Get lost in the surreal, disorienting world of Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke’s debut album
Jonathan Zawada spent five years crafting the visual universe for Tall Tales. Its final form is a delightfully absurd feature-length film interrogating humanity’s insatiable appetite for progress.
- Date
- 15 May 2025
- Words
- Marigold Warner
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Created by Australian artist Jonathan Zawada, the accompanying feature film to Tall Tales – Mark Pitchard and Thom Yorke’s debut collaboration released by Warp Records – is a fractured trip into an absurd dreamscape. “It’s more like an exhibition of installations – almost like a gallery with a different room dedicated to each song,” Jonathan explains. A product of a five-year collaboration, each of these “rooms” is equally distinct and bizarre, forming a disorientating sequence of psychedelic landscapes populated by uncanny characters with strange stories to tell.
We meet a procession of disfigured creatures, for example, marching through a candy-coloured town to trudging electronic beats. At times it feels like a dream; at others, a glitch in a nightmare. Between renderings of robotic arms and carnivalesque figures are flickers of real life – black-and-white found footage, amusement parks and construction sites shot from afar. These scenes feel like a nod to the decay of society, a critique of modernisation and technology.
But in all its strangeness, the film is enticing rather than glum or cynical. The Tall Tales album is available now, and the film is screening in select theatres around the world. Here, the Australian artist breaks down the concept behind this meandering film, the inspirations that guided key scenes, and why “everything is much more complicated than it seems”.
Buggin Out Again
It’s Nice That:
The film opens with a lighthouse panning the ocean and music slowly building in tension. Lighthouses are symbolic in literature and art – what does it mean in this context?
Jonathan Zawada:
For me the lighthouse really symbolises this attempt at orienting yourself in a totally disorienting and changing environment. They are incredibly precarious positions to be in. From the perspective of the lighthouse, it is only ever illuminating the tiniest glimpse of the world around in this giddy, constantly spinning dance. From the perspective of a passing ship, it is the most minimal hint of information to go off to help warn you of danger.
There is an interesting mixture of perspectives at play, the sailors at sea and the very stranded and isolated lighthouse keeper on the rock, the lone individual and the group or community. Historically, from an economic and social standpoint they’re incredibly interesting too, being an odd mixture of a publicly funded service that operates in aid of trade and commerce, but which cannot directly make money itself. It’s an emblem of a kind of social contract that develops hand in hand with the evolution of a complex economy, welcoming the outsider.
INT:
Can you describe the synopsis that follows in as few words as you can?
JZ:
One of the most fundamental ideas of the film is really that we each apply our own narrative to the world we find ourselves in, that there are positive or negative forces taking place, but they are all just a matter of perspective. In that sense it’s tricky to give the film a synopsis, but first and foremost it was always intended as something that could visually support and enhance the feeling in the music without taking over it too much or being entirely secondary to it. I wanted it to represent the world as broadly as possible, but from a non-objective or removed perspective. Something that collapses history, economics, myth and art – in the way we do in our individual lives – into its own strange little fable.
Tall Tales
“As you get older you come to realise that you really don’t understand much of anything... That’s what I wanted the film to be about, to articulate what that constant sense of disorientation feels like.”
Jonathan Zawada
INT:
What kind of references or emotional cues shaped the world of this film?
There is a sprawling and expansive network of references to do with art forgery, labour, technology and economics that sort of weaves its way through history that I had the absolute joy of wandering through in making the work. I was drawn to stories that involved outcomes that were somewhat vague in their ethical positions. There is something in that kind of sense of disorientation that felt like it was at the heart of the music to me. When we’re young we like to think we know what is happening and that the answers are fairly obvious and simple. As you get older you come to realise that you really don’t understand much of anything, that everything is much more complicated and complex than it seems. That’s sort of at odds with the way we like to think of things culturally, which is very reductionist now more than ever. That’s really what I wanted the film to be about, to articulate what that constant sense of disorientation feels like, that there are no absolutes.
INT:
There’s a feeling in the film of watching something unfold without clear explanation – a sense of mystery, repetition, even futility. Was the Theatre of the Absurd an influence on the tone or narrative arc?
JZ:
I’m ashamed to say that I only have the most cursory knowledge of the Theatre of the Absurd via plays like Waiting For Godot. Although it wasn’t consciously in my mind while working on this, you’re entirely right to point out the connection there. It absolutely exists in the space of feelings of futility. Although it wasn’t an influence as an overall movement, the individual works within it were absolutely huge influences. There is something in the way that trickled down into popular culture too, in particular in the ways it influenced British children’s television of the 1960s and 1970s, which were very direct influences on a lot of Tall Tales, both for me and for Mark.
Back in the Game
1 of 6
Happy Days
1 of 6
Happy Days
INT:
Tell us about how you met Mark and Thom and how your collaboration began?
JZ:
I was first introduced to Mark around 2006 over email through Warp Records, but we didn’t actually meet face-to-face until about 2010 in Sydney, where he still lives today. I was immediately drawn to how diverse and deep his approach to music was – how he embraced so many different styles, wasn’t afraid to constantly shift the creative spaces he worked in, or even change his name. I felt a real sense of kinship with that sensibility. Over the years, I’ve collaborated with him on several artistic projects. Mark has a habit of sharing music with me as it’s developing, so I was familiar with Tall Tales from its inception.
I first met Thom over Zoom during the pandemic. Mark had shared their early demos, which immediately sparked all sorts of ideas, even though I had no clear picture of what the project would ultimately become – musically or visually. The project began without concrete expectations, but I knew I wanted to capture the diversity of the music. In my mind, it was such an extraordinary and unique album – each song with its own distinct identity. While they all contribute to a cohesive whole, they also stand firmly on their own. I really felt each track deserved its own dedicated attention and treatment.
For quite a while, the exact form of the project remained ambiguous. Even now that it’s manifested itself as a film, I think of it more like an exhibition of installations – almost like a gallery with a different room dedicated to each song.
1 of 3
Wandering Genie
1 of 3
Wandering Genie
INT:
How closely did the three of you work together on the visuals, what did that look like?
JZ:
Mark and I talked most days over the course of the four or five years that the Tall Tales project developed. I’ve become very reliant on infinite online whiteboards to develop ideas, so from the very start we had a Miro board which we both accessed to jot down thoughts. Slowly the individual ideas coalesced from that. Being an unbelievably busy person, Thom would be part of check-in calls every now and then. He was so open and trusting, while also being super astute and critical where he needed to be. The mixture of our three different perspectives created what felt like a perfect arrangement so that all aspects of the project were being looked at and we didn’t ever get too lost in the weeds, or lose a sense of what it was that we were making overall, which is a pretty challenging thing to do when working on something over such a long time period.
Wandering Genie
Gangsters
Wandering Genie
Gangsters
Gangsters
“It’s more like an exhibition of installations – a gallery with a different room dedicated to each song.”
Jonathan Zawada
INT:
As the film progresses it moves through a wide range of visual styles – some sequences feel surreal and digital, others more grounded in reality, like the black-and-white footage. Could you give us an overview of the different mediums and processes you used?
JZ:
From the very beginning it felt vital to me that the work should traverse a wide range of styles since the music itself traverses a wide range of styles. A lot of the variation was the result of the subjective feeling that I got from the music, as well as what would be a practical way to achieve the concept or idea I had in my mind. There wasn’t much of a budget for the project so a great number of creative decisions were also pragmatic ones. In something like the video for Gangsters, the little bleeps and bloops that propel the track along made me think of video games from the very start, so it felt right that I should build that piece in a video game engine. For Happy Days, Mark had shown me the incredible photography of Tish Murtha and that sent me down a path of exploration that spat me out at the North West Film Archive and an incredible film called Late Hope Street which documented the redevelopment of Manchester in the 1960s. The whole story of those housing developments became incredibly inspiring to me and at some point it felt like a foregone conclusion to repurpose the Late Hope Street film for that song which has a strange sense of nostalgia to it musically.
INT:
What guided your choices around these aesthetic shifts and how did you want them to reflect the emotional arc of the album?
JZ:
In the end it became quite a tricky process to figure out how to move from one visual language to another. Mark has a wonderful sense of feeling and emotion. After many different attempts at constructing a sequence he cracked it somehow, finding a way to flow from one piece to another in a way that worked from a narrative point of view as well as an aesthetic one.
INT:
You also question the idea of progress – or our appetite for it. How did that theme manifest visually?
JZ:
The idea of progress was something that revealed itself in almost every idea and feeling I had around the project, sometimes in more obvious ways and sometimes much more subtly. There are some very overt parts of the film, like the sequence for A Fake In A Faker’s World [right, top] which depicts an endless array of robotic arms painting paintings. Or the video for This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice [right, bottom] which reduces the entire history of the world to a series of boxes shuffling on and off a conveyor belt.
INT:
Are there any specific moments of the film where you wanted to invite reflection or critique on this idea of progress?
JW:
Reflection is the right word there, rather than necessarily calling it a critique. In making this film I really interrogated a lot of the thoughts and niggling concerns I have around technology and progress in more depth and detail than I have before. It was pretty illuminating for me and, much like the project as a whole, has probably left me feeling like I’m on even less solid ground than ever before. I think we often think about “progress” in terms of the purely rational, the technological or economic but I wanted to interrogate how art and culture fit into that too. What is the story we tell ourselves about “progress” in art? Particularly the art of the 20th century, and how we extend those ideas into the projections of an imagined utopian future of human activity, how that story becomes the basis for broad social and economic positioning.
This Conversation is Missing Your Voice
INT:
Overall, how important is this visual element of this project, what does it add to the experience of listening to the music?
JZ:
One of the most remarkable privileges of my job is experiencing music in its purest form – without any visual associations, often without even a title. Any visual that accompanies music, which almost always happens out of necessity, automatically creates a set of associations and connections in your brain. It subtly guides how you hear and interpret the music. Even the most minimal visual touch will influence your listening experience. It’s actually a bit of a shame that most people don’t get to experience music without these visual frameworks first. Mark and I actually discussed this possibility for Tall Tales – we briefly considered releasing the album as just black squares on Spotify, then following a week later with all the videos and artwork. This would have given everyone the chance to form their own relationship with the music before introducing any visual context.
Tall Tales by Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke is out now on Warp Records.
Tall Tales cover artwork
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About the Author
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Marigold Warner is a British-Japanese writer and editor based in Tokyo. She covers art and culture, and is particularly interested in Japanese photography and design.