My mom has never shied away from taking risks and she really supports me as an artist and the same with my brother. My mom knows the type of artist that I am and I think that thankfully we’ve had a really interesting life together. It’s just using real life relationships to achieve this added level of realism. So, when I started my work as a filmmaker, really around the time of my second film, I found this process of what I like to call ‘reality cinema’. I have always have found it quite challenging to not be aware that there’s a whole group of people standing around watching me and try and look like I’m really a person who is really experiencing the things that I’m supposed to be experiencing. MW: Yeah, I think for me as an actor and having an opportunity to work with a lot of really great filmmakers throughout my career, it sent me through this kind of obsessive journey of realism and how to achieve that in a traditional working environment on the film set. Can you just bring me back how you brought this forward to your mom and your brother and got them involved? And how you decided to make this such a family effort? ‘Flesh and Blood’ is described as kind of part drama, part documentary and you use your family in the casting. I had the opportunity to discuss this innovative feature with Mark Webber and he spoke candidly about his homeless past, recruiting his family as performers, what he’s learned from working with great directors, and the necessity to shuck off the ego in the artist process. The film’s unassuming rawness is infectious, as is Webber’s soul-bearing central performance. We meet his activist mother, his socially awkward brother and a pair of deadbeat father figures, each losing a lifelong battle to addiction, and all help contextualize this man and the troubled life he’s lived. He excises demons both literal and metaphorical and the dissolution between the barrier of the two makes for some unchartered and often challenging cinema. With his latest feature, a documentary-cum-drama, Webber has pioneered something unclassifiable, a powerfully pure art piece where the lines of reality and fiction become blur and indistinguishable.Ī soul-thumping exercise in cinema verite, Flesh and Blood explores family relations in the context of Mark’s own family. A seasoned actor and filmmaker both, Webber has not followed a traditional path but has found success nonetheless. Fans of the darker side of cinema may recognize Mark Webber from last year’s excellent Green Room where Mark played a Nazi trying (and failing) to defect from a gnarly order of backwoods skinheads but his roots in the film world run deeper than you’d think at first glance.
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