Dress for dinner
Ideally, your movie should feature lots of couples immaculately attired in tuxedos and ballgowns. The spectacle of people dressed this way, at once intensely conventional yet utterly bizarre, is a staple of surrealist movies from Luis Buñuel to Monty Python. Somehow, it can always be made to seem more strange and subversive if they appear in the proper context: at a ball or a dinner party.
Made in 1962, The Exterminating Angel, one of Buñuel's finest movies, features upper-class dinner guests who find themselves inexplicably unable to leave the party, even as the lavish house of the host, Señor Nobile, is reduced to rubble over the course of the next few days. There is no explanation for this destruction, nor for the sheep that is slaughtered and the couple who commit suicide in a closet, although it is safe to assume that bourgeois values are being attacked.
Repeat scenes shamelessly
Do this wholesale in different locations with small, enigmatic variations in dialogue. The great example is Alain Resnais's Last Year in Marienbad (1961). The technique subverts our ideas of time and narrative, our assumption that if B follows A, there must be a causal relationship that sheds light on the film's constituent narrative elements.
The technique can be somewhat exasperating. It holds out the possibility of meaning, only to withdraw it in favour, by implication, of a different, elusive, poetic sort of meaning. Or, of course, no meaning at all.
Incorporate sudden scene changes
Have the picture change sharply and bafflingly from a noisy interior to a vast, empty outdoor landscape, such as a wheatfield or lonely stretch of beach, into which you can introduce incongruously dressed characters from the previous scene, as in Michel Gondry's new movie, The Science of Sleep. Or, better still, leave it utterly empty for several minutes with nothing but the swaying corn or distant waves to look at.
This sudden shift to the great outdoors is used by surrealist Humphrey Jennings in his wartime classic, Listen to Britain - a celebration of the nation's wartime spirit that uses sound to convey mood, emphasis and narrative climax. There is something about the hugeness of nature, untenanted by humankind, that is always disquieting.
Let a seashell co-star
Use an elaborate seashell as a weirdly inappropriate prop. The shell can be normal size, or grotesquely large.
The curious potency of this image was harnessed in what is sometimes considered the first surrealist film, The Seashell and the Clergyman. In it, a clergyman wrestles with his own erotic imaginings and society's constraints - and a shell keeps popping up. The 1926 French silent was directed by Germaine Dulac and used a succession of images devised by Antonin Artaud, who was drummed out of the surrealist movement for refusing to renounce theatre as a bourgeois commercial art form. At the film's premiere, Artaud, displeased by what Dulac had done to his screenplay, shouted at the screen and called her a cow.
The British Board of Film Censors banned the work, saying: "This film is so obscure as to have no apparent meaning. If there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable."
Slice open an eyeball
Have someone slowly and sadistically slash the eye on a Spacehopper's smiley face with a razor blade, in a homage to Buñuel and Dali's 1928 collaboration Un Chien Andalou. Follow this with a big close-up into the sliced, orange, rubbery eye. If possible, this shot should be paired with a rotting donkey and a man using the tablets of the 10 commandments to drag a piano, as in Chien. The more outrageous and striking your images, the more likely they are to be interpreted as a complex Freudian comment on the hidden meanings lurking within dreams. Which brings us to ...
Insert a dream sequence
No self-respecting surreal movie is complete without one. Spellbound, Alfred Hitchcock's 1945 attempt to "turn out the first film about psychoanalysis", has dream sequences by Dalí on the theme of mental delusion, a condition afflicting the movie's hero Gregory Peck, who flips whenever he sees vertical lines. These dream sequences include floating eyes, distorted landscapes and a faceless man in, again, dinner attire. You may find these elements difficult to film.
Some would say that the dream sequence is the sine qua non of the surrealist film; others that it is a sell-out, reducing the surreal vision to something subordinate or inauthentic. Reality is the waking world, it implies, and this is "only a dream". Buñuel is notable for attempting to collapse the distinction. Perhaps your dream sequence could take up the entire film.
In 1976, David Lynch raised the bar with his startling debut, Eraserhead; it features a dream within a dream, in which a head is whacked off and replaced by a pencil eraser. Again, you may find this difficult to film; but, should you succeed, your movie may be hailed as a dark comment on sexuality.
Think Plasticene
Use stop-motion animation in your movie - not fancy digital animation, but good old-fashioned Plasticene figures morphing into figures, clocks, knives and household objects, all skittering around on table-tops and forming into faces. The great Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer did this in films such as 1983's Down to the Cellar, in which a little girl goes down to the basement to fetch some potatoes, and finds all her hidden fears there, depicted in animated form. Svankmajer's childlike energy inspired Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton. Stop-motion has a raw, rough-hewn quality - it has the unsettling, tactless power of a bad dream.
Sprinkle with sex
Sex is arguably very surreal in itself, and surrealism has always valued the fortuitous encounter, with its potential to be disturbing, bizarre, astonishing - not in any obviously transgressive form, just in ordinary vanilla. It is always the same, yet always different; its participants experience it in their own way, and so do the onlookers; yet the intensity of pleasure creates the sense of eternal novelty.
David Lynch's 2001 movie Mulholland Drive boasts a great erotic scene between an aspiring actress and a woman who has lost her memory - two individuals for whom sex is the crowningly appropriate activity. They are people whose serendipitous meeting, whose simple juxtaposition, has already liberated them from the constraints and worries of identity and behaviour.
Hire diving suits
Have a Q&A session before the first screening of the film, and have it conducted by the director and his interviewer in deep-sea diving suits, complete with big, heavy helmets, thereby making speech entirely incomprehensible - in tribute to Dalí's appearance at the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936 in London. A plastic shower curtain decorated with fish could be hung in front of the pair to enhance the effect. This session will last at least three hours, until someone releases the two with pliers - a charitable service English surrealist David Gascoyne performed at the exhibition.
Sell tickets made of sandpaper
Issue tickets for the world premiere that are the size and weight of doormats, and made of an abrasive material, thus making them disagreeable to handle - scouring pads, for instance. This is in homage to the first edition of writer and film-maker Guy Débord's 1959 book Memoires, which was bound in sandpaper so that it would damage all other books placed next to it.
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