The Red Bulletin June 2019

Secret Cinema
At an undisclosed location in
London, the bustle of activity
is afoot. Inside a cavernous
warehouse spanning 6,000m 2 ,
contractors feverishly put
the finishing touches to a
ginormous set that resembles…
well, we’d best not say.
Performers rehearse routines in a startling
recreation of the backstreets of… actually,
never mind. A man who looks suspiciously like
Daniel Craig walks among them, broodingly
scanning his surroundings. Studying him is
Barbara Broccoli, producer of the James Bond
movies. This scene may or may not have
happened; we can’t really tell you, because
the first rule of Secret Cinema is: tell no one.
The second rule is: immerse yourself. This is
what hundreds of thousands of people have
done during Secret Cinema’s 12-year run.
It’s a commitment delivered on a promise –
you pay more than the regular cinema price
to see an old film. You’re told what to wear
and where to meet at a certain time on a
certain day. You’re forbidden to bring your
smartphone inside, or take pictures. And by
the time you leave, you’ve had one of the most
incredible experiences of your life. If that
sounds like a religion, it’s not far off. There
are two types of people in this world: those
who know the secret and those who don’t.
In 2012, Andrea Moccia attended Secret
Cinema presents The Shawshank Redemption.
The ticket directed him to an east London
library, where he was ushered into a makeshift
courtroom. “The judge sentenced you for
a crime you hadn’t committed,” he recalls.
“Policemen loaded you into a blacked-out van
that took you to a school transformed into a
prison, where other audience members were
shouting at you. You were stripped, put in a
prison uniform and locked in a cell. I left that
night thinking, ‘These people are insane and
I have to work with them.’” Today, he’s one
of lead producers for Secret Cinema.
“The first production I worked on was
Brazil,” says Moccia. “Day one, I walked into
the 12-floor building they’d transformed
into this dystopian world and got stuck in
a lift with [the film’s director] Terry Gilliam.
That was a baptism of fire.”
This is an apt phrase for anyone experiencing
their first Secret Cinema – a six-hour adventure
where you enter a sandbox recreation of a
movie’s universe with a narrative that unfolds
until it reaches a crescendo at the exact moment
the film begins. Last year, when Secret
Cinema adapted Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 movie
Romeo + Juliet – recreating the landscape of
Verona Beach for an audience of 5,000 a
night, with choirs, police cars, and a masked
ball at the Capulet mansion – the film director
described it as “a whole new art form”.
That art involves what Secret Cinema calls
‘mirror moments’, where performers reenact
scenes in perfect synchronisation with the
on-screen action. Before that, audiences
might encounter these characters on their
adventure. “One of my friends at Romeo +
Juliet texted to say girls were chasing the
actor playing Leonardo DiCaprio and crying
because he looked so real,” says Susan
Kulkarni, head of costume at Secret Cinema.
“I was like, ‘We nailed it,’ because that’s the
feeling I had as a teenager watching the film.”
For an event the size of Romeo + Juliet,
Kulkarni had a team of more than 30 working
on as many as 700 outfits on rotation. “The
actors have two or three changes throughout
the evening, then we costume the bar staff,
security, even the cleaners, because one
person wearing the wrong thing pulls you out
of the world.” Her team has to consider every
eventuality. “We create a capsule wardrobe
for each character, because if it’s raining you
have to imagine what else Juliet would wear.”
Kulkarni also has to consider the look of
the general public: “We use the audience to
Brazil, Croydon
“The main character
had to jump off a
tower block and abseil
wearing huge wings,
but seem to be flying,”
says Kulkarni. “We
only had a couple of
days to create the
wings. You figure it
out as you go.”
SECRET CINEMA/HANSON LEATHERBY
44 THE RED BULLETIN