Mark Jenkin interview | the Rose of Nevada filmmaker on Cornwall, fishing and sound design

Cornish director Mark Jenkin has fast emerged as one of the British film industry’s most provocative and striking artists. His feature film Bait (2019) immediately established an air of blackly comic foreboding with its disorienting use of sound and stark imagery, further cemented by the 2023 release Enys Men.

Jenkin’s latest film is Rose of Nevada, a Mary Celeste-esque mystery story about the titular fishing vessel, which has mysteriously returned to its native port 30 years after a tragedy consumed its crew. Talented British stars George MacKay and Callum Turner play the Rose of Nevada’s unsuspecting new fishermen, who find themselves travelling back in time to inhabit the bodies of the original crew members.

What unfolds is surrealistic, arresting, poignant and humorous in equal measure. Devon & Cornwall Film’s Sean Wilson caught up with Mark to discuss his filmmaking process, the essence of the fishing industry and the ways in which sound can both entrance and unsettle an audience.

The following is a transcription of the full podcast interview, which can be heard above.

Rose of Nevada is released in cinemas on 24 April and on BFI Blu-ray and BFI Player this summer.

SEAN: So, Mark, it’s lovely to be able to talk to you about your third feature film, Rose of Nevada. On my initial impression of the movie, I was really struck by the Gothic nature of it. The idea of the past coming back and reclaiming itself. Was that part of your inspiration for the story?

MARK: I don’t think it was. I’m never quite sure what ‘Gothic’ means. My work has been described in those terms before so maybe I should Google what it means. Get an exact definition. I had this idea for an opening scene that had been knocking around in my head for a long time, this ghost boat, effectively, coming back and reappearing in the harbour one morning. It had been lost 30 years before with all hands. I had that idea for a long time and didn’t really know where to go with it.

During the pandemic, I needed something to write because Enys Men had been put on hold when all production stopped. I spoke to Mary Woodvine, my partner, about this idea I’d had and she said, ‘Well, what happens after that?’ She suggested that maybe not everyone is surprised that the boat has come back. I felt that was really interesting and it opened the story out.

It could have simply been the community trying to work out what had happened and why the boat had come back.  Logically, their first step would surely be to report it to the authorities. It would then become a conspiracy thriller or something like that. I loved the ultimate idea that the community just didn’t tell anybody that the boat had come back, and they put it back out into their fleet because they took it as an omen that things were going to improve in the community. It went from there and we batted ideas back and forth between us until we had a beginning, middle and end, and not necessarily in that order.

SEAN: Yes, as you’ve described it there, the movie becomes a more subjective experience from the point of view of George MacKay’s character. When he realises he’s stepped back in time and the village isn’t as he knows it, that’s a marvellous moment. There’s humour in it but it’s also surrealistic. Do you find that the overall success of a project hinges on these kinds of creative decisions?

MARK: Yeah, I think so. On the page it’s quite easy to write: someone slips back in time and then has to deal with the consequences. But then it’s about, what if that happened to me or you? Would you stand in the street screaming only to be taken away? There are dramatic things you have to do that might not necessarily align with reality, but that’s the nature of movies. You have to decide whether you’re trusting what you’re seeing, whether George’s character’s reality is really reality or not. I never really knew if an audience was going to go with that until it was put in front of an audience. Either the audience’s suspension of disbelief is very strong, or we got away with it –again.

SEAN: How much of a film’s success is based on thinking through it versus instinctive decisions?

MARK: I try not to think about anything. Thinking is always the start of the end. It’s purely about being instinctive and about feeling it. Thinking and cinema just don’t go together, for me. If you’re watching a film in a theatre and you start thinking, from top to bottom the whole thing is destroyed. If you start thinking about the logic of a story, the whole thing falls to pieces. If you start questioning your feelings while watching a certain film, having got on a bus, paid for the ticket, sat through all the adverts and witnessed the light and sound coming up on the screen, the whole experience is dead. It’s all about feeling. As much as you can, you need to just feel it during the creation process, not overthink things. Use the brain that’s in your gut as that’s the best brain one has. The brain in our heads is a dick that should be ignored at all times. It’s instinct and feeling but it is a big fight to stop thinking about things. There’s that saying, overthinking is dangerous.

SEAN: Well, so much of the joy of Rose of Nevada is the show don’t tell approach to the storytelling. The tactility of the boat is itself an important character. We feel the texture of the boat, we hear the chains being drawn up from the deep. We hear the waves crashing. How much do you rely on the tactility of the landscape to bring your story forward?

MARK: It’s a combination of the tactility, as you say, of the landscape, and the way that it’s captured. Also, not just the way it’s captured but the way it’s put together with the sound and the picture to create the final product. The thing is, with film, it only deals with two senses. You see it and you hear it. But film really comes alive when the other senses are stimulated. I’m always really happy when I read a review where somebody says, ‘Oh, I’ve come out of the cinema and I think I’m smelling of fish.’ Or, ‘It felt like I had rust on my hands.’ There have been gimmicks during the 130-year history of cinema that have been designed to play with the other senses like shaking the seats or spraying water out into the audience.

SEAN: The old William Castle approach.

MARK: Yeah, that sort of thing. Even 3D, to a certain extent. But those gimmicks never really stick and it’s only ever about watching the picture on the screen and hearing the sound coming out of the speakers. When the form is used to its fullest potential, the other senses are stimulated. It’s really important to me. That’s why I find the fishing industry so cinematic. It’s an alien environment for almost everybody. Not many people are fishermen in this country, but it’s very familiar. People can relate to it, but most haven’t experienced it. I like the potential to be able to show something that’s familiar, and to give the audience something that’s experiential. That’s my attempt at 4D cinema.

SEAN: I grew up in Torquay by the coast so I can relate to exactly what you said there: the smells, the sights, the sounds. This is one of the reasons why I enjoyed the film so much. I’m not a fisherman at all and don’t have my sea legs, but I recognise the briny smell emanating from the film.

MARK: But you were probably surrounded by fishermen growing up, weren’t you?

SEAN: Yes, almost certainly in a surreptitious or subconscious sense. You walk past people and register certain characters. This is what the film observes so brilliantly.

MARK: Yeah, places like Torquay and, just down the way from you, places like Brixham. These places exist because of the fishing. Even if you’re not involved in the fishing, the whole culture and local economy is shaped by that. If you growing up in a fishing town, you are fishing folk. We’re just up the road from Newlyn and there would likely be nothing there if it wasn’t for the fishing. It’s in everybody to a certain degree, whether you’re involved in or not. There is that slight paradox of it being very alien and very familiar at the same time. It’s an industry that’s worldwide, one of the most ancient ways of life on the planet. Every culture has a relationship to fishing if they’ve got a coastline, or big lakes or rivers.

SEAN: When we look at depictions of the sea, it’s often quite atavistic and primal. Like you say, we understand it on a deep level, even if we’re not in it.

MARK: Yeah, I mean, having been brought up in a predominantly Christian country, fishermen are almost as prominent as the Bible. In old storytelling, there is always fishing. It’s one of those very rare things in that it’s both ancient and contemporary. Fishermen are often called the last of the hunters. We were all hunters at one point. I was almost going to say that fishermen are like mythic beings but I’ll retract that because I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few weeks saying that I don’t like the romanticisation of the fishing industry. And yet here I am, practically describing them as mythic figures. In a sense, however, they are because of that timelessness.

SEAN: You mentioned Newlyn there. This film, and Enys Men and Bait, both of which preceded it, have done remarkable things in putting the Cornish landscape on the map. How important a character is Newlyn in the movie?

MARK: Well, Newlyn isn’t a character in the film because we didn’t shoot anything there. We never considered it because it’s a working fishing port. I wouldn’t have been comfortable working there in amongst the fishing community and making something as relatively frivolous as a film. Also, it’s my local community and filmmaking is disruptive. I wouldn’t want to go in and piss anybody off. In Rose of Nevada, the village is called Nebaum [sic] Barton – if you freeze frame the letters that George MacKay picks up, you’ll be able to see it.

It’s important to note that it’s a fictionalised place because I don’t want anyone to think that I’m making a comment on a specific place or a community. Cornwall isn’t even really mentioned in the film. For people who know me, know Cornwall and know my filmmaking, they’ll know it’s Cornwall but I don’t want it to be specifically a comment on Cornwall. It has a specific, and hopefully authentic, context in which it’s set but the story needs to be universal in order for it to be worth telling. For me, it’s not even a film about fishing. I’m no spokesperson for the Cornish fishing industry. I’m just using that setting, that context, to locate my story in. It’s important for me to put an authentic context on screen. It’s slightly more pointed in my case because I personally believe that Cornwall has got a real image problem in the way it’s portrayed on screen. It’s been quite damaging in the past. It’s been romanticised and simplified.

That goes for the fishing industry as well – either overly romanticised or demonised with not much in the middle. If there’s a plot hole, a logical hole or a believability hole in the film, it’s the idea that in contemporary Cornwall there could be a derelict fishing harbour. [laughs] There’s no such thing! Either the harbour is being used commercially for fishing or otherwise, within an hour it’s been rebranded as a leisure facility and packed out with paddle borders, leisure craft and the like. For that reason, I don’t think the harbour in the film is recognisable as a specific place. It’s bordering on allegorical when you see this derelict harbour. The village is also something that’s been left behind. We filmed the main street in one particular village but other bits are filmed all over the place. Everything is a jigsaw and an amalgamation of several different locations to create something that’s new and, importantly, non-specific.

SEAN: I’m primarily a soundtrack journalist and the legacy of both music and sound in your films is fascinating. This goes back to Bait with, and forgive me if this isn’t the correct phrase, the post-synced sound. Did you carry that legacy through into this film or did you change up your process?

MARK: It was exactly the same. So, with the camera I use, you can’t really capture location sound with it. I mean, you could, but it would be quite difficult and cumbersome to do it. So, when I started using this camera for the first time, I threw away the idea of ever being able to capture location sound. Initially, I thought it would be a real bind, and a lot of work to do all the sound in post, but I took that decision based on the camera I’d chosen. Instead, it turned out to be the best possible decision because now, I create everything in post in a much more controlled environment. I can take my time with the sound.

I work with my supervising sound editor, Ian Andrews, just outside Penzance, and we spend a lot of time in the studio carefully constructing it from scratch rather than recording location sound that may have to be fixed later on. We don’t have to spend any time correcting mistakes. We start from a blank canvas, which is a great starting point. In Rose of Nevada, for example, a lot of stuff with the boat was filmed in the inner harbour at Hale, which is overlooked by a huge Asda supermarket, and we were shooting in the middle of the school summer holidays, so you can imagine what the noise was like. So, as long as we’re not featuring any of that visually, and because we’re not recording sound, the audience will never know that. Until I ruin the magic of cinema by explaining it to you! You frame out the Asda car park and you then add the sound of whistling wind and the sea, and all of a sudden you’re not in Hale but out in the middle of the open ocean. Post-syncing the sound is my favourite bit of the process in many ways.

SEAN: It fulfils a practical purpose, but does it also have an aesthetic purpose in that the audience feels slightly unnerved and discombobulated by the effect of the post-synced sound?

MARK: I think so, yeah. There’s a definite level of abstraction when you post-sync the sound. Sometimes, when you visually abstract the film, it’s easier for the audience to work it out. They can recognise that something’s out of focus or moving at a funny speed or whatever. But audio is much more sophisticated than the image. You can have maybe 20 tracks of sound that are all naturalistic but then you maybe have one track of sound that’s playing backwards or slow or something, which unsettles the audience. But they don’t know why.

It’s like when you watch a David Lynch movie. He was the master at doing that. He has just one sound going backwards and you’re no longer able to relax in your seat. Something’s not quite right here. And the fact that you can’t quite work it out makes it even more unsettling. Playing with that in the sound is something that I really enjoy doing. Like I say, I fell into it accidentally. I was forced into it because of the camera I decided to use, but I would never go back now. I’d never go back to location sound recording.

SEAN: So, the camera you describe, that’s the hand-cranked camera, yes?

MARK: The Bolex H-16 camera, yeah. The one I use is almost exactly my age, so it’s about 50 years old. Very simple, you just wind it up and it runs for about 27 seconds. Then you wind it up again and it runs for another 27 seconds. It takes 100-foot rolls of film that last about 2 minutes 45. It means you work in a very focused yet fragmented way, or because it’s fragmented, that’s what makes it focused. That’s why the film doesn’t have very many long takes in it. It’s made up of fragments that construct the overall montage, which is another key signifier of my work.

SEAN: I got the David Lynch impression as well, that sense of being in a liminal space. That extends to the music as well, and I understand you also hand-craft the music from scratch as well, is that right?

MARK: Yeah, and I really like that expression, liminal space. I love taking spaces we’re familiar with that aren’t necessarily liminal, but through an abstraction of sound and picture, making them liminal. The music augments all of that. I fell into doing the music accidentally with Bait. I created some drones to go over the rough cut of Bait in the absence of the Foley. I placed drones to cover up the absence of footsteps and other things. The drones ended up staying in the edit for so long that myself and the producers really liked the effect. We ended up creating a score out of these drones, and I got a lot of interest from Invada Records in Bristol, where you’re based. They ended up putting the score out on vinyl and it did really well. I didn’t give myself a credit on Bait for the score because I was self-conscious that I was doing lots of other things. I also didn’t consider myself to be a musician, and so I left it anonymous. When Reg from Invada called me up to ask to put the score out, he had to ask who’d composed it. So, I said I’d done it and the next thing you know, it’s out on vinyl. Then came Enys Men and we even toured the live tour of Enys Men, me and my recording partner, Dion Star. He came in, we re-imagined that score and we took it out live. I did the score on my own again for Rose of Nevada but we’re in the studio rehearsing a new version of the score, which will go out on tour later in the year. Music’s inadvertently become a really big thing for me. I spent my teenage years wanting to be in bands, and I was in a couple and we rehearsed a lot, but we never played live. I thought that bit of my life was over, and the first time we performed the Enys Men score live was at NFT1 at the BFI in front of 400-plus people. I thought, what if my teenage self could see me now? It was quite surreal. It’s something I really like to do, even if say ‘music’ in inverted commas because I’m still conscious about calling myself a musician. I create the music alongside the sound design. I’ll be in the studio, editing the picture as well as doing the sound design and playing little bits of music that are quite often simply little demos. More often than not, they just stay in the edit. I can’t play them any better than I played them the first time. I usually record quite roughly onto quarter-inch tape most of the time, and they’re eventually mastered and put out on vinyl. The score for Rose of Nevada is out soon.

SEAN: You’ve almost had a Rose of Nevada experience, stepping back into your younger self!

MARK: Yeah! I’m quite glad the music didn’t go anywhere when I was younger because otherwise I wouldn’t be making films. I clearly had a compulsion to express myself in an artistic form and I thought it was going to be music, but it ended up being films. I’m more suited to being a filmmaker than I am being a musician. I don’t think I’d ever play music live unless it was attached to one of my films. I’d feel far too exposed and too much of a charlatan.

SEAN: How important is a score to a given film?

MARK: I used to think it was completely unimportant. In fact, I used to think that a lot of scores damaged their respective movies and undermined their emotional power. Bait was never intended to have any score at all. Like I said, I fell into that accidentally by laying in some drones to hide the fact there was no Foley. But then it became very important. I wrote Enys Men while creating the music. Much of the way in which it was shot was dictated by the score I had already created. Now, I have a much more nuanced relationship with film music, particularly since my relationship with Invada Records has developed. They send me a lot of the scores they put out and I listen to a lot of scores now. I still think film music is used badly at times, but that’s often down to the directors and filmmakers as opposed to the musicians. Sometimes it’s a simple thing like how loud the score is in the mix.

While working with Ian on the mix for Rose of Nevada, I kept asking him to bring the music down and down. I asked him to bury the music in amongst the Foley and he said it was refreshing to be in a mix where the composer was asking for the score to be turned down. Because I do the score as well, I’m not fighting for its space in the film. I’m not saying that’s what composers ordinarily do, but I do think that very often the score is treated as a completely separate thing, the last piece of the puzzle. I’ve curated a BFI season of films around Rose of Nevada and I programmed a screening of The Perfect Storm, the George Clooney-Mark Wahlberg film directed by Wolfgang Petersen. It’s a really Hollywood take on a fantastic book about fishing, and it’s a film I really love. The problem I’ve always had with it is the score’s too high.

SEAN: James Horner, yeah.

MARK: Yeah, the score’s fantastic but there’s bits where the storm is absolutely raging, the visuals and the performances are amazing, and you’ve got Mother Nature absolutely tearing at this boat, and then there’s the score on top of it. You’re not going to outdo the natural world, even if it is all ultimately sound design, but to add the score on top is almost counter-productive to me. Like I say, the score’s fantastic but overbearing in those scenes.

SEAN: I love the nuances in other parts, like the bass piano and high strings when they see the giant wave, which is a perfect way to capture the horror of the situation. This must be the yin and yang battle I imagine: how do you work with both objective sound and subjective music? That must be quite a challenging thing?

MARK: I think the challenge is addressed by making sure the score is part of the sound design. We’ve just been creating a new version of Rose of Nevada that doesn’t have the score on it, so that we can instead perform the score live. It’s quite funny though because bits of the score have to stay in because I’ve mixed in bits of Foley and sound design into the score itself. And because it’s all on quarter-inch tape, we can’t take bits out. For me it’s all just one thing and a lot of the time, the score is subservient to the Foley and the atmos and the natural sounds that we’ve created.

SEAN: Mark, this has been fantastic discussing your creative process. Where are you with the film and the whole process of promoting the film?

MARK: Well as we’re recording this, I’m six days into a month-long preview tour. I’m still in Cornwall at the moment, with two screenings in east Cornwall and then heading off on the road to Exeter, Bristol, Cardiff, nationwide, and then London on April 23rd at the BFI where we’ve got a big preview screening with some of the cast. The film’s then in theatres on April 24th. I’m doing lots of appearances in London with screenings, and also introducing other films I’ve curated. The Q&A screenings will continue into May. Hopefully the film will be out there travelling under its own steam and staying in cinemas for a few weeks. It should have a wide enough release that people can see it in a cinema near them. I know everyone says this but it really is a big screen experience. I spend a lot of time working out what the cinematic experience means. A lot of the time people think it’s to do with the size of the screen and how loud it is. That’s part of it, but the main thing is seeing the film in a packed theatre, because it’s a film about community. If you can see it with the filmgoing community, then absolutely do so.

SEAN: Yes, people should see it to be engulfed by the, and here’s this word again, the tactile sensations of the story. Final final question: what do you hope audiences will take away from the film?

MARK: Well, I’ve always found that such an abstract question but I’ve stumbled into a convenient answer in the last few weeks: I hope the audience leaves the theatre with the film still playing in their heads. Those are my favourite films. That’s what I’d like my audiences to take away, just to go home and keep talking about it. My favourite films still play in my head daily, even if I might not have seen them for 20 years. That’s the sign of an effective film, I think.

top image: Rose of Nevada. Courtesy Bosena.Photo by Steve Tanner.

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