The making of No Liars Were Harmed
After 25,000 views it's not a commercial success - but it's certainly an artistic one
Jacob’s music for No Liars Were Harmed came before my story. We were both indirectly affected by World War II – while his grandparents were held under arrest by the Nazis, my grandparents lost their homes in the Clydebank Blitz and wound up having to buy their own furniture back from spivs.
Since Jacob is in Norway, he’s much closer (at least in terms of immediate physical violence) than I am to the Ukraine invasion. He didn’t have the words to express his sadness, but he did have his musical genius; and so I received a track he’d called Sad Sounds. I’d recently witnessed a violent episode outside a pub, in which a young woman had the veil of happy fiction torn away in an extremely crude manner; so I was able to channel terror to complement the music.
It needed something else. And then in around 45 seconds in a beautiful sunny field in the middle of nowhere, the anger came to me in about 45 seconds. The anger of a billionaire – not all billionaires, I stress – who needs his money to protect him from his own fear, and believes everyone else is that same.
Adding Kelly Phillips’ onscreen interpretation resulted in the creation of something incredibly intense. So intense, actually, that all three of us felt a little intimidated by what we’d created. We honestly didn’t think it stood a chance in the flashy, trashy world of modern entertainment; and in strictly commercial terms it doesn’t. But to have passed 25,000 views, with the vast majority in Ukraine and Brazil – two places most obviously affected by the forms of violence I was exploring – is a humbling artistic success and a proud achievement.
To mark the 25,000th view (it’s already several thousand behind us) Kelly and I had a short chat about No Liars and how we put it together. I’m fascinated by other artists’ processes, so it was fun for me to rattle on about my own.
