There are few places you would expect to find a comedy than a hospice, but that is exactly where Daniel Audritt and Kat Butterfield have chosen to set Life Goes On. The 19-minute short follows 83-year-old Bill (David Bradley), who, while receiving end-of-life care, finds himself trapped in an infinite time loop that forces him to relive his final day again and again. What begins as a darkly comic premise gradually becomes something far more tender, exploring mortality, family, vulnerability and the things we leave unsaid. Having drawn on their own experiences of hospice care, Audritt and Butterfield set out to challenge the idea of the hospice as a place defined solely by sadness, instead finding the warmth, humour and love that can exist within it.
Life Goes On tackles morality through an unusual combination of dark comedy and an infinite time loop. Where did that original idea come from, and what made you want to tell this particular story?
Kat: I think end-of-life care is a very taboo topic, and no one wants to touch it with a barge pole. It felt like a challenge for us. If an idea scares you a little bit, then you should do it. I think you’re in good territory.
I have a background working at a hospice. I was in the fundraising team at a hospice and I’ve lost relatives in hospices, so I felt like I was able to sensitively deal with that topic. But because of both of our comedy backgrounds, we were able to inject humour into it sensitively. What we wanted to do was find glimmers of light in a place that is perhaps known as a dark or depressing place.
It’s been a bit of a bugbear of mine how most times hospices are portrayed on camera. They’re always very depressing and downbeat, and that was very against my lived experience.
I think there’s actually a lot more joy, warmth and hope in hospice than people think. The nursing staff are all about making you feel safe and experiencing as much life as you can out of what time you have left. Those themes went into it.
It scared us a little bit, and we thought, “Let’s go for it.” I felt like this was a story that needed telling. I hadn’t ever seen anything like it before, so it felt very unique to us as filmmakers.
Dan: From a practical point of view, we really love time-loop comedies, like Palm Springs and Groundhog Day. We’ve always liked them, but we’ve also always felt that Groundhog Day had been done perfectly. Then you see Palm Springs and think, “Oh, there was another way of doing it, and that’s also perfect.”
When we started talking about hospices, we had lots of little ideas around them. It was only when Kat came up with the idea of applying the time-loop concept to someone who doesn’t have any time to change.
Most time-loop films are about someone changing and then going forward in life as a better person. We thought about applying that element to someone who doesn’t have any time to change. It’s not about living a better life going forward. It’s about having closure and a good death, really.
When Kat originally said, “What if there’s someone who really wants to die but can’t die because they’re in a time loop?”, it was not only really inappropriate, which I found funny, but we realised there was quite a lot of depth we could put into what was quite an inappropriate comedy idea. We really liked that.
Kat: We also entirely self-funded the film. We thought it would be easy to do a time loop because you’d be repeating things, but it really wasn’t easy. That was our first mistake!
“We wanted to find glimmers of light in a place that is perhaps known as a dark or depressing place.”
What was the difficult part of filming the time loop?
Dan: That’s the tricky thing. When you actually start practically picturing the film in your head and talking it through, you realise it would be incredibly repetitive. That’s the flip side of repeating stuff. It is, by nature, repetitive. Therefore, you have to basically do the same thing but differently five times.
Kat: We wanted to experience it as Bill experienced it, so the audience would be feeling everything he’s feeling as he’s going through it. That meant filming it in entirely different ways each time.
Dan: The lead actor barely moves. He’s in bed for 90% of the film, so we had to really inject energy and perspective through the camera.
What we thought would be very simple, “Oh, we’ll just shoot that scene three times,” ended up meaning that as a crew, Kat and I were constantly saying, “Right, we’re doing the same scene, but now we’re doing it like this. Now we’re doing it like this.”
For David, our lead actor, he had to film completely out of sequence, as you do on a short film. We’d be saying, “Right, now you’re in this mind frame. Now you’re in this mind frame. Now you’re in this mind frame.” He was just brilliant.
Kat: He was a pro.
Dan: We were very lucky in that respect. It ended up being quite a complicated mathematical equation of trying to get the same but different five times. Then going, “No, not you. You’re the same. He’s different. The camera’s different, but that’s the same.” Trying to get everyone on the same page was more complicated than I think we originally thought it would be.
One thing that you spoke about earlier that came to my mind is the perspective of how you present a social care environment. I saw an interview with an actor a while ago where he said that all self-budgeted indie British films, if it’s a working-class person, are always shaky, black and white and very grainy.
What I noticed about this film is how bright and colourful it is. Even when the sunrays come in at sunset, it looks beautiful. Was that something you thought about when capturing the environment?
Dan: So much so that the window is actually fake. We put that window in because we knew the most important way to shift things was not only to show the day changing, because when you’re in the same location otherwise it will all look the same, but also to use the light to show personality and perspective changing.
It was an internal window that we put loads of lights on. We shifted the angles and temperatures of the lights to shape the time of day. Our director of photography, Hamish Anderson, is incredible when it comes to light. We’d spoken about it with him and the way he ended up using it was brilliant.
But the way you said that is very important to us. What we tried to do with this is be equal parts inspired by slightly down-and-dirty British films and British humour, where everything is a bit downplayed, and also very glossy American-type things, which are slicker and shot very brightly.
We tried to marry the two. What we’ve ended up with, I think, is something where the character and relationships are very British in their portrayal and very real. We haven’t tried to be too emotionally over the top with them.
But in the directing, we’ve tried to be far more, I guess, “American” about it and a bit more slick. Or American slash Edgar Wright as the Brit who’s doing that kind of thing!
Films like Everything Everywhere All at Once and Edgar Wright’s films use the camera not just to capture something, but to be entertaining, cut through time, slow down time or manipulate the audience’s perspective.
We’ve got moments where time completely stops. We’re using the camera to manipulate time or characters, or just to get a gag out of something, rather than, say, the Shane Meadows style of filmmaking, where the camera just captures. I love Shane Meadows, but that wasn’t how we saw this film.
Were you both inspired by specific filmmakers or films when it came to bringing this to life? I know you mentioned Groundhog Day because of the time loop, but were there any other specific reference points?
Kat: We’re always drawn to films like Little Miss Sunshine. It’s got a very real family dynamic, and the tone and feeling of it is what we call “happy sad”. You’re kind of crying and laughing in the same film.
Basically, at the end, it is a tragedy. Everyone’s lost everything they were going for and everything they were dreaming of, but you leave feeling positive. It’s such an amazing trick that they’ve managed to pull off.
We wanted to do the same thing with ours. By all accounts, it’s a sad ending, but hopefully that’s not the feeling you’re left with. Audiences who have spoken to us haven’t left saying, “Oh my God, what a sad ending.” That’s not what we wanted.
Dan: We tried to do that same kind of trick on ours.
Kat: We also took inspiration from The Worst Person in the World, which has that great frozen-in-time sequence. We took inspiration from that because we were trying to play with time and use the camera in a more heightened and stylised way in certain areas.
Everything Everywhere All at Once was also a reference point because we have an older protagonist going through something crazy. That was the reference point there, someone you would never expect to be at the centre of that kind of story.
We didn’t go quite as wild as that, although it was in our heads!
Dan: Something we were very aware of is that the camera is very much from the perspective of the character rather than sitting back and simply capturing what happens to him. It’s dictated by how he’s feeling at any given time.
At first, it’s very static, then it becomes a bit more manic as he’s more worried, and then it manipulates time in different ways. We had quite an expressive camera, so we looked at those kinds of films that use the camera in those ways to give us inspiration.
Another thing we didn’t quite comprehend when we wrote the script is that if you have a character who doesn’t move, that can make 19 minutes feel very long. It’s on the longer side of short films, so it’s quite tricky to keep the pace and keep people hooked and entertained.
We really had to push ourselves from a filmmaking point of view, particularly with the camera and our DOP, to make sure entertainment was always the first thing.
We come from sketch comedy, so if you lose the audience, you’ve lost. We’re very much about making sure the audience is along for the ride.
Then, secondly, how do we use the camera to say that you should be able to pick a camera move and understand his emotional state from it? That’s the goal, anyway.
That’s why we couldn’t take a shot from earlier and move it to later. The chances are we’d have shot it in an entirely different way.
Kat: Even with the grade, going back to what you were saying earlier about the gritty working-class aesthetic, there are more grey tones at the beginning, because that’s how he’s experiencing the hospice at that moment. As we go along, we start bringing in more colour because his world is opening up a bit.
He’s warming up and starting to see more of the joy.
Dan: We had a great colourist, Finn Reed, and we had discussions with him about how we could subtly bring up the warmth in the whole film, even if it’s a scene we’ve seen before. Just bring it back up so it feels the same but different.
That was the constant phrase we had to say to each other and everyone else: “It’s the same but different.”
“I think there’s actually a lot more joy, warmth and hope in hospice than people think.”
One thing that really resonated with me was that everyone hopes not only to have a peaceful ending, but to die the way that they want to die. That’s something I really felt in the film.
You’re happy because he dies the way he wanted to, and he says what he wanted to say, but that still leaves you with sadness because he’s gone. That’s a very specific feeling when it comes to grief.
Kat: Yeah. It’s a very complex emotion that we leave people with.
Dan: It’s the best way you can hope for, really. The sadness is inevitable, unfortunately. The only hope you can have is that there’s some happiness in there. Some sense of closure and connection.
That’s exactly what we were trying to capture. In some early drafts, we probably overdid it. We were just like, “Now this feels a bit over the top and unrealistic.” Other times, we thought maybe we didn’t need to say anything at all and it could all be done through the performances. We had to find that balance so it felt right.
And the performances themselves. You assembled such a great cast, including David Bradley, Matt Berry, Maggie Steed and Laura Checkley. What was it like bringing such a talented group of actors on board for your debut short?
Kat: It was amazing. On our debut, to work with such talent was incredible.
David just blew us away on set. Like I said, he was so on it with such a complex role. It’s not an easy shoot, and he brought so much depth to the character. There was lightness as well as sadness behind the sarcasm and vulnerability. He brought all of that.
Dan: It became an ongoing joke in the edit. We’d say, “Oh, if only we had just a glimmer of something there. I feel like it needs it.” Then you’d go back to the rushes and it was there. Every time.
Kat: If you thought you’d forgotten to give him a certain direction, you’d go back and look and realise you had it. He’d given it to you.
We wrote it for him and had him in mind the whole time. We’ve seen him in lots of comedies, because we’re Edgar Wright fans, and we thought, “He’s so funny, and he only ever really gets to play this kind of villain character. He’s either angry or mad.”
We thought, let’s do everything with him. Let’s have him be a villain and be warm and joyful at the same time, because we really put him through it for 19 minutes!
On David himself, one thing I specifically noticed was the emotion in his eyes. Was there something that surprised you about what he brought to the role? The camera gets so close to his face, and you really see the emotion in his expressions.
Kat: There’s a scene I’m thinking of, and I don’t want to spoil anything.
Dan: The one in the corridor, I think?
Kat: Yeah, where we go close to his face. All we had to do was push in on him very gently and hold on it. That’s all we had to do. He gave so much with his eyes.
Dan: The first half of the day was just pre-lighting, and then the second half we had David and Maggie. We’d done loads of the fun stuff that happened, and that was just a joy to watch. It was really fun because you’re directing David Bradley and Maggie Steed. This is mad! They were old friends who hadn’t acted together in 40-odd years, so that was fun to watch.
Then when we did that scene, I remember we were stood next to each other at the monitor. We did take one and just looked at each other as if to say, “Holy…”
Kat: It made you tear up just watching it. Completely out of context, not even in the film. No music, no nothing.
So we knew it was great. It was at that point we knew we had something really special. We felt we had the potential to make something very special.
Dan: We wrote a good script and did the best we could, but David is known as a great actor because he can do that. He’s so, so good.
What was really lovely was having David bring along Maggie. She’s an old friend of his. We’d never worked with Maggie, but we’d seen her largely as quite intimidating, powerful women, which Maggie is, don’t get me wrong!
But she’s also so lovely. She was funny, self-effacing, dry and just great. She was so much fun.
Matt was a stroke of luck because we filmed an advert with him about ten days before our short film shoot.
Kat: We’d never met him before that advert shoot. We have Movember to thank for that because we’ve done Movember charity sketches for the last few years.
We cheekily asked him because we had a role available. Someone had dropped out, so we were in need of someone. We thought, “Let’s just ask Matt Berry. It would be amazing to have Matt Berry.”
And he said yes. He was so generous with his time, and it was amazing that we got him.
Dan: I think partly it was because he’s just a really nice man who wants to help people out. But also, he really loves David Bradley and had never met him before. It was a chance for him to drop in, act with David, do us a favour and then leave.
And then Laura, who I just think is amazing in this. We’ve worked with her before and known her for a long time as a master of these really big, bordering-on-the-grotesque comedy characters. Really heightened, almost cartoonish comedy characters that are so funny.
Kat: I’d seen a little bit of her dramatic side in Screw on Channel 4, and she has such a warmth to her, as a person and on camera.
It just felt right that she would be David’s daughter. I saw it in my head and thought, “Laura’s the one for this.”
I’d never seen her do exactly that, but I just felt that she was right. And she was so great.
Dan: We basically cast one of the most out-there comedy actors we know to do one of the few roles in the film that has zero jokes!
Because we’re co-directors, we’ll divide and conquer a little bit on set. Time was against us from the second we started.
On that day, I was doing one of the more tricky camera shots and sent Kat out.
Kat: I went and talked to David and Laura, and we talked through that scene. We had no rehearsal time at all, so we just went into another room and talked about what that scene meant, their own experiences of their families and things like that.
We really got into it for the small amount of time we had.
Dan: The second I saw it, once we’d done the lighting and popped them in situ, we were like, “Oh, wow. Okay.”
It’s not easy to go toe-to-toe with David Bradley.
And she more than delivers. She’s the emotional gut punch, really.
We really lucked out with the casting. We’ve also managed to cast loads of people we’ve known for a long time.
Either we’ve worked with them a lot, like Paul G Raymond, the guy with the camera, or Mark Davison, the really boring guy with the moustache. These are people we’ve known for years and made countless videos with, so we were able to bring them back.
There were also some people we just found for this, like Jayne Aguire, who plays one of the nurses.
Kat: There were 17 cast members, which is a bit ambitious for a short film.
Dan: We kind of felt like we needed them all. We needed enough people to bring in different moments that you remember throughout the day. Otherwise, the day isn’t repetitive enough.
So yeah, that was a bit of a balance. We really lucked out with the casting. We got some new people we’d never worked with before but wanted to, some people who were complete discoveries, some old friends and then some absolute legends.
“There is life to live, no matter how much of it you have left.”
Ultimately, the film is about appreciating the time we have and saying the important things to the important people in our lives. Has making Life Goes On changed the way either of you think about life, loss or things that have been unsaid?
Kat: It kind of came about because I was already thinking those things about what you should say to your family. Those thoughts were in my head when writing the script.
Then, having made it, seen it and seen the impact it’s having on people, we’ve had people come up to us afterwards saying things like, “I had to call my dad,” or, “I had to call my mum.”
It’s making people think about family. People who have lost relatives are thinking about their family members in a positive way.
So yeah, it’s really made me reflect even more on how important family is and saying the things you should say now while there’s time. It’s been amazing to see the reaction to it.
It’s definitely changed my perspective. In future projects, I want to have that emotion in there and make things that are meaningful.
Dan: We come from comedy, so often we think of things from the joke first. One of the first things Kat said about this idea was about him being visited by the same people who are there for their own selfish reasons, rather than really helping him, which is funny.
But finding those extra layers of depth is something we now want to do. Some of our other ideas are purely comedy-first, but we’ve now peeled them back a little bit and thought, “Right, what’s underneath here that we can really dig into?”
Kat: I guess we have a bit more confidence now because the film’s going well and is being really well received. We’re now having the confidence to think we can put more emotion into things.
We have a scene without jokes!
In terms of the response, is there a message that you’re hoping audiences take away? You mentioned people telling you they’re calling their families. Is there a message that you really felt was at the core of the film that you want audiences to take away from their experience?
Kat: I think it’s a lot of what we’ve said about seeing the joy and the light in dark times.
Bill thinks that he’s not got any time left, and he’s quite down about that. What a hospice does, and what hospice staff do, is make a patient see and feel that they are safe and that they’re in an environment where they can make the most of the time they have left.
The message is that there is life to live, no matter how much of it you have left.
Dan: You can always get one last laugh. One last bit of connection.
Shining a light on hospice care is something we’re very keen to do and to change the perspective of that because it’s important to David as well, but it was very important to Kat and me.
A theme that comes up quite a lot in our work, but definitely in this, is the importance of human connection. Vulnerability is a big thing, too.
Those two things are often really entwined. You can actually connect with people when you’re vulnerable, and if you’re not going to be vulnerable, you’re probably not going to get very deep. That’s something that comes up quite a lot in our work.
Kat: I think I’ll hold my hands up and say I struggle with vulnerability, and a lot of that went into it.
All those feelings of, “I need to be more open. I need to connect more,” went into the film. Luckily, I’m not alone, and other people have also said that they relate to that.
People of Bill’s generation also struggle with this idea of, “I am strong. I don’t need anyone.” But perhaps it’s not that they don’t need anyone. It’s that they don’t want to bother people by admitting that they need help, want help or just want them to be there.
Dan: People want to be let in. There’s no benefit to keeping people at arm’s length.
