Magic Aroundabout

Ryan Owen has a drink with actor and director, Scott Ryan, in a swanky Cardiff hotel bar. As his new movie, The Magician, hits the silver screen, there could be no better time to bond over the love of everything film...

By Ryan Owen

Scott Ryan is a patient man. “Originally I did a hitman script after I read this book Contract Killer, around 15 to 17 years ago, so it’s taken a long time for it to become The Magician and get made,” he explains.

Obvious comparisons have been made between Man Bites Dog and The Last Horror Movie. He talks about why he chose to film The Magician in a mockumentary style. “They’re the least done, and if done well I think they’re better than anything else. It’s about stripping it down to the nuts and bolts: there’s no bullshit, there’s no lying, no pretence, no fancy camera angles. It’s pretty raw; that’s what people like about it.”

Continuing on this theme, Scott discusses how The Magician isn’t stylised and its ability to de-romanticise violence. “In Guy Ritchie films, there tends to be a lot of fucking around with the camera, and it’s all very stylised, whereas this isn’t, it’s what it’s kinda like if you’re one of these guys doing this job for a living, but a little bit more humorous probably than in real life.”

Meandering onto his acting style, Mr Ryan mentions his fellow actors and inspirations. “The only performance I really love is Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of New York. He’s just the scariest character I’ve ever seen on film, you don’t know what he’s going to do, he’s got that ability about him and he underplays it for most of the film. This is the way I tried to be. Guys that are really hard and violent don’t actually go around pretending to be, because they are. It’s what they do.”

So what’s happening next? “I’ve started writing a zombie-road movie, Who Cares Who Wins. Hopefully I’ll get to shoot that later this year or next year with HD cameras. It is very much handheld documentary style.”

Predicting his future he comments: “I want to do everything from sci-fi, a rom-com, a war film, a bit of horror. I think all stories have been told. But the important thing is trying to tell these stories in a way that no-one has told them before, bringing something new to it. Also to make it character-driven; the story is a secondary thing.”

Ryan is very encouraging to potential filmmakers.“If I can do it, what’s to stop anybody else doing it? It’s hard to get it in front of an audience, but it’s not that hard to make. I was desperate, and not getting anywhere, and this is the thing I was best at, and that I wanted to do more than anything else. So I felt like if I gave up on it I was going to regret it, you know. I don’t want to be sitting on my death bed when I’m 80, thinking about if I had just given it a go, instead of regretting not doing something with what I had. So that’s sort of what kept me going.”

Continuing on from this, he talks about his fellow students in film-school. “None of them are doing what they wanted to do, they could’ve done exactly what I did, but they didn’t. If you’re gonna do something then do it. If you are a filmmaker, make films. You may not get a theatrical release but you will learn more from doing it than you ever will from film school, and that will make you a better filmmaker when you go and make the next movie. Just do it.”

On a tangent relating to recent developments in camera hardware, Scott’s advice to filmmakers is “The technology is there so there’s no reason why you or anybody can’t go and bloody make a feature film for a couple of grand, and edit it and get a rough cut. You can get it released all across the UK with digital projectors. There’s no reason you can’t do it.” Again, he insists: “if you wanna do something, just do it, and don’t give up. Don’t listen to anybody saying you can’t do it.”

As our interview draws to its close Scott Ryan ponders in retrospect: “I look back and I think The Magician is probably the cheapest film ever to get released theatrically internationally, so I think that’s pretty fucking cool.”

Apparently since the film’s success he has also met real hard man Chopper as well as getting funding for his new film. Not bad, for a film that apparently cost just $3000, and is bloody good. Go see it now, it will make you laugh like David Blaine would laugh at Noel Edmonds’ face.