny. Anything else…. It’s just suddenly indulgent.

Chris Blaine:

Yeah, yeah. And on the comedy front, we’ve always loved working with a director called Ben Gosling Fuller. He has a really great knack for doing really interesting blocking in a really short space of time with the actors. We did a series with him called Marley’s Ghosts, where some of the stuff that he came up with on the fly was just like…oh, well, that’s that was really impressive just to see. And as an editor, you’re sat there going….I don’t need to edit anything because… you’ve done it all in camera. And yeah, that’s always beautiful to see when you’re able to do that. And it’s not just about, oh, we’ve got to move the camera and the camera’s doing something special. It’s actually like, no, it’s about getting the actors where you want them to be so that it becomes different shot sizes all in one go. And that’s definitely something that we’ve always tried to be getting better at with ourselves.

Ben Blaine:

Yeah. And again, with Bleak Old Shop of Stuff, I tried to find a short way of saying that and failed completely. Yeah, that was him and produced by Gareth Edwards, wasn’t it? And again, that was a real kind of comedy masterclass working with those two as editors and coming into that as an editor feeling very…this is how I want to cut this scene. And then Gareth would very calmly and patiently just go….no… cut here, cut here, show that, show that, then it’s funny. You’d be kind of like, fucking, oh, yeah, that’s, I see.

Chris Blaine:

A lot of the time the comedy edit is one where you’re not allowed to cut before the end of the line.

Ben Blaine:

Hmm

Chris Blaine:

You know, you have to wait until somebody has said it and then you go to the reaction because then it’s going to be funny. Whereas if you go to the reaction before the thing’s finished being said,

Ben Blaine:

That’s drama.

Chris Blaine:

Yeah, that’s a drama cut. That’s one big lesson for us.

Ben Blaine:

Yeah.

Danielle:

Fascinating. Oh, I’ve only got time for one more question before we wrap up. So I’d love to know… you talked in terms of your process about planning massively and then also just having to improvise and be creative, because it doesn’t work out as planned. So when you look at the rest of… we’re in 2023 now, so the rest of 2023, 2024, moving on… and you think about what you want to do next…. How much are you able to plan and control projects versus, versus your ideal projects, versus what comes in. What’s that blend looking like for you right now?

Ben Blaine:

It’s exactly the same, you know. You have no choice but to plan. Like you can’t help but plan, you know, you’d be stupid not to plan, but yeah…then you hand those plans up to a God I don’t believe in… and God goes, well, you don’t believe in me, do you? So screw you mate.

Chris Blaine:

And then somebody else phones you up and says…you know, do you want to do this? And you’re like, yeah, right.

Ben Blaine:

Yes please.

Chris Blaine:

Yeah, we just love making stuff. And we have all sorts of different people and in all sorts of different ways. So we’re just really keen to be making as much stuff as possible, really.

Ben Blaine:

Yeah, again, you know, we started out, as we said, kind of as filmmakers, and, you know, between us, we would come up with an idea and then we would go and make it and it would very much be our thing. And I think it’s really nice to be at a stage now where the projects that we’re working on, some of them are that still. We have scripts that we’ve poured sweat and blood and tears into and are very proud of, and they feel good to go, depending if there’s an industry to make them. And then we’re sort of picking up, jumping on board other people’s projects, and that can be coming on board to direct a script that we love and kind of going, well, we’d love to help you make that better and then direct it. Or finding directors that we think would be good for our work and also just working in all the other things, doing editing, doing VFX in Chris’s case. We just like making stuff really.

Danielle:

Wonderful. And where should people go to find out more about you and your work?

Ben Blaine:

Well the simplest place is blainebrothers.com that’s right isn’t it Chris?

Chris Blaine:

No. blainebrothers.co.uk

Chris Blaine:

Blainebrothers.com…will go to the trucks. You’ll be going to a haulage company in Minnesota.

Danielle:

No, don’t do that.

Chris Blaine:

That’s not actually us.

Ben Blaine:

That is definitely where you should go.

Chris Blaine:

Blainebrothers trucking.

Ben Blaine:

For all of your Minnesotan haulage needs.

Chris Blaine:

Blainebrothers.co.uk.

Danielle:

Perfect, wonderful. And I’ll put that in the show notes to direct people to you, not the haulage. Awesome. Thanks so much for your time, both of you.

Chris Blaine:

Thank you.

Ben Blaine:

Pleasure, thank you.