"A head, a mouth, the sky"

Richard Billingham on Fishtank, April 2002

I first got a camcorder in 1996. The main reason was that I wanted to make some short films for gallery spaces. Also, I wanted to take photographs from the TV screen, of the video footage I'd recorded played back. The third reason was that I'd been trying to write a screenplay for some time, but what I was finding difficult was the dialogue. So I figured the camcorder would help by recording people's voices and gestures, which I could later study. I didn't originally intend to make a film for TV. If I had, I would have got some better quality equipment. But when I began putting particular short pieces of footage together, I realised they would make one long coherent film if I could put them in the right sequence. The best footage was when I'd been just looking and not really thinking (trance-like) so that the camcorder was more an extension of the eye. Also, I did choose to hold on things - a head, a mouth, the sky... - for long periods, in order to build up emotional tension. The relationships that came out in the film, between my father, mother, brother or me are inherent to looking through my eye in those ways.