04/09/2025 - VENICE 2025: The British director discusses his new movie, in which a lost fishing vessel takes two young men into the past in a coastal village in Cornwall

(© Andrea Avezz/La Biennale di Venezia/Foto ASAC)

BAFTA-winning Cornish director Mark Jenkin lends his undivided attention to the complex relationship between individuals and the community they belong to, but in his newest film, Rose of Nevada [+see also:
film review
interview: Mark Jenkin
film profile], from Venice’s Orizzonti line-up, things are not that simple. The movie borrows its title from a fishing vessel that, after having been lost at sea with all hands some 30 years ago, has reappeared in the old harbour. Newcomers Nick (George MacKay) and Liam (Callum Turner) board The Rose of Nevada without knowing any of this, but the boat has its own way of making them aware of the sacrifices one must make in order for life to go on. Jenkin wrote, directed, shot and edited this film that traverses past and present, shepherding the two men on a journey they never knew they’d take. Something’s amiss, and Jenkin discussed what that something is.

Cineuropa: Rose of Nevada is a vehicle for time travel. What is time for you?
Mark Jenkin: Time is everything, in terms of film! The thing is, we invented time – the idea of keeping time, a clock that’s always ticking, productivity and so on. Our consciousness, too, is all about time – we’re haunted by the past and are always worrying about the future. On the flipside, we invented cinema in order to try to make sense of it all – to reanimate time as well.

People are saying you’ve made another ghost movie after Enys Men [+see also:
film review
interview: Mark Jenkin
film profile]. Have you?
Maybe, on the surface, but deep down, every film is a ghost film. Cinema is the ghost medium. You don’t even have to go that far back – you can watch a film made in the 1970s, and many if not all of the actors in it could already be dead in real life. But on the screen, they are animated, forever living and speaking. Also, editing, with its temporal and geographical dislocations, jumping back and forward in time – that's just the way our brains work. In some ways, the more experimental the formal approach to time, the more real a film becomes.

Watching the feature, we partake in that dual temporality, but what was the rhythm of the earlier stages of making the film like? From script to shooting, and then editing?
The script was straightforward in that the two timelines are distinct: the first 30 pages are in the present day, and for the next 80 pages, we’re back in 1993. In terms of shooting, the rhythm was dictated by the schedule. For example, every shot from inside the boat looking up to the quayside was shot at a harbour that we only had access to for eight days, while every reverse shot looking down from the quay onto the boat we shot two weeks later in a different harbour. Everything below deck was filmed on a stage in the studio, and the interior of the boat was built on a gimbal there, so it was incredibly fragmented in terms of how we shot it. That’s the joy of it for me, misleading the audience. It’s all lies and smoke and mirrors, in a way, and I love it when you [do it well enough so you can] get away with it.

How do you replicate a storm and the associated harsh conditions?
The storm was buckets of water thrown onto the set and the actors! The scenes where George and Callum’s characters are at the back of the boat, for example, we obviously filmed that in the harbour, but we had ten people holding ropes attached to a pole on the top of the vessel, and when they pulled the rope, the boat would move. We had a two-ton water tank with a safety boat, and there were also jet skis and speed boats churning up the water… When you look at the rushes with all of the individual elements, and then you cut it together really quick, you feel the energy go up according to the editing rhythm. And then you add all of the sound effects on top.

You shot on a Bolex camera that doesn’t record sound. What was it like conjuring the soundscape for these particularly complex environments?
I don't record any sound at the time of shooting, and I don't go back to any of the locations; instead, I’d just grab audio from elsewhere and use sound effects. A lot of the sea sounds within the film are slowed down and put onto the tape, before I then manually slow the tape down as it goes through the tape recorder, so you get all this rumbling noise. Some of it would be [a recording of] me breathing into a reverb mic, which is then slowed down ten times; or the wave impact sounds might be a drum – I try to be as experimental in the sound design as I can.