A Love Story Wrapped in Time
Cashback’s release back in 2006 was not just another indie romance film. It was more like a thoughtful consideration of loneliness, creativity, and how time goes by. The film, directed by Sean Ellis, was like a short piece that was already awarded an Academy Award nomination. It expanded on his already short film of the same name. What would they expect? It was a cinephile’s dream. The challenge, however, was shifting a poetic short into a full length feature without losing the dream-like quality.
The film centers around Ben Willis, an art student plagued by insomnia after a heartbreaking romance, and is played by Sean Biggerstaff. Lockdowns left many without any more logic. As a his marriage and a hob he resorts to. Later, Ben discovers that he can literally stop time. While frozen in time, Ben wanders and sketeches capturing the most nermerous feminine forms he like the rest and intimacy. Ben is a young, heartbroken man, trying to cope by slowing time down to heal.
Sean Biggerstaff — From Hogwarts to the Aisles of Sainsbury’s
Sean Biggerstaff was previously known by many Harry Potter fans as the Gryffindor Quidditch captain ‘Oliver Wood’. His role in a multi-award winning film previously and now moving onto an indie film was and still is a challenge. Biggerstaff had to delete the boyish charm he was known for and try and quell the stillness that is the sleep deprived misery of Ben.
Biggerstaff was and still is grappling with the issues many young actors encounter after being a part of history; what’s next after becoming an icon? He found his answer in ‘Cashback’. The role needed a depth of emotion and as the name suggests, an ability to hold the film with next to no dialogues. Ben and Biggerstaff’s personal fight seemed to be eerily similar; being understood. Ben was only seen to be heartbroken. The same emotional and mental restrictions Biggerstaff had, was the same as the rest of the world, “ the Quidditch captain”.
Emilia Fox — The Muse Who Grounded the Fantasy
Emilia Fox, with the role of Sharon who is the emotional anchor of the film, provided the film with its equilibrium. Fox is known in the UK for her contributions to television and the theatre, and was able to provide a subtle and understated counter to Ben’s reality distorting fantasies.During this period, Fox was building her career through a thoughtful selection of roles, frequently alternating between period dramas and contemporary characters. Sharon, who was a combination of affection and doubt, let her modernize romance without the touch of a platitude. In the context of her interviews, Fox articulated the belief that female roles ought to be more sophisticated than “the man’s rescuer.” In the film Cashback, despite the fact that Sharon did at one point become an emotional outlet for Ben, she was imbued, to a degree, with agency and humor, in tandem with Fox’s own advocacy for complex characters.
A Film Which Caused Temporary Situations of Asphyxia
One of the elegant touches which referred to the editing of that film was the period of time in which time was said to freeze. Ellis did not want a collection of additional ‘time fillers,’ and the spectators to appreciate the ethereal quality of the stretched time. It was not easy to film these sequences. The performers had to be totally motionless for extended periods while the camera moved fluidly around. This meant endless looping of the film whenever even the smallest blink or twitch was caught on any film.
It seems that the cast members had a tendency to joke about the difficulty that came with remaining motionless, joking that it was more challenging than performing the lines. For Biggerstaff, the discipline, more than the physical effort required, was the most exhausting aspect of the day. Though these challenges did not appear in the final cut of the movie, it was critical in shaping the film’s unique ‘magic.
From Short Film to Feature — The Weight of Expectations
There is a deliberate risk that comes with extending a short film to a feature length film. Fans of Ellis’s original short wondered whether the film’s original poetic core would still be present. However, Ellis was keen to explore. He humorously gave depth to the side characters, particularly the supermarket staff, to infuse laughable humanity to the narrative which otherwise, could have been too abstract.
Under the abstract poetry of time, art, love, there was a comical side where audiences were laughing at the ridiculousness of supermarket routines and night shifts. The fusion of these two aspects — a unique combination of visual poetry and absurd comedy — is what made Cashback a gem in the indie film circuit.
Box Office and Buzz Beyond Borders
Even though Cashback did not ‘take the world by storm’ and did not set the global box office blazing, the film did manage to create a niche for itself among ardent and passionate fans and festivalgoers. It was a point of pride in the UK as a benchmark for the achievement of ambition by filmmakers in the small confines of a micro-budget. What was more interesting was how the film bloomed into unexpected popularity in the world’s second most populous country, India, with the aid of DVD, the Internet, and subsequently, streaming services. The film’s had popular appeal, and gained widespread admiration particularly among the Indian youth, including art students and avid romantics, and Ben’s ruminations and speculations on beauty and heartbreak was as relevant as the Indian context allowed.
Ellis, of course, was the subject of buzz and hype, but not solely because of the story. What every admirer of film has come to respect in Ellis, who is a former photographer, is the unprecedented attention to detail he brings to each individual frame, turning all that he captures into a kind of art. Every aspiring cinematographer and filmmaker has been inspired by his transformational depiction of a mundane supermarket into a cathedral of frozen beauty.
Bonds Forged in Long Nights
Even more profound than those captured on the supermarket shelves is the bond that the cast formed. Long Shooting schedules of ‘night’ sequences often resulted in working during insomniac hours, and Ernie was relentless in crafting diverse and odd strategies that assailed fatigue as a constant. Crew members recall with nostalgia how they survived through sheer fatigue with the assistance of cups of tea and mindless games between shooting sequences.
Sean Biggerstaff, who was quite new in wielding a film as a lead, leaned on a lot on Fox and the rest of the cast for assistance. There were stories of the cast actually staying beyond wrap and informally practicing scenes between themselves in the aisles of the supermarket in a bid to improve their chemistry. It was this spirit of friendship that converted to the on-screen affection, particularly in the smaller, funny fragments with the odd members of the store’s staff.
Years later, Cashback continues to live in conversations as one of those films that quietly slips under the mainstream radar but leaves an incomparable impression. For Biggerstaff, it proved he could move beyond the walls of Hogwarts and take up other serious roles. For Fox, it was yet another opportunity to her of her capacity to inject humanity into the otherwise skeletal body of indie films. For Ellis, it was the signature of a director that refused to divorce art from narration.
And for the audience, it was in all the places it was screened, be it the UK, United States or even as far as India. It was this idea of how time could actually come to a standstill, not because of supernatural powers, but because of the tender moments that filled one with beauty, love and heartbreak.