Laurence Fuller – Echoes of You

By starrymag | October 14, 2019

By: Ellie Dolan-Yates

 

 

Q) What attracted you to the film? 

 

A) I remember first reading the script and bursting into tears when I came to the end. That message of faith in the capacity for even the smallest of moments can be reimagined through the artist’s lens to something illuminating and beautiful.

 

I think it’s rare to find that sort of message in the modern world as there’s a lot out there that’s just attention-grabbing nonsense. It also depends on the person receiving the thing, to one person a flower could bring them to tears in pure exaltation at the complexities of existence, to another it might be nothing but a wet twig. It depends on the capacity for sensitivity and sensual faculties of the individual. As an artist that is the aspect that’s pointless to even try and control, any attempts to do so will leave the work itself feeling inauthentic. For those reasons I really have become immune to what the reception to my work is a lot of the time. To make anything of worth you have to have that sort of conviction in your own ability to create what you know to be good work and to do what you want to do. The artist Anselm Kiefer said that each work of art cancels out those that precede it. He was talking about the language of history as a contribution to culture. But don’t get me wrong, it’s nice when my performances are well received, often that helps to get the next opportunity.

 

I knew for this piece specifically if it was structured for the effect of a beautiful karmic experience, that was designed to inspire compassion. That, in itself, is very difficult to accomplish. So, it had to be real love, really beautiful and powerfully compassionate. It had to be the biggest moment in this man’s life. Bigger than winning an Oscar. Like being rekindled with the love of one’s life, seeing their child or anyone they have loved and felt really deserved it, become a success in the world. I knew I had to open up and be vulnerable in front of the camera, which is impossible to fake, the camera sees everything. It took digging deep and talking to the ghosts of my past. I saw this film as an opportunity to contribute to something beautiful.

 

Q) Echoes of You shows just what can happen when a little kindness and compassion is shown to others. How important do you feel this message is right now?

 

A) It’s also about how early experiences can have a huge effect on who you ultimately become. I’m personally grateful for the challenges I faced as a boy. Growing up without a father, I had to become very independent and strong willed, it’s the sort of challenge that a lot of young men simply fall into addiction and troubled behaviors they never manage to escape. I did not suffer from that fate. I can proudly say that the arts saved my life. I hope I can be a symbol to young men who’ve suffered similar challenges to go on and live their dreams. It is possible to find the right roles models to replace the ones who were not able to be there for you and create your own journey.

 

However, saying all this, I don’t think all films need to have a moral purpose in a direct way. A lot of narratives are cautionary tales, which also have their roots in early fables and biblical stories. Artists are not educators and should not be held accountable as such. Artists create to expand the imagination, to push the limits of human experience, to experiment with aesthetics and sometimes (as in this case) that does align with a compassionate message. On the subject of censorship, I think people should look to artists like Ai Wei Wei whose work is essentially humanitarian and yet the old regime of the Communist government in China has been trying to censor him for decades, too strong is his will.

 

Obviously, there’s a lot of negative attention seeking going on from our political leaders, and that has an unfortunate tendency to trickle down. I just see it as a sort of collective desperation. It’s sad to see people treat others badly or to try and put people down to meet their own ends. A good leader should set examples and come up with progressive solutions. I’d personally rather give no attention than to respond to negative behavior at all, just go on and live my life and fulfill my purpose, further my journey. What you choose to pay attention holds a lot of weight. It’s your decision what to pay attention to and to decide what not to pay attention to. That is a power that we all have.

 

For me that is both in the act of movie making and its reception. To make the kind of films that come out of one’s soul, to act from the soul, to write from the soul and then to inhabit other’s work from the soul.

 

Echoes of You is beautiful and there is a lot of honesty and vulnerability to the piece; however, I do not feel this piece is about unconditional love. I personally don’t believe it is man’s purpose to love unconditionally either, nor that this should be the ideal state of man. Andrew believes in the boy because he shows up, consistently he participates in his own development, expresses the desire to improve at Christopher’s mentorship. He picks up the keyboard and makes the decision to ask questions and learn from his mentor. That’s why this message of hope is so satisfying because the boy really deserves it and clearly works hard to become the man that he does.

 

In a way, the little boy Christopher is an antagonist. Many people have pointed that out to me. I think the concept of whether or not the boy “steals” the song is interesting because where else was he going to learn it? We all learn all sorts of things from each other, like the whales. I remember the head of my course at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, Bonnie Hurren, telling me that “at first we as actors are of the tendency to think that it’s all about us, it’s all about the way we feel and expressing our emotions, but then we come to realize what we do is more of a public service.” A skill like acting, or any of the arts, are very similar to languages we learn how to speak a language from other people. Eventually we speak in our own voice with our own ideas. It depends what you decide to do with it that counts, whether he’s the antagonist or not is up for debate.

 

With Echoes of You people are really responding to the compassionate message in this film. The intention is not necessarily humorous irony, it exists more in a sort of sacred space. It is about two people coming together who really make a positive impact on each other’s lives, give each other a purpose, which extends out to a much wider community. To see something special in another (if it is there), to believe in them and their worth regardless of circumstances. To believe in the person this boy shows himself to be. It is about humility and an offering.

 

Q) What is it like working on such films where the cast and set is quite minimal?

 

A On Echoes of You the set was very intimate, which helped as there was often scenes with minimal dialogue where a lot had to be conveyed in quiet moments. I would say we were only aided by that aspect of production on this one.

 

On Road to The Well we had a very small tight knit cast and crew; I think there were around twelve core people for the whole feature and then day players too. There were very deep and long-lasting relationships built on that one. The director Jon Cvack just proposed marriage to his long-time girlfriend who was also the make-up artist on that one. It was Jon’s first feature and Micah Parker (the other lead actor in the film) and I were very excited to be carrying such a substantial piece. But it turned out, because of that intimate set, I got to go off on my own a lot and work on scenes and then we had a lot of rehearsals too so there was a lot of room to play, a lot of creative freedom. It’s funny, on projects with bigger casts and crews it can feel like you’re more on your own at times as the structure is more about production, understandably, so the priorities change a bit. But with discipline you can get to where you need to be artistically regardless.

 

The set on Echoes of You was largely provided by two locations, the beautiful old theatre and the grimy back alley, the juxtaposition between the two spoke volumes.

 

Q) What preparation did you have to undertake for the role of Andrew?

 

A) The biggest thing was finding the internal objects for what the piano meant to me and my journey – the struggle that I’ve been through as an artist, and the people in my life I’ve been doing this for. I saw the ghosts of my ancestors who I imagined knowing what it would mean to them to see me on that stage, the underlying sense of loss knowing that I will never have that. I will never see their faces in that audience. But to live it out like Stanislavsky would say ‘as if’ for the rest of us living to enjoy.

 

The accent was one aspect to this performance. I’ve worked with an American accent a lot in LA. It’s bread and butter. Speaking in my natural voice out here people say to me “you have an accent,” but everyone who speaks a language speaks with an accent and we learned that accent when we were young from the people around us. The same can be done in adulthood if need be.

 

Andrew is very masculine and very feminine at the same time. That paradox is something I could identify with. I’m heterosexual, but I also feel left out of the discussion when it comes to rigid gender definitions. I feel misrepresented.

 

Q) What were some of your favorite moments from filming?

 

A) Shooting that final scene was the most rewarding of all. I remember after the first take walking down the aisle I could feel from Henry [Quilici] things were going really well. I could see the excitement in his eyes.

 

Going through it I imaged lined up in the front rows of the theatre the ghosts of my past present for my proudest moment. For me, that’s a personal thing what specifically. But I imagined my own personal paradise taking place in that theatre. You can read my poetry to see what my version of paradise looks like. – http://laurencefuller.squarespace.com/blog

 

Q) What do you hope viewers take away from watching Echoes of You?

 

A) Compassion. The longer I’ve been on this journey as an artist the more I see how my work coming back at me in the little marks its left on others and that is increasingly rewarding, sometimes confusing, but mostly rewarding.

 

I think this film really shows that the only thing you can control as an artist is your performance, how someone else chooses to receive it is their decision. You don’t have to like it, but it’s not your problem.

 

That’s something I got used to early on, luckily auditioning for drama schools alone gives you pretty tough skin, but then having to work with British drama school teachers, is a baptism of fire. They rarely give praise for anything. So usually by the end of it you end up not liking them but coming out stronger, more well versed in a lot of things. More anxieties, but also more competent. A lot of my peers did not enjoy their training at all. I accepted the realities of what it takes to make it as a professional artist as this was what my upbringing and my life has been about.

 

Q) As well as acting, you’ve produced and written films. Do you feel it more of an achievement seeing the finished product of your own films or do you get just as much satisfaction seeing those you’ve acted in?

 

A) Looking at Possession(s) I wrote the screenplay with director Jim Lounsbury and acted in that film when I was nineteen years old. I reached out to Jim with an idea for a film about a collector who becomes so obsessed with a work of art it destroys his entire life. I owned the painting by Peter Booth “Figure with Bandaged Head” at the time and I ended up selling the piece with the film’s release through auctioneer Damien Hackett. It was a really interesting experience to pull off an illusion like that, which extended out to the real art world.

 

They gave me a co-executive producer credit on Paint It Red as I helped out with casting, bringing on a few key actors to the project including Randy Wayne and Jacinta Stapleton who both killed it in the film. I think that one is worth watching for the performances of the ensemble of leading actors alone. And a very funny script by my good friend, the late Paul T Murray. This was his last film and it was an honor to be a part of his legacy in that way.

 

Right now, I’m working on a screenplay about my late father, which I’m on the fourth draft right now. That experience has been incredibly rewarding as I’ve gotten to know my father perhaps even better than I would have living, as I got to internalize his thoughts and character through his writings and the marks he left behind. A historical piece this size has been a very challenging endeavor in all sorts of ways. There are so many people involved and so much at stake. Being at the center of it has pushed me to develop in all sorts of ways, as an artist and as a human being.

 

Q) How did you get into acting? Is it something you always wanted to do?

 

A) Yes, from as young as I can remember I felt very connected to cinema. I watched a lot of films in my youth and it helped me to understand the world, learning from the camp fire fables of our time. I also had sects of the contemporary art world happening around me as my mother is an artist, Stephanie Burns, and my step-father after Peter was an art critic too. So, we were really at the center of things. I felt like a conduit between those two worlds, the social world of the arts and the stories flickering on the screen. I got the feeling that the best stories are made from the stuff of life and that the art about art was less authentic. The stuff that touches the nerves of real life is the real raw material for creation.

 

I started acting in the theatre in amateur productions in Australia throughout school and then went enrolled in Narrabundah College in Canberra because of its theatre program. They gave me the freedom there to focus almost entirely on my drama education. I made it clear I wanted to go to drama school after high school and set that intention. They were very supportive of that. Peter Wilkins and Ernie Glass were running the drama department at the time. They were notoriously good dramatists.

 

It’s hard to say what it was specifically about acting as appose to other mediums that I gravitated towards. I suppose it was in some ways the magic of transforming into someone else. I thought it was almost superhuman the way the great actors were able to inhabit the skin of other people. Like an ancient shaman, but the more I looked into it the more I found the best actors were not using snake oil yet altering their physical and emotional states with deliberate conditions over time. They were like top athletes training for a big fight. That’s what I think is so mesmerizing for people about Robert De Niro in Raging Bull. He was like a top contender training for the championship with that character and he won the Oscar for that role.

 

As I got older I became obsessed with De Niro’s working method’s trying to find out as much as I could about how he went about inhabiting a character as well as Daniel Day-Lewis, learning from the same teachers as they did – dreaming of one day being part of an ensemble like the actor’s studio and taking on that craft into film. I found that home at Bristol Old Vic and then the theatre productions I worked on in England, especially “Madness In Valencia.” The passion we found in that collective to tell that story to its fullest potential…I believe anyone looking to get into film should also spend lot of time in the theatre, working with other creatives and be informed by a community of like-minded peers. The director of that piece, Simon Evans, is now directing movie stars in top West End shows.

 

When I came to Los Angeles I found homes in the different acting studios around town. I would spend up to a year working with one coach and then find a different approach, as long as they were fundamentally Stanislavski based. I tried all sorts Michael Woolsen, Michael Monks, Eric Morris, Beverly Hills Playhouse, Bojesse Christopher, Ivana Chubbuck. It was Ivana who really started to get me journaling more in an emotional way, writing out my inner dialogue and using those memories to inform my work as actor. As I started reading back some of the background work, I was doing for characters I realized some of it was actually pretty good. So, I started writing essays, more screenplays (one called “Devotion” that was a finalist in the Shoreline Scripts completion and developing the screenplay about my late father, which is now in its fourth draft and nearly ready for development). Reading his work more on a daily basis got me thinking about aesthetics in a totally different way and enhanced the inner objects I was using in my acting. I also heard from a number of his colleagues that really he wanted to give up art criticism eventually and become a poet or novelist. I found amongst his journals a whole book of unpublished poetry that I might go about getting published sometime. He was very inspired by Boudelaire and had a very formal approach that is also inspired by his life and relationships, like a method poet.

 

All this inspired me to start writing poetry of my own, my work is a lot more free form than my father’s was, more emotional and contemporary but still telling my life through the narratives of art history, cultural movements, philosophy and mythology. I spent the better part of this last year writing poetry every day in between working on film projects, my morning ritual would be to get up, roll out of bed and straight into Muay Thai class and then sit down at a cafe writing poetry for a couple hours then begin work on my films and acting projects. The result was I came away with two books of poetry now finished, one called “Elysium Verto” (Paradise Is Changing) and “Minotaur’s Song.” Both of them I feel are underlying currents that run through my life and thoughts and feelings about things, like extensions of myself and the world around me.

 

Q) You are a part of social media. Do you enjoy the instant fan feedback you receive to the work you do?

 

A) Yes! More to that point, I’ve found social media if used in the correct way can be a great tool to work out artistic matters. It’s a communal camp fire like anything else. My main page on Instagram and Twitter is @laurencefuller. On there I put out a lot of my activities and thoughts about film, sometimes martial arts and occasional glimpses of my adventures. That’s the main one people follow, but I also have a page that is more art and poetry focused called @praxisaesthetics

 

Social media is a lot of things. I think it serves as another platform to express one’s own creative life and desires. It’s also good motivation to stay accountable to yourself and others to show up and train, improve, go to the event, network, create. It can be all those things, so it can be used for good or the complete opposite. It depends what’s going on with the person using it and what’s going on with the person at the receiving end, you can only take accountability for your intentions. If someone else gets that wrong, it’s their problem. Regardless of those flames at the barricades of good intentions, if the motive one has behind creating something to show the world is done for the effect of broadening the minds and nerves of a collective audience then it’s done right. Obviously, there are a lot of people using it with the wrong intentions and the less said about those people the better. I believe as a living organism that social media will ultimately succeed those who have the most to offer the world as with persistence talent rises to the top. I have faith in humanity as a collective.

 

I just read an article by the art critic Waldemar Januszcak which said that Leonardo da Vinci’s presence today actually exposed the stupidity of the modern world, with the hordes of selfies being taken next to the Mona Lisa, among a lot of other things. I think there’s something funny about that, but also at least those people are taking selfies next to the Mona Lisa…There’s a lot of people out there with huge followings now for the oddest things, just creating memes or whatever – pop culture idiots that sort of thing. But at the same time, they now have the power of the public’s ears and eyes. It depends what they do with it that really counts. The lower level thinker seeks out attention for its own sake with no consideration to the cost of its viewer. Mass medias are all such a deep wound to the soul of culture. I would encourage people to look away, preserve the capacity for romance and love which has its roots in a deep connection to all the world, that humanity will prevail and the faith that is enough. Curate your own life.

 

Q) What advice would you give to those wanting to work in the film industry?

 

A) Know who you are. You will be faced with a lot of rejection and the expectations that will be placed upon you will be exceptionally high. You will have to meet them.

 

An audition will often take up days of your time. You will be required to put your whole mind, body and soul into it. You will not be paid. They may not be particularly nice to you when you show up. There will be thirty other people just as qualified as you auditioning in that same morning, but you might still get the part. Then, it’s up to you if you want to take it.

 

Q) Are there any other projects that you’re working on that we should keep an eye out for in the near future?

 

A) I’m very excited about Adam Cushman’s plans to turn Five Families into a feature. That is a gangster film I had the honor of working with Barry Primus as my grandfather. Acting with him felt like being part of a legacy of gangster movies. He was such a close colleague of De Niro and Scorsese, so much so he directed De Niro in a couple of films. There has been a lot of interest for Barry to take on a leading role in this sort of film for a long time. So, it was an honor to act opposite him and bring what I could bring to the table.

 

As part of preparation for this piece Adam and I discussed how there was something rooted in romanticism about this character’s longing for the past. So, he asked me to read Shelley and I wrote a poem to help me get into his mindset.

 

I’m coming to the end of the fourth draft of “The Peter Fuller Project” (working title) about my late father the art critic, Peter Fuller. It has been a personal pilgrimage of sorts to find my father. He was one of the most controversial figures in at 20th Century art world in Britain and had a growing reach out here in the US, too. He wrote fifteen books, started the magazine Modern Painters and was one of the most widely read writers on art during his time. His relationships with the top intellectuals and artists of his day were deep and provocative. Working on this project has been a lifelong passion and studying my father’s writing, as I developed into an artist in my own right, has brought me a consolation I didn’t think was possible. My hope is when it comes time to making the film that I can connect with this character and therefore with the spirit of my father.

 

I also have a two poetry books and an art exhibition in the works, keep up with those projects here: http://laurencefuller.squarespace.com/blog

 

Q) What would like to say to your fans and those who support you? 

 

A) I love you. Thank you for taking the time to read my work and watch my films. I hope you will take it with you and it will serve to develop and heal your spiritual matters and I look forward to seeing how it comes back around one day, like Andrew in Echoes Of You.