Two Cats On A Beach / 2022 / 17 minutes
They are Roy Orbison impersonators who always look the part and half the time seem seriously into it but half the time don’t even talk about it or seem to remember who they’re dressed as... The film never questions or addresses why they chose this or are this way, they just are. They live in a nether-world of screen-testing for the role of Roy Orbison in an unseen film about his life and times. They hang around together in languor, moving forward with their Roy ambitions, sharing the same strange faith and aspiration that they’re going to break through. They kind of go to one audition, but an audition for what? Is it actually for a Roy Orbison impersonator, or..? At some point it becomes clear that this film is just play, that the film is not a story but rather a spirit, that it’s just about these two people... a friendship; this friendship being a perfect expression of that time in life when friendship is very close and aimless.
It is essentially a fictional memoir of my time spent in Athens, Greece in 2017. More than anything, I expect the expression of mental geography will come across loud and clear, that I treated this film as if it were a puzzle that needed solving, and that all plausible combinations were tried in order to find its final shape; that the combination of choices and discreet arrangements necessary to get it to where it is only gives off the illusion of it being clean and strong, that in reality, one can see that this whole film is the coverup of a failure, that I am just delivering false information; trying to cover my tracks, and have done so with minor forms of playfulness and trickery; it is a beautifully designed and calculated forgery.
The idea of it was conceived in January 2017, when Sean and I were living together in Spandau, Germany. Strolling through relatively deserted leaf covered streets of this place, at an odd moment on one of our many nights together, it came up that he was going to Athens for a show. Seeing as Greece was finally in reach for me, I thought it was a suitable moment to tag along with him; it would also give me the opportunity to meet up with my old friend Giorgio in the process. It was at this point, that we thought we may as well make a film too.
Sean asked me if I had any ideas, and I told him I'd recently been listening to a lot of Roy Orbison, and roughly drafting a strange little story about his life (his E.T-like uniqueness); something about how it was that Roy started wearing those iconic RayBan sunglasses. Things started turning... ‘Sean’s a musician, why doesn't he play Roy Orbison in this little sketch I was writing? But what about his hair, it’s blonde, whereas Roy’s was black ... no problem, we’ll shoot it in black and white, naturally it should be this way anyway. But what about his accent? ... no problem, he’ll either try to impersonate it or speak normally, whatever whatsoever feels most comfortable in the moment’. Easy. The loving world of this movie catapulted from there. At the time, it was called “The Animated Man”. The very first note I made as to what I wanted the film to be was this: “tragi-bio-meta-com.” (an excited and overzealous note by a much younger me).
Upon getting to Athens, we spent some days looking for locations, the factory location specifically; our friend Dimitris (a dear friend of Sean’s who became our chaperone for the shoot), showed us this one location, a beach. Upon leaving it I noticed two cats playing and prowling around together. Later that night I was having a smoke outside the flat we were staying and Sean and I were talking. I was telling him about the ocean scene, what was originally supposed to be the last scene in the movie, that we were to shoot the next night, but I got sidetracked talking about the beach we were going to shoot it at, and soon found myself digressing... telling him about the two cats I’d seen on the beach earlier that afternoon ... voila, Two Cats on a Beach. I remember Sean practically leaping around the room when he first heard it, me too for that matter. We were frantic, because really, who am I kidding, that’s what this film is more than anything, a title.
Two Cats on a Beach was shot in two stages. On January 19th 2017, and in the following May of the same year. The first shoot was loosely based on something I had written; spur of the moment, on a whim. The second time around, we opted to doing things in an entirely different fashion; aiming to accomplish a small stable narrative; to ensure we had something. In the time between then and now I’ve produced roughly ten cuts; some more comedic, and some more dramatic, but mostly just different.
There were many errors in the shooting process. On top of that, (for a number of unorganized reasons) the sound had to be synced manually. Long story short... the project was abandoned several times. For a while I became venomous towards it, feeling so debilitated by the mess of it that I nearly erased the footage... All of this time with this material has amounted to it becoming a sort of symbol and compendium of my neuroses. What should have been ready several years ago is instead ready now, making it clear to me, that ready is a strange and meaningless word, for I already imagined all this happening so long ago, but here I am now ... right here, experiencing, thinking it now (again).
And now, here I was ... sitting at a desk, staring at a reasonably large monitor in front of me waiting for the master to finish exporting; aware of a vague disappointment mixed with uncertainty within me –– a touch of bewilderment too. I’ve come to believe that the longer one spends on something, the longer one takes on something... meaning to say, the more time you put in, the more time it takes out... meaning to say, if you stretch a project out like time in front of you, it will slowly become the same thing as time itself. ‘Process’ is an evasive concept and doesn’t preclude that any one action is different from any other action.
I will soon find out if there is any real possibility of this film being distributed outside of the limited confines of my own social media. You will be my first proof. There is nothing profitable (commercial) about this kind of film, as it is such an unlikely combination of things. It doesn’t have anything like breakneck speed, punch, messaging, or revolutionism like so many things appear to have these days, it has no stake or part in anything, it exists on its own, secluded and meandering; only relevant in so far as it features human beings and is shot on Earth.
Starring: Sean Nicholas Savage & Giorgio Zavos
Director: Angus Borsos Editor: Angus Borsos
With gratitude to: Dimitris Rokos, Marilena Batali, Silas Borsos, Laura Mars