A 36-Hour Bus Ride in My Underpants

I just visited England and I have a complicated relationship with the place.

I only spent a few days, but I did a lot of walking and some retrospective understanding.

The 80s and 90s was not a glorious high point for England and English culture. And growing up in small-town Devon was a particularly closed-minded place, a poor place, and the place where thinking differently was ready to make your life a bit harder. It felt like the way to do well in this town at that point was to stay in your lane. And do that I largely did, with alcohol, music, clothing, ways of speaking. My accent got noticed for being more Devonian in my teens, just because I went to a school where the kids there spoke those strong accents.

This feeling, this energy around me, always gave me the sense that I wanted to go somewhere else, discover other things. I like new things. I like challenges, finding out what’s beyond where I am. I think I had a pretty strong sense of that even when I was a kid.

Travel journalism was one of my great fascinations, along with sport. I would write out imaginary football teams from around the world to play computer games with. A birthday present from my brothers to me was once a guide to the Trans-Siberian Railway. Both were ways to understand the world. Both spoke to a variety of cultures outside my hometown, and both took me away from the small minded bit of little England.

Which of course is the crucial element. What I had and didn’t have, through the necessary friction of youth. And what I yearned for and pushed against.

Being back in England made me think of everything that made me want to travel in the first place.

Going home is such a challenging topic for me. Ripe for a film that I’ve tried and failed writing. Well not failed maybe, just not quite nailed. Maybe I’ll give it another go. There’s this itch of a feeling, a harsh reflection that’s thrown up on you in the town you’re from. It’s always rich with inner challenges and reframing of who I am versus who I want to be.

On these long walks this past week, I spent time thinking about what the place around me makes me feel and what it felt like to a young me.

Flashes of all the strange and wonderful places I’ve been to in the over 25 years since I’ve lived in Devon. The situations I’ve put myself in and lived in kept rising up. Not quite with pride or satisfaction, but a sense of wonder at the choices I’ve made, and my willingness to go along with and force things to happen.

A list started forming.

I love a list. Especially as a way to reveal character. Autoportrait by Édouard Levé, which does this brilliantly and I return to it often. It’s an incredible self-portrait built from seemingly unconnected sentences.

These kinds of lists, unlike stories, are little glimpses and fractions of places I’ve been and things I’ve done. As I was walking around Devon, I started collating them in my head to get more of a sense of what they mean to me.

The first big trip I really took was to South America when I was 19. Whilst I was there I took a 36-hour bus ride in Chile. Just before I got on the bus I’d washed my clothes so that I might feel fresh, but about 30 minutes into the journey I started to realise that the washing detergent was making my skin come up in big red rashes everywhere, from head to toe. I decided to just strip down to my underpants and do the entire bus journey in my pants.

I was born and raised a vegetarian, so I’ve never really had meat or fish. When I was making a film about beekeepers in Yugoslavia, I did a research trip on my own and stayed on the floor of a guy I’d never met. I went out into the country and met beekeepers. One of them made lunch for us and decided to make a fish soup with all the heads. As a guest I had to serve myself first, which meant I could tell by their gestures that I was supposed to choose the juiciest heads for myself.

In my second year at university I wrote a short film about a lighthouse keeper playing chess via post against someone from Finland. We needed to find a lighthouse. I can’t really remember if needing to find a lighthouse came first or the film idea, but touring around all these lighthouses felt like true filmmaking. Scouting still might be one of the best or worst things to do, depending on the locations you find. Somehow the British lighthouse organisation were totally okay with showing us tonnes of them, and when we chose one on an island for our film, they gave us the key.

Somewhere in the middle of this walk I start thinking about Scotland and my commercials…

The best commercial shoot I ever did, where we got to travel the UK finding out different people’s idea of what they thought of as home. As part of that we got to go to Ben Fogle’s favourite beach on Harris. Which took freaking ages. When we got there it was so brutally foggy and windy that we couldn’t see or really stand, but then the sun cleared for about 20 minutes and we got the most glorious shots with this incredible water in front of us. Then Ben, and the advertising agency, got on a private jet and went home.

That’s just pure joy though. Going to beautiful places you might not otherwise go to. There’s no great challenge to that, just a bit of determination and good production sense.

There are other times, especially when I was younger, where it took this sense of drive and not quite bravery but well-filled selective ignorance and single-mindedness.

I’ve never sought out danger of any sort, but I also need to be dissuaded quite hard if I think something’s a good idea. When I started researching a drunken horse race in Guatemala, I wasn’t that put off that some people had been burned alive for taking photos there a few years beforehand. We turned up in the town. The Mayan council wanted to vet us, so we were led into a little hut in the dark, where I had to explain what I wanted the film to be. After about 23 hours of travelling. They put potatoes in the fire and and I sat with this circle of elders, telling them what I thought the film would be. I was 27.

These places weren’t really linked in my brain. It was more like a tumble of situations, places, and people.

I filmed the last person in the UK who made handmade glass eyes. About once a year someone writes to me trying to find a way to get in touch with him. Lots of these situations I put myself in take on different meaning when I learn more, or think more, about what the person I was with actually meant to me or to the world. It’s a particularly niche, particularly beautiful thing that is obsolete.

I once got to interview Franco Battiato in his house in Sicily. If I had known and appreciated who Franco was and his music as much as I do now, I might have flipped out. Instead I just got to do a very focused interview and have lunch in this really charming man’s house. In fact the main thing I took away from him, for years, was that he gave us a herbal liqueur which was un-f’ing-believable and which he told us they only made in a small store around the corner from his house.

I don’t know what this teaches me about myself as a filmmaker or as a person. The best I can understand is that I have a high tolerance for discomfort, a lot of patience and I can stand still for ages.

These are the the things that flooded in as I walked and remembered and tried to get a sense of perspective on ideas of home and where we come from and what that means to me.

And the joy that filmmaking has given me. And the bravery. And stupidity.

Does any of this mean anything? Who knows.

Don’t you also lose your mind when you return home?

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