Out of Blue director discusses her newest film

Mysterious. Accessible. Discussable. These are the three words that film director, screenwriter and producer Carol Morley chooses to sum up the feel of her latest directorial effort, Out of Blue.

Carol Morley, courtesy of Paul Marc Mitchell

An adaptation of Martin Amis’ novel Night Train, Carol insists she is “not trying to illustrate the book for people that know it well”, hence the change in title. It tells the story of a female detective tasked with investigating the murder of an astrophysicist and black hole expert.

Cosmology and the detective work are what drew Carol to the work the begin with: “Those two themes seemed so ripe for exploration, and I wanted to look at the detective in a way that focussed on uncovering how her mind worked,” she says. “Someone told me that we know more about the universe than we do our own minds, and that fascinated me: the universe seems more mysterious, and yet we are more so.”

Carol describes the detective character in the film saying: “I realised at one point it was like she’d been looking at the ground her entire life, and never really inside or up.

“With the death of Jennifer Rockwell, the astrophysicist, she has to start looking up and outside herself; but that also triggers something that makes her start to look inward.”

Patricia Clarkson stars as Jennifer Rockwell, the film’s detective

Film isn’t a career for Carol, but a way of life. Yet unlike Spielberg, who picked up a Super 8 camera when he was eight, directing wan’t a “burning ambition”. She recalls not knowing that it was a thing that people even did: “Growing up I thought it was two things: one – male, and two – out of my reach. I didn’t know anyone in that world.”

Instead she ventured into the music scene, joining bands after leaving school at 16.However, this doesn’t seem to have been a well-established desire of Carol’s either: “I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll be in a band: that’s how I’ll do stuff’.”

At 23, realising she had to “do something with [her] life”, she studied A-Levels, randomly picking photography and film studies. It was then that she fell in love with film, going on to study fine art film and video at Central Saint Martins.

But back to those three words Carol uses to describe the film – mysterious, accessible, discussible.

What exactly does ‘accessible’ mean in this context? That it’s “not a difficult film”, according to Carol. Intriguingly, this seems to contradict her coinciding belief in the film’s complexity: “It is asking something of the audience,” she claims. “It’s asking them to be detectives as well, and to really look. I think you could see it a number of times and get different things from it each time.”

All this probing and prodding is not necessarily what Carol aims for, however. “It’s more that I can’t help myself,” she chuckles. “I think it’s just what I do, and what I like doing, but it’s not like I go, ‘I wanna make the audience discuss things afterwards’, or ‘I wanna make a layered film’.”

This attitude echoes her approach to the genre of the film. Out of Blue has been described as ‘neo noir’: “Noir is black film and it’s got a tradition, coming from German expressionism,” she says. “It has a look, but it also has a feel and an intention; the characters are often trapped, and there are tropes in it, like the alcoholic detective.

“Neo noir started to be used in the 70s, and it means new noir, because it fell out of favour as a genre. But it’s not necessarily that I was trying to work within that genre; it’s more than you know you’re in the tradition of that. I was well aware of the world that I was in.”

As for ‘mysterious’ and ‘discussable’, the two other words Carol uses – her background in documentary making has nurtured these elements in her film.

“I wanted to leave space for the audience to insert themselves into, so that they can make their own minds up,” she says. “I like to make those kinds of films, too, that leave space for discussion and possibility.”

And according to Carol, who knows Bristol well through the Encounters film festival and Watershed, there is plenty of space for possibility in the city for those hoping to kick-start a career in film. “I think it has really excellent facilities and very good courses, colleges and film courses. Cinemas aren’t uber expensive either, so you get to see lots of films. And you can get anywhere from here as well.”

Out of Blue runs at Watershed between 29 March and 4 April. Visit www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/9592/out-of-blue/ for more information. 

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