Marc Munden

My father was a filmmaker who made documentaries for the Ministry of Information during the war but he died when I was young so I had no idea what it was like to be a director. But I suppose it must have been lodged in my mind and definitely in the air as a possibility. When I was older I saw his film Song of the People, which told the history of the “common” people in the UK from a socialist perspective – but as a musical. It’s wild – hundreds of factory workers singing together as they work on lathes in a vast machine shop. It’s a classic bit of post-war idealism made for the Manchester Co-operative society telling history through working-class movements like the Diggers and the Chartists. I went to UCL to study Philosophy and Maths. They had a great film society which Christopher Nolan later ran and which had screenings of classic European films every week. The film that sparked with me was Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, a highly formalist film which chimed with my sensibility at the time. I loved Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras and those abstruse conceptual films that came out of French new wave as well as the irreverent experiments of Godard and Truffaut. But I also loved Jacques Tati as a child and still do. I consumed Bunuel, then later Antonioni, Fellini, Pasolini. As a consequence I have big gaps in my knowledge of classic Hollywood. The Scala Cinema was in Tottenham Street just around the corner from university halls – they had film and music all-nighters with the noise band Throbbing Gristle playing pneumatic drills – a lot of post-punk bands, David Lynch’s Eraserhead was always playing, John Waters and George Kuchar films. So all that went into the melting pot.