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A Little Learning Is A Dangerous Thing
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A young man named Michael (played by Ryan Dylan) goes down a potentially dangerous internet rabbit hole which estranges him from his friends and family in Dominic Curran’s new thriller, A Little Learning Is A Dangerous Thing. Screening as part of the Belfast Film Festival, it explores the way that isolation and exposure to constant calls to action leads a well-intention guy who is struggling to recover from a traffic accident down a dangerous, obsessive path. When I met Dominic to discuss the film, I asked if it had any relationship to his previous short film, Cycle. It doesn’t, he says, but “It deals with some similar themes, definitely. Mainly toxic masculinity and issues with male violence. Although it's not as central an idea as it is in Cycle.”
Was there a reason why he picked this film for his first cinematic feature?
“Yeah. When I was coming up as a teenager, the people I looked up to were the Nineties indie filmmakers, in a big way. Kevin Smith, through his podcast and stuff, was someone who was almost a film teacher to me. So I always had the idea in my head that I wanted to make something completely independently and for next to no money. It was just a case of writing a script that fit with that, really. I've been writing for years, trying to write something that was both low budget and exciting. I wrote a lot of one room things, and it just never really appealed to me. It didn't seem like it was worth doing it.
“This was just” – he hesitates – “the stars aligned, really. I came up with this idea and was working on it for a while. It involved a style that I thought could be achieved on a very low budget and still be something exciting and worth watching. And Ryan and a number of other people who I worked with had reached a skill level where I just felt they could really help me make something amazing. I think his central performance really carries a lot of the movie. He's just brilliant in it.”
I suggest that this is a great calling card as a first feature because it very effectively demonstrates his mastery of technique. One notable feature is that there is a lot of layering, certainly with sound and sometimes with visuals. It seems like a reference to mental illness.
“Yeah, I mean, there's definitely some issues. I've done a lot of studying actually, and research, on brain injuries, which was an influence on the film. And undiagnosed or recovering from brain injuries, how difficult that can be and how you can lose yourself doing that, was a big influence on the movie. But yeah, I think a lot of people feel almost waterboarded by the internet, you know? They get into these self abusive cycles of wasting their lives watching nothingness. Or in the case of this character, convincing themselves that they're spending their time really fruitfully, creating a sort of illusion of learning.
“In reality it takes a lot more time and a lot more concentrated work to understand the complicated topics that this character thinks he's got a grasp on. So it was really creating a sense of that and the way in which the Internet washes over you. The montage in the middle was very inspired by Under The Skin, the Jonathan Glazer film. There's a sequence in that where she's driving around and it starts building up layer after layer of different people that she's watching. I became fascinated with that about five or six years ago. More just in my head, I was like, ‘that is how the Internet feels. That is exactly how it feels when you're completely overwhelmed by it.’
“I just wanted to put people in that place. Originally that montage, the rough cut of it was 40 minutes long. It was really torturous. Now it's two minutes or three minutes, maybe, and you get enough of a sense where it's still overwhelming. Filmmakers like Lars von Trier were very big influences on me, and they play around a lot with creating experiences that aren't necessarily enjoyable for the viewer but create a sense of something bigger.”
It’s about there being other reasons to go to cinema than just to enjoy oneself, I suggest, and he nods. We talk about how Michael fins work as a carer and spends time with a lot of older people who don't necessarily have that experience. For them, everything is going at a slower pace. It seems like he does get moments of quiet when he's in those spaces. Was that a deliberate contrast?
“Yeah, for sure. Obviously they're from a different generation, so they have no real consciousness of whatever what he's been exposed to here. He creates this reduced perspective where, from using the internet, he expects people to behave a certain way or to be evil, essentially, to be villainous in some sense. And the reality of people is, even if they actually are quite villainous, often the most villainous people are the most charming people, really.
“There's a deeper human side to it that he's just not taking into account, which is really what makes all this very difficult. He’s expecting to bump into a lot of wealthy people who are being looked after, and that's not the situation at all, really. He has a very myopic perspective on people. The whole problem is that he doesn't know that much. He doesn't know all the types of individual.
“The best things about people, in my opinion, are all the individual differences. The ways in which people are different, how they get where they are, is one of the best things to learn in life, to understand. He just has this idea in his head and he wants to lock it in.”
There's also a sense of tragedy to it because to begin with, people are reaching out to him and trying to connect, but he just drives everybody away with his behaviour. We get the impression that there are people who would like to somehow rescue those in his situation, but don't know how to do it. Nobody can get through to him.
“Yeah, I definitely feel that. I wanted people to feel that when watching it. At a certain point it's right there. You just need to see it. And you can see that you Just need to appreciate this is very complicated and you haven't got the solution. You’ve got to give people a certain amount of grace and patience and they'll give it back to you as well. And instead it's the stimulation. I think anger is very stimulating. I think that's why a lot of people get addicted to, like in comment sections and all these sorts of things. It's a sort of gratifying stimulation.
“They get their adrenaline pumped up, and it's the easy thing to do, to be angry. So, yeah, I think his dad, in particular, tries to help him learn from his own mistakes and realise that this is easy and actually being virtuous and peaceful, that's hard. That's the hard path. I don't want to ruin it, but he struggles with that throughout the whole movie.”
How did he work with Ryan to get that performance?
“I gave him a playlist of music that I used to write as well. It had a very heavy electronic feel to it, like, Rage against the Machine, some Ghost Wolf Girl, I think it was called, or Machine Girl, which is really great electronic music. And Incline Core, which is these two guys who I love. It's sort of like modern jazz, punk, two guys in masks playing saxophone and drums. Just really chaotic stuff.
“The first thing we shot was all that montage stuff, so the first thing we did was get him in the basement where his character lives. For two days he went through and watched all these montages that I'd cut together, of public domain YouTube videos and things that some people had kindly licensed to us. It gave him a sense of what this character is going through, as close as we could possibly get by just making him live in the basement where he had to eat disgusting microwave meals. We had a lot of conversations before that, obviously, about the character, and a lot of development of the script with him. But from then on, he understood that this guy had been inundated with information that he couldn't possibly process in the summer where he was in the basement trying to learn.
“Ryan's just a fantastic actor, so it wasn't too hard, really. I gave him all the touchstones, like Taxi Driver, obviously a very huge touchstone. We talked about that character a lot. I said to people ‘The quick summary for the film is sort of a digital Taxi Driver, in a more modern age. Travis Bickle has been through the Vietnam War, possibly, and is living in New York. This is a guy who's been through no such thing. He’s exceptionally middle class. His difficulty is ignorance – ironically, I think, probably because he spends too much time on the Internet. If he'd gone to the park, he would have been much more satisfied, just walking around.”
It's interesting that he has this big focus on the natural environment, but he's not actually spending time in it.
“No, he isn't. You know, it's a very obvious pressing issue. I've grown up being told about global warming all the time, and it's something that's always in the back of our heads, so it's a very easy thing to fixate [on]. And then he finds August Wellesley-Bond, who owns the lough. The mind seems most comfortable focusing on a singular person. For me, he's trying to come from a more economic and colonialist perspective, and this is where he ends up, with this one thing that gathers all these other ideas together and focuses them all on one person, who ultimately is just one piece of the puzzle.
“He has created a version of him in his head and has some idea of him as ultra-wealthy. He thinks this is his connection to the billionaires of the world. I think in reality, this guy is maybe pushing a million as his net worth, you know? I think it's the internet creates this sort of haze over everything and you can just focus and lock in on whatever you want.”
The film is well suited to the Belfast Film Festival, I note.
“Yeah,” he says. “It's so amazing. Belfast has this whole independents section. A lot of film festivals don't have anything for independents. So it's amazing and I would love to sell it out. It's a very exciting movie, I think, so I would love to get young people in. I just want people to experience it in a cinema – it'll be a really unique experience. So I hope I can get people in, and then I would love to get it out into the world. I've got it in more festivals soon.
“I was in a training thing with Werner Herzog in January. It was amazing, but I've made so many connections through it as well, so I want to go to everywhere that they are as well, and actually see it. But it's amazing Belfast hosting all these films.”
