Charlie Cattrall, director of new film Titus, gives some key insights into the making of the film, which stars Ron Cephas Jones as Titus, the saxophone-playing African-American jazz musician at the heart and soul of the story
Titus is the story of a down on his luck jazz legend the 60-year-old Titus (Ron Cephas Jones) lost in London in the autumn of his years and living in his patron Marina’s suburban house. Fighting to find a way back to the music that has kept him going all these years, the “musical voice” of Titus is provided by Archie Shepp, crucially and unusually for the 76-year-old Florida-born jazz master, performing on alto saxophone, Titus’ preferred instrument.
The film’s director Charlie Cattrall, speaking exclusively to marlbank, explains that Titus owes its origins to conversations that took place as long ago as 2001 talking jazz with theatre and film actor Ron Cephas Jones. They talked long into the night about Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock and much else and began to envisage the making of a film with jazz at its artistic heart. Cattrall got in deep, listened to the records of Rahsaan Roland Kirk for the first time at Jones' suggestion, and in April 2010 went to see Jones perform on stage in Paris. They talked some more but the timing was more propitious, and a script came together soon afterwards written by Nico Mensinga. First shooting began almost straight away in July 2010. Jones, who played Caliban in the Sam Mendes Old Vic production of The Tempest, fitted in initial filming at weekends around his appearances at the Old Vic with more filming following in 2011 that included the film’s dream sequence with filming then completing in 2012 with the last pick-ups.
Cattrall says straightforwardly that his and Jones’ primary inspiration in Titus is “jazz music” and the film was partly inspired by the 1991 Geoff Dyer book But Beautiful when Dyer blended events in historical jazz with figures from his own imaginings. The figure of Titus in Cattrall’s film is a composite, he says: a 60-year-old man discovered in a situation of some distress at the beginning of the film, contemplating suicide. Cattrall looks to the little-known alto saxophonist Clarence C. Sharpe, who died aged just 52 in New York at the beginning of the 1990s, as a partial inspiration. “He died of throat cancer and has been described as the ‘missing link between Ornette Coleman and Charlie Parker’,” Cattrall explains. Sharpe in the late-1960s actually, whether a coincidence or not, performed on Archie Shepp’s Impulse album For Losers on such tracks as Cal Massey’s ‘What Would It Be Without You’, and for the film Shepp then recorded a session in London for Titus two years ago when he was in the capital for an appearance at the London Jazz Festival, his presence an essential part of the project. Cattrall readily points out that in the persona of Titus the story is almost an anatomy of failure.