Filmmaker Michelle Williams Gamaker On Rewriting History Through Fantasy

Last week, Dundee Contemporary Arts unveiled their next exhibition, Our Mountains Are Painted on Glass, by British-Sri Lankan filmmaker Michelle Williams Gamaker, of which her new film, Thieves, stands at the centre. The fantasy adventure retells the story of the Thief of Bagdad, a silent, black-and-white film from 1924, which was remade in colour in 1940.

Dedicating her remake to exploring race and identity, William Gamaker's Thieves acts as a movie told within a movie. Bearing witness to a reversing of roles, characters originally played by Chinese-American actor Anna May Wong and Indian-born American actor Sabu are seen breaking out of their black-and-white screen images into full technicolour; a metaphor used to convey Disney's past prejudices as Williams Gamaker's central characters rise up to reclaim the story as their own.

Following on from its premiere at South London Gallery and now Dundee Contemporary Arts, we spoke to Williams Gamaker about the challenges of filmmaking today and why the magic of cinema will never die.

Christina Donoghue: Can you talk about your background as a filmmaker?

Michelle Williams Gamaker: Well, I chose to go to art school instead of film school in the late 1990s and early 2000s. And most of my tutors around that time had come out of either the London Filmmakers Co-op or the London Video Arts scene and so they were very much into performance art. I went to both those spaces because, in terms of mediums, they were quite accessible: you would just rent out a gigantic camera, stick a VHS tape in and get access to the equipment. That was the beginning of working with my body as a performer while also learning about cameras and starting to make films. By the time I left art school, I got into New Contemporaries which was quite a boost for me and gave me a sort of push in the right direction which was to keep on making in this area.

A part of me would have loved the film school route too but, in a way, I'm grateful I didn’t go down that path. I’ve always been someone who has watched a lot of films and TV and so i’ve always been obsessed with moving images.

CD: I think, regardless, an art school approach is pivotal to your development as a creative. I often do think that people who come from an artistic and creative background, particularly one synonymous with performance art are armed with much more room for experimentation there. Rather than say, with traditional filmmaking, you’re taught a set way, a set of rules, and if you don’t follow them, you’re downgraded; it’s quite regimented in that sense. I think an art education only encourages one’s artistic freedom, or at least it should.

MWG: Yeah, It’s quite free, isn’t it?

I’m grateful for that. I teach now at Goldsmiths although I’m currently on a research leave. But I will say that I do wish the arts were more respected as an important route of education; it’s where I found my place to speak.

CD: Was it performance art you studied?

MWG: It was just a fine art degree but it ended up being very performance-led. And because of low budgets, sometimes no budgets, you would use yourself in front of the camera as a model or subject. It’s funny because I always harboured fantasies that I'd be an actor or something and it expressed itself through performance. Another thing is that performance art is very much about shaping the image, which was also very much connected to my love of painting and trying to think through composition, texture and light. I was quite obsessive over it in my 20s. Even now, I still am with how I create my images.

CD: It’s interesting that you reference how having a low budget can push your creativity because I know a few people who still think a low budget is synonymous with unprofessionalism, which is just not true. A Low budget gives room for experimentation; you have to think outside the box. A budget doesn't dictate a film’s professionalism; its artistic ideas do. Moving on, can you talk a little bit about your latest project, Thieves?

MWG: Embedded within all of my films is a lot of attention to the costume and styling of the set. The film Thieves is basically, in a nutshell, based on two versions of the Thief of Bagdad - one from 1924, the other from 1940. Anna May Wong’s character wakes up in the 1940s set, but she’s trapped in her screen image, so she herself is in black and white while everyone else is depicted in technicolour. As is with all the marginalised film stars that I look at, my work is not only about the narrative but Western film history as a whole. I wanted to say that with her body, she carries her screen image with her and that she works within a structure that’s conditioned to reinforce a certain role or stereotype. It’s a little bit of a playful gimmick but it actually means a lot to me because it’s about Anna’s journey through the film, released back into the fully realised technicolour.

CD: There are a lot of Disney films from that period with racist underscores. What made you choose this film specifically to make a reproduction of?

MWG: Not so much the 1924 version, but the 1940 version, which is a real technicolour fantasy epic, was meant to come out at Christmas; it had this need to cheer people up. But it does what a lot of British and Hollywood films did at that time, which is look to the East, orientalise it, and, you know, make a spectacle of it. It’s based on a One Thousand and One Nights story. It’s got a lot of opulent sets and individuals participating in brown face makeup. It’s a marker of a type of filmmaking - those are the types of films that I watched on television as a teenager and they obviously stuck in my psyche because I absolutely adore TV productions and set builds and I think one of the greatest pleasures of being an artist is that you can return to your passions and I play with that a lot. There's obviously a deeper political meaning in the works I'm making but they alter from a kind of textural and visual space. Really, above all, it’s about celebrating the fantasy of cinema. I often try to say I use the tools of cinema against itself to lean into the magic of cinema but also use those sound effects and visual tricks to bring in a political message. It’s about using the structure to do more with it and do better.

CD: What is it about film as a medium to tell stories that you like the most?

MWG: Film as a medium within itself has such a transporting capacity. But also, and I say this with total seriousness, it enables the viewer to time travel. I’m not even just referencing period dramas, either. It's all-encompassing. Also, for me, film offers multiple challenges through writing, even just making and working with the sound designer and composer to add layers of meaning that initially I may not even see in the beginning script. It’s a process that, when brought to life, is akin to time travel itself.

CD: In relation to working with the sound designer and people who took up other roles like the costume and set - how did you enlist these people?

MWG: It’s an interesting time for me because I've spent the majority of my time working as an independent filmmaker and now, as the budgets go up, there’s a bit more scope to choose who I want to work with and how. I’ve worked with my cinematographer, Tom Wright, for 10 years but as for everyone else, it’s through my link at Goldsmiths. A huge percentage of the teams I work with generally are all artists in their own right and often individuals I may have taught at Goldsmiths years ago. For this project, It was really important for me to zone in to the individual talents of people I've known for years, and knowing I can trust them with that, whether it be costume or production design. I also think it’s important to note that while my budgets remain at a certain level, I will always have a hands-on approach in the casting of all my crew, as well as a casting of all my cast.

CD: Speaking about budget, how has your work changed since you won the Jarman Award?

MWG: It’s been a big shift and it definitely started to open doors to conversations that maybe weren’t being had before. Marking the shift, I think it’s important to speak about money sometimes and I'm not uncomfortable about doing that. The film I worked on before Thieves came in at around £17-£18,000 which is quite low, but that was shot on 16mm film. Thieves came in at just under £90,000 - that’s a lot more people coming to the table to support the project and as a result, you sort of see the expansion and scale of the production, but I will say, I don't always need to work to that budget. I think it’s about what you do with the money you have. I know how to apply the money where I need to.

CD: I think that’s where it comes back to your arts education. Helping you to not only be resourceful, but to think creatively and outside of any real limitations that may be imposed on your filmmaking, whether that be budget or limited crew. Final question: What do you want people to take away from this film?

MWG: I think I want people to, first and foremost, fall into the fantasy world that’s been constructed. That said, through the two lead characters, I want people to witness and listen to what they’re saying because I think that no matter where you’re from, a lot of us have absorbed cinema or screen culture and there have been moments where we’ve been witness to really odd casting decisions or racist casting decisions. I’m not, in any way, trying to be didactic here, but I do want people to secondly really think about that kind of viewing complicity.

I want the fantasy to bring you in. I want to leave you with magic. I want to write for characters of colour but I don’t expect them to carry all of the burdens and injustices of the world. What I want is for them to have full creative agency, expression and to just be fully realised. I Want people to come away with what the original Thieves of Baghdad does; It is meant to be a fantasy classic and I want my film to do the same, just with undercurrents that have a more political foundation.

CD: I think that’s a really important point raised because, obviously, some people make certain decisions, and they think if you’re someone from a marginalised group or community, then you have to be an activist for your group, or you have to stand up, or you’re cast for this reason. And at the end of the day, they should just be cast for the same reason as anyone else is - to act and act well.

MWG: Well, exactly. It’s always been the thing that I have to crunch through in my head, constantly asking the question, ‘What am I making the work for?’ I’m trying really hard to make it fit my own desire and pleasure, and of course, alongside that comes a wealth of more complex conversations but if I can’t make it on those terms, I’m sort of doing what’s being asked of a lot of performers and artists of colour which is to fix the system, and I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to be able to just make stuff that brings me a lot of joy and hopefully brings the viewers joy, too.

CD: Touching on those main characters that have existed in each version of the film, you change their narrative, right? Would you say their roles have been completely adjusted?

MWG: There’s a kind of truth to some of the aspects of their careers. There’s even dialogue from Anna May Wong that’s used verbatim. And then similarly, with director Michael Powell, I've taken dialogue from him and applied it so there is this kind of cinematic historical nod and it’s interesting to put the true words of someone back into a fictional script. But yeah, I have tweaked things.

This is actually the first film in my series of what I'm calling ‘fictional revenge’ which highlights three strands. ‘Fictional activism’ was my first, which culminated in an entire body of work I did about ten years ago which is followed by ‘fictional revenge’ and then what I'm working on now is ‘fictional healing’. All my brown protagonists overlap in different films so one day, I'd like to make an almighty showdown where they all appear in one film and it’s a complete extravaganza.

CD: I can’t help but picture a scene from a John Waters film.

MWG: Exactly! I think I’ll break a lot of rules by the end of that film, and I think it will be a completely overblown production when I get there, but you know, this is a lifelong project, so it’ll just take as long as it takes.

Our Mountains Are Painted on Glass at Dundee Contemporary Arts will be open to the public until 24 March, 2024.