The Red Bulletin June 2019

Secret Cinema
create the world.” After a guest buys a ticket,
they’re assigned a character and given outfit
suggestions. “For The Shawshank Redemption
we asked everyone to come in a suit, but once
they were stripped we needed 1,200 prison
uniforms. I found a guy with some original
’40s Norwegian prison uniforms in his garage.
That made the audience feel part of the world,
because they were wearing something real.”
It was very different in 2009 when Kulkarni
first joined Secret Cinema for a one-day popup
of the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera.
“That was the first that had costumes. It’s just
me with a rack of clothes and two days to
outfit 40 people,” she recalls. “A tall man
came in asking for costume. I put an outfit
together and because I didn’t panic I got a call
to join the company.” The man turned out to be
Fabien Riggall, the founder of Secret Cinema.
The idea came to Riggall as a child living
in Morocco in the ’80s. “I was 11 and I
went to this fleapit cinema in Casablanca
without knowing what the film was,”
he recalls. “It turned out to be Sergio Leone’s
Once Upon A Time In America – an insane film
with an epic [Ennio]Morricone soundtrack.
The protagonist was this boy a bit older
than me – Noodles – who was in love with
Deborah, played by Jennifer Connelly.
I transported myself and became Noodles.”
Seventeen years later, in 2003, Riggall
launched a short-film festival called Future
Shorts. “A friend of mine had this venue,
an underground bunker in Shepherd’s Bush
Green [in west London] called Ginglik, which
was one of those lavish toilets from the old
days. I put on a night – 12 short films, a DJ,
people chatting, drinking, in those days when
you could smoke inside. The idea evolved into
the feature-length Future Cinema with 1922
horror Nosferatu at London club SeOne.
“We didn’t reveal the film or location, and I
thought, ‘It’s not going to sell,’ but 400 people
came.” He experimented with an immersive
adaptation of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. “The
concept was, ‘How can we make this more
real?’ We wanted to play with mystery.”
In 2007, this became Secret Cinema.
“The first [Secret Cinema] was [Gus Van
Sant’s] Paranoid Park, about a skater accused
“People want
experiences that are
mysterious [and]
part of a bigger thing”
46 THE RED BULLETIN