“Undeletable” follows a grieving daughter named Emma (Loki star Sophia Di Martino) as she struggles to leave a voicemail for a stranger: She’s just learned that her father was seeing someone other than her mother for years, and when he dies, Emma needs to call the other woman and inform her of his passing.
It’s shot in black and white, in one continuous seven-minute shot. And it really happened.
“This is the gist of the actual disastrous answerphone message I left for my Dad’s lover the day after he died,” says Benjamin Blaine, who co-wrote and co-directed the film with his brother and longtime creative partner, Chris Blaine.
Adding to the emotional rawness of the film, the UK-based brothers shot it on the street where Benjamin made the fateful call.
“When we shot I hadn’t been back to this street for just shy of a decade but it had always been in my head that we’d film this pacing the same pavement and ending up outside the same ugly church that I had done for real. This hill was also the setting for the final shot of the first film Chris and I made together as kids, though in that one we were two of the four horsemen of the apocalypse walking away at the end of the world, with mum coming in at the end of the shot to tidy up the mess we’d left in the street.”
And the significance of the street goes even deeper: “The walk Sophia takes in this film was also the way to the train station that connected my suburban self to London and, more recent to the answerphone message, had been the way to the local chemist to pick up Dad’s morphine. Going back was something of a pilgrimage or a laying to rest of ghosts. I had also wondered if something of the intensity of the return would create an energy for Sophia to bounce off, though in the end the most shocking thing about being back was how utterly normal it felt so I think the magic in her performance was all her own.”
The film is also a walk through the Blaines’ film history in other ways, too: It reunites them with the Festival Formula founder Katie Bignell, who helped the film connect with Indy Shorts, one of MovieMaker‘s 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee and 25 Coolest Film Festivals in the World. She has been an advocate of Indy Shorts since it launched in 2018 as a spinoff of the Indianapolis’ Heartland Film Festival.
We talked with Benjamin Blaine about how he and Chris brought Undeletable to life, enlisting Sophia Di Martino to tell their story, and their longtime collaboration with Bignell.
MovieMaker: “Undeletable” was shot in one continuous scene, something that’s becoming much more common recently. Why was that the best way to tell this story?
Benjamin Blaine: We didn’t want to give the freedom of the delete to the character or the audience — when you don’t cut there is a building tension that is perfect for this story. She’s stuck in this situation and there’s no way out, so: no edits allowed.
The technique of the “oner” is definitely having a moment right now, not just because it’s a great way of heightening tension, not just because it highlights the “how did they do that?” magic trick that has pulled audiences into cinema from its very inception, but also because that magic demands the eyeballs never leave the screen, or you’ll miss the trick.
And funnily, by doing that, it affords you more space for thought, both for the characters and the audience. In a more conventionally edited narrative, there is always the pressure to speed things up, smooth things over, get there sooner. The oner is a very direct way of playing a highwire act with the audience’s anticipation for what comes next, and that felt just right for this story.
MovieMaker: Why did you shoot “Undeletable” in black and white?
Benjamin Blaine: We knew we wanted to frame it 1.33:1 so we trapped Emma in her quandary, but we didn’t decide for sure on black and white until we watched through the rushes with Sophia. It felt right to push the image and audio hard and black and white really helps you push contrast in a way that feels pleasing rather than going too far.
More importantly, we wanted the audience to be right there with Emma but also to feel the distance, same as with the sound feeling like it’s what Susie is hearing on the answerphone. It’s not just about Emma’s emotions but about what she imagines the emotions of the person on the other end of the line will then be feeling. Putting us in a space somewhere between the two that makes us feel both sides of that felt the right thing to do.
Benjamin Blaine on Shooting Sophia Di Martino in ‘Undeletable’ on a Public Street in One Take
MovieMaker: “Undeletable” was shot on a real street, perhaps with real traffic — can you talk about the way you did it? Did you block it off? What camera and sound equipment did you use?
Benjamin Blaine: We did shoot on a real street, with no control over traffic or passers-by. We didn’t block anything off. The sounds of builders are from builders actually working away across the road as we went by.
It was a very small crew, Chris operating a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K on a DJI Ronin-S gimbal and me recording sound on a Zoom H6N with a boom, personal mic and the audio from the phone, and we had two assistants, Martin and Lauren, guiding us as we walked backwards making sure we didn’t hit any trees or walk in front of a car.
But that was it, just the four of us. We deliberately wanted to keep things small so we could concentrate on performance and so the world would happen around us. And the more it did, the better. There were takes which were technically much smoother, but the world around us was flat, and watching it back, it all just felt a bit lifeless. Having the randomness of the world really added something.
In the end the take we used was the last one we shot. Chris was fighting the gimbal throughout and by the end of the take everything was shaking, which really added to the emotion of the film. And then on “cut” Chris fell to the floor, exhausted, having had the flu the previous week.
We used a lot of the phone sound in the mix with the brilliant Steve Bond, letting that sense of it ebb and flow through the piece so we are sometimes closer to Emma or further down a shitty phone line. Steve was great in harnessing our desire for the film to feel like it is careening out of control — yeah, we want to hear the wind hit the phone mic — whilst being in control of when and where the story wanted to do that.
But Steve’s always been great at working with the real sounds of a real space — he’s “shot” radio dramas on location, choosing the location himself for the sounds it brings, rather than doing it in a dead studio where all the surrounding life will need to be added afterwards. It’s something we are trying to embrace more and more with our filmmaking.
Too often filmmaking is a process of finding something exciting and alive, then stripping it of all the things that made it exciting and alive so we can then bring in replacements that hopefully give the illusion that everything is exciting and alive. Sometimes that choreography can work brilliantly, sometimes it just leaves everything flat. We love letting the world in, letting the happy accident take the story to another level — for us that’s when things get magical.
MovieMaker: The experience of leaving a long message and trying to delete and re-do it feels so universal, even if the stakes are heightened in “Undeletable.”
Benjamin Blaine: I’m glad you find the ideas behind the film feel universal… I do think that true universality is always found through detail and specificity but part of casting, well casting Sophia was because she’s amazing and we’d long wanted to work together, but part of writing the character as someone who wasn’t directly a stand-in for me was to try and open this moment up to an audience as fiction.
Sophia knew the history and, excuse the double negative, but whilst she isn’t not playing me — her being me is always going to be an analog copy of the original. That means there’s space for her in the performance and so hopefully space for everyone else in the audience to be there too. Part of what obsesses me about that moment in my life was how as I left the message I got to glimpse this sense of my Dad as his lover had known him, an analog copy himself that somehow existed in the same physical space the Dad I had known had just vacated.
I hope by putting my words in Sophia’s mouth and her feet on my old street this film is a similar act of multiplying.
MovieMaker: Can you talk about enlisting Sophia Di Martino for “Undeletable”?
Benjamin Blaine: This is a script that we had waited on for some time to actually make. Then Sophia got in touch with us about working together and it felt like this could be a really exciting collaboration, so we sent her the project and met up to talk it through. It is certainly a daunting role, there are depths of pain with waves of humor and we always wanted to do it in one take.
We were really grateful that Sophia wanted to take on the challenge. We talked it all through a lot, and didn’t rehearse before the shoot day, instead Sophia came along that morning word perfect for the whole thing and so we could work out timings and nuances as we walked through the first few takes, knowing it would be a few before the five of us were all up to speed.
Having got something great on Take 9 — there was a moment towards the end with a peloton of cyclists whizzing past down the road which made it a tempting take to use — we stopped for tea, then went back out and took it all to another level. It was great to see Sophia really hone the comedy whilst reaching into the depths of heart-rending emotions. And we went on to Take 18 and until Chris collapsed.
Not all the takes went all the way through but we had quite a few options that all had their own strengths. We narrowed it down to a handful and then watched them all through on a big screen with Sophia and made our choice together.
MovieMaker: Finally, Katie credits you with inspiring her business, Festival Formula. Can you talk about how your collaboration began, and how it’s come together again with this film?
Benjamin Blaine: Katie is brilliant and we’ve always known that from the moment we met her. Some time ago she came and did work experience with us whilst she was studying at university and the first task we put her on was sending our short films out to festivals — it’s a laborious job, especially in those days when you had to send a physical copy to every festival.
Katie’s the reason we started winning awards for our short films — without her, we wouldn’t have entered all those festivals. She came back to do more work experience over a summer holiday and once she’d finished university we started paying her once a week to do the job, it was so invaluable to us — if a job is worth doing, it’s worth paying for. Katie’s also a brilliant writer, so she would write replies to emails and on Twitter as our office manager, Bingo The Clown, who she invented an entire backstory for which involved some form of murder I seem to recall.
Anyway, we also got her writing in character as a penguin for an online campaign we were making videos for and she helped run our Kickstarter for our feature film Nina Forever. Over the years we saw her build Festival Formula and we’re not surprised they are thriving. Because every time we’ve made another short — and we love to keep making shorts — we’ve then taken it straight to Katie. She has such a good sense of the film festival world and her predictions of how things will go are usually spot on, and we know she will always help our films find their audiences across the world.
Collaborating with her on “Undeletable” is especially sweet though as she knew the real people behind this story and has walked down this very street herself. She’s always been part of the family and it means a lot to work with her on this film in particular.
“Undeletable” played Indy Shorts and is also available for streaming online.
Main image: Sophia Di Martino in “Undeletable.”