Passion. One could argue that that is all you need to make it in the film team, passion. With passion comes hard work and a big shining beacon that attracts fellow creatives to your hub of imagination. Luke Mordue is a young man with intelligence, empathy and most importantly passion. I’ll let you into a little secret, five minutes into meeting him, I already knew this. Meeting at a popular coffee chain at Milton Keynes shopping centre, our first words revolve around movies we’ve seen and ones that are coming out. Not only does he know his stuff, but he is astute and impossibly energetic.
“If had to liken it to one movie, it would be Shame. I came out of that movie thinking that’s a film that I want to make.” He’s talking, of course, about Steve McQueen’s brilliant, should have won an Oscar too, second feature about a man struggling with a sex addiction. “McQueen did it right; he made it artistic but still about the story. And he just laid it bare, without ever preaching he just says how it is. That’s what I hope this movie does too.”
Luke states that SOLA is about that isolation created by mental illness and how he hopes to translate that into his pictures. Obviously navigating a complex world and clinical depression is going to be tough for Eden. Luke wants to leave as many theories as possible but Eden interacting with a post-apocalyptic world is going to lead her down some dark paths. “She’s not going to do over the top mental things,” he says, “but maybe things that people wouldn’t do in that situation that will get people talking about her state of mind.”
Accumulating his budget and more for SOLA through Kickstarter, Luke was amazed when he started to receive messages of support and peoples own stories. “I just had all these emails saying how personally people had been affected from mental illness and how they are supporting my idea.”
That’s not to say he hasn’t had backlash with people questioning his position as a man to write a troubled female lead. Truthfully, Luke has his brain switched on with it. “The story started off as a homosexual male but the more I was involved with the character, the more this utterly feminine spirit came out of it,” he says talking about lead character Eden. “It was more that she spoke to me, told me her name and her story. But I don’t want to write her as a cliché or people thinking that I am. She is going to do these things regardless of whether she is male or female. She’s just a person struggling with this harsh world and mind.”
But Mordue wants to expand this, with the creative and animated side of the film being high on his interest list. “There are dogs here but I hate CGI it’s so fake looking,” he states before proclaiming the dogs be a mixture of animatronics and animal actors. “CGI takes you away from the realness and it’s hard to engage an actress if she is being attacked by nothing.” Already capturing the essence of SOLA, concept art by Bin Li is on their website now proving that Mordue inspires many with this already epic story.
Luke has already worked out his next features and has the characters bubbling away in a waiting room at the back of his mind, hoping to be fleshed out. Sticking my critical oar in, Luke and his future projects are something you need to get behind now. Enthusiastic, insightful and with a massive love for film (half our time together was spent talking about movies and actors,) Mordue is an astonishing talent with a keen eye for the importance of cinema. Not only does SOLA sound enticing, and will hopefully have a strong actress as Eden, but it has a ridiculously important message to help people understand life with a dystopian mind.
It’s safe to say that Luke Mordue is a name that is going to be on the wagging tongues of the film industry for years to come. Writer, director and actor, he's not just the ultimate triple threat, but a stellar human being too. And those years will develop into a much deserved film career. I say this not just as a film journalist but as someone who has suffered with similar issues; this film is important and so is the man behind it.
And that is something you’ll realise, five minutes into meeting him.
Follow the success of SOLA and all of Luke's projects here.