OH: For those who don’t yet know your work, I’d like to start with the backstory to this wonderful, extraordinary new film of yours, Queen of the Redwood Mountains, which is a four-chapter portmanteau based on works by Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, and McClure. It goes back at least 20 years, I believe, to when you collaborated with McClure on a revival of The Beard in London, and followed up by making a short film based on the poem that inspired the play, “The Sermons of Jean Harlow and the Curses of Billy the Kid.” Although this was the first of your short films, it appears last in the structure of Queen of the Redwood Mountains, which I find interesting in itself. When you presented it at the Paris EBSN Conference in 2017, it went down really well and Ann Charters, the doyenne of Beat Studies, described your portrait of McClure as “loving, but accurate.” I know you reworked Curses and Sermons, along with the other shorts for the new film, but can you say something about this as a point of origin for your work on the Beats, and how you go about making a film that is “loving, but accurate”?
NS: In terms of an origin point, music was my gateway drug to the Beats – all the normal suspects, Dylan, Patti Smith, Tom Waits – but, for me, my favourites were The Doors. I was given a copy of Danny Sugerman’s No One Here Gets Out Alive and I devoured it, reading it cover to cover countless times and from sleepy rural Gloucestershire I really bought into the Jim Morrison myth that, of course, I know now bears little resemblance to the truth, but at fifteen or sixteen I found all the shamanic Dionysian stuff really mesmerising and through my interest in Morrison, I became aware of Michael McClure.
McClure seemed, to me, to be someone that had one foot in the classic Beat Generation as it were, with his links to Kerouac, the Six Gallery reading, Gathering of the Tribes, etc, and the other firmly planted in the psychedelic Sixties counterculture, through people like Dennis Hopper and Morrison and with his readings to the lions in San Francisco zoo, he felt like the connective tissue that linked so much and through him I was jumping off in all sorts of directions and just absorbing so many new books, films and albums. There’s that famous Larry Keenan photo of McClure in Jack Keroauc alley with Dylan and Ginsberg, for example, and he just opened so many new doors, no pun intended, for me.
Anyway, jump ahead fifteen years or so and I reached out to McClure and convinced him to let me revive his play The Beard in London. I’d trained as a theatre director at RADA in London and whilst slowly gravitating towards teaching, I was really keen to direct his play. He flew over for that from Oakland where he lived with his lovely wife Amy, fortunately we got along well and after The Beard had been well received, he was keen we do something else together and that’s how Curses and Sermons was born, a short film based on the poem that had originally inspired The Beard.
As for the “loving, but accurate” comment, well I’m glad you feel like that. It was always my intention to show the utmost respect for the source material and the writers behind it and any “interpretation” I came up with needed to be grounded in that. I’ve often referred to the finished film as my “unrequited love letter to the Beat Generation” and it really is. I wanted to tell my own story, but through design elements, for example, try to capture some of the “essence” or spirit of the original material if that doesn’t sound pretentious. So, for example, in our Kerouac chapter, we shot in Big Sur – we could have probably used any beach, but I felt it needed to be Big Sur. For Burroughs, we shot in Tangiers, at the Café Central, and outside his London apartment in Dalmeny Court. For Ginsberg at the Beat Hotel and other locations he mentions in Paris, or I’d seen photos of him at. I always wanted the film to work on its own terms for every viewer but be really layered for those who really knew the Beats. I mean, one of those “easter eggs,” for want of a better word, is having Al Hinkle play a small role in the first chapter. As your readers will obviously know, Al was immortalised as Ed Dunkel in On The Road and was a good friend of Kerouac for a while. For me, the film had to have all these bits of connective tissue, and I think that’s where the “loving, but accurate” feel probably comes from. I mean we’ve not had the film reviewed by anyone like Mark Kermode, but even if we do it’s the comments from people like yourself, Bill Morgan, Barry Miles, Kevin Ring, that actually mean more because you guys understand the Beats and will know if I’ve done a good job.
OH: I’d like to know more in particular about the actors in Curses and Sermons, who recur as a pair across each of the four shorts that make up Queen of the Redwood Mountains. To say that Kasia Halpin beautifully embodies the blonde bombshell look of Jean Harlow would be to risk slighting her acting, which here, and in all the shorts, is always right on the money. She’s clearly a fantasy figure in many ways, not just within the hallucinatory poetic scenario of Curses and Sermons but, for example, in The Good Blonde, where she seems to walk out of the sea at Big Sur before she lies down to sunbathe next to Philip Lambert, who plays the shy and startled Kerouac character. In films with a small cast, so much depends on the leads: how did it go working with them across almost a decade on four quite distinct shorts?
NS: Both Philip and Kasia auditioned via an ad in the trade paper The Stage for Curses and Sermons. We held the auditions at The Old Red Lion theatre where I’d directed The Beard the year before and they both gave great auditions and I felt were a great fit for the project. Philip had just come off The Dark Knight with Christopher Nolan, so I was a bit in awe and couldn’t really understand why he’d want to do a short like mine, but as I’ve come to know him, he’s genuinely driven by the work and wants to do interesting projects – he chases the craft and not the celebrity which I completely admire. He has real integrity as an actor. Of course, none of us knew that that first project would be anything more than a couple of weeks collaboration and they’d probably have thought differently had they known they were signing on for the next fifteen years of their lives! But it’s turned out to be a life-changing journey for us all. I feel they’ve both done a great job – Kasia embodies that “good blonde” perfectly, whilst Philip has had a real journey with his character – each time trying to channel some of the original author’s spirit whilst finding the through line in each chapter because once we started the bigger picture, Philip knew that he was playing the same character at very different stages of his life and I think he’s found, and I hope it’s not too pretentious to say, a real centre or truth each time out that completely sells the character’s arc across all the film. I think he does a great job, but I do really like his work in the Burroughs chapter.
OH: OK, if we continue by working backwards through the film but taking the chapters in the order you filmed the shorts, after Curses and Sermons in 2009 you completed At Apollinaire’s Grave in 2011. This is set in Paris and filmed in a very evocative black-and-white, which gives the film a kind of moody, anxious noirish quality. You use lines from several well-known Ginsberg poems and set parts of it in Père Lachaise cemetery, but what really struck me were the scenes you filmed of the Ginsberg character inside his room, struggling to write, in what was the old Beat Hotel, now a luxurious four-star establishment. What I’m getting at is the curious way you make a palimpsest of time past and time present: it’s simultaneously the late 1950s and the 21st century. I don’t know if that was a practical issue, or a variation on the way McClure brought together figures from entirely different time periods in The Beard, but the effect certainly is to make the film far more a dialogue than an adaptation. Was that always the idea or did it emerge as you worked?
NS: So, as you know Curses and Sermons came first and then came the Ginsberg chapter. I spoke with the Ginsberg Estate, and they were incredibly gracious and granted us permission to adapt “Europe! Europe!” “Message,” and “At Apollinaire’s Grave.” Those three were all written by Ginsberg at The Beat Hotel in Paris and I felt I could make a narrative connection between them and expand out the story I was trying to tell. By this point, I’d planned out the whole film and even though we’d not acquired all the relevant rights, I knew what each chapter needed to achieve. As the source material had been written in Paris and this was now a love story, filming in Paris was a no-brainer. This would be the chapter where our main character regains his ability to write by seeking out and getting help from his literary heroes and I liked the idea that the main character in the film seeks advice from his literary heroes in a film I was making about mine!
The timeless quality you talk about was as controlled as we could. We didn’t have the budget to do a period piece, but we hoped we could capture a Paris that felt timeless and not really be something audiences would question. In the San Francisco scenes from the first chapter, we have some modern cars, so the audience already knew it was a contemporary film, but we did actually edit out some references to the internet and phones to not explicitly draw attention to the “when.” I think the Père Lachaise and the backstreets of Montmartre where we shot also have a timeless look, especially at night – I doubt they’ve changed that much over the years. Perhaps of interest is the fact that whilst we did shoot in Paris and at Apollinaire’s real grave, the interior of Philip’s hotel room is in Henley on Thames. The exterior is Rue Git Le Coeur, but the interior is in a different country – same for the restaurant in which he meets Apollinaire, Picasso, Tzara, etc which is in Romford. Eagle eye viewers will spot a lot of Beat easter eggs in this chapter, and there are a couple of Jim Morrison nods in there too – he’s also buried in Père Lachaise, for starters.
The biggest decisions for me in this chapter were to not invent any original text, but trust in Ginsberg’s words and use mostly voice over. I felt we could make a script without me having to write anything new if I cut across the three poems I’d selected well enough and the voice over, for me at least, was intended to give this chapter a sense of the character’s internal voice – he’s alone and talking to himself, he’s thinking and pondering what his life means now, what art is – and using voice over I thought could convey that. And the other big decision was to go into black and white which we did to try and give the film a flavour of the French New Wave which was something Dominic really lent into in his editing with jump cuts, etc and Andy Dragazis, our composer, tried to suggest in his score. The little touch of the lips at the end is meant to evoke Belmondo in Godard’s Breathless which is a touch I always liked.
OH: One Night at the Aristo followed in 2013. This was the first film of yours I saw, and because it’s based on the Burroughs short story, “The Finger,” I watched it many times, which is also why I recognised how dramatically you re-edited it for Queen of the Redwood Mountains. It’s almost a different film, the chapter now called “Stranger in a Strange Land,” and even better than the original, even funnier and darker. Maybe I appreciate it more also because I realise that creatively taking inspiration from the source is the way to make a true homage, whereas before I had looked at it as an adaptation and so was thinking too much in terms of fidelity, of what you had changed or added. It’s not just that I can enjoy the wonderful deadpan joke you have about a man who keeps bees in a box under his bed, but also that I get how well it works to set the story in Tangier, with its winding medina streets and an Interzone café where the barman is a six-foot insect, even though it’s a tale based on an event in late 1930s New York. And Lambert’s acting conveys so well a torturous intersection of trauma, memory, and fantasy, without in any sense looking or sounding like a Burroughs impersonation. So, how did it come about: Why “The Finger”? Why Tangier?
NS: I’m glad you like this one. As a Burroughs expert, that’s high praise. You’re right to mention the name change – all the films have different names as chapters than they did originally as shorts. The Good Blonde has become “The Promise,” At Apollinaire’s Grave is now “There Lies The Heart,” Curses and Sermons is “From the Flames” and originally this short was called One Night at the Aristo and is now “Stranger in a Strange Land.” I just felt that these new titles work better narratively for us.
I always felt the Burroughs chapter would give us our most experimental chapter. I watched a lot of Burroughs’ own films, looked at his cut up work, re-read him and, I’ll admit it, also rewatched Cronenberg’s adaptation of Naked Lunch which I like quite a lot. We’ve tried to give each chapter an aesthetic that we felt would give a visual flavour of the writer, so for this chapter we went for degraded VHS look, lots of quick cut imagery and I just knew that we needed the Tangier medina to complete that. There was no way we’d ever be able to recreate that look anywhere else and it’s just so Burroughs to me. The medina, the streets, have, to my mind, almost become another character – we referred to it as the labyrinth when we were shooting and I wanted a dark, menacing, claustrophobic, empty space in which to trap him in his grief and confusion. There’s a moment the bartender Kiki – a Burroughs reference itself – traps a cockroach under a glass and his line to John, the name our main character was now going by, sort of encapsulates all we were trying to show. Perhaps it’s a little on the nose, but it sums up John in this part of his story.
Talking of the bartender, that was an important choice. I felt a seven-foot cockroach bar tender would make the audience question John’s state of mind as in the real world, I don’t know of many “bugtenders” as we affectionally nicknamed him on set. The inclusion of Kiki is intended to add a surreal nightmarish element that perhaps suggests we are again in a very internal world and the whole chapter is perhaps a fever dream drug-induced interzone of his own making. I also wanted to go old school practical effects and have Kiki as a real creature, a man in a suit, for the actors to play off because that just feels, uh, better to me. As an extra nod to that age of filmmaking we were very lucky to get R2-D2 himself, Kenny Baker, to provide Kiki’s bug language which we then very geekishly subtitled in the same font Greedo speaks in Star Wars when talking to Han Solo – our seedy interzone jazz bar and the Tatooine cantina subliminally blending for a moment perhaps.
As for the choice of “The Finger,” it was a short story that I felt had a nightmarish concept at its heart and would fit perfectly into the story we were telling. There was certainly a lot of material to look through, but “The Finger” fitted the bill perfectly.
An interesting piece of trivia perhaps here is that amongst the few other characters John encounters in this chapter is the gap year student played by Ryan Sampson to whom John tells the story of the finger and the seedy Aristo hotel in which he cut it off. This was completely different in early drafts with the part having been originally written especially for the singer songwriter Pete Doherty. Doherty, like Jim Morrison, seemed to me to have that mix of poet and rock star and I thought he’d be perfect to play a poet cum barfly who just happens to have washed up in our bar and meet our main character. I’d managed to speak to his manager, and it was looking likely that Peter would play the part, but unfortunately, he was sent to spend time at Her Majesty’s pleasure before we could film with him, so the role was completely rewritten about two weeks before filming. Doherty’s version would have suggested what might lie ahead for John if he never manages to escape the labyrinth, whereas Sampson’s version became a reflection of John before the darkness descends and perhaps motivates him to want to escape. At the time of filming, Ryan was perhaps best known for a small role in Doctor Who opposite David Tennant’s Doctor, but in the years since has become a very well-known British writer, actor and BAFTA winner. He was only on set for one day, but I jokingly say he’s the film’s biggest star now! For those interested, the exterior of the bar was in Tangier as was the house we used, inside and out, but the interior of the bar was built from scratch in the backroom of a pub in Reading and dressed to look Moroccan.
OH: In context of Queen of the Redwood Mountains, the opening chapter is the Kerouac-based story that you actually filmed last, and was completed in 2017, not long before our Paris EBSN conference. The feel of it makes for a striking contrast to “Stranger in a Strange Land,” which is a claustrophobic nightmare, whereas this is dreamy and light. It has an old 1960s home movie style look to the filming, and again it makes you aware of the overlaying of different time periods. It’s odd, because this could just feel anachronistic: the Kerouac character reading Proust on the beach ought to feel out of place when he goes to a 21st century City Lights bookstore—where he chats with Al Hinkle—and yet somehow it works perfectly. This part also sets up the central relationship between the couple played by Kasia and Philip across the four chapters, and again, in a way that’s hard to pin down, it works that while she stays the same, his identity changes from one chapter to another. So, I’d like to know more about the experience of filming a Kerouac story at Big Sur, but also about how the four parts came together, how much of this was planned in advance and how much emerged organically or only in retrospect through the editing?
NS: The Kerouac chapter was intended to set up the story; it’s the meeting between John and The Girl. Like the Ginsberg and Burroughs Estates, we’d had no real problem acquiring the rights to adapt the source material and we obtained the rights to adapt Kerouac’s short story, “The Good Blonde.” However, and I don’t think I’m saying anything I shouldn’t here, when we came to re-negotiate all the rights – we originally only had them for short film versions – the Kerouac Estate changed their mind and we’ve had to remove any lines spoken that were taken verbatim from Kerouac’s work and we’ve been told we cannot use the Kerouac name in any marketing. If I’m honest, this was a real blow and although to any Beat fan, I think it’s fairly obvious he’s the inspiration behind this first chapter, for the casual viewer his name is never mentioned in the credits or on our poster, etc and I think that if anyone feels curious to pick up a Beat text after seeing the film, Ginsberg, Burroughs and McClure are going to be the beneficiaries of Kerouac’s absence. I don’t really know why, but there was no changing their mind.
That aside, filming at Big Sur and at City Lights was a joy. We got to work with Al Hinkle who was an absolute joy and did his scenes effortlessly. The Good Blonde as this short was originally called later screened at The Berkeley Film and Video Festival and won Best Short Film and Al and his daughter attended in my absence and accepted the award, so he was obviously happy to be associated with us. Sadly, he’s since passed on – as has Kenny Baker, Michael McClure and Gavan O’Herlihy, more of whom in a bit, I guess.
Again, a little bit of trivia that might be of interest, but John has a line about living in a shack in the woods and we fortuitously found an abandoned shack in the redwood forest at Big Sur that we filmed that flashback in. Since then, a mud slide has washed that cabin away, so it no longer exists, but when I was reading some news coverage about the mud slide, we discovered that local legend says Charles Manson and members of the Family once hid in that cabin, so that was cool in a macabre way.
To your question specifically, as I’ve alluded to earlier, once we decided that the McClure short was going to be expanded, I planned out the whole film writing each chapter knowing what source material I wanted to use, even if I’d yet to get permission. Lots changed in the edit as Dominic and I shaped the finished film, but we did have a plan and a completed script pretty early on. I guess on our budget we couldn’t really afford to shoot much we didn’t need, so we were fairly sharp on that actually. I mean, there are scenes from the shorts that have not made the final cut – the Burroughs chapter, for example, originally ended with a shot of John looking out at the ocean that worked in the context of the short, but not the feature. Chapter One has had dialogue cut, so we could comply with the Kerouac Estate’s wishes and that was a challenge to make sure we were still telling the story we wanted to tell. There are snips here and there, odd lines, odd shots. It might be fun one day to sit down and do a shot-by-shot comparison between the shorts and the feature version. I guess the whole film has been meticulously reworked, with a new score, sound design and a colour grade, so it does feel like a completely separate entity to me really, especially the McClure chapter which has had a fiery hellscape added by Dominic instead of being in a sterile white void as it was in the original film.
OH: Finally, there’s the new framing structure of the old man in the New York church, who we understand is reliving chapters from his past, scenes that are both familiar and strange to him, and also the Epilogue. Were these elements that you always had in mind, or were they required only when you reworked the parts into the new whole?
NS: I always felt the linking story with Old John was going to be necessary for the finished feature and that the chapters were going to be framed as his story. Casting Old John was a challenge primarily because of budget. Of course, I knew we’d never get a big-name film star in our little Beat film, but from the start I’d always strived to use professional actors to legitimise the project, and I think we have been very fortunate with our cast, but Old John was going to be crucial. He needed to be believable as an older version of Philip, and I felt we needed an actor with the gravitas to tell John’s story. We approached a few actors – it would be disingenuous to name names – but Gavan was actually on that list. We sent the script to his agent, he read it and accepted pretty much straight away much to my surprise and delight obviously and we could afford him. In his heyday, Gavan had been in the original cast of Happy Days and been in a Bond film, a Superman film, Star Trek and lots of other high profile projects, was actually the son of an Oscar winner, but he’d pretty much been retired for twenty years and had relocated to the UK which was enormously convenient, but it turned out he was a fan of the Beat writers, especially Ginsberg, and avant garde theatre in general, so he said yes. He was a California resident in the sixties, so that probably shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise in hindsight.
We met a few times near his home, discussed the role, read his scenes. I was open to his ideas and over a glass of wine we’d improvise with each other and ideas from that worked itself into the finished script. I think my openness to his ideas really appealed to him and helped build the trust you need to work with an actor. He was an absolute joy to direct, and he never talked down to me due to my lack of experience and his wealth of experience. I loved the experience of shaping his scenes opposite Ben Ashton who plays The Priest. Gavan has passed away since filming, and I’m genuinely saddened he will never see the finished film – same for McClure – but I hope to screen it for both their widows and that will be a special thing.
The Epilogue is something I’ve been in and out of love with. Some days, I feel I should take it out, other days I feels it’s necessary. We filmed a longer scene, for sure, and Dominic has definitely edited it to its most concise form. The reason it’s in there is, I guess, because I feel the film is a challenging watch, especially the final chapter, and I don’t want to talk down to any viewers, but I think it just helps the whole story make sense. It was always planned from the beginning, but I guess you can just turn the DVD off before the epilogue if you really need to.
Frankly, I’m still surprised we’ve made it to the end of the road, although as I’m finding out, there’s a whole new road out there getting the film in front of an audience. When we started out, I dreamt of a DVD release one day, but those days are gone and we’re now in the land of the streaming giants, so I’m hoping we can get some interest from one of them. We’re now planning our festival circuit, and I hope we’ll get in front of audiences soon, so thank you so much Oliver for doing this interview and helping us get the film some attention. It’s appreciated more than you’ll know. I do think the Beat community will enjoy the film, and I think a wider audience will also find much to appreciate, so fingers crossed …
OH: Nic, thank YOU for sharing so much of the backstory to your work. Queen of the
Redwood Mountains is a beautiful, inspired film that really deserves an audience.
For information on screenings and to find out more, please visit www.queenoftheredwoodmountains.com or follow @queenoftheredwoodmountains on Instagram
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July 2026
All photographs and promotional material copyright 14167 Films, Ltd. All rights reserved.
Interview published by Benjamin J. Heal, July 2026