FILMMAKING
Nick Walker is a writer and director of short films…
Influences: Luis Bunuel, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Jean Luc Godard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Marx Brothers, Laurel & Hardy, Silent Cinema, Classic Hollywood, German Expressionism, French New Wave, Italian Neo-Realism, Musicals, Melodrama…
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TRAVELOGUE
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15 minutes
Director: Nick Walker
Synopsis: Synopsis: A psychological drama
Travelogue is a story of deceit, deception and betrayal; a psychological drama laced with dark surreal comedy, centring on an egotistic and deceitful therapist writing a theoretical book on client behaviour.
Five clients’ case studies [based on Freud’s own early experiments with psychoanalytical theory] are used without their knowledge; an ex-prostitute/porn star turned actress, an alcoholic gigolo, a sexualised drug-addicted entrepreneur, a tattooed burlesque performance artist and an unsuccessful writer.
The narratives are chronicled through therapy sessions and vignettes explaining the clients’ interrelated stories, all interwoven via a news/culture show, as the Therapist gains the success his clients seek but can never attain.
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LES FABULOUS TROUBADOURS
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19 minutes
Director: Nick Walker
Synopsis: A surreal and melodramamatic drama/musical
Three characters – all performers, troubadours; all murderers of their siblings…now all guilt ridden and searching for new identities. All are wanton libertines, living between the divine laws of pleasure and hedonism and yet bound by a strange morality, faith, hope, humanity and virtue.
They tell their tales of jealousy, resentment, murder and revenge in flashback sequences, some using song to enhance the storytelling. In these, they advocate murder, cruelty, incest, self-abuse and deviancy; they share an appetite for the dark side and a definite inability to escape from their childhood disappointments and losses…
Influences of Proust, Marx, Freud are all discussed around a table in a seedy bar where Henry, the main character, discovers he needs to recover documents to prove his identity and so a heist movie is born…
The film has the look of fin de Siecle Paris, circa 1900; French chanteuse, Paris Bordellos and the music reflects this – accordion, piano, trumpet…
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THE SIXPENNY OPERA
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In Production
Director: Nick Walker
Synopsis: Part Brechtian/ adult fairytale, part political satire
Set in 1930s Europe, in a seedy port where political extremism is rife, this is a satire on bourgeois opportunist morals and attitudes of capitalist, anti-Semitist pre-War Germany and Britain.
Two siblings, Henry and Phaedra are separated and sent away as children by Lilith, their Mother, to escape their abuse Father, Walker. Henry as a Sailor then Troubadour and drunk while Phaedra lived first as a nun and then a prostitute; both return and instantly fall in love, not knowing they’re related.
As children they were told stories by Lilith; the most memorable was the Sixpenny Opera, where Phaedra must find a dark handsome stranger who must give her 6 pennies to win her heart; a story reminiscent of Lilith’s own childhood, when her own Jewish/Communist parents, were forced to sell her for six pence to try to give her a better life; to Walker, an anti-Semite, capitalist profiteer, who made this money from the misery of other and who was deemed unfit for service in the Great War!
Phaedra and Henry marry and want a child so badly, but are unable to due to Phaedra’s childhood abuse so she makes a pact with Death to create a child if Henry dies. This is faked with some success initially as a Magician is unjustly blamed for the fake murder of Henry but tragically the plot is discovered as Lilith tells Death of the plan and Death comes to take them both so the abuses of the past will not be repeated and Walker will not continue this cycle of abuse
Walker and Lilith comment on the findings, confirming the maxim, each man kills the thing he loves most!
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