How pop promo maker Tim Pope got the call to move into movies. And how he homed Phone with the help of a fad, fate and a 'bacon and egg' Swatch watch! A Film Review interview by David Aldridge

True-Brit pop promo maestro Tim, maker of music vids for David Bowie, Queen, Paul McCartney and The Cure, has heard the call. And he's answered it by making his feature debut with the quirkiest piece of offbeat psychodrama since Twin Peaks. It's called Phone. It's just 31 minutes long and its script is the true-life transcript of a bizarre 'prankster' call-- of which, more later.
Even more remarkably, the micro movie, which Tim shot in Los Angeles, was made in under two weeks. Now, normally, it takes Hollywood even longer than that to respond to an earthquake alert, let alone a film plan. But Tim's idea deemed that casting directors queued up to have their talent tapped for it.
Within 36 hours of Phone's synopsis being sent round, Tim had secured and signed Exorcist girl Linda Blair, Fisher King star Amanda Plummer, Bill Pullmand and Ed Blatchford. And all for a short- mind-fuck' film about an egg-and-bacon watch, with a phone conversation for a script.
Lucky
To find out how an English commerical and promo maker wound up LA-shooting an emotion-wringing mini psychodrama, we have to fast-backward a few months. "I'd wanted to make a feature film for a long time," lanky, nervous Tim tells me, sitting needlessly in the London Soho office of his production company, Cowboy Films. "But I didn't just want to go the classic pop promo director's route of simply doing an overlong pop promo. I wanted to do something with actors in it- just to prove that I could handle them. And I made a very conscious effort to find something that was utterly removed from the sort of work that I'd been associated with in the past. I'm a very lucky person. Sometimes fate steps in. And that's what happened with Phone.
"I wnet to America, ostensibly for two weeks just to do some work with David Bowie. But somehow the trip got extended to four months. I did some filming in New York with Spike Lee's brother and sister. And eventually I wound u doing a few commericals in Los Angesles. There, a friend gave me this tape of weird phone calls to listen to."
Prank Calls
Now, apparently, the latest craze in fad-frenzied America is to make prankster response calls to small ads. There were 30 such mischievous calls on the tape that Tim heard. "Most of them were just routine," he recalls. "But one really registered. It was about a Swatch watch. A very collectable Swatch watch. One with an egg-and-bacon design. One couple was offering it for sale. The other couple was offering to buy it. It wounds banal, but it was anything but. For the call involved a relationship that was radically different from the relationshipips struck up in the other calls. And, most intriguingly of all, it wasn't clear from the conversation who the victims were. It should have been the couple on the receiving end of the call. But somehow, here, it wasn't. Something just clicked, and I just knew I had to make a film about it."
Seduction & Death
Phone, says Tim, is a film about "people scoring points, and putting one over on other people. And, ultimately, it's about seduction and death. For Tim has applied his imagination to the manufacture of an enigmatic, multi-level 'what might have been.'
The prankster callers, with their mind games and manipulations, may seem to be the bad guys. But, boy, just maybe they've gotten a really wrong number this time. For Phone hints that their Swatch watch 'victims' are, in fact, a couple of killers. And who's to say what happens after the film tantalizingly finishes in mid mind-fuck? Indeed, who's to know what happened after that original, inspirational call was concluded?
Phone statys 95 per cent true to the call's transcript. Only a few words were omitted, Tim says, to keep the film on course, and to stop the storyline going off on tangents. "But I never told the actors it was a real call. I'm not sure they'd have been able to handle it."
Risk-Taking
Within 36 hours of hearing the call tape, and of wondering not only who the 'victims' were, but also why the 'non-victims' stayed on the phone as things got weirder and weirder, Tim had a transcript ready, and a synopsis sent to top Hollywood agents. "This was on the Monday, and we were set to start filming on the Saturday," Tim remembers. "We were worried that we'd get not response. But the phone started going crazy. Hollywood as a whole may not be known for its risk-taking. But, individually, its actors and actresses oviously are. By the Wednesday, our synopsis was the hottest thing out there. We had more than 80 responses. And we were able to cherry-pick who we'd really like, rather than just take who we could get. Somehow, the word had gotten out that this four-hander had a script with a difference."
Tim intensively rehearsed his actors. And he 'moulded' the transcript around them- albeit without actually altering a single word of dialogue. "It was a very risky project for some of the actors," he says. "i just wanted to give them room to play."
Intensity
And they stayed separated for the whole of the three-day shoot--one couple filming on the one floor of the shooting facility; the other three floors down. "They only responded to the voices on the phone. They never saw each other. We had to keep the intensity going. The whole thing is words: who's saying what to whom, and for what reasons. And, to get the circles of words going, we had to shoot the film in long takes. The shots are simple. There are only around four of them in the whole film."
But visual boredom is kept well at bay by bizarre sight sleights. Lamp shades inexplicably alter colour between shots. There's an enigmatic glimpse of what appears to be a woman's dead body. "I really admire the actors for making Phone." Tim tells me. "The speed of filming was very hard for them. And the overall project was a major risk. There were many, many reasons why they really should not have done it. But they did. And they proved themselves. "And I proved to myself, and hopefully to others, that I can direct actors. Whcich was one of the main objects of the exercise really."
Mind-Game
Fate played a little mind-game of its own on Tim during the micro-movie's making. "We wer filming a scene where Linda Blair was talking on the phone while lying on a bed," he recalls. "And it inevitable brought to mind that bed scene of hers in The Exorcist.
"Mid-way through the scene, I went the three floors down to see how the couple on the other end of her line were getting on. And I passed the crew room, where a TV had been left on. And guess what calbe TV was showing just at that very minute? Right! Linda's head-spinning scene from The Exorcist!"
Cue Twilight Zone theme music! At the time of talking, Phone hadn't yet secured UK distribution. If anyone out there can help, you can contact Tim and Cowboy Films on 071-734-7342.
In the meantime, Tim's thoughts are already turning towards his next project, a psychological thriller called Suite 16. "In some repects, its feel is quite similar to Phone's," he says. "But I was asked to do the film before its producers had seen that."
Must be fate sticking its feet in again.

The actticle is accompanied by a ninth page black & white phote of Phone director Tim Pope, A fifth page b&w photo of Ed Blatchfor on the line in Phone; Fifth page b&w photo of Linda Blair exorcising phone fears; Fifth page b&w photo of Tim Pope: "I proved to myself that I can direct actors."