Director Kate Hardie and ExitMan aka Ewen Bremner Talk New Video "Love Proof"

Kate Hardie, director: "We were really interested in trying to tell a proper little story. I love music videos and the freedom a random music based edit can give, but we were also very inspired by old fashioned musicals — the slightly comedic dance routine stuff of the forties — by guys like Donald O'connor and Gene Kelly.  So as tempted as we were to go freestyle music vid styley- we decided to take our lead from them and try a little linear time dance based story. Tom Brooke is an actor that both myself and Ewen are big fans of. I had first seen him in the play Jerusalem and had  directed him in a drama Co written by myself and Grayson Perry earlier this year.  And he was very up for trying out a dance video- even though dancing is not something he has ever tried professionally before! Ewen was keen not to have to perform too much in this video — so that led us to think about someone else performing the song for him and there is something about him and Tom together that really seems to work — they both have wonderful cinematic faces- they can both tell stories so easily with their body language and expressions and I was excited to put them on screen together.  The video was made on a strictly NO budget basis and so we had to find a location that suited that criteria

My sister- choreographer Bonnie Oddie had always wanted to try a dance piece in our local cafe- Mario's. It is a truly tiny space ( about 8 foot by 25!) so this was quite a mad idea as shot wise it was going to be incredibly limited. But as the whole spirit of this video was "experimental"- using a non dancer to dance, trying a story rather than a random fast cutting music video edit, locking our star in the loo in the first minute, making the whole thing for no budget... We thought — In for a penny, in for 50p —   lets give it a go! Mario's has for many years been a very popular haunt for various artists and musicians.  And whilst hanging out in there looking at the space — or lack of it — we were really stuck by how Mario is such a generous facilitator of local creative talent — quietly day in day out, making their coffee, providing them with a space to chat and think whilst they worked- or avoided work! ( He even has a guitar hanging on the wall were many a local talent has thrashed out their stuff... ) We started to love the idea of a musician in the cafe at closing time-  really struggling to write a song, getting fed up and taking a loo break- and  whilst he is in there the quiet cafe owner takes a peak at what our tortured musician is writing and works the whole song out for him. Really playing with the idea that we don't sometimes know where songs come from, and that maybe there are forces or even other people out there, un be-known to us- helping us to work  our creative stuff out. Love Proof is such a gentle and oddly dream like song and there was something gentle and dream like about the story of this quietly magical guy writing it for Ewen. The film is a really low fi-made with love, seat of your pants, lets give it a go- production, and we had a blast doing it."

Ewen Bremner, ExitMan: 'I’ve always been a massive fan of Kate as an actress, a writer and a film maker as she has a completely unique perspective and energy. We’ve talked about a doing a million projects over the years, but this is actually the first time we’ve ever worked together. There is no label involved in this project and no budgets for videos, so it was very brave of Kate to cook up the whole production and pull it off. Tom Brooke is by far my favourite young British actor, so I was awestruck to have him agree to do this and leap in to the world of dance."