I guess I was thinking about just what it means to make a film as a show radical and the the way that like um making a book or writing a book feels to me like instinctively quite apt as a kind of as a kind of thing to do as someone who's a shy radical and whether there's any differences between that and making a film or just if you could give us some insights into how the film came about and yeah and what the process was like um it's a very odd type of book there's no narrative there's no charac
ters and it's built on like um so I take this radical idea that everything is fiction so um everything from you know we always encountering forms of writing like uh the law or a menu or the the blurby thing for this and those can all be formats for fiction um so answering your question um that you've really confounded me how did the film come about what was that so uh there's a there's a there's a little uh as the Director describes the introvert Bookshop in Margate um so margate's uh like a hid
den shoreditch I guess there's a creative Community there um there's all sorts of uh venues that um so there's a there's a venue called the shell Grotto in um in Margate which you see right at the beginning of the film and it's literally a mystery underground cave made entirely of seashells um so that was incubating in there was part of the process for this and the film was also shot just before kovid broke um the scene shot in uh Oxford Street around Chinatown there were rumors Urban rumors of
Chinatown being evacuated or a sort of uh sheenophobia around Chinatown uh given the first wave of covid um my relationship to the camera is also uh very much related to my brother um incarceration so uh my brother I'm I'm I've been very actively involved in a lot of the war and Terror campaigns I don't know if people have seen the film The mauritranian or um about the guantan I'm friends with a lot of the ex Quintanilla prisoners um and uh my brother's part of that Nexus or one of the sort of H
uman Rights abuses uh at the time um it was detained without trial for uh eight yeah uh six years and then put into solitary confinement and so my relationship to the camera is about putting truth against uh hysterical uh uh media climate uh created through uh news bulletins which are quite violent in terms of uh demonizing people um giving a context to things uh like the way uh euphemisms for for forms of uh violence and so I was thrust had Theresa May an entire British establishment and the I
think it was George Bush at the time when my brother's incarcerated producing their sort of Fox News and a type of uh media which uh yeah it was quite violent and dehumanizing and then I guess it's an aspect to speaking truth to power and people say how can you speak publicly even uh whilst aligning with this introvert thing so I mean I have two conditions speaking public one like um I have to read lots of books about the topic and two I have to have cried about it in my bedroom and they're the
only two conditions for um and and it's the same for um the film as well a lot of the scenes were devised it was a very highly collaborative film um I mean there's pits I put in the film so there's a um close-up of the Court transcripts for example I mean that's I mean who puts Court transcripts in the film Tom comes from background of directing Me music videos black dog films with a production um company behind it as part of Ridley Scott's branch of production companies they're mainly direct mu
sic videos and I think the most famous music video is bjork's all is full of love and so Tom and I developed this relationship through uh we're about the same age so the 1990s is this golden age of reality before uh social media creates a hyper hyper reality um and sort of bonding over those that period of music when people actually bought physical things um and and that was my relationship to to the camera and I even suggested a lot of angles in the film too um and there's there's also a lot of
the film which is not actually um so we shot about probably seven films and then we condensed it for like short film entry film which is a you know so it's a very dense every aspect of the film could be unpacked a lot so uh there's there's a location I shot which is in the Central Library in Ljubljana in Slovenia and so for those who don't know so I I have the book and then I develop art projects out of the book so one of the biggest art projects I did was a referendum so people could vote to b
e part of the state of aspergistan in an exhibition in Slovenia uh which we actually and we actually won the referendum so I do have a democratic mandate as a commander-in-chief of the global movement to destroy extroverts Supremacy and uh and it also won the election in Poland which is uh great in terms of how things are so I think it sets itself it's a very unconventional form of film and it does set itself against like you know you have the standard 25 minute like I don't know um CNN type doc
umentary you have news bulletins I mean it's sort of ripping all those things apart um so I mean actually the the one of the biggest expenses was that BBC archive you see it actually charge thousands of pounds for the archive material but we took that and stretched it into entire more humanizing I mean they're not going to show you know a lot of the films in um I think it's 16 mil or eight mil um and you know you're not going to try eight mil footage of my parents in the house and in a sort of n
ews about the term but then that gives a dimension you need and that gives uh things I think it's also a radical form of filmmaking which actually breaks uh those conventions but also a lot of the filmmaking is actually quite banal in terms of you do walk up the same set of stairs about eight times I can understand why um film stars become like junkies and uh ruin their lives that's great so yeah you're very funny and I and uh I wondered like yeah and that gets mentioned in the in the film as we
ll as we just saw there what view is the importance of humor in there because it's so it's so weighty and it's so serious and it's so urgent but then it's also you dealing with it in a way that is doesn't in any way shy away from humor yeah um I think one of the earliest films that really inspired me was uh Roberto benini's Life is Beautiful which is a comedy set in the Holocaust you're a concentration camp um and I also I think four Lions Chris Morris and British comedies uh of interest to me u
m I know I think I just need validation like if you laugh I know you've connected in some way um too and there's an element of sort of knowing um it's actually not as funny as I like it to be I'd like I'd actually like John Waters to be the director of a future show radicals um or um I love um Jack Keel with his films like I know switchblade sisters and coffee brown in these Camp um I think there's something in Camp and irony that like uh I you know when you're a so-called disabled person and I'
ve been classified disabled under until the conservative government came and reclassified what disabled means you're subject to all these forms of administration and bureaucracy and taking them all sort of you don't totally take your diagnosis seriously you know totally take the administration seriously they're all approximations and and uh when you meet an audience member who gets your sense of humor uh there's another form of knowledge and knowing uh and recognition and um yeah um also in that
film uh there's there's a lot to unpack so in the introvert emergency rescue hotline we really in direct in this film we made we actually made a real emerging uh introvert rescue emergency hotline which people could actually dial in and we put the adverts all over social media so people actually dialed in and gave their real life testimonies uh one of the voices you hear is uh one of my dearest friends Don biswas who's one of the fellow gang members I I met I recommend anyone Google donbizos he
's a dyspraxic autistic depressive comedian somehow very funny and and integrates that into his actual performance I also like if I fail like if I was awkward or or like you know flip up you know I've always got a vacuum yes because I'm all good right yeah I'm gonna ask one more question if that's all right which is a question I asked when I wrote in your book Bing pen which is like so I'm thinking about when I was I remember being a young teenager and having a new teacher and for some reason th
e teacher immediately identified me as being a quiet kid and said like oh this is I can see Daniel that you're a quiet kid and he said that loudly to the whole class and my response was to very loudly say no I'm not um and I feel like since then that's been my way of engaging in like extrovert supremacies is to be like loud and awkward but I know that I come with I I associate this with dyspraxia somehow I come with like an accidental awkward loudness and awkwardness awkward loudness and and so
I wonder if shyness is always related to volume that's for me not an interesting philosophical question there's there's a there's a wonderful bit in Daniel's book called why awkwardness is great and I always make him read it like but time tunity won't do that but you can let's get his book I I don't I I do think so I mean a lot I was a fan I used to do sound art and I was a fan of a lot of avant-garde music as a big fan of Sonic Youth the alternative rock band and sometimes they do these they ju
st play these noise things which is just pure noise and there's no Melody there's no cordiality It's Just Pure Noise and and and I like um Japanese avant-garde musicians like mersbo where it's again just pure signal noise I like the Lou Reed album metal Museum music which is again a form of Pure Noise and pure so like people could actually enjoy that type of stuff that requires a very intense form of listening and so so I would say this giant is about listening so I'm I'm interested in a structu
ral uh transformation politics which puts listening at the center rather than speaking um but I also reflect of how Universal this Trope is of The Quiet kid so as you see in the film the film has developed this sort of global following and the books develops Global following and so some of my fans in Beijing they relate to this Trope of The Quiet fat kid and they're sort of still like whether it's sort of Mexico or um Brazil or wherever in the world it's this this Trope of The Quiet kid seems to
resonate uh so universally and so broadly across classes races geographies and uh one day we're all going to unify and um every Friday the world order the constitution of the aspergistan state which is a Britain um and uh reparations and uh redress um I think we already there's already forms of real existing aspergistan even in this Library here right now uh are sitting next together I think the Poetry library in uh in the South Bank Center which is almost always empty but has this huge I think
that's real existing aspergistan I think a lot of the film was shot in Ljubljana and Slovenia and even though it's a capital city there's there's no place in it like Times Square or Leicester Square it's like um it's almost like and the entire architecture of the city which is divine by this architect called um Jose plasnik who's like the Gordy of the city who's designing all of it he had a very introvert lifestyle so even the bridge is split into three those Central bridge in the city so there
's no even the city's Center is introvert there's nowhere there's a traffic jam um and and the sort of um classical sounds and city is there where it's not you're not never under Century overload um I also think uh in terms of there's also a dismantlement of real existing Asperger's done in terms of there's there's a war against uh public space which is quiet so libraries have been closed by hundreds by by the conservative government and you could you could Define that by um neoliberalism as a w
ar against public spending but you could also Define that as a war against uh quiet space uh so one of my fans uh called partly robot in Portland Oregon he just he just took a photograph of uh his favorite Corner uh in his bedroom where he sits and reads books and he says oh I aspects Diner exists it's in the corner of my room I still think we need to reinvent what socializing is there's a phrase I saw somewhere fluency and silence um so uh and and there were um I don't know there were things I
enjoyed probably get enough time like I really enjoyed like Quakers meetings where the form of worship was sitting in silence um I I I mean like I agree there isn't one um like atypical form of uh like there's a there's a whole um diversity within the neurodiversity thing um and uh I think it's I think there's so there's a Consciousness though that there's something to be negotiated so you don't always assume this is the correct way of being like yesterday I think we're invited to the red carpet
Gala and obviously that's something that makes me terrified and Shrink away and that's very extrovert normative and very extrovert supremacist um and there's like an awareness there's something to be negotiated or the validity of the person who wants to withdraw really oddly though so there is actually extrovert fan base of share articles too and they said oh well there's some people who said they converted to information from there but there's also the extra fan base has said it made them more
sensitive and aware person too um so I I don't I think uh I mean even as you speak you're not speaking as like an opponent um but I think the way I a lot of us experience the world is like a boot on our head and we have to live with it whether we like it or not and um that's just the way the world is um so like the Consciousness that isn't just the way the world is Plus in inhabiting spaces like people are like why are you on Instagram isn't that where Kim Kardashian and like extrovert Supremac
y thrives or people are like oh why would you go to a football match because a football stadium is inherently extrovert or something like that but that's to me the reason why one should occupy their spaces anyway because to reinhabit them and redefine them so one can redefine um football stadiums I mean you have some football same as like Arsenal is called the library right the the stadium there but you can redefine that as a cathedral experience and similarly I have a presence on Instagram look
at Tri radicals uh on Instagram uh it's um similarly I occupy that space because it is over like nothing is inherently anything you know so even loud noise itself is not inherently uh in whatever uh neurotypical extra the reason we should stay there and not move like when I was in residency at Yan van Nike Academy in Art Academy in the Netherlands and uh they would have these Rave parties outside my window every single night sometime so 4am which I naturally hated and um and and the directory A
cademy was like oh you should just have another Studio move like to the other side of the like uh remember but that was the reason I was like no I'm gonna stay here and they're going to accommodate the fact that I find this uh intolerable or unbearable and then uh they can become better so the Democratic structures reopened and is always open for us I guess that's my answer I actually it brought in neurodiversity to so I I a lot of share articles it's not just book it's just discourse that lives
on and on and on uh through all the tours and stuff so I did a event for the Open studio called radical Roundtable around neurodiversity uh there's a very uneven I'm not sure everyone in the room knows what neurodiversity is but it's also it's part of a new wave of progressive movements which is inspired in some ways by lgbtqi uh movements in terms of these things were once seen as simply a pathology or something to be corrected but instead look at that as a sort of another sensibility another
language so I did this radical Round Table around neurodiversity in the Netherlands uh I think Britain is actually one of the best places in the world so I don't want to lose my decolonial credit there yeah for actually recognition of neurodiversity so I actually you know like Tate modern has uh quite a room it's neurodiversity is built into its inclusion structure I think also in the BFI like that's not uniform in other in either play like Germany or or Netherlands or other places in Europe I'v
e been uh Netherlands didn't have that institutional recognition within that Academy until I put it on the table and the number of participants actually left who also knew a typical um so yeah so actually neurodiversity gave me a um a sort of a a sort of a sort of a framework uh a rights framework in which to negotiate with them um and there's some really good developments here so uh when Jeremy corbyn was leading the labor party there was a branch within the labor party called neurodivergent La
bor and it was led by someone called Janine Booth who's a trade unionist so she looked at Trade union motions policies uh Frameworks in which to uh uh assert that uh equality one thing they have in the Netherlands though that we don't have here is to have this award called neurodiverse um politician of the year I mean I I don't know who would win Euro diverse politician of the year in British Parliament but um interesting to think about
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