5 Major Influences From Havana Marking

Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers

1.    Rififi (1955) dir Jules Dassin I always knew that Smash and Grab had to be a heist movie—it’s a film about real life diamond thieves after all. I watched hundreds of heist dramas during the development period but it was Rififi, Jules Dassin’s noir classic that inspired, invigorated and informed my approach beyond all others. It is the finest heist film ever made. I decided that S&G would be a noir film first and foremost. Perhaps the first ever noir-doc?

Clio Barnard’s The Arbor is an extraordinary, unique and wonderful piece. It came out when I was figuring out how I was going to tell a story when all my main characters refused to show their face on camera. The film blew my mind. For me it finally threw off the constraints of the trad “direct cinema” doc. Using actors lip-synching to original recordings, it achieved an emotional purity unrivalled by many, many strait docs. It was completely liberating. Not his films but his music. I knew I wanted deep, dark, dirty music inspired by the industrial techno of my youth. But nothing seemed to work during the edit. Joby Gee my editor plucked John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) CD out and it felt good. When we discovered a 1980s dance remix of "The End," we had it. My composer Simon Russell finally had something to work with! 4.    Thomas Hardy I sincerely believe that everything you need to make an excellent documentary can be learnt form Thomas Hardy. He writes in pixels. His characters are completely 3D: as flawed and human and challenging as life. He is always challenging a status quo, often based on class, gender or his fury with the established church. But above all, he moves from the micro detail of someone’s life to the macro vision of their society seamlessly. 5.    My mother My mum, Stacy Marking, was the first female documentary director at ITV, a very important channel here in the UK. She often tells me how proud she is of me, and how much better at it I am—but however hard I try to tell her, she never seems to see that I couldn’t be here expressing myself if she, and the women of her generation, hadn’t been there breaking the glass ceiling.  

 [Smash & Grab; director Havana Marking]