Filmmaker Karan Kandhari talks through the songs that soundtracked his life, and the creation of his BAFTA-nominated debut feature Sister Midnight.
Described by its writer and director Karan Kandhari as, “a film about a smalltown misfit who becomes an accidental outlaw”, Sister Midnight is a work that wears its musical influences out and proud.
From the Iggy Pop-lifted title to the impeccably-chosen needle-drops that soundtrack Radhika Apte’s character Uma and her feral journey through an unhappy arranged marriage in Mumbai, the genre-weird debut feature from Kandhari is flush with the outsider spirit of rock and roll.
A bold, darkly funny and visually inventive film, Sister Midnight introduces the 44-year-old Kuwait-born director and writer as one of the most exciting new voices in British cinema.
The film – which world-premiered in Cannes’ Directors Fortnight and won Best Film in the Next Wave section at Fantastic Fest – hits cinemas this Friday and is the culmination of a decade-long journey for the London-based artist, who cut his teeth on shorts and music videos for the likes of Franz Ferdinand and The Vaccines.
“I was struggling at the start,” he tells me, a week out from the film's release. “I wrote a terrible feature, I tried to get it through the doors and no doors opened. And then out of necessity, I wrote Hard Hat, this short about three hapless dudes trying to get a gig and working on a building site and getting ripped off – and I sort of funded that by hustling a bunch of dentists I met.” Hard Hat's success on the film festival circuit helped Kandhari to make his next two shorts back to back and set up development for Sister Midnight.
The rawness and momentum of Kandhari’s writing and direction is matched by songs from The Stooges, Motörhead, T-Rex and Buddy Holly, alongside original music from Interpol’s Paul Banks, making his debut as a film composer. "I never wanted to use songs to push an emotion," Kandhari explains. "Paul’s stuff is very emotional so it was his first instinct to lean into the emotion, and I would say, 'Well if the scene is emotional, go completely in the other direction.'
"What happened is he would write something for one part of the film, and then we would juxtapose it on another part of the film, and suddenly the meaning would totally change. It was one of my favourite collaborations on this film. I think he's such a talented, smart, sensitive, human and one of my favourite lyricists as well."
Music remains Kandhari's north star and talking through the songs that have shaped his life and experiences reveals someone who is forever indebted to sound and the people who can harness its power.
"I don't know that many directors, but I feel like I can speak the same language when I talk to musicians," he says. "I hold music and humour above any other form of art."
“Kokomo” by The Beach Boys
KARAN KANDHARI: My earliest memory of music is really this song that I put at the top of this list. I must have been seven or eight and my mom, my dad, me and my granddad went to visit my dad's brother who lived in the States. And I don't know why it was there, but I remember a pink Best of The Beach Boys cassette in the Winnebago we were travelling in.
It’s not like I sit around now listening to “Kokomo” as an older person, but I remember that was the first thing that hit me, and where I got seized by music. It’s the fucking cheesiest song, and here’s me getting rid of my punk rock guilt, saying I had a musical epiphany as seven-year-old, listening to this in a Winnebago and being mesmerised by music for the first time. It sent me off somewhere else.
I think what seized me was melody. And it's not like I became a massive Beach Boys fan; I just remember this song, sitting in this Winnebago, watching America go by.
BEST FIT: What came after The Beach Boys?
When we evacuated from Kuwait during the Gulf War we ended up in India for a year, and about that time in my life – and I don't know how – I ended up being very obsessed with Elvis. I remember having this massive poster of him in Jailhouse Rock. He was my first pop culture crush or idol.
My aunt – my mom's sister, and she has three – was the youngest and felt more like a bigger sister to me. She was about to get married, and I was very insecure that we wouldn’t get to hang out again, but it turned out the guy she was marrying was a massive Elvis fan and I went and interrogated him to make sure he was a true Elvis fan.
When do you think your listening started to mature a little more?
In my early teens, I guess. I don't know how, but I ended up listening to Ice T, I remember The Iceberg album. I don't know if I could listen to that shit now because it’s kind of severe in its misogyny, but there was this dalliance with early Hip-Hop stuff before I discovered guitar music with Metallica and Guns N' Roses. I'd ride around the desert on my bicycle listening to “Night Train”, just wanting to escape the desert.
I found the other weirdo in high school – this Egyptian kid who was the only other guy who listened to metal – and he wrote all his essays in the Metallica font. I think that period was pretty important.
“Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” by Bob Dylan
The equivalent of taking acid for the first time was hearing Bob Dylan in that ‘60s period after he went electric. And that just blew my mind; I remember listening to “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” on repeat in my bed and it was like taking a hallucinogenic, because the imagery that he evokes was so wild. For a young mind, they were these bizarre, very vivid images that sent your brain off into all these different directions.
This is typical of that era of Dylan lyrically, with the mixture of myth and reality, isn’t it?
Absolutely, he was inspired by all these Imagist poets and that’s my favourite period of Dylan's. To me, all art comes from the unconscious, and there's something about this period of his where it sounds like he had a direct line into his unconscious. It was untethered and unfiltered.
I'm not sure even he could tell you what the songs are about. There’s an interview I was watching recently, where he talks about that period and how he could never write songs like that again. I think he describes it as being in a trance, and the experience of listening to that stuff was like being in a trance.
More than anything in my films, Bob Dylan has played a major role – there’s even a scene in Sister Midnight that I literally ripped off from a verse from an obscure Dylan song, and a whole scene came out of it. The song is called “Drifters Escape” – it’s not a very well-known song and it came from album of off-cuts that the label put out when he wasn't turning up with anything.
It’s an outlaw ballad like a lot of the stuff he did at the end of the ‘60s around the time of John Wesley Harding. And the lyrics go: “Just then a bolt of lightning / Struck the courthouse out of shape / And while everybody knelt to pray / The drifter did escape”. The film is about somebody becoming an accidental outlaw, I’m playing with that American mythos and mutating it into this Indian context. She's kind of backed into a corner – and not to ruin the film for anyone – but what appears to be a supernatural strike of lightning appears and has an effect on a cop and a priest.
I think Bob Dylan is like fertiliser for my unconscious. The lines that stick in my head from being a kid and listening to “Stuck Inside of Mobile…” are “Now Shakespeare’s in the alley / With his pointed shoes and his bells / Speaking to some French girl / Who says she knows me well / And I would send a message to find out if she’s talked / But the post office has been stolen and the mailbox is locked”, and “Now Mona tried to tell me / She said to stay away from the train lines / She said all the railroad men do is drink your blood like wine / And I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know, but then again, there’s only one I’ve met / And he just smoked my eyelids / And punched my cigarette.”
Honestly, it was like taking drugs and it sent me on a trip. I just hope I can make films that are as vivid as his lyrics, which are basically images that explode like little neutron bombs.
Do you see Sister Midnight as a piece of punk filmmaking? I was thinking about filmmakers like Alex Cox and Jim Jarmusch when I was watching it.
It’s being described as punk, sure, and that’s fair, but I don’t love labels, and I have an anarchic spirit. I'll question anything – whether that's the way a film should be made or the way a story should be told. I like taking all the things that are sacred and subverting them and messing with them.
Alex Cox’s Repo Man was a big film for me, though of course it has a great Iggy Pop song in there too. And Jarmusch came out of that no wave and punk scene in New York too, and there’s something super punk about those first two movies he made - Permanent Vacation and Stranger Than Paradise – both in terms of the attitude they radiated and the way they were constructed.
But to me, the greatest punk in Hollywood was Robert Altman, because he was a kind of anarchist with the form and a true rebel who took all these well-worn American genres and dismantled them – he dismantled the notion of what America was. In its own different ways, punk also tried to dismantle what the UK meant, like it also did in New York or when it moved to the West Coast.
‘Punk’ has become quite a nebulous term at this point hasn’t it? I’m not sure there’s a nuance in the way it’s used today.
I agree with you. For me, punk rock is a molecule — not a jacket you slip on or a chord structure. It’s an attitude or an outlook…
Did music figure into your concept of your work very early on in your filmmaking?
I think because I grew up in essentially a small desert – this was not Kuwait, but another place the Middle East, where we ended up after the Gulf War. Deserts are like blank canvases and if you're a displaced teenager you spend a lot of time in your own head. And music was that thing that fed me.
I was obsessive with the music I was listening to – I’d listen to the same song 100 times and then it would unlock something. I would see images in my head. I would dream about making films and I could only make them in my head by sticking on a Velvet Underground song and watching the desert pass by. So I think music is definitely my one true love, in terms of the art that I digest.
It's always been there, and writing for me is intertwined with music. It’s not necessarily the music that I'm listening to when I'm writing that’s going to end up in the film, even though this film has a lot of it. Some of the things that seized me when I was writing Sister Midnight were obviously Iggy Pop, Patti Smith and a lot of Leonard Cohen.
How did you first start connecting with bands when you moved to London?
Through a weird series of events. Somebody saw the short I made and he recommended it to someone else, and somebody at a label was looking for some new directors, and in a roundabout way I was recommended to The Vaccines and ended up doing a video for them and they became really good friends. I’ve done other stuff with them that isn't just music, photos and a zine for their show at Ally pally many years ago. Through that, I think Franz Ferdinand saw the Vaccines video, and I did one for them too. I haven't made that many music videos but the people I feel most comfortable with are musicians.
When did the songs in Sister Midnight start to lock in for you?
I’d carried the story in parts or fragments for so long, and I was in a period of listening to a lot of Iggy Pop. That song “Sister Midnight” – “Calling sister midnight / You've got me reaching for the moon” – and the mysterious romance of the night in that song…. everything just clicked. It never occurred to me to use the song in the film, but it was always something that unlocked everything and I wanted to pay homage to it by naming the film after that. The Motörhead song was always there from the start and I always knew I wanted to use “Ann” by the Stooges.
Pretty much everything was there; the only thing that was a late addition to the film was Buddy Holly, when we found ourselves with a scene where something wasn't quite working and it just felt right, and it had the right attitude and humour. A lot of the music in this film shouldn't work on paper with what's going on and the context culturally, but it's like a kind of cultural collage, and I like putting things together that shouldn't go together.
For the longest time, I had the T-Rex song “Mambo Sun” in my head. It feels like an ending, and it might be the grooviest thing that Bolan ever did. It’s mind-blowing what that band did. They’re an absolute anomaly and there’s nobody like them. Bolan is like an adorable fairy and there's a sense of humour to him and he’s weird… I remember when I was very depressed when I was younger, I went and hung out by that place west where his car crashed into a tree.
When did Paul Banks get involved with the film?
Well, it took about 10 years to get made but Paul came onboard maybe seven years ago. I was in New York eating tacos with a friend of mine, Jess Lord, who was managing Interpol at the time, and I was telling her how I was listening to a lot of Interpol when I was writing it. I asked her if Paul had ever scored anything, and she said “Well, he's always wanted to” and so she sent him my shorts.
We met up for a coffee and spent three hours talking about all sorts of abstract things – a lot about quantum physics. Neither of us are experts in this field, but we found a great language and a friendship between us, and then he started making music all that time ago, because it was his first go and we were so excited about working together. We just kept, slowly over the years, building this collaboration until it finally got to making the film.
Part of what makes his music in the film so great is it feels like we just jumped into a needle drop and then jumped back out, rather than it feeling like a traditional film score, which I'm not interested in anyway.
You've got other musicians involved in the film on-screen as well?
The great Rozi Plain, one of my favourite London musicians, is the voice of a goat and a couple of birds in the film. I often end up just roping friends in because I know their personalities or humour, and I knew Rozi would be very fun to have in there, because there are these animals in the film, but we have to have a specific performance vocally from them. We also have the amazing powerhouse Japanese drummer Monna from Bo Ningen with a surprise cameo in this film, he shows up in the form of a very old outlaw archetype, and he's pretty damn cool in it.
“Sister Ray” by The Velvet Underground
All the music I’ve picked is a breadcrumb trail for me, either in life or in the endeavour of making art. When I first heard The Velvet Underground that was an epiphany, and it blew my mind. It was like seeing the lineage of where all these other punk bands that I loved so much came from. I'm always looking for a sort of purity I guess, and The Velvet Underground – like The Stooges – are just pure, unhinged expression, at least in that period with White Light/White Heat.
If I want to tap into my unconscious, I put on “Sister Ray”. And I'm such a dork – I spend a lot of time looking for the longest live version bootlegs of this song, and this thing puts me in a trance, it's an absolute fucking trip. But also, Lou Reed had an impact on this film lyrically, because his songs – even though they're not always linear in a narrative sense – are all storytelling to some degree. He’s telling stories of people who exist in the night and there's something nocturnal about “Sister Ray”.
I have his description of “Sister Ray” in front of me; he said, “It has eight characters in it and this guy gets killed and nobody does anything. It was built around this story that I wrote about this scene of total debauchery and decay. I like to think of 'Sister Ray' as a transvestite smack dealer. The situation is a bunch of drag queens taking some sailors home with them, shooting up on smack and having this orgy when the police appear.”
Fucking amazing! I blame Lou Reed for why I write films the way I do. And he was transgressive – these are these vivid snapshots of life and people in the after hours. He was the poet of the street in the night. “Sister Ray” is the quintessential Velvet Underground song, because it’s got this transgressive lyric quality of these people on the outside, on the fringes – and then that drone element, the noise, the feedback and this pounding, propulsive escalation to this point of sheer noise delirium.
I think I'm attracted to punk also because there’s repetition that's built into punk. I keep using this word ‘trance’ but it's like; repetition, repetition, repetition, and then a slight variation in a chord and a shift in tone after you've been sort of lulled into this trance-like state. With this stuff, it can feel like an orgasm for the mind, and there's something about the repetition that’s almost transcendental to me in The Velvet Underground.
I'm not a musician, but in my own twisted way I'm trying to get that three-chord, transcendental thing going on in the way I approach structuring my films. My friend Alex from Franz Ferdinand saw the film and described it like a Mogwai song, in this slow-build to a sort-of-explosion.
“1970” by The Stooges
It’s really hard to describe what The Stooges do to me, but it's that purity I was talking about. The Stooges, in my opinion, are the greatest band that ever walked the earth, and I still listen to them at least once a week. It’s like plugging into the mainframe of some life force, and it jacks me back into feeling alive.
1,000 bands were spawned in the wake of The Stooges, but no punk band, no guitar band, can still quite capture the unbridled, pure expression of what these guys did.
I think you need naivety in art, because if you become too conscious it can get in the way of making stuff, and to me The Stooges always felt so pure and untouched. You know, kids are amazing because their minds haven't been polluted yet and so art still feels like play – it's pure and it’s not conscious. It’s true expression, and that's that naivety that The Stooges had in those first three albums, that I’m always trying to get back to as an artist. It’s a pure reaction to existence.
“1970” is wonderfully fucking deranged and it builds to such a chaotic and euphoric place. And all throughout it, it just sums up Iggy to me… he's yelling at the top of his lungs, “I feel alright”, but he doesn't. And he keeps saying it: “I feel alright, I feel alright!” You fucking don’t, dude! You're on the edge of a cliff! That raw, naked exposure of Iggy Pop, the vulnerability and – to cheesily reference it – the fucking raw power of it that comes up.
I've had moments in my life, back to my 20s, where I felt so disappointed because I was struggling to get films made, getting rejections from funding schemes or getting my foot in the door anywhere. I would go back home to my room, stick on Fun House, whacking it up full, blasting the song and sticking my head between the two speakers. So there's certainly a healing quality to the Stooges for me too.
It’s the thing I always return to – the true-life force. I don't know if that sounds too pretentious, but that's the best way I can explain it.
"Oh Oh I Love Her So" by The Ramones
These guys were the greatest outsiders – they were not meant to be rock stars… I mean look at them! They're these mutants of humanity. They were so inspired by ‘50s pop, Phil Spector and Doo-wop and I think in some weird way The Ramones thought they could be The Ronettes, but what came out through the naivety of their expression, was this beautiful, strange, mutant hybrid of Americana.
I love this song, and I would equate this to the innocence of love, because it sums up the purity of the Ramones: “I met her at the Burger King / We fell in love by the soda machine.” There's something very innocent and sweet about it but with that powerful urgency of the Ramones.
I think I've grown out of it now, but I remember being very obsessed with that lyric when I was younger and it being an indication of the innocence of love.
"It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" by Bob Dylan
It’s a soundtrack to a very difficult period in my life; a song that helped me negotiate with the past and the present. I had a very strange experience happen to me in my 30s, that I will talk about without being too explicit.
Essentially, I walked into a building one day and I lost where I lived and home as I knew it. I lost my autonomy; I was essentially exiled. I couldn’t get back home, and I ended up in a country very far away, against my will. I was mourning my life as I knew it.
I had lots of friends come visit me and my friend Zena was going through her own sort of mourning for a period in her life. This song was very special to us both because we would listen to it endlessly together as we travelled, transposing our feelings and experiences onto it, using the lyrics like shorthand between each other and the more we listened to it, the more it helped us find ways to say goodbye to these two particular times in our lives.
You know: “Forget the dead you've left / They will not follow you.” That's Dylan going from the vivid explosion of imagery in the mid-sixties to tapping into emotion, but in an unsentimental way. And that's the beauty of Dylan: you can transpose what you want onto his words – and there's so many fucking words – to find ways to navigate your own existence.
"Sound and Vision" by David Bowie
I remember being in art school and obviously I knew about Bowie, but I hadn't really dived in. The first record I bought was Hunky Dory and again, like Dylan and Lou, he wrote these snippets of outsider ecosystems – sailors fighting in the dancehall – and there was this sort of music like I'd never heard before.
He’s been a major fixture in my life and “Sound and Vision” is very special to me, because I was obsessed with it when I first came up with the first fragments of Sister Midnight. I'd visited Bombay for the first time, and it was a very overwhelming city but also intoxicating. It seduced me, but I found myself very lonely there, and the only thing I could do to get through it was to write and draw.
And this song fills me with wonder, because he's saying such a simple thing but it's actually a brilliant, massive, existential question: Do you wonder sometimes about sound and vision? Like, fuck me, we can see, we can hear, and what magic that shit can create!
I think I always associate it with this very fertile, vulnerable time in my life and allowing me to see the wonder in these two senses, what happens when they come together and how beautiful they can be. Every time I hear this song it's like visiting a familiar, safe place, because it's so bright and lush and sonically you can dive into it. If anyone's losing faith in art, listen to this song.
Did the entire Berlin period of Bowie really resonate with you? I remember finding it in my mid-teens and it felt like it was hidden away under the artist that all of my friends knew Bowie as, especially with the instrumentals.
Yes, it's my favourite too. I still put on side B of Low and nothing else sounds like it. And Berlin is an amazing, beautiful, strange, battered city that's been scarred so much. It’s also a city of exiles that took everyone in in many ways, and there's a romantic alienation to Berlin which is very prominent in all the Bowie stuff from that time. But it's not a navel-gazing, ‘Woe-is-me’, or a self-pitying kind of alienation. It's embracing alienation and displacement, like wearing the badge of an outsider.
“A Warm Place” by Nine Inch Nails
The Downward Spiral is not just one of the greatest albums ever made… it’s a fucking piece of art. It is one of the most mysterious, amazing pieces of art I've ever witnessed in my life, and it still blows my mind in the trip it takes you on.
You can listen to it as one piece, which is how I do it, but with that song in particular you can see the influence of Bowie – this was like having an alternate universe where Bowie returned to the Berlin period. I think there's an interview with the two of them where Trent talks about accidentally ripping off a piece Bowie wrote, “Crystal Japan”. But that's art, right? It's like one big, unconscious tapestry and all these things leave imprints on you.
This is another song I went to a lot when I was making this film, as a way to find some solace from the stress of making the thing. And you know, the title really does indicate what the thing feels like: this warm but dimly lit cocoon, like a haze you can go into, where you sit with the melancholy and soothe it away.
Where it sits in the record is also very interesting – right after you've gone on this quite brutal trip of emotions and places and feelings and quite severe imagery… it's almost like a bath. There’s a whole section of Sister Midnight which I explain in a similar way: that the film also goes through all these severe, really gruesome and insane bits and it needed this sort of existential period to bathe and breathe.
It comes in the film as this song does in the record’s sequencing. I’d completely forgot this, but at one point I was toying with actually using this song, but I realised that while so many things feed you, they don't all have to be included.
I always thought of the record as a soundtrack for a film that never existed. It’s basically Trent’s pitch for the entire career he has now as a film composer, isn’t it?
It's so cinematic – you can see it all there, It’s the blueprint for what this what this guy went on to create.
“The Passenger” by Iggy Pop
I think he wrote it in Berlin when he just walked and walked and walked and walked. And you can feel that in this song – this isolated character wandering through a sparse, empty, bleak landscape.
It's a beautiful, broken hymn of alienation, it’s about travelling and it’s about motion and it sounds like a croaky, broken jalopy. This song goes back the same time in my life as “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, that same kind of romantic alienation, where I felt like a passenger in my own life, because all my autonomy was stripped away from me.
But it’s a hymn of hope too, because there's a romance to it, and he's kind of singing it out to this mythical other half, it’s like two lonely souls trying to claim the world as their own. There's some strange hope in accepting your strangeness and embracing the fact that you don't fit in.
I don't know if there's any connection, but one of my favourite films is Antonioni’s The Passenger and I think you can draw some parallels about that, because it's about somebody running away from their own life and trying to re-mould their identity and existence, and it's also about alienation and is very existential.
I actually have the word ‘Passenger’ tattooed on my arm, and then after some years, when I felt like I'd gotten over that experience, I crossed it out - I tattooed a line through it.
Do you think your approach to using music in your work will change after this film?
I guess you're asking if I have that thing where everyone puts everything into the first album? I mean, I don't want to repeat myself, but I don't think I can make films that won't be intertwined with music as a secondary narrative or a driving force in the narrative. It’s the beauty of sound and vision together, right?
Obviously, I want to try different things and expand, because we must grow as an artist. Paul Banks and I are talking about doing something a little bit anarchic for the next one, with a saxophone as his main instrument. What I would like to do is a film where I’d use every song from just one album or just use one artist solely. McCabe & Mrs. Miller is pretty much all Leonard Cohen, and then Harold and Maude is all Cat Stevens stuff that was around at the time. It gives a kind of cohesion to it, because you're stepping into a universe.
And I think with all these songs I’ve chosen, they’re all tiny universes you can step into – whether its Lou Reed's junkie drag queens in crisis in “Sister Ray”, Iggy's urban alienation and existential crisis in “The Passenger” and Bowie's Berlin stuff. But I don’t know if I want to go into the universes of “Kokomo” ever again though!
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