Charlie Productions : Some Of The Content Of This Website May Not Be True.

Both Chris and I enjoy exercising our freedom of speech; and if there is one freedom more important than the freedom to tell the truth it is the freedom to make things up.

Lying, or as I prefer to think of it, the acceptance of the complex unknowability of existence, is the key thing that sets us apart from animals. After all whilst a Russian dog was the first inhabitant of our planet who made it into space, it took humans to pretend that we had been to the moon. Alright Laika didn't escape Earth's gravity in a craft of her own devising* but how much more impressive is it that, realising there was nothing of any interest or value on the Moon and the only reason to make the journey was to rub the Russians' noses in it, the Americans realised their best course of action was to build a film set, tell a great bit lie and get exactly the same amount of geopolitical kudos as if they'd done it for real. Or at least I hope that's what happened since if we're really suggesting that we went to the Moon in 1966 and all we have to show for the experience is the non-stick frying pan then perhaps we be a little more cautious about proclaiming ourselves more advanced than the rest of the animals on the planet. Animals don't lie. Crows make rudimentary tools, swans fall in love, elephants can paint, parrots can talk and certain types of african wasps can start fires but only human beings tell lies.

The first lie I remember telling was when I once told my Dad that animals only see in black and white. I was about seven and whilst I'm sure I'd told a great many lies before this point the key thing about this occasion was it was entirely unprovoked. He was digging the garden and I was supposedly helping him and out of nowhere I had this urge to tell him something that I had completely made up. I can still remember the strange sense of trepidation I felt as the words pushed past my lips and I can still remember the astonishing sense of power I felt when he paused for a moment, looked at me, said something like "Gosh, really" and then got on with his work. I had said something that wasn't real, something that had come out of my head and he had accepted it as if it was a real thing. In some sense that almost meant that it was real, in some sense I had just changed reality, right there in the garden. As it happens it actually was a real thing, apparently animals do have largely monochrome vision. This might be why my father wasn't especially phased by the idea and didn't, despite my expectations, strike me firmly round the jaw for telling an untruth**. However if he did, in some part of his mind, know the whole animal/black/white/seeing deal then he had clearly forgotten it because he didn't straighten and say "Yes, Son I know, it's because their eyes are evolved to equip them for different situations and colour vision isn't especially useful when you're a labrador". So - despite the fact that I was unwittingly telling the truth, it still remains that, without knowing one way or the other, he believed me. Or perhaps, of course, he hadn't been listening and instead his mind had been full of digging and worms and then he'd noticed that I'd just said something and was hoping that "Gosh, really" would sound like he'd been paying attention. But whether or not he believed me or was lying about believing me and despite the fact that the fact I thought was a lie was actually the truth the truth still remains that I told what I thought was an unprovoked, premeditated lie and I got away with it. And it felt good.

Obviously lying in the reckless way that I tend to has brought its fair share of problems, arguments, misunderstandings and upsets. Consequently these days, especially in everyday conversation with loved ones and business colleagues I do my best to express myself through the narrow confines of the factual truth. But I would like to put straight one common misconception about the nature of lying, that if you are telling lies it is because you have a problem with the truth, you don't understand it or you are simply unaware of what it is. This is simply not so, in fact, I would suggest it is the very reverse of the case. In short, people who can't tell lies simply aren't trustworthy.

The only way in which you can successfully tell a lie is if you have a properly founded grasp of reality. In the same way that in order to move a piano downstairs you must first get it upstairs; in order to successfully bend, twist, avoid or bury the truth you must first know what the truth is. Filmmaking+ is a very good example of this since by it's very nature it is a series of lies (Not least because the entire medium is based upon the second cleverest optical illusion after drawn perspective). The process of making a film is one of assembling convincing lies. Actors proclaim undying love for people they hate using words written for them by people who have been convinced that one day they will be famous and well paid for writing film scripts. It is astonishing the things that get faked in order to make a film seem real. Live dialogue is re-recorded in a studio so it is clearer, live sounds are recreated, colours are changed, wires removed and snow is added (though obviously not in every film). At the end of Casablanca Humphrey and Ingrid are not standing at an airport in Africa, they are in a studio in America and because there wasn't room for a full sized plane and ground crew to be in perspective they are standing in front of a model plane being manned by midgets.

As soon as you start breaking the truth down in order to try and rebuild it on the screen you start to realise quite how complex it really is. More importantly you start to realise quite how little attention most of the rest of the world actually pays to it. A good example is the moment in the Big Leibowski when they fling a bag from a moving car. The Coens wanted a shot of the bag sailing from the window, spinning in the sort of high desperate arc that would make the moment funny. Unfortunately this is physically impossible, as they found out after spending a night of trying. Their solution was to drive the car backwards at speed and have someone throw the bag for John Goodman to catch and then play the whole sequence in reverse. This worked, not only with the laws of physics but also with the far more important laws of poetry.

Like poems, films work on the basis of compression. Events that should take days, months or years are concertina 'd into a few hours. As a result pretty much everything that takes place on the screen is some sort of a lie. Bags do not arc gracefully from moving vehicles, it does not rain when you are depressed and midgets do not, on the whole, work as ground crew (they are too busy working as midgets in films). However no one minds about these lies because at the same time as being palpably false they are fundamentally true. It may not rain when you are depressed but it feels like it does. It may be against all of Newton's laws for a bag to arc out of a moving car but if you were throwing a bag of dirty pants to a group of kidnappers having just realised it was the worst thing you could do that bag would hang in the air for a very very long time. The midgets example doesn't quite pan out the same way although the last time I was in airport it certainly did feel like I was surrounded by circus freaks. Not that all midgets are circus freaks.

This is the problem with the truth, it doesn't properly account for the reality of human existence. It is not an audience's suspension of disbelief that enables them to watch a film without being angered by the artificiality of it all, it is simply that as long as the artifice is being used to express something that feels right, no one minds. Films, good films, the best films, are not how life is or even how we would wish it to be - they are how we remember it. Since all but the briefest moments of our life exist only in our memories the narrative truth, the truth we remember, the truth we tell ourselves, is far more powerful than something that merely happens to be accurate.

Which is why I don't trust anyone who can't lie. For starters lying is very easy, it just involves saying something that isn't true and anyone who claims to understand truth better than something they have just invented is clearly lying because truth is so complicated. You can trust a lie, you know where you are with a lie, by being something that has no claim on reality a lie is far truer to itself than the truth which claims the almost impossible task of being an accurate representation of reality, not even a representation, reality itself. Which is why I have such a problem with Lars Von Trier. Indeed, following his much trumpeted call to arms for a greater reality within filmmaking I would call him a liar and a charlatan, were I not sure that he was completely aware of the dubious nature of his theoretical position and was basically having a laugh at everyone else's expense.

It does however make me laugh when I see filmmakers hiding behind the dubious trappings of reality. For a while there was a running joke, the sort of lazy observational comedy that makes it's way into lazy standup routines and dull party conversations, that no one ever went to the loo in movies. Then there was a spate of films in which characters went to the loo. This didn't make them more realistic though. When watching an actor go to the loo in a film you instantly realise that the director is making a sly comment about the nature of filmed reality. When watching an actor go to the loo in reality you instantly realise that you shouldn't be in the bathroom anymore.

In the end the only true reality you can film is that of a group of actors repeating things someone has asked them to say - which is actually quite dull, especially when you consider what you can achieve if you show that mendacious sense of truth the door and settle back to tell a quite spectacularly accurate lie.

bB

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**Not that our Dad ever hit either of us you understand but as a child one is constantly bombarded with fictional role models who do tend to get knocked about by their uncaring parents and, no matter how kind, caring, normal and supportive your parents may be it can be very difficult to fully accept that they and you are real. Especially when that reality seems so much at odds with the examples one is given in children's books. (back)

+This is not a proper footnote, just a literary expression of the mental sigh of relief you have just given upon the first glimmer that this essay may have something to do with the matter in hand, namely my career as a filmmaker.(back)

Charlie Productions believe passionately in doing things and always trying to stop in time for tea.
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