Fred Rowson Guides Us Through Palo Santo, His New Film for Years and Years

Blink's Fred Rowson has directed this amazing new short film, called Palo Santo, which is released today. The film accompanies the release of the new Years and Years album, also called Palo Santo, and is a 15-minute science fiction story in which artificial intelligence has taken over and human-like robots have control.

The unemotional AI use humans to attempt to learn how to feel, making them sing, dance and perform for them. Olly Alexander, the front man for the band, stars in the film which also has a cameo from Ben Whishaw and a voice-over from Dame Judy Dench. 

Rowson has already helmed the videos for Sanctify and If You’re Over Me, tracks from the Palo Santo album, and here talks to shots about the making of the new film, how the concept came about and working with the band.

Above: Fred Rowson [centre] on set with Olly Alexander [right] and one of the film's actors.

How did the partnership with Years and Years come about?

I worked with them a bit of their last album [Communion, released in 2015]. Olly’s the creative force behind it and he wanted there to be a unified concept behind Palo Santo. He wanted the videos to tell a continuous story and we’d been talking about it for a year, maybe more. When we worked together before we got on well and both found we got what we wanted out of the collaboration. He knew he wanted it to have a science fiction element to it, and that he wanted it to be about dance. We talked about loads of version of what this could be.

"I was definitely nervous. Usually I have a big board on set with all the storyboards and all the references, that I can turn to; this was a bit more ‘skin of my teeth’"

It's a big, lavish production; was it hard to get the backing for it?

The record company were [going to put money behind it], then they weren’t then they were again. So, we were writing around the budget, but whatever money we had, we knew what the concept was going to be. And we had the video ideas but we decided to make a film to connect them together, but we didn’t want to go down the route of making a film and them plonking the video in the middle of it, we wanted something new, that stood on its own, that tied the videos together and gave them more context as well as being its own thing.

Above: Vithaya Pansringarm, the Thai actor who plays Olly Alexander's android 'handler'

Where did the idea initially come from?

The idea of it being AI came from Olly, and that was something he wanted to put in there. It’s very ‘of the moment’, but everything I’ve done with them before has been about human emotion and how watching a performance makes someone feel, so combining that with the idea of robotics felt like a natural way to go, because robots can’t feel and can’t relate to it, so how do they react to human performance?

In a way, we wanted it to be fun and a story and a cinematic experience, rather than something that shoves lots of ideas down your throat. We really like the idea of exploring why these robots are watching humans perform and we decided it was because they thought, well, that’s what humans do. We had this character, Olly’s manager or recruiter, who’s such a good actor [Vithaya Pansringarm who has been in films such as Only God Forgives], and with him I had long discussions about... even though he’s a robot and at the beginning, very detached, can we get people to care about him? It was interesting to play with that.

"Thailand seemed like the right place. Even though a lot of it is indoors you get that sense of heat there, because, of course, the future is going to be hot!"

Were there any reference points for the film?

Showgirls was a big reference for the film; it’s like Showgirls in space, with a bit of Twin Peaks and some Muppet Show, with things always going wrong backstage. [There's also] The X-Factor; at some points we weren’t sure if it was a bit obvious, but it felt like it was the right thing to have there, in a Twilight Zone sort of a way, and The X-Factor is so weird anyway.

Above: The video for the first release from Palo Santo, Sanctify, also directed by Fred Rowson.

Sometimes artists who aren't actors can seem quite wooden in front of the camera; was that ever a worry?

No, Olly, before he was a musician, was an actor; that’s how he knows Ben Whishaw and Judy Dench, he was in a play with them. He was in Enter the Void, the Gaspar Noe film, and The Riot Club, and a few other things, and he’s done some theatre work. He’s very good on camera and knows that he doesn’t always need to do a lot for the performance to work. So I felt confident in saying, ‘let’s do a short film’.

Whay did you decide to shoot in Thailand?

We definitely didn’t want to shoot it in the UK because you’ve seen everything, and we wanted an otherworldly-ness. If we could afford to go further, Thailand seemed like the right place. Even though a lot of it is indoors you get that sense of heat there, because, of course, the future is going to be hot!

Above: A scene from Palo Santo 

How long were you in Thailand for? 

The whole thing, including the two videos, was a four-day shoot. My plan was to have everything work in two ways, shooting for the videos and the film, so there’re slight variations but that’s how we approached it.

What were the main challenges for the project?

The main challenge was that, [the record company] were like, ok, you’re going to Thailand in two weeks… and in Thailand they do great commercials and features but don’t really do music videos, and they wanted a proper script. So, I needed to write the screenplay for the film, alongside the two music videos, in around a week, so that was a huge challenge. To go from a few paragraphs outlining what the thing was, to 15 pages with scenes, beats, dialogue, storylines… that was hard. Though in some ways it was helpful because we had a hard deadline which focussed the mind. I love a deadline!

And, usually in everything I do I storyboard pretty carefully. Even to storyboard a 30-second commercial, that’s pretty much two days to get it right. There wasn’t time to do that here, not for 15 minutes. Instead, I just revisited the locations again and again to really get to know them and work out what I wanted to do.

Was it nerve-racking not working in your usual manner?

I was definitely nervous. Usually I have a big board on set with all the storyboards and all the references, that I can turn to; this was a bit more ‘skin of my teeth’, but it worked because the whole thing felt like a feature film in miniature, and that’s the approach we took, with lots of recce-ing.

Above: The second promo from Palo Santo, If You're Over Me, directed by Rowson.

Will there be any more journeys to the world of Palo Santo?

Yes, there are a couple more videos that will fit in with this narrative. We’ve set it up and we can start to play with it a bit.