Interview: Marc Evans, director of Hunky Dory

WhILE Marc Evans was shooting his new film Hunky Dory, he came up with an alternative title more befitting its 1970s suburban Swansea setting and sixth-formers-putting-on-a-show plot. “We jokingly called it ‘Glum’ – you know, the Welsh Glee,” he says, a wry smile creeping across his face. “Hopefully it’s not too glum though.”

He needn’t worry on that front. Though nobody could accuse the film of being as relentlessly upbeat as the US teen phenomenon, Hunky Dory’s heartfelt paean to a small-town drama teacher (played by Minnie Driver), and her attempts to inspire her students by putting on a David Bowie-flavoured rock-opera version of The Tempest, has a sweetness and a sunniness that belies its drabber setting.

It’s something Evans consciously set out to achieve. Determined to make a British film that would celebrate the important relationship between pop music and adolescence, he looked at the poignant tone of US teen films such as American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused, then settled on the year 1976, partly for the obvious reason that he was in sixth form then so knew the period well, but more for the practical reason that the UK was riding a historic heatwave that summer – giving Evans licence to bathe the film in a golden hue.

“There’s something about sunshine forgiving this kind of landscape,” says the director. “That’s really why we chose ’76. But then you start thinking about it and realise that in ’75 Thatcher becomes leader of the Conservative Party and in ’77 Elvis dies and Johnny Rotten appears. I know every year seems significant to some generation, but ’76 is significant because it was the end of the beginning of something.”

The film, which stars a cast of first-timers and up-and-coming actors, certainly taps into the intense joy and pain of being young. Treating adolescence as a foreign land in which those experiencing it are learning how to negotiate the terrain, it shows how overwhelming but also how wondrous it can be. And where other films featuring inspirational teachers and performing kids can blow the follow-your-dreams message out of all proportion, Hunky Dory celebrates the fact that while participating in something like a school show may not be life-changing, the memories it generates can be priceless.

“That’s why we presented it as a moment in hindsight,” nods Evans, who included an American Graffiti-esque coda (detailing how the characters’ lives turn out) to emphasise this point. “The coda was much debated, but I’m all for it because it’s what tells you that this moment never comes again, nor can it, nor should it. By the same token, that makes it inherently melancholic, so the music tends to be a little anti-Glee as well in the sense that it’s not all about ‘me’ or about how ‘I’m still standing’ and ‘I can do anything.’”

Indeed, the soundtrack – which, in addition to a couple of obligatory Bowie songs, includes music by the likes of Nick Drake, Pink Floyd and ELO – speaks more to the alienated feelings we all tend to have as teenagers.

“I spent a lot of time as a teenager listening to records on my own,” says Evans. “I’m sure a lot of other teenagers did, and continue to do so, and you take so much from that music that I almost wanted the film to do that for the audience, rather than providing them with a lot of happy-clappy songs.”

When it came to arranging the music, Evans was inspired by the Langley Schools Music Project, a collection of contemporary pop song recordings made by a Canadian primary school choir between 1976 and 1977. Though obscure at the time, they became a cult phenomenon around 2001 when record collectors unearthed them and marvelled at kids’ haunting performances of the likes of God Only Knows by The Beach Boys and Bowie’s Space Oddity.

“I remember with great affection David Bowie’s quote that no amount of mind-expanding drugs could have helped him come up with a version quite as interesting as that,” chuckles Evans, who was already thinking about Hunky Dory when he first heard the Langley albums online just after completing his third feature, My Little Eye, in 2002. “I didn’t want to make a film about kids as young as they were, but I wanted the music to be in the same spirit.”

Consequently, he and composer Joby Talbot set about creating a sort of verité musical on set by having everyone in the film do their own singing and play their own instruments. “It’s impossible to do make it completely live,” explains Evans, “but it’s as live as it can be.” The idea, he says, was to bring us “inside” the music. “Glee is fantastic, but it’s almost proscenium television in the way they go ‘this is a show’. I really wanted to concentrate on rehearsals because I think there’s a sort of serenity and an intensity to kids playing music that you only get when they’re playing for real.”

Evans is in negotiations to release a Langley-esque soundtrack album featuring the cast recordings and arrangements from the film. He’s not too sure, however, if he can foresee a point when the film might follow the route of other modern musical-themed movies and become a stage show in its own right. “Our producer, Jon Finn, did Billy Elliot and then did the musical Billy Elliot, so there’s obviously a pre-history there, but there was no part of us that made it with that in mind. What I think would be interesting – and this is just me thinking – is that it would work quite well as a TV series.”

It certainly worked for Shane Meadows with This is England, and there’s precedent in the form of Alan Parker’s grittier-than-you-remember-it Fame inspiring the early 1980s TV show of the same name. “Yeah, that’s a good example,” says Evans. “Who knows, though? It’s much easier to have these conversations on the back of a film that’s done well than film that’s yet to come out.”

• Hunky Dory is at the Glasgow Film Festival on 18 February, and released nationwide on 2 March.