30/05/2022 - CANNES 2022: Cineuropa met up with the Cornish director to talk about the influences and superstitions that fed into his new film – plus red jackets

Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men [+see also:
film review
interview: Mark Jenkin
film profile] debuted in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. Following the phenomenal success of Bait [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Mark Jenkin
film profile], which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, it was one of the most highly anticipated British films at the event. Jenkin met with Cineuropa to talk about the influences and superstitions that fed into the movie – plus red jackets.

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Cineuropa: Can you explain what the words “Enys Men” mean?
Mark Jenkin: Literally speaking, it's the Cornish-language name for “Stone Island”. Enys means island, and Men, pronounced “me-an”, means long stone or standing stone, which are very prominent in Cornwall. There are a lot of places called Long Stone and Standing Stone.

This is a psychological horror that plays with memory and time, and it’s set in the wilderness in 1973. Did you pick that year as an homage to Don't Look Now and The Wicker Man?
The 1973 thing is funny: it's because I'm incredibly superstitious. I have a lot of superstitions around numbers, and 73 is a really significant one for me. As a kid, my grandma would always tell me to be wary of the number three, adding that I should be cautious around groups of three people, as there would always be a minority. Seven is my lucky number.

So it’s nothing to do with Don’t Look Now, then?
I suppose I knew about the significance of 1973 with regard to Don't Look Now, but it wasn't something I was really thinking about, which sounds nuts because the poster for the film at Cannes prominently features the red jacket. But the truth is that up to the very last minute, the volunteer who works on the island was going to be wearing a yellow mac, and the oilskin she finds was going to be red. Then I got worried that the yellow jacket and blue jeans would be a rip-off of Charlotte Gainsbourg's costume in Antichrist [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Lars von Trier
film profile], so I decided to swap the jackets around, and this meant I walked into a much more obvious homage.

The film takes place inside the head of a volunteer who lives alone on an island, and it shows us her traumas. While aesthetically, it feels like it’s 1973, thematically, it looks at the influence of a patriarchal society and the traumas stemming from it, which feels very modern. Was this your intention?
Again, I think that was very unconscious, but it's in there. From my point of view, you can't help but reflect what's going on in the world around you. What we're exposed to, what sorts of changes we are living through, are so prominent. I think as a male filmmaker, you cannot put a female character front and centre in a feature like this without considering what you're saying. There's a responsibility, and that doesn’t mean it's got a message; it means you have to be able to defend what happens. I was very keen not to have a female character being terrorised and chased around the island in her nightdress at the end of the movie.

The film's structure is like a jigsaw puzzle, where we find pieces and must put them together without a preordained order. Was that how you saw it?
I think that's kind of the structure – it's a puzzle, yes. There's no beginning or end to the narrative. I think you might drive yourself mad trying to work out what the chronology of it is. My feeling is that the past, present and future all exist at the same time because that is the way that our consciousness works. It's non-linear.