Article: The Losing Game

  • Charlie Cattrall

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.

Filmed in black and white, a metaphor that sits beyond literal film stock, it’s a story of how a man can be celebrated as a legend and yet achieve so little worldly success in a society where more insidious factors such as racial prejudice and overwhelmingly polarising attitudes can stunt career progress for African Americans and jazz musicians. “I wanted to make a film about a musician who never succeeded,” says Cattrall, who studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London at a fertile time when jazz musician contemporaries included Shabaka Hutchings and Tom Challenger who have both taken part in the music for the film some of which was recorded on location at the Vortex club in Dalston. Cattrall, who co-produced the 2010 short Watching starring Ian Hart (best known for his portrayal of John Lennon in Backbeat a film about the early days of the Beatles) explains that music has both “saved and enslaved” Titus who is assisted in the course of the film’s narrative arc by two crucial figures: his platonic but long suffering friend Marina very much in the dark about Titus’ more pressing concerns (played by stage and television actress Ann Mitchell), and club owner Eric, played by jazz singer Ian Shaw who tries to coax Titus out of retirement and who offers him a gig. Shot on a hand-held camera with long shots rather than in the breakneck short and sharp shooting style more familiar in current films its artistic look is grounded in the look of classic jazz photography without falling for the sepia clichés. There’s a sense of social realism in the look but also a contrasting “lush” cinematography as a counterpoint, Cattrall says.
The film is set in the present during one day of Titus’s life but there are also flashbacks to memories of the altoist’s childhood. Titus grew up during segregation and knew the struggles of the civil rights movement, a struggle Shepp in real life was very much part of. Cattrall says the film is for “people who want to watch a film to make them think.”
Ron Cephas Jones as Titus pictured top; Archie Shepp above;and Charlie Cattrall with Jones. Photos: Dakus films
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