There is a quiet revolution taking place in cinematic experience. No longer does seeing a movie involve buying a ticket, sitting in a dark room for an hour and a half with your popcorn, then going home. Across the UK, screenings are being staged which combine cinema with live acting and drama – a phenomenon known as immersive cinema. I sat down with Edd Elliott, co-founder of Oxford-based Hacked Off Films and Exeter College alumnus, who told me about Hacked Off’s upcoming Sin City screening, the trials of staging an immersive event, and why we should all be excited about the upcoming year of Oxford cinema.
Edd begins by outlining the concept of immersive cinema for me.
“I’ve been describing this for about three years and I still haven’t come up with a succinct description. Effectively, it’s the creation of the world of the film around the audience, so instead of sitting in a dusty cinema, in a dark room, watching something on a screen, the idea is that everything around you is taken from the film which you’re watching. In the past we did Harry Potter in an Oxford dining hall and we had actors going round trying to make you feel like you were a character in the film.”
A combination of numerous influences and artforms, then? Edd agrees. “The weird thing about immersive cinema is that there’s no rulebook. It’s really, really wide and almost anything is allowed as long as it comes from the ideas of the film.”
Edd tells me that “pretty much all” of the actors working with Hacked Off come from Oxford’s student body. He himself founded the company whilst studying at Exeter. “I founded this with my friend Owen Donovan in 2012, towards the end of our first year, but originally we just started doing short film screenings. The first immersive screening was during Michelmas of our second year. Since then we’ve done four more projects and it’s pretty much ongoing.”
The “ongoing” project is an immersive screening of Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City, live at Cellar and the Purple Turtle on Sunday 2nd November. Why was it that film they were attracted to, specifically?
“Sin City was something we’ve wanted to do for ages and ages. When you start making these things you start to see films and think: “That is so easy to do and would be so great,” and Sin City has always struck us as something that would be so easy. We first had the idea about a year ago but just couldn’t find a venue that would allow us to do it. A lot of this stuff does come down to venues and you’re very much restricted by where you can put your stuff in.”
They seem like good places to do it, with the alleyway and the cavernous area underground; very much in keeping with the film. Edd nods. “We couldn’t really think of anywhere else that would be able to do it in Oxford and that could do it well, so it was there or nothing.”
Does he find that more stylised films lend themselves to an immersive experience? Past Hacked Off immersive screenings have included Black Swan, Harry Potter and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which all seem to be films with their own aesthetic. I suggest that there is a specific mood that an event can capture.
“Cult films tend to do well. If you look at Secret Cinema, most of those are cult films and they bill them as that. Some films you rule out as impossible, like 2001: A Space Odyssey; obviously you’re never going to be able to do that.”
Did they consider it?
He laughs. “No, we’ve never even come close! For a long time we were worried that we were picking films that were based around educational establishments — Harry Potter, Ferris Bueller, to some extent Black Swan. We’ve been trying to break that mould.”
Nonetheless, even doable films present their own issues, Edd tells me.
“One of the weird things about immersive cinema in comparison to, say, putting on a play, is that with a play once you’ve secured the space it is, to some extent, a blank canvas. You can do whatever you want to do. That’s just not the case with immersive cinema. You’re constantly working within the boundaries which are being set by the money you have, the screening licenses, what the venues will and won’t allow you to do.
“We’ve had some pretty extreme cases. With Ferris Bueller, we did it in the English Faculty and we thought we’d booked out the whole of the ground floor area of three or four rooms. Then on the day we showed up we were told that there was an open day the next day and that we could only have one of the rooms, which was pretty extreme. That was intense, but we managed to change it round and make it work.”
I suggest that if there was going to be one thing that would encourage people to come to Oxford it would be going to a Ferris Bueller-themed open day.
“I think they were a little bit worried when they saw us bringing in all these balloons, confetti and glitter and stuff.” He pauses. “They were really worried!”
Following the screening of the film itself, Hacked Off has organised a club night at The Cellar in association with Deep Cover. I wonder aloud whether along with the film element and the stage element the club night continues the theme.
“We’re hoping that most of the audience will stick around for the club night. It’ll continue the theme; there will be some plot points within the night, so it’s worth sticking around. We wanted to do a club night after one of our films for a very long time now but this is the first one. We’re so lucky that Deep Cover and Simon Devenport agreed to do it because we wanted that from the beginning.”
I mention that the Facebook event and the event description online and is somewhat cryptic in terms of what’s been hinted at. Can Edd give us any more hints as to what to expect?
“Broad hints. We’re deliberately trying to keep some stuff back.” He considers this for a moment. “I think the way this will be different to events we’ve done in the past is that a lot of those events, possibly with the exception of the first one, the Harry Potter one, is that a lot of them have been fairly linear, meaning all the audience do the same thing, go through the same progression. With this, the whole space will be open and people can just wander around and see what there is. There’ll be loads and loads of things happening in different places: there’ll be gangsters, there’ll be dancers, there’ll be characters from the film. There’ll be lots going on and I think the best suggestion I can give is just to explore as much as you can.”
Despite the fact that Sin City hasn’t gone ahead yet, I ask whether Edd has any idea what could be next. Does he have any plans?
“Possibly too many plans! Hacked Off Films is a little bit up in the air but there will be a film festival next year – not next academic year but next term – which I’m very much involved in organising. There will be an immersive event.
“We’re hoping as well – and this is something that I’m definitely pushing – to branch out in a new area which is going to flip the whole of Hacked Off Films on its head. So far we’ve been making events from films whereas now we’re gonna try a completely new thing: making films out of events, where people come to an event then we make it into a film which everyone’s a part of. Exactly how that’s gonna work we’re still working out but we’ve got some really, really interesting ideas about this.”
So you generate the content of the film through the event and see what you can make afterwards?
“Pretty much. In fact, I’m just going to say this because at the moment it’s horribly cryptic: we have this great idea of doing a spoof of Summer Eights where it’s called the Great Oxford Pedalo Race, where everyone comes down to where the rowing is and there’s an obstacle course for pedalos. It’s like Summer Eights, and we’ll have barbeques and everybody drinking but we’ll film it as if it’s a Formula One-type thing with pit lanes, as a spoof. That’s the sort of thing we want to do.”
Flipping immersive cinema on its head?
“Yeah, so people will be able to see themselves in the film. We’d like to see how that works out, but we haven’t planned the technicalities yet.”
I confess that I have one personal question about the Sin City screening. I really liked Sin City a lot, and there’s one storyline that sticks in my mind specifically: that of the Yellow Bastard. Will the film’s most infamous character will be making an appearance?
“He will be making an appearance. In fact, he’s a pretty prominent part of our marketing because we’re gonna be sending the Yellow Man out into the Oxford club nights of Wednesday and Thursday and people have to take photos with him, post it on the wall and they get free tickets.”
It sounds terrifying and really cool. So if I see a bald, disfigured man painted lurid yellow and carrying a large knife wandering around Bridge or Cellar this Thursday, I shouldn’t be alarmed?
“Yeah!”
Satisfied that my personal favourite aspect of the film will be done justice, we wrap things up as Edd adds a final point: “There’s a common misconception that to come to these events you have to have seen the film – that’s not the case. I’d be really interested to see what people who hadn’t seen the film made of the event. We’ve got a couple of people coming down who I know haven’t seen the film. It’d be interesting to see what that’s like and to see what they made of it. Even if you haven’t seen the film, please do come down.”
Sin City will be screened in an immersive performance by Hacked Off Films at Cellar and the Purple Turtle at 7pm on Sunday 2nd November.
