DIRECTED BY Simon Lex | Written by Celine Arden
Produced by Celine Arden, Simon Haines & Simon Lex
Insecure millennial Nicole attempts to rekindle intimacy with her distant boyfriend by forcing him to do an online ecstatic dance.
ABOUT THE FILM
“Dance With Me” was created for Mandy.com’s Mini Movie Fest where it won. As it’s prize it played off-competition at the Raindance Film Festival. The film also won Best International Short and Simon Haines won Best Actor at the Golden Horse International Film Festival. Simon also won Best Actor the Berlin Indie Film Festival.
ABOUT THE FILMmakers
Simon Lex is an award-winning film director and doctor working in London. He has worked most notably on DANCE WITH ME (2022), winner of the Mandy Mini Movie Fest and screened at Raindance Film Festival; EMILY (2020), awarded Best Romantic Comedy Micro Film at the Austin Comedy Short Film Festival. From 2018 to the events of 2020 he worked with Actors East in London, hosting their Scene Night - a monthly theatre scratch night. His short film MAGPIES (2021) premiered at the Oscar-qualifying Bengaluru International Short Film Festival. He is passionate about working closely with actors to get truthful performances and create nutritious experiences for his audiences.
Simon Haines is an award-winning actor and filmmaker. Screen roles include Litvinenko (ITVX), I Am Einstein (Netflix/BBC), Knightfall (Netflix), Forgive Me Father (ADB Films), Bombing Auschwitz(BBC/PBS) and several award-winning shorts. Stage roles include The Mousetrap (West End), Straight White Men (Southwark Playhouse), his one-man show Animals and Children (Dutch National Theatre), Posh and Rubenstein Kiss (Nottingham Playhouse/Tour), Europe After the Rain (Mercury Theatre), Distinguished Villa (Finborough), as well as performing Shakespeare around Europe and Asia including Cambridge Arts Theatre, Orange Tree Theatre, Elsinore Castle and Shakespeare's Globe. He also directs and teaches at drama schools.
Celine Arden is an award-winning actress and producer with a slate of award winning films. Her most recent TV credits include, Mimi in Netflix's thriller Obsession, Sally Bloom in Sky's comedy Bloods, Stak in SyFy's Krypton S2, Alice in Acorn TV's Agatha Raisin to name a few. Recent film credits: MGM's ‘The Hustle’, ‘The Postcard Killings’ opposite Jeffrey Morgan Stanley and ‘Us or Them’ opposite Malin Akerman.
READ OUR INTERVIEW WITH THE FILMMAKERS
Welcome to our Short of the Week series. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your filmmaking background?
SIMON LEX: Hi, thanks so much for hosting us and our film Dance With Me. I’m Simon Lex and I directed the film. The other key collaborators on it are Celine Arden (writer, actor and producer), Simon Haines (actor and producer) and Horia Cojan (cinematographer). We have all worked together on a number of films. The collaborative aspect of filmmaking is hugely important to me and is key to how I like to work. I started out directing films through 48 hour film challenges in Exeter back in 2014 I think. It’s funny because the process we did for Dance With Me reminds me a lot of those times. We shot the film in a day with really minimal planning and a tiny crew (we were 5 people on set including the cast!), and then bashed out an edit in another 2-3 days in time to submit it for the Mandy Mini Movie festival. There’s something really liberating about forcing limitations upon creative acts.
Tell us about the genesis of Dance With Me?
LEX: Simon Haines, Celine and I have worked together for a number of years. Both on theatre scenes and on short films. We wanted to make something else together so we had compiled a list of film ideas/half-baked scripts. We were struggling to pick one, until Celine discovered the Mandy Mini Movie Fest and suggested we make something for it, which forced our hand to pick one of the ideas…
CELINE ARDEN: During the first portion of the lockdown, my partner and I were doing an online ecstatic dance and a similar moment happened where my partner (rightly so) did not want to dance with me. However, in the real-life situation I shrugged that off and we carried on dancing. Afterwards, I thought what if I had taken the ‘rejection’ personally and Dance With Me was born.
The performances in Dance With Me are wonderful - especially the chemistry between the two leads. Can you talk more about the director/actor dynamic, and what it’s like directing a script written by one of your actors?
LEX: Thanks for your kind words about the performances in our film. The director/actor dynamic is something that I am infinitely passionate and curious about and I can talk ad nauseam about. So I’ll be conscious to try and make this succinct. I see it as something sacred. It requires so much trust, going both ways. When it works, there is some serious magic that can take place and the end result of this can be so much richer than either director or actor could possibly have imagined before. I owe a huge amount to my directing teacher Adrienne Weiss and my acting teacher Tom Radcliffe for teaching me so much about this divine dance. Check them out!
Regarding directing a work that has been written by the actor who is going to perform it. Well, as a general rule I try to avoid this. I feel that it’s exceptionally difficult to have written something and then act in it with the same amount of freedom and flexibility as you do on another script. But having worked with Celine before and knowing what an incredible actor she is, and the fact that we both trust each other and have that working relationship already in place, I knew we would be able to achieve some really great work regardless.
What were some of the main obstacles you experienced when making Dance With Me and how did you overcome them?
LEX: For me, the biggest one with this film was that I rushed out an edit of it in time for the submission deadline for the Mandy Mini Movie Fest. And then - I mention this not out of self-promotion, but just that it’s essential for the point that I’m about to make - it won one of the categories in the festival. But I knew that the edit wasn’t as good as it could be, so I wanted to go back and re-edit it. But the motivation to do that, once it was out in the world and it appeared evident that people thought that it was alright, was excruciating to muster. Thanks to a lot of prodding and nudging from Simon Haines and Celine (with their producer hats on), I did finally get there but I think it took me 6 months!
Tell us about the journey of getting your film to audiences.
SIMON HAINES: I love film festivals: the people, conversations, sense of community and mutual support, reconnections/new connections - and of course the buzz of watching new work.
I had a lot of fun working with Celine on our festival strategy but no matter how much you plan, there’s always a sort of mysterious kismet that comes into play. For example, we’d never planned on taking the film to Raindance, but screening at Raindance was part of the prize for winning the Mandy Mini Movie Fest. Kino wasn’t part of our original strategy either. Then I discovered the festival when a friend invited me to your final-night award ceremony in April, and I loved both the films we saw and the whole Kino ethos. Basically: stuff leads to stuff in beautifully unplannable ways.
What advice or hacks would you give to other short filmmakers?
LEX: Gosh, I don’t think there are any hacks. Get in touch if you want to ask me anything: @simonlexfilms on insta, I’m more than happy to help in any way that I can. I think the best advice that I was ever given was to just make things, you most likely have a camera on your phone and probably editing software too nowadays, so just make stuff!
CELINE: 1) Find a group of people that you love working with. It makes life so much easier. 2) Keep the locations of the script minimal so you can spend your time filming rather than setting up and moving locations. 3) Preparation is KEY! Rehearsals!!! So important. And if you can get the DOP in on the rehearsal days, DO IT!
HAINES: Agreed. Make stuff and find your people. Celine has taught me so much about grabbing the bull by the horns and just doing something, rather than procrastinating until it’s ‘perfect’. It’ll never be perfect. When you just make stuff, it’s not perfect but it actually tends to be unexpectedly lovely in moments. And from all the unlovely stuff between those moments, you’ve learnt something. And then it’s iterative: each thing you make is a little more lovely than the thing before.
What do you think is the biggest challenge short filmmakers face trying to break into the industry?
LEX: I’m very much of the view that if artists continue to make good work, it will find an audience, so artists shouldn’t get discouraged by the apparent challenges of “breaking into the industry”. We just need to keep on making stuff and do the work.
HAINES: Money. Our first short together was shot on an iPhone – and you could tell – but people loved it. We effectively shot that for £50, split between us plus a small festival budget. Dance With Me is the second short we’ve made together and it cost more, but not a lot more.
Stepping up to each ‘next level’ is a challenge but it feels easier if you go step by step.
Any film recommendations that we should add to our watchlist?
LEX: Really depends what you are into… the two films over the last year that left a big impression on me were ‘Close’ by Lukas Dhont and ‘Everything Everywhere’ but you’ve probably already seen those!
HAINES: Ellie Foumbi’s stunning ethical thriller ‘Mon Père, Le Diable’ aka ‘Our Father, The Devil’.