Clever crafting with Idiots

Chris Barfoot on the set of Idiots Anonymous with cinematographer John E Fry Photo: Idiots Anonymous Movie Limited/Jan Pavelka

Idiots Anonymous might be filmmaker Chris Barfoot’s first feature, but he’s far from new to the business. The director worked with Jeremy Beadle and Edgar Wright at London Weekend Television back in the Nineties and also made several successful short films, Phoenix (Prunella Scales), Dead Clean (Shane Richie, Andrew Sachs) and Gothic horror The Reckoning. After a break from the industry, which we talked about when we caught up to chat about the feature project on Zoom, he went back to university and has now produced his blackly comic drama about a group of convicts forced to take group therapy sessions if they want to get parole.

Among the group at the first session are an addict determined to disrupt proceedings, a soldier with PTSD and a woman who sought a unique form of vengeance. As they begin to confess, Barfoot mixes comedy and tension as unexpected secrets are revealed. The ensemble cast of his one-room film includes Richard Summers-Calvert (Drive Me To The End), Sara Dee and Austin Caley. It’s a script-driven film, which makes it all the more remarkable that Barfoot wrote it so quickly.

“The first 50 pages fell out of me in one night,” he recalls. “Over time I expanded it to about 75 or something. But apart from one character I added later, it all just fell out of my head on the page in six or seven hours. It was constant, I couldn't stop.”

The speed is also a surprise, given that he’d taken a break from the industry, in about 2006. Discussing how that came about he said: “I’d done a 10-year thing, where half of that was creating short films for selling through to NBC, the SyFy Channel, Sky Movies, that kind of thing. They were classed as shorts but really they were mini features. So I’d done that quite successfully for a few years and it was time to do a feature.

Richard Summers-Calvert as Shithead. Chris Barfoot: 'I created characters who were prisoners – you don't go to prison generally for being a sweetheart' Photo: Idiots Anonymous Movie Limited/Jan Pavelka

“I'd written a screenplay for a mate of mine, Ray Winstone, who was into the script. So Vinnie Jones and Samantha Morton, and Molinaire, were involved but we didn’t have the contracts down yet. Everyone had agreed and then Spielberg contacted Ray through his agent and said, ‘I’ve got a gig for you’ and that was that.”

The gig was Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull and though there were no hard feelings from Barfoot it left his project, The Fall Of Roman's Empire, adrift.

“I just lost my nuts, if you’ll excuse the expression,” says Barfoot. “I just gave up and ran away. I drove a lorry for five years. I just couldn’t bear the thought of what I’d lost.”

Some turbulent years in his personal life followed, including losing one of his brothers to a road traffic accident but, ultimately, he says: “I decided that I needed to get my act back together. The only thing I knew was film. I'm a writer or director and I needed to get back in the game.”

Having had a long lay-off, Barfoot realised he needed to skill himself up with some fresh qualifications.

“I decided that the only way I was going to learn about what was going on was to go to uni and learn about digital film. I picked up a couple degrees when I was 50 – that was 2016 when I started that and I did both inside a two-year period because I already had the experience so they let me off the first two years of the Honours degree. And the second one was a Masters. So after that, I kind of knew what I was doing with the technical side of the business. Even though how we do business had changed, technically, how you shoot the film, dealing with actors, all that kind of thing was exactly the same… although actors have moved on, there is a lot more need for love in the world than perhaps there was.”

Then came the inspiration for Idiots Anonymous, which presented some challenges in terms of shooting because of its one-room setting and the fact that Barfoot only had a limited time to capture his 12-member cast on camera.

Chris Barfoot during his early years of success Photo: Courtesy of Chris Barfoot

Much of the success stems from the actors and crew, says Barfoot. “I look for highly skilled people and I’m very lucky that I found them.”

He adds: “It's the cast that bring you the true character. You’re just giving them sort of 2D, it's their skill that brings them to life. You're just there to sort of point at them and go, ‘A bit louder’ or, ‘A bit quieter’, things like that. It's tweaking, that's what the director does on the day.”

In the case of Idiots Anonymous, they had a three-day rehearsal followed by a three-day shoot.

“It had to have the rehearsal or the shoot would never have been managed in three days,” says Barfoot. “So all we did was rehearse it again and again and again and again – they all knew their lines, they were all off book and then, when we got to the end of the second day, they could bring extra elements of what they believed the character had, a bit of adlib. There's not too much but certainly a nuance as in how they project themselves.”

When he originally had the idea, it was 2019, Covid hit, and there was a suggestion that it might work best as a podcast, then just as the pandemic was getting into the rearview mirror, there was the writers’ and actors’ strike. But a friend of his, Fabrizio Santino – known to many as Ziggy in Hollyoaks – said they should do it in a proper way from the start. But there was no money at that time and Barfoot said there were other constraints.

“We knew we had to shoot 40 to 90 minute takes on this. You couldn't just do it the usual way, 20 seconds, ‘Cut!’, change the glass, it's not like that. So we filmed it against six cameras pointing in one direction, with half of the cast, and we'd go wide, mid, close and so we shot nine movies’ worth of material in the first day. Then the second, we did the same with the cameras facing the others. It was a hell of a risk because things change. So we shot 18 films to cut one, and my cast were spot on, every take.

“I’d never done anything like this because it was like theatre meets TV with a film cut. It was like all three media in one. I’d never had a chance of the luxury of having proper rehearsals before, so this was magnificent fun.

Idiots Anonymous used six cameras and was shot in three days Photo: Idiots Anonymous Movie Limited/Jan Pavelka

“I had three days with my cast. It was glorious.Then when we got them in the room, the camera's ready to go and it never ceased and the third day was just about pick-ups, stuff like getting them to stand up, sit down, move around. We finished an hour early. I’d never done that before.”

Barfoot says the good thing about having so much footage was that if one shot didn’t work, he had something else to try. Plus he was able to select the best moments of performance from each of his cast. As for the characters, they’re no angels. “I wanted to be truthful with my audience,” he says. “So I created characters who had done wrong, they were prisoners – you don't go to prison generally for being a sweetheart. But I had to think about not making my people hateful, they had to have redeeming qualities, all of them, as most human beings do, otherwise no one's going to want to watch it or see it again. They've all got to have something, they don't connect, but somehow in moments they do.”

Among the characters is the colourfully named Shithead (Summers-Calvert). “Not very refined, right?” says Barfoot with a laugh. "But that’s the character, that’s who he was, that’s what his mother called him and that’s the life he had. So you know that whether you like him or not, life had given him a rough deal and you kind of forgive a person a little bit, don't you, for their past, if it wasn’t down to them. But everything that happened to him since is because he carried on down that road, so maybe he is a toe-rag or maybe he’s just got this thing for self-hate and then, as an audience, you just want to try to help fix it.”

The strength of the characters and the unexpected interplay between them is what drives Idiots Anonymous, which has received a BBFC 15 rating and which Barfoot hopes will have its premiere at a festival soon, intending to screen it during Cannes. And he already has further projects up his sleeve.

“There's one called Hell's Gate that's with a broker in London at the moment,” says Barfoot “That's a big sci-fi epic. The next one I’m looking at is called The Farm, it’s a thriller with a slasher-type ending. I’ve got six or seven screenplays and a short series ready to go.”

He adds: “This was an odd one, long rehearsals and previously directing one-on-one with everybody on Zoom or whatever, and it was a great writing experience.”

You can read more about Idiots Anonymous at idiotsanon.com and follow the progress of the film on Instagram and watch the trailer below.