WHAT YOU WILL – director’s vision: Simon Reade

WHAT YOU WILL is scripted but doesn’t have a conventional screenplay. Nor is it a conventional documentary, despite appearances.

The film is conceived through character, and devised in multiple story scenarios, by the producer/writer, director/writer and the performer/writers of Filter Theatre Company – inspired by Filter’s hugely successful touring theatre production of Twelfth Night with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Producer and Director drafted a treatment from which the performers improvise on camera, usually in one take – whatever the sound or picture quality. In the pursuit of authenticity on every level, spontaneity (whether actual or contrived) is key.

The 40 hours of footage has then been edited and cut together not always according to the initial treatment, but by following the additional stories which emerged in the eleven-day, three-week shoot – shot using available light, largely by day, while the company performed their Twelfth Night each night (which the film-makers shot live, multi-camera, or in the wings, peering along corridors into dressing-rooms.)

The overriding story arc of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night informs the offstage life of the people playing the parallel characters on stage: the egotist who gets his comeuppance (Greg/Malvolio); the confusion of cross-dressing ingénue (Penny/Sebastian+Viola); the drunk Lord of Misrule whose authority is emasculated (Oscar/Sir Toby Belch); the all-seeing, all-knowing, tell-it-as-it-is Fool (Emma/Feste).

WHAT YOU WILL takes the form of a behind-the-scenes, on-the-road, fly-on-the-wall documentary.

It starts out as the story of a successful touring theatre company; but as the invisible, unobtrusive and anonymous film crew bear witness, a backstage drama unfolds, driven by the personal tensions and financial pressures brought to bear on a group of people, who have not only worked together for over a decade, but have lived and slept together and fallen out with each other all along the way.

As the road movie progresses, it both opens the door into the behind-the-scenes world of theatre, demystifying it, pricking its bubble, while at the same time exposing the very familiar aggravations in all our lives in extremis.

The vocabulary of the film both borrows - and rejects - the style, techniques and tone of a range of films including the mocumentaries of Christopher Guest, Sasha Baron Cohen and Steve Coogan/Rob Brydon; the rockumentary Anvil; the ‘documentaries’ King of Kong, Exit Through the Gift Shop and Catfish; and the feature District 9 (which purports to be a documentary until the drama thriller takes over.)

The tragi-comedy of WHAT YOU WILL rigorously follows the tragic, allowing the dark comedy to emerge in the moment, not out of fabricated and signalled self-consciousness. It is shot digitally on HDV as a feature film; long-lens shots of the company van travelling across the moors counter-pointing the close-ups of talking-head interviews and Vox Pops. WHAT YOU WILL seeks to push still further the envelope of the truth of fiction, the lie of cinema verité, the faux reality of documentary. But when you watch it, make of it what you will.