Sunrise Film Festival, 2025
Jake Alden-Falconer
the colour of my room
Sunrise Film Festival, 2025
Screening Section: Connections
23 May 13:00
April, 22, 2025
Sylvie is hiding away on the coast while she waits to hear if her radiotherapy has been effective. But when her chirpy friend Anita comes to visit, she brings with her a London headspace (all wedding plans and career gossip) which interrupts the grounded space Sylvie has created.
Interview originally appeared during the Hollyshorts Film Festival London 2024.
Hello Jake, thank you for taking the time to talk with us. What has it meant to you to have The Colour of My Room part of the debut HollyShorts London?
Hollyshorts is such an energetic festival with a careful programme and an emphasis on the short film medium. I’m from London, so I’m especially chuffed to be playing at the inaugural edition here.
Any nerves ahead of your screening?
After obsessing over all the details that make a film come alive on the big screen –from colour timing to the spatial sound design – it just feels really good to play the film in a theatre like the Curzon Soho where it’s meant to be seen – and in dialogue with the other films in the programme.
What do you think it is about The Colour of My Room that’s connected so much with festival audiences?
I believe in that old phrase. The particular is in the universal.
You produced 1BR back in 2020 which went on to become No 1 on Netflix USA, what did it mean to you to see this film get such an amazing public response?
It was a big surprise. The film played at Fantasia Festival in Montreal, but after it was picked up by Netflix, the word-of-mouth energy spread like electricity – and we just watched it climb higher and higher up the Netflix list.
The director David Marmor made the film in Los Angeles on an ultra low budget, with the producers putting a lot on the line to get financing – and Alok’s mom even bringing food to the set.
During production, we faced some hurdles. The camera truck was stolen overnight, in front of the overnight PA, leading to a police chase down the I-405. The initial lead actor had to pull out right before principal photography. But that was a blessing, because Nicole anchored that film. She just went for it, giving a moving, uninhibited, scream-queen performance.
The experience showed me that you can only make the film you need to make. If it’s good, it’ll find its audience. As David Lynch quipped, on turning down the offer to direct Star Wars, "George Lucas is a guy who does what he loves, and I do what I love. The difference is what George loves makes billions of dollars.”
How much did your experience directing music videos help prepare you for helming your debut short ALICE?
I love making music videos. I lie down, shut my eyes, listen to the track over and over, and free-associate. I see them like a contained short, even if they’re more experimental or non-narrative. You’re forced to be efficient. I try to find a single image that is immediately evocative – like photography. I like having to invent within the restrictions.
The more you work, in whichever medium, the more you grow your personal understanding of the relationship between ideation and execution. You strengthen your intuition – like – how is this dutch angle going to fit into the puzzle during the edit?
What did winning The Pitch Film Fund mean to you? Did it add any additional pressure on you as a filmmaker?
Raising funding for any film is hard; short films in particular. Winning The Pitch had a material impact and it galvanised me. I met some brilliant filmmakers through the process with whom I’m still in touch. It was a long process – I submitted in September, we had a residential bootcamp in December, then two more days of pitching the screenplay in January at the NFTS. You had to incorporate feedback overnight. The judging panel included BAFTA winners and Jon Wardle of the NFTS, so getting that vote of confidence meant a great deal to me.
Any bad habits you needed to break before you started shooting?
I’ve worked for quite a few years as a film producer. It’s easy for your instincts there to kick in, as there’s always more to do on a film. So when it came to being on set, I trusted the strong team around me and made a conscious decision to focus solely on directing.
Where did the inspiration for The Colour of My Room come from?
The film is a personal one about friendship, love, and the beauty in small moments. While it’s fiction, it’s rooted in an emotional truth inspired by my childhood and my late mum’s writing on chronic illness.
It was re-reading an old lecture by Simone de Beauvoir which she gave in Japan in 1966, that lent me the conviction to make it. “By speaking of our most intimate experiences,” she said, “Like loneliness, anguish, the death of those we love, we bring each other closer, make the world less dark. This is the irreplaceable and essential task of literature.”
In the casting process did you have an idea of who you wanted to play Sylvie, Anita and Alex?
I try not to have too many preconceptions. One of the pleasures in casting is seeing the character leave your imagination to become something tangible and different – through the choices and the experiences of the performer. It’s nice to be surprised.
I wrote Elaine a letter and thought, if she comes on-board, then it’s happening. She responded straight away and I was thrilled. Elaine is hugely accomplished – she’s won the Irish Film and Television Award for her role in Harper’s Island (HBO), and was nominated at the BIFAs for Disco Pigs with Cillian Murphy. She’s also had these intense roles in films by Atom Egoyan, Alejandro Amenabar and in Sebastian Lelio’s The Wonder with Florence Pugh, which really drew me to her work. I felt so lucky that she could bring her tenderness, subtlety and humour to Sylvie.
When I met Sharon (Anita), I felt an instant synergy. She was inquisitive, full of insights into particular moments and line readings. She had an inner beauty and a sparkle in her eye which I felt was so true to Anita.
Finding Alex was a longer process. We had a brilliant casting director in Stevee Davies, who helped us to audition dozens of kids. I was looking for a child who wasn’t self-consciously acting. Then Martin came in with an overgrown fringe – he was intelligent, natural, and reactive. He recalled a young Jérémie Rénier in the Dardennes’ La Promesse. I knew Martin’s absence of self-reflexivity would make the dramatic moments which Alex witnesses all the more impactful.
As a writer/director how close do you like to keep to your text once you start shooting. Do you allow your actors some flexible with the material?
So many directors I admire maintain a flexible relationship to the text. Hong Sang Soo, Joanna Hogg, Mike Leigh. So I’d always intended to work in that mode. In practice, I revised the dialogue over many drafts, and re-wrote lines after rehearsals – but we broadly kept close to the text, with its particular rhythm and cadence. More often, lines were cut where we could do without. There’s the odd completely unplanned moment in the film though. I tend to believe the more you’ve prepared, the more space you’ve earned to try something unexpected.
Are you able to create some detachment between your role as a writer and that of a director once you start the shoot?
For me, one feeds into the other. I like Agnes Varda’s notion that filmmaking is artisanal, like sewing or weaving – and that a good production has the atmosphere of an atelier.
How important is the collaborative relationship between you and your DOP Adam Barnett when working on a short like this?
It’s very important. Adam has a natural eye and a gifted intuition. We would share photography, painting, film references back and forth long before shooting. I had a sort of mini-manifesto about camera set-ups – this is when a certain camera movement can be motivated, that kind of thing. Of course, you throw some of that out on the day, but I think the power of setting those rules together is that you can choose when to break them. We’ve a shorthand and rapport – which is really helpful when you’re working against the clock.
Now that you’re two short films in what do you think you’ve learnt about yourself as a filmmaker and the stories you want to tell? What other themes are you looking forward to exploring with future films?
To borrow from James Baldwin – when I’m making a film, I’m hoping to find something out I don’t know. Something I don’t want to know, but I’m compelled to anyway.
"...it wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I realised being a filmmaker might actually be a life."
Where did you passion for filmmaking come from?
I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. I have an early memory of lying on a bed of coats at a house-party in Berlin. My Mum had brought me, and I lay watching Laurel and Hardy for hours on VHS, as the adults would come in from the kitchen next door to drop off their coats.
My parents were big cinephiles. My mum had me watching Varda, Rohmer, Almodovar at a startlingly inappropriate age. Theatre too. We’d get cheap standing tickets if we could. Pinter, Beckett, Peter Handke. There was a memorable thirteen year old trip to see Thomas Ostemeirer’s production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted (Zerbombt) at the Barbican. The sheer potency and directness of the writing stayed with me for a long time. Though it wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I realised being a filmmaker might actually be a life.
How essential was the experience working on First Reformed? You’ve worked with a really incredible roster of filmmakers and writers, what has some of the best advice they’ve offered you?
I learned so much from working on First Reformed. I was hungry and would jot down everything.
Paul had this vision from the screenplay stage of moving the camera very, very little. At the end of the first day, shooting non-sequentially, he hadn’t had a camera move once. The visual vocabulary of the film was set. I think he said something like, “There we go. We can’t back out. If it doesn’t work now, I’ve fucked it.” And gave a nervous laugh. A bold decision can be daunting.
One of the other things Paul talked about was Bresson. What’s happening when Bresson isn’t cutting as someone walks out of a room? In the real world, you don’t stare at the door. It’s about the time itself you spend looking at the door.
And finally, what message do you hope your audiences will take from The Colour of My Room?
The feeling you get after leaving the cinema, when you’re walking to the bus, talking to your friend, lover, whomever – and figuring out a good film – that’s sacred. Sometimes you realise there was an utterly different takeaway than yours. So I hope audiences can find their own meaning from the film. But if it makes them reflect on their relationships – call a friend, text their mum – then I’d be delighted.