Quiet storm: How one man’s solitude became the toast of British cinema

JAKE Williams lives a hermit-like existence with only his two cats for company in a remote, ramshackle house in the Cairngorms. He is also the star of a near-silent documentary of his own daily life that has made him the toast of film festivals

THERE’S a joke Jake Williams likes to make about Two Years at Sea, the film in which he stars. He tells people, if they nip out to the toilet during a screening, that they missed a car chase and a love scene.

He laughs long and hard as he relates this over a bowl of soup in an Edinburgh café. I’ve seen the film, so I get the joke. It’s a film in which very little happens at all. The very idea of it featuring a car chase is indeed laughable.

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Blurring the line between documentary and fiction, it follows 62-year-old Williams as he goes about his life in a remote, ramshackle house in the Cairngorms.

He goes for walks, bathes, builds a fire. On one occasion, when examining an old jar of pills, he mumbles “chesty cough” but those two words are the only dialogue in the feature-length film.

It’s the work of Brighton-based Ben Rivers, a film-maker whose projects usually appear in art galleries, but Two Years at Sea (the title comes from the work Williams did 30 years ago to fund his isolated existence) is now screening at cinemas across the country. It portrays an “exaggerated reality”, a sort of utopian vision of Williams’ simple, solitary life. Its slow pace and lack of dialogue is refreshing to some, dull to others.

People don’t talk that much to themselves, even when they live on their own,” says Rivers, on the phone from London. “I thought it would be a good challenge, and maybe it’s a challenge for the audience as well, but it offers a different kind of immersion, without dialogue. It’s about trying to lose yourself in a space in a way that’s different to a narrative engagement. It’s more about an atmospheric engagement.”

In person, Jake Williams is a little different to how I’d imagined him. Sure, the long, white beard is there, as is the untamed hair. He’s certainly got down the hermit look. But he has a mobile phone. It’s pink. He shows me photographs of his home on a laptop and complains about his “scabby” kitchen floor.

He read an article about himself which used the word “eccentric” a few too many times for his liking. He thinks he’s “normal” and anyway “everyone else is eccentric!” His day-to-day life, as he describes it, is as it appears on film, but with a little help from friends, family and technology.

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“When I went to a screening in London I could see why people love the film,” he says. “It’s really slow and calm with nothing much happening.”

Does he think that the people who watched the film in London might envy his way of life? “I don’t know. It feels normal to me.”

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Born and brought up in Inverness, Williams studied science at the University of Aberdeen. He taught for a while after graduating, and lived in Boston for two years, but became “scunnered with landlords” after a while and set out to buy his own home and live a simple life in the woods. The intensive two-year period he spent working at sea allowed him to achieve his goal, and at 32 he bought his home. He’s been working on it ever since. He says repeatedly that he takes things “in my stride”; a simple philosophy, but one linked to him starring in a feature about his life, a proposition of which some people might be wary.

He gets work planting trees in the winter, gets visitors from all over the world and plays in folk bands. Two cats keep him company and his daughter, who lives ten miles away, visits regularly. A mutual friend introduced him to Rivers, who was looking to make a film about someone who lives a solitary life in the woods. They made a short film together a decade ago, before embarking on this project and Williams jokes that perhaps they’ll make a third film in another ten years, though “I said to him ‘can you not give me young make-up and we’ll do a prequel?’”

There are surreal moments in Two Years at Sea which hint at the fact that this is not a film to be taken at face value. In one scene, Williams goes to sleep in a caravan on his land and wakes to find that while he slept it had floated up into the trees. Since between them director and star had gone to some lengths to haul the thing 15 feet in the air, Williams assumed this would be something of an action-packed scene. Not so, of course, but it helps to establish that the film is part fiction.

“It’s an exaggeration of certain parts of his life and it obviously leaves a lot out because that’s what film-making often does,” says Rivers. “It’s not full-blown fiction but it’s a fictionalised version of his life because it’s not him and it’s not meant to be an accurate representation of him. It’s him playing someone very much like himself.”

For Rivers, the opportunity to experience Williams’ lifestyle during filming was an exciting one. “It’s something I’ve always quite fancied since I was pretty young,” he says. “I used to think how nice it would be to just go and live in a hut in the forest, and I wanted to see if there was any reality to it and what that reality was, if it was as idealistic as it was in my mind. It was really quite different. In my more utopian vision it seemed a lot easier than it is. Especially in the winter it becomes a really difficult proposition, and you have to really believe in it to stick it out.”

Jake Williams has stuck it out for 30 years. He can get around on skis in the winter and is harvesting some kale at the moment, but it’s not an easy life, even if it’s presented as tranquil and dreamlike on screen. In one scene he builds a makeshift raft and rows out on a loch, his small craft drifting slowly across the screen over a period of several minutes.

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As Rivers points out, it’s “not for everyone”, but for others it’s an antidote to the fast pace of modern life. Even Williams wasn’t quite sure what to make of it at first: “Ben sent me clips of me floating on a pond and I thought ‘how are you going to make a film out of this?’” Rivers and Williams have been attending film festivals together, with Williams answering questions after screenings and even playing his mandolin for audiences.

“I’ve never really been interested in films,” he says. “I’ve got a short attention span. Even a film I’m enjoying, I think ‘oh, get to the point!’ And now I’m in a film that’s got no point at all.”

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He’s proud of the result, however, and is enjoying being a star, so much so that he’s been hosting his own “mobile screenings” for friends by rigging up an old television in the back of a car and driving it to parties. A makeshift awning and seating complete the outdoor cinema experience.

For now, he’s got a rather more official screening to attend with Rivers, in Brussels. “We’re going to see the film a few times and then hang around like interesting characters,” he says with a twinkly smile that suggests that he’s pretty amused by the whole thing.

I watch the film for a second time after our interview. When Williams starts paddling his raft, I get up for a few minutes, returning to find that the screen looks almost exactly the same as when I left it. I know it’s not the case, of course, but the thought that I might just have missed our hero in a high-octane car chase in those few minutes certainly makes me chuckle.

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