Directed by BAILEY TOM BAILEY
Written BY Christopher Buckley
Produced BY Marek Lichtenberg & Nathan Craig
Georgian England. A society lady raises her pistol to duel with her aristocratic mentor over a grave insult.
ABOUT THE FILM
Satisfaction was an Official Selection at our very own BIFA qualifying Kino London Short Film Festival in 2024 where it was nominated for Best Score. Other festival highlights include the Oscar Qualifying Flickers’ Rhode Island IFF, the BAFTA qualifying Bolton IFF, the four other BIFA qualifying festivals including Exit 6 (Nominated for Best Editing), Crystal Palace IFF, Brighton Rocks FF, and Sunderland SFF.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Bailey Tom Bailey has made many shorts and music videos that have played international BIFA, BAFTA & OSCAR qualifying festivals and online platforms including Short of the Week, Slamdance, Fright Fest, Berlinale, LSFF, Rhode Island, Bolton, Nowness, Omeleto, 1.4 awards, Shiny awards, and have won several awards along the way. He also works as an editor and sometimes VFX artist for clients including Nike, Adidas, Somesuch, AMV, BBH, Dazed. He has a background in painting, is an alumnus of Arts University College Bournemouth, Berlinale Talent Campus and has studied Meisner acting and improv comedy. Bailey is developing several features and a series based on Satisfaction.
Christopher Buckley is an actor and writer. He has written two shorts, including Satisfaction and a play ‘Third Grade’ performed at the online ‘8x8’ theatre festival in May 2020. Chris was a lead part in the original cast of Stranger Things: The First Shadow. He has performed onstage across the UK and Europe, winning the Theatrepreis Hamburg Rolfe Mares award for ‘Best Actor’ in 2017 for ‘Orphans’. He has also recorded various radio and audio dramas for BBC4 and Audible. Through his writing, he hopes to champion and elevate neglected stories and characters, both onscreen and onstage.
READ OUR INTERVIEW WITH bailey
Tell us about the genesis of Satisfaction and your motivation for making this film.
I (Bailey) and Christopher connected through Centerframe's Get It Made competition. Christopher had written a script about petticoat duels (duels between women), which were uncommon but happened throughout history. In his research, he found a famous Georgian cartoon of two women duelling with pistols, and the script grew from there. We were fascinated by how Georgian social structures were dehumanising these old friends, making them rivals. Over the course of the script, they rediscover their humanity, their mercy. Chris developed a brilliant Georgian slang that had me looking up various words, but gave the project a unique voice and tone. In later drafts, I encouraged Chris to draw out the duel and heighten the suspense, an approach that continued into production, where I took cues from how Sergio Leone built his shootouts.
What were some of the main obstacles you experienced when making Satisfaction and how did you overcome them?
Fields. It's surprisingly hard to find a field / landscape that offered compositional possibilities, where you don't risk some member of the public slowly traipsing across the back of the frame. We realised the answer was to find a location that had private grounds, likely a stately home. However, these came with a hefty price tag, and often their lawns were too manicured. Finally, one of our producers Nathan Craig, found a stately home (that anecdotally, had briefly been owned by Led Zepplin) that wasn't on a location library, which was sympathetic to our project and had natural and photogenic grounds.
As we led up to the shoot day it was forecast to rain on our second day, but didn't feel we could move everything. So we crossed our fingers - and the gods laughed. It was torrential and our morning was mostly rained out. To cover ourselves, we had shot longer on our first day, then on the second we worked under cover for close-ups and grabbed the remaining necessary shots in a brief dry patch at day's end.
Photo Credit: DEVIN DE VIL @ licence to capture
Tell us about the journey of getting your film to audiences and some of the festival circuit highlights.
Post on a short can be slow but we managed to complete this within 5 month, with a deadline for a screening hosted by our funders Centerframe. Iron Box Films came on as a partner to fund the festival run. We quickly got it onto the festival circuit and focused on BIFA qualifying events. The film is short and fairly punchy so was often programmed towards the end of blocks as a big finish or pick-me-up before people left. It was nice to see the film, an intended audience pleaser, was landing with gasps, 'oo's and 'no's in the right place. Kino London gave us our first nomination for Andreas Aaser's score, which I believe was much deserved. Music is such an important part of my films and Andreas is very gifted and imaginative. Rhode Island gave us our US premiere and Bolton International film festival also stood out as a great experience.
What advice or hacks would you give to other short filmmakers?
Keep it short of focus the story and make it easy to programme. Keep it in one location so its easier to produce. iIf you're trying to make something that opens doors - keep the audience in mind.
Plan as much as you can, I storyboard everything myself, which is the final re-write before shooting (until we edit, of course!), which saves time.
Have an idea for every department, and brief them as clearly as you can.
Get the best cast you can! Our casting director, Chloe Blake was really helpful, she works with the National Theatre and has her ear to the ground about new talent.
Any film recommendations that we should add to our watchlist?
Once Upon a Time in the West, is a film I thought about a lot during the making of this film, as with the rest of the dollars trilogy, its inventive, plays with audience expectation and has such an operatic quality. It's climax's and pure cinema and I get the buzz I get when I watch a Hitchcock movie that you can see what the director is doing, which I always find thrilling.
Sweet Smell of Success, a noir-drama that I thought of because in his book 'On Filmmaking' the director Alexander Mackendrick (a Brit making his first US film) said he had been given a 'wordy' script but the writer Clifford Odett's (a famous playwright) told him - 'just do it fast'. I thought about that when dealing with the stylised language of Satisfaction. I also marvelled at the blocking of the film and stole moments from it. I'm a huge fan of the blocking of mid-centrury movies (40s-60s).
Days of Heaven - is always and inspiration for its editing, structure and elliptical storytelling, but this time I was thinking about the photography. Along with the paintings of Andrew Wyeth, this film helped me figure out the look and composition of the landscape. It was pivotal in me picking a location that have long grass that was somewhat yellowing, like corn, but not as difficult to work around.
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Adam Curtis' documentary, draws incredible connections between obscure historical figures, science, philosophy, politics and society - I believe these alternative versions of history are a little subjective, but the ideas and stories had my jaw on the floor every ten minutes. Expanding Saisfactions' historical subject into a series we're constantly finding the roots of social concepts we now take for granted and Curtis will be in my mind when doing this.
What are you working on next?
We’re developing Satisfaction into a limited series about Ann and Belinda becoming hired guns fighting for women’s honour.
I’m also developing a few features, and packaging one caled Torn Velvet, about a fashion marketer who unravels when she discovers that the sight of safety pins triggers orgasmic, spiritually awakening seizues.
