INTERVIEW: Seamus Murphy on his travels with PJ Harvey
Photo: PJ Harvey, the acclaimed singer-songwriter, is the subject of the new documentary PJ Harvey: A Dog Called Money by filmmaker Seamus Murphy. Photo courtesy of Film Forum / Provided by official site.
English singer-songwriter PJ Harvey took a detour for her latest project and decided to travel around the world with photographer Seamus Murphy. The two visited Kosovo; Kabul, Afghanistan; and Washington, D.C., and the result of their trekking was not only Harvey’s 2016 album, The Hope Six Demolition Project, but also the recently released documentary PJ Harvey: A Dog Called Money, now playing virtually via New York City’s Film Forum.
The film — written, directed and photographed by Murphy — follows the musician around many different towns, villages and cities as she meets local residents, hears their stories and is touched by the muse. Along the way, Harvey keeps a journal, and Murphy keeps recording and clicking his camera. When they return to London, the singer-songwriter sets up shop in an open-space studio and records her original songs, with the world invited to look in and see her creative process.
The two artists first met when Harvey was putting together the 2011 album Let England Shake.
“We got together,” Murphy said in a recent phone interview. “She approached me, and I did some pictures of her. And we got on very well, and then she offered that I could make some films for Let England Shake, which I did. And that went well, and we just thought the next time we work together maybe we could start at the same time. Rather than take a few years to do it and then hand me all the songs, perhaps we could actually do something from the beginning and in real time be witnessing at the same time.”
That idea was the genesis behind their next collaboration. They knew they wanted to travel together, and Murphy is an expert on Afghanistan and many other areas of the world. So he served as host, and Murphy followed his lead.
“The work I was doing very much in those days was journalism, photojournalism, documentary photography, and it involved quite a lot of travel,” he said. “She wanted to see what that was like. She wanted to see what it’s like to go to a place. She had been interested in Afghanistan for many years, and then she saw this exhibition of mine. It pricked her interest, so that was the beginning of it. It was the idea that we didn’t know what was going to happen. We didn’t know what the result was going to be like. We didn’t have any expectations that it would even work. We sort of had this pact where if one of us didn’t like what either of us was doing, or we didn’t like what we were doing ourselves in this collaboration, or we didn’t like traveling together, or we found it impossible to work with each other, no hard feelings. We would walk away, and that was the end of that.”
Their first trip together was to Kosovo, the disputed country that has seen years of war in Eastern Europe. They realized during that maiden voyage that they enjoyed working together and traveling together.
“The first trip was to Kosovo, which I think really opened up Polly’s eyes to a world she’d never seen,” Murphy said. “Her traveling up to then would have been with friends, the band, a manager. What kind of room do you want? What are your preferences? All that kind of stuff. That’s not the way you travel in a place in Kosovo. Sometimes there are no hotels, or the hotel is pretty shabby — but you’re lucky to get it. I think it was a huge eye-opener, and I think that fell into her writing.”
Murphy was impressed by how quickly Harvey was able to make a connection with a complete stranger. As he put it, the singer was able to “sum up” anyone on their travels. These encounters on the road didn’t always scream documentary film or original song, but Murphy knew creativity was taking place.
“We would talk about stuff afterward,” he remembers. “I’d be off doing my thing, and she’d be off doing her thing. … We left this village in Kosovo, which is featured in the film, and she said, ‘There were two things that really struck me about that encounter with the old woman. One was the plums on the road, the rotting plums. There was no one there to harvest the plums because everyone had left because of the war, and it was a deserted village. And the other thing was the woman walking around in the village with the keys behind her back. And I said, ‘Jesus, I filmed both things.’ Now I’ve been in situations with other writers where they go on about something that I just didn’t see, or it didn’t make the picture. It was just funny we were both quite visual.”
He added: “In the film you get these snatches of the notebooks that she was keeping, and they were literally the first draft of what would later become a poem or a song. They were also the very first thing that she put pen to paper when she saw something, and I thought that was very, very strong and raw. Sometimes they’re disjointed, and they don’t make sense. But they’re very evocative, and I thought that was a way that I can try to stitch the film together and also drive what was coming next.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
PJ Harvey: A Dog Called Money, featuring PJ Harvey, was written, directed and photographed by Seamus Murphy. The documentary is playing virtually at New York City’s Film Forum. Click here for more information and tickets.
