Marie Schuller
is a London based filmmaker and photographer.
My early work was heavily shaped by my mentor at the time, Nick Knight. I worked with Nick for 5 years after film school, and his studio-driven, graphic, technically avant-garde style heavily influenced my own work at the time. I started working with novel uses of lighting, projections and moving lights. I applied heavy post production, manipulating the source image into new visual languages, crafting very abstract and surreal imagery. Back then I was a much better editor than I was a director and my films benefited from that - my work was heavily cut, using editing as a stylistic driving force, and I pretty much explored every single trick in the FCP7 effects library. I approached film from the editing backwards, hiding the fact that I wasn't a very good director. Instead of going into a shoot with a sense of structure or narrative in mind, I very much had a 'fix it in post' mentality and was only concerned with capturing visually beautiful and exciting stuff on the day.
Once I left SHOWstudio and Nick's mentorship, I started exploring my own practice and find my own style. It took years, and close to 100 films, to gain a conceptual understanding of what I actually like and believe in, and how I am able to communicate this with the medium of film. Back in the days I had a technique I named 'accidental editing', where I took a clip and literally chopped it up by random. I'd then rearrange the bits to create a choppy edit that would jump back and forth and inject dynamic and energy into the edit. When I started thinking more intensely about the structure and cinematic flow of my own films, I had to seriously adjust my approach to editing. I made a rule for myself to never cut unless the cut was needed. How does this film actually benefit from this cut? Do I need to cut, or am I only doing it to hide the fact that my material doesn't have the energy or doesn't hold the interest of its audience without a choppy edit?
This new approach led to a chain of pretty boring films at first, but then forced me to become a better director and seriously address my sense of storytelling. I moved away from heavy post production and became much more raw and intimate in my work. I started working with narrative and dialogue and made use of the elements that make film unique and differ to photography. I questioned every decision I took as a director: Is this idea original? Do my casting choices represent the world as I see it? Does this make sense? What am I trying to say? Most of what I am trying to do still fails, but with every film I do continue to become a better director.
Awards
ASVOFF 2011
Best Director of Fashion
ASVOFF 2012
Best Sound
ASVOFF 2014
Best Beauty
Fashion Film Festival Milano 2014
Best Styling
Fashion Film Festival Milano 2016
Best Styling
Fashion Film Festival Milano 2016
Best Sound
Le Books Creative Awards 2015
Best Fashion Imagery
Chicago Fashion Film Festival 2016
Winner of Audience Award
Australian Fashion Film Awards 2016
Best Make Up
Australian Fashion Film Awards 2016
Best Hair
Transylvania Short Film Festival 2016
Best Fashion Film
Santiago de Chile Fashion Film Awards 2018
Grand Prize for Best Film
Le Books Creative Awards 2018
Best Music Video