Jan Dunn (writer-director) – The Calling

In writer-director JAN DUNN’S third feature film THE CALLING, a young university graduate has to make a difficult decision between the comfortable life set up for her and the longing to fulfil her childhood desire to become a nun.

Against the wishes of friends and family, she joins a closed order (Susannah York, Brenda Blethyn, Pauline McLynn, Rita Tushingham). However, things aren’t quite what she expected.

DUNN chats to film journalist Jan Gilbert about the coincidences of casting, the difficulties of micro-budget movies, and Benedictine bees.

MMM: You’re a classically trained actress. What took you behind the camera?
Dunn: I discovered acting as a teenager and joined a school film club which started for the older students – this was in 1977. The first film the teacher screened was Nic Roeg’s Walkabout, I saw that and decided I wanted to be a director; I didn’t realise film could be like that. The next film was Bergman’s Virgin Spring and that sealed it.

At that time I didn’t dare say I wanted to be a director. It was this huge secret I carried around. This stayed with me for several years until I was at drama school in London training to be a professional actor and I began to tell a few people that I wanted to be a director. That the late 1980s and even then there were very few women directors and even fewer working class ones.

I stuck to acting because the jobs seemed to come. As for directing, I knew it would be a long uphill journey. I directed my first funded film, a short, in 1996.

MMM: How important were the awards that your first feature Gypo garnered in getting your more recent features off the ground?
Dunn: I naively thought it would make a big difference, especially the BIFA (British Independent Film Award) but actually it is still hard, even now. It did mean we had something to show potential equity investors even if traditional finance is yet to appear.

For my new film The Calling, we finally got industry acknowledgement with development money from Europe in the form of the MEDIA programme which is notoriously hard to get.

Our local county council in their wisdom have set up the Kent Film Office to support regional filmmakers and they contributed a small amount towards the production funds as an investment, and also because our spend in the region is very, very high. Our budget is so low that Kent’s money seems to be a large portion of the funds. So it’s a start.

We’ve always had the support of Screen South, our regional UK Film Council but they don’t really have concrete funding to offer apart from a tiny portion of financial aid at the beginning and when we were a little stuck at the end, but they help in other ways.

MMM: I believe you met the star of your latest film The Calling at the Cambridge Film Festival when you screened Gypo there. Tell me about that.
Dunn: Yes, it’s funny when you think of the ecclesiastical nature of the film because it felt like we’ve had some kind of divine support in some ways!

I mean I’d been talking with Elaine Wickham [the film’s producer] just a few days before we were at Cambridge about wanting to approach Susannah York to play the film’s Prioress.

I always planned that this character would go a bit off the rails. I thought of all those wonderful roles Susannah has played, including her Oscar-nominated part in They Shoot Horses and Killing of Sister George, and I thought she’d bring that special level of melodrama that I really wanted with The Prioress.

She was arriving at the festival as Elaine and I were leaving, so I wrote her a long scrawled hand-written letter asking her if she’d be interested in being in my next film. She rang me that evening and we were on the phone for ages. She committed to the project from that call. I had similar experiences gathering some of my other actresses too.

MMM: Is The Calling based on a real order?
Dunn: It is a total work of fiction but I suppose you could say it was inspired by our local nuns of Minster Abbey, just a few miles from my house in Ramsgate. Nuns have been at the premises since the 13th century and it is a tiny order now of around 12 to 13 nuns. They live a cloistered, quiet life yet they’re surrounded by the modern world.

Producer Elaine Wickham hard at work on the set of The Calling

MMM: How much research did you have to carry out before putting pen to paper?
Dunn: I read, and read and I also had meetings for tea with my local Benedictine Monks at St Augustine’s Abbey in Ramsgate. We talked about all sorts of things including bee-keeping and I got into all the bee-keeping gear and went along for a second trip with my cinematographer Ole Birkeland to see how we might shoot them.

As it happened, we ended up borrowing some of their outfits for our cast. We also used real “sanctuary” honey from their bees. I was a bit concerned that the monk I spoke with may feel a little ill-at-ease with some of the controversy I bring up in the film, but they are actually very open-minded when they have a true faith or calling.

I think sometimes they get caught up at the Vatican with outdated interpretation rather than existing within a modern world like the real monks and nuns who are ironically in these cloistered environments yet somehow seem more in touch.

The ones I met and read about seem very well read and have a social awareness too. Our nuns at Minster caused a furore recently with the local community in their village for helping drug addicts. I found that quite bizarre, I mean, shouldn’t that be applauded, surely?

MMM: Was there anything you came across during that research that really surprised you?
Dunn: The first time I asked to speak with a Sister who communicates with the outside I was shown the door when I said a) I was writing a script – as I was perceived as being from the “Media”, and b) I wasn’t Catholic.

However when my costume/production designer Stevie Stewart visited the order, she happened across Mother Nicola, the Mother Superior at the Abbey, and she was really sweet and helpful and even lent us some Benedictine belts for our nuns and some specific Benedictine crosses for them.

As for Rita Tushingham, I mentioned Nic Roeg earlier and by now I had met him several times at various film festivals. I bumped into him again at a screening and asked him what he’d been up to. He’d just finished filming with Rita and once again, I had only been talking about casting Rita a day before with Elaine. So Nic put me in touch with her and she’s been fabulous from the beginning.

Amanda Donohoe had been on the judging panel when we won our BIFA with Gypo, so we hoped she’d say yes to coming along and working with us as she’d obviously been impressed with our first film. We met Amanda in London and there really is something very special about her.

MMM: Actress Pauline McLynn, who was in your first film Gypo, also appears in this film. How did the experience of working together on The Calling compare to that first venture?
Dunn: That woman is a bloody nightmare, and I’d urge anyone to never work with her! [Laughs] No, seriously Pauline is one of the best actresses around. I originally met her when she agreed to be in one of my shorts in 1999 – Mary’s Date, a comedy written by top TV comedy writer Georgia Pritchett.

Georgia and I created the film with Pauline in mind, at the height of her popularity as Mrs Doyle in Father Ted. She was hilarious and we were so pleased she agreed to be in the film. It ended up being a huge hit with audiences. She very quickly became one of my closest friends.

I knew she also has a great reputation in Ireland as a theatre actress playing in all sorts of classical stuff as well as modern. And after her incredible performance as Aunt Aggy in Alan Parker’s Angela’s Ashes, I had no hesitation writing the lead in my first feature for her, even though it was going to be a hard-hitting contemporary drama.

I wanted to write a script which included improvised dialogue and of course Pauline is vastly experienced in this from her comedy work over the years. Thankfully she agreed to be in Gypo and ended up being nominated for the Irish version of a BAFTA for her leading role in it.

The Calling is very different. Her performance as Sister Hilda is probably on more familiar territory of how audiences know her, especially in light of her current regular TV role in Shameless. She’s back on form being silly and funny.

MMM: When you write your films, how far do you have a specific audience in mind?
Dunn: As a writer, I think the audience doesn’t really enter into the process too much. But when I put on my director’s hat, I begin to sit in the darkened auditorium in my head and start working towards a specific target. But the writer Jan isn’t the same as the director Jan!

I knew that The Calling would appeal to an older, mostly female audience and I’ve been proved right. We couldn’t get completion money from the UK Film Council because they said there is no audience for this film.

Actually I don’t think they gave us the money because they don’t have enough money to give out and that’s the honest part, because from the very first screening in Edinburgh Film Festival the audiences have been a) packed to the brim and b) mostly women over forty.

A film like Mamma Mia comes out and everyone seems surprised that it is such a huge hit with audiences, but that film had the machine of a studio behind it and that machine totally targeted a specific female audience who are desperate to have films targeted at them.

We’ve had no press budget yet all the festival screenings of this film have been full. Edinburgh film festival nowadays gives an audience report and ours told us that we sold out all public screenings in advance with a 75% female audience.

MMM: The three features you’ve made are all micro-budget films. Can you explain what that means for you as a filmmaker?
Dunn: It means myself and the producer live very frugally indeed and make huge sacrifices that most people, particularly women, may find unpalatable.

I don’t think it’s so much a micro-budget thing, but all independent filmmakers don’t really earn very much money. It’s a labour of love which we choose to take on.

For us, we have a social conscience and we both became filmmakers because we feel strongly about things and want to have a voice.

Anyone who thinks about being a filmmaker for some kind of warped idea of lifestyle should forget it and go and be a cinematographer or a production designer or a sound designer etc, but unless you are really committed don’t be the person who spends 2 years on no income to get a film off the ground that may or may not see the light of day.

MMM: How do you view the British film scene today?
Dunn: It’s funny because since I left London five years ago I don’t really spend much time on the scene, but it’s nice to occasionally meet up with everyone at festivals like Edinburgh, Cannes, Berlin or Dinard.

However, on the day-to-day ground we actually feel quite apart from the film scene these days as everything is so London-centric. We’ve become the Network Partner for Screen South in Kent – which means we are kind of the hub here for professional filmmakers.

We also have friends in the regions who do this kind of thing too so the regional filmmaking scene is probably the scene we spend more time in. It can be very full-on in London… you feel obliged to go to events around twice a week and be in the know all the time and it becomes very all-consuming.

Nowadays it’s actually making the films which is all-consuming and for me that’s better as both myself and Elaine have always been doers rather than talkers, and there’s too many of those filmmakers in London to wade through before getting noticed.

We just get on with it really without too much thought of the British Film Scene. If you are engaged with making films then by the nature of that it means you keep in the know about movements in the industry just as much as being in London.

We read trade press and we try to stay constantly aware of changes all the time. It will be interesting to see what happens after the election. There’s so little money around to make films nowadays I’m glad to have had my start in micro-budget and still manage to pay union rates and get a film on cinema screens.

MMM: What’s next for you?
Dunn: When we last met, I’d just obtained the film rights to a Rose Tremain best-seller, Sacred Country. So I’m not halfway through the screenplay. But the next film we make as a company will be Elaine’s directorial debut called Lollipop. We expect to go into production with Sacred Country next year.

In the meantime, we have set up a young offenders’ film school in Kent to see if we can contribute towards tackling the modern phenomenon of anti-social behaviour flooding this country. We’ve had amazing results in turning some of these young adults into people who become more engaged with life and their community. So far, so good but we are as always under-funded, so we are setting the whole project up as a charity to raise the shortfall so we don’t have to close down.

THE CALLING IS IN CINEMAS NOW.