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Interviews with female directors / Index of Interviews
Here you will find all of our interviews with film directors, actors, cinematographers, and more.
Jennifer Phang’s Advantageous is a feminist science fiction film for lovers of French New Wave cinema and intimate family dramas. I talked to Phang about the inspiration for the film, the film’s world-building, and feminism in science fiction.
[Read more…] about Advantageous director Jennifer Phang talks bringing feminist sci-fi to the screen
Québécois filmmaker Maxime Giroux discusses his TIFF-winner Felix and Meira, telling authentic stories about Hasidic Jews, and why he wanted to make the film.
In our 2019 Canadian Cinema Yearbook, we talked to Giroux about his more recent film The Great Darkened Days. The ebook is available to purchase here.
When I heard there was a new romance about Hasidic Jews in Montreal premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, I was instantly intrigued. And then it won the award for Best Canadian Film. What I hadn’t expected was that it would be such a touching, sweet, and thoughtful story of the heroine’s journey to emancipation. The film follows Meira (Hadas Yaron), a married Hasidic woman in her early twenties, who seems to be suffering from depression. Her religion no longer brings her joy, and all the patriarchal rules make her feel confined and imprisoned. Her devout husband, Shulem (Luzer Twersky), is commanding but not affectionate. He also takes little part in the care of their infant; she’s surreptitiously taking birth control pills so that she won’t be forced to have the gaggle of kids that’s expected.
When Meira encounters Félix (Martin Debreuil), a French Québécois man in her neighborhood who is grieving the loss of his father, an unexpected connection forms. He treats her like an equal with valid ideas and agency, and he offers her tenderness and understanding she’s never experienced. It’s enough to make her consider seriously leaving her community, something that’s clearly been on her mind for a while but that she hadn’t been able to act on.
Writer-director Maxime Giroux explores the ways in which all of the characters feel trapped in roles forced on them and the way they’re able to help each other find freedom and happiness. We also see the ways in which the mores and lifestyle of the French Québécois community, which is right in Meira’s neighbourhood, has started to seep into her consciousness and her view of the world. Félix and Meira is a classically shot film with long takes and many closeups, emphasizing the connection or disconnect between characters. The two-shots of Félix and Meira during their courtship reveal a real sweetness between them. I sat down with Giroux to talk about creating a realistic depiction of the Hasidic Jew community in Montreal, the predicaments of the characters, and the film’s wonderful musical choices.
Seventh Row (7R): Félix and Meira feels to me very much like a very Montreal film, like in some ways it couldn’t be set somewhere else.
Maxime Giroux (MG): For me, it is totally a Montreal film. When I present it New York or a place where there are some Hasidic people, they think that it’s universal. A lot of people think it’s a film that can be placed in a lot of different religions or a lot of different places in the world. But for me, it’s totally local. It’s my neighbourhood. It’s in French and English and Yiddish. Even in Israel, most people don’t speak Yiddish. They speak Hebrew. So you cannot be more Montreal than that: it’s cold; it’s winter-time; it’s grey; it’s depressing.
7R: I guess a lot of the main actors in Felix and Meira are not from Montreal.
MG: Hadas [Yaron who plays Meira] is from Israel and Luzer Twersky [who plays Shulem] is from Brooklyn. But the rest of the ex-Hasidic community who act in the film — there are five in total, two from New York and three from Montreal. Like, the cousin, she’s from Montreal. Those people really helped me to do this film. Without them, it would have been impossible to do this film.
I had read things in books so I knew that in the morning they had to wash their hands and pray. I knew that they had to put one foot in front of the other one and one shoe before the other one. But I never saw it in my life. I’m not there in the morning with them. So when Luzer Twersky did it, the first scene where we shot that, he was just doing what he had done for 22 years. It was pretty easy for him and maybe pretty painful also. But for me, it was the key for making that movie. It would be impossible to take normal actors for that.
7R: What language was the script in? Were there any challenges with working in multiple languages and with a cast that wasn’t fluent in all of them?
MG: First, we wrote the script in French. Then, it was translated into English, and then it was translated into Yiddish by Luzer. The second challenge was on the set because I had to speak in English with my actors most of the time. But at the same time, I discovered it’s way easier to do a film in English than in French.
English is the universal language of cinema, music, and stuff like that. You can say stuff in English that you cannot say in French, because it sounds too cheesy. For example, if I do a translation of Radiohead’s lyrics in French, it’s ridiculous. We cannot sing like that. Even Leonard Cohen, if you translate that into French, like literally, it doesn’t work. In English, it was super easy to work with the actors. It was way easier to work in English or Yiddish than in French. It’s a big reason why everywhere in the world does music in English. It’s way easier than doing music in Swedish or French.
7R: How did you decide on the costumes for Felix and Meira? Especially for Meira, I thought that you really got a sense of her personal style, even though she’s really confined in what she can actually wear. She’s very chic.
MG: Men are all the same: they all wear the same thing. But women, it’s something different, especially when they are in the house. I was surprised to see that, but there are some trends. Every year, there’s a new collection. Some women in some communities are more trendy than the others. And their clothing is super expensive. So we went to Brooklyn, and we went to some stores where they sold those kind of things. I was with Patricia, the costume designer, and together we chose the wardrobe for Meira. We had two challenges. First, trying to have some things that are accurate, that is true. But also, we had a small budget. The film was made with half a million dollars, which is nothing. We had so many people who needed to have costumes. We went with the 2013 collection.
But it’s true that, in a way, Meira is really, in French, we’d say “coquette.” She’s really cute with her clothing. And it’s something that I didn’t feel when I was not looking at them, when I was living in the neighbourhood. But now that I am interested in them, I can see that women are trying more and more to have their own personality. I guess that they are influenced by the women in the neighbourhood. They want to be cute. Those women are 18, 19, 22 years old, and I feel that more and more they look at other women. They talk to other women, non-Hasidic women. Even in the last two years, some women look at me for a few seconds, which is totally new, because ten years ago, it was impossible. So I think it’s changing also in their community.
7R: There’s no technology that marks the era. You don’t see any cell phones. You don’t see any computers. Even when they’re listening to music, they’re listening to records. So it took me a while to figure out that it was actually present day.
MG: Yes, it is in 2014. The reason that I did it like this is that Meira and her community, they really live like they were living in 1950 or 1960. They don’t watch our TV shows. They’re not supposed to go on the internet except if they are going for business. But more and more, they are going on the internet. Felix, the Québecois, he’s also a bit old school. He doesn’t accept the new way of life, which is about more competition, more money, more always. And that’s why he doesn’t feel well in his society. He is a loner. Some people can say he’s a loser. But why is he a loser? Because he doesn’t want to play that game, our game of the capitalist consumer and competition. For me, he’s an old school guy.
I still know some people who don’t really use cell phones and don’t have their Apple computer at the cafe. I still know some people like that. Especially these guys that are 40 years old. It’s true that people of 25-years old, there are no people like that anymore. But in my generation, I’m 38 now, I still know some people like that. So that’s the reason why we think it’s maybe not 2015. But at the same time, we didn’t change anything in the apartment for that. The apartment we rent for Felix, it was like this. And same thing for the father. So some people really live in those houses.
7R: There are these two songs in Felix and Meira. There’s the Wendy Rene song that plays multiple times in the movie and the Leonard Cohen song towards the end. They both have a pretty important and prominent role in the film. How did you choose those songs?
MG: For Wendy Rene, this song was in the first draft of the script. It was there from the beginning. As soon as I knew that I will do this film, and Alex Laferrière, the co-writer, knew that she will listen to “Goy music,” non-Jewish music, I decided she will go for soul music, and music from African-American black women from those eras. Those women were probably sons and daughters of slaves, and they decided to sing and even take a guitar, and play a guitar like if they were men. When I heard this song, I felt that it was what Meira felt inside of her, and I wanted to be able to express that at the end of the movie.
Same thing when she goes dancing in the Latino bar in New York. The woman is dancing and she is really free in the way that she dances. For me, it was another time it’s a woman who is just free, who just does what she wants and feels comfortable. It’s a kind of model for Meira.
Leonard Cohen came to me when we were in the editing room. I just felt that moment needed some music to give it a little bit more emotion. I liked the fact that it’s the Jewish Montrealer singer. And the story of this song, you know, that’s talking about this love triangle. This song was just perfect for that moment of the film.
7R: In the scene towards the end of Felix and Meira, when Shulem goes to see Felix, it was the first time I felt like I really got some window into how Shulem was feeling. We spend a lot of the film thinking about how Meira feels very trapped and alone. It’s kind of a sweet scene, but it’s also patriarchal. When you were writing that scene, what were you thinking about, as far as the purpose of that scene and putting it together?
MG: That scene was the most difficult one to write. It’s strange, because I think it’s the heart of the film, even if Meira is not there. Everything is in that scene. We understand that, in a way, Shulem is not as bad as we thought. I think he understands that his wife cannot live in that religion, that she cannot have those boundaries. We understand that he needs those boundaries. The story of Felix and his father is similar to that of Meira and Shulem. So when Shulem is reading the letter for Felix, he’s also reading the letter for him, you know, which is a kind of irony.
When Shulem says, “Please take care of my wife,” when we were writing that, we were like, “Oh my god, this is big. This is pretty much impossible.” But when we presented the film at the New York Jewish Film Festival a few months ago, there were a lot of ex-Hasidic members in the room. One woman came to me, and said “I’m an ex-Hasidic woman. I was cheating on my husband. At one point, I left my husband, and he went to the guy, and he said the exact same thing to him.” So I was like, “Oh my god.”
At the same time, it’s true that it’s really patriarchal. He goes to see Felix to tell [him to take care of Meira]. I was really afraid of this scene. And at one point, there was an edit without the scene. You’re always trying to cut scenes, because you think it’s too long. But now I understand that it’s the scene that is the heart of the film.
7R: To what degree do you think Shulem is happy in his religion at the end of Felix and Meira?
MG: That’s a good question. That’s the first time someone asked me this question about Shulem. They always ask me the question about Meira. But is he happy with his religion? I don’t think so. He was born into that religion. Like me, I was born French Québecois, which means, yeah, I’m happy to be a French Québecois, and I live in French. But at the same time, I would prefer to be an English person. It would be way more easier for me. But what can I do? I have to live with that all my life.
It’s the same thing for him. You know, some French Québecois, they decide to leave: they go to Toronto, New York, anywhere. Me, I decided to stay in Montreal. I will always stay in Montreal even though I would prefer to go somewhere else sometimes. But I’m afraid. I think he’s a little afraid of going somewhere else where he doesn’t have such boundaries and he has no limits, even if we do have limits in our society. He’s afraid of that. He needs those boundaries. It’s the opposite for Meira. She doesn’t want those [boundaries or limits]. She doesn’t need them. I don’t think Shulem is really happy, but I think he needs it.
7R: Is that part of what interested you in making Felix and Meira, looking at how women are treated in religion?
MG: For sure. For me, the story of Meira and her emancipation is the story of my mother. My mother is from Quebec in the 1960s, and it was really Catholic hardcore. It was really different from now. At one point, this generation became feminist, and they decided to put away the church. It’s the story of my mother. It’s the story of every woman in every country in every era, and it’s still going to be the story of the woman in 10 years. Just look at what’s happening right now with religion and women. It’s a disaster, and we’re there doing nothing. We’re just like “Yeah, freedom of religion.” Yeah, it’s true, they have the right to believe in any religion, but let’s try to be equal, women and men.
Director Kornél Mundruczó and animal trainer Teresa Miller on White God, aesthetic approach, street dogs, and the importance of “Hungarian Rhapsody.” Read another animal trainer interview in our ebook on Kelly Reichardt.
When Hungarian writer-director Kornél Mundruczó decided he wanted to make a film about and starring street dogs, without CGI, it seemed unthinkable. At the Sundance Film Festival in January, he recalled, “Everybody thought it’s impossible, [saying], ‘Kornél, forget about this movie’.” But after meeting American Animal Trainer Teresa Miller, this daunting task suddenly seemed within grasp. Their collaboration eventually led to the remarkable film White God, which premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, winning its top prize, as well as the lesser known Palme Dog award, for the best dog in a film at the festival. It also screened in the Spotlight section at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
White God tells the story of a mixed breed street dog, Hagen (Body), and his teenage owner Lili (Zsófia Psotta), who get separated when Lili’s divorced mother takes a trip, forcing her to temporarily live with her father (Sándor Zsótér) who doesn’t want a dog in his house. The Budapest they live in is unfriendly towards dogs. When Lili’s father forces her to abandon Hagen, he gets tossed between a series of crueler and crueler human oppressors, until he finally snaps, becomes vicious towards humans, and leads his fellow oppressed dogs in an uprising against the humans. Meanwhile, Lili, a trumpet player, feels lost and alone, left to navigate a world she doesn’t fit into without her one friend and companion, Hagen. It’s a heartbreaking and thrilling story, of friendship and injustice, told with formal mastery and old-fashioned romanticism.
Part of what made the film possible is that the way Teresa Miller trains dogs is unconventional. She doesn’t bark orders or give commands. In fact, her approach is the polar opposite of the owner-dog relationship we see derided in the movie when Lili and Hagen sit on a hill in a city park together, watching an owner yell at his dog to repeatedly sit and lie down, without reprieve; Lili promises to never torture Hagen like that. Miller talks to the dogs gently and in full sentences, offering suggestions, like “Why don’t you walk over there?” This gives the dogs the chance to behave and react like dogs, looking from side to side, and in effect, give a realistic performance. It’s Miller’s patience and diligence that allows the film’s lead, played by the mixed breed street dog Body, to give a performance that feels so realistic and is so compelling to watch. Miller allows him to behave like a dog and react to the situation.
Teresa Miller spent five months training the dogs — the film features at least a hundred of them — in the U.S. prior to shooting, while they were still in the process of finding the dog that would play the film’s lead, Hagen. They needed a dog that was distinct enough that he would stand out in a large group of dogs — there are many scenes featuring a large assembly of dogs — and Kornél Mundruczó wanted to use real street dogs, further complicating the matter. They looked at many dogs, until they found one that they felt was both right for the part and distinct enough to carry the film. For Miller, training Body, the dog that played Hagen, was especially challenging, as she had never trained a dog that would have to change on a dime in a film, from a sweet and loving dog to a vicious, villainous dog; usually it’s just one or the other.
Although the film is about a dog uprising, Kornél Mundruczó is quick to point out that he uses the dogs as “a metaphor for our society, [for] how our majority handles minorities. The dogs, especially street dogs, symbolize something about our contemporary world, mirroring us.” Both Mundruczó and Miller are fascinated by the similarities between the empathic qualities of dogs and humans and the strong bond between dogs and their human owners.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘The street dogs, symbolize something about our contemporary world, mirroring us.’ – Mundruczó” quote=”The dogs, especially street dogs, symbolize something about our contemporary world, mirroring us.”]
“Dogs are the only ones that technically really want to please man,” Teresa Miller explained. “All other animals are animals doing animal things, but [dogs] have a genuine desire to want to be loved. They need it. Even cats don’t need it. That’s what’s so heartbreaking about Lili being torn away from [Hagen]. She’s from a broken family. She doesn’t fit in with the younger kids. She doesn’t fit in with the older kids. She doesn’t have any friends. Everything is just against this kid, and all she has is the love of her dog, who is everything to her, and she loses that. It’s just heartbreaking to her. I’ve heard more people just compliment the scene in the car where she’s crying, and the dog is trying to get to her through the window, and she can’t open the door. She can’t get to him. I get chills now [thinking about it]. It was just gripping. You just felt so bad for both of them. That’s all they knew; they just knew each other.”
“In the new Godard film, Goodbye to Language, ” Kornél Mundruczó added, “There’s a sentence, ‘The humans do not love themselves as much as the dogs love humans,’ and it’s so meaningful and so true. They really trust us, and we don’t do anything for them.”
Mundruczó also noted that dogs that come from good, well-educated families, are very similar to five-year-old children: “They have their own rights, and they even don’t know they are dogs. They are just part of the family — the Harry Potter of the family.” It’s for this reason that Mundruczó felt the height of the camera was the most important directorial choice: he wanted to capture the child-like innocence of the dog’s perspective by shooting from the height of the dogs in the scenes involving Hagen.
In North America, colonies of street dogs, like the one that Hagen becomes a part of in the film once he’s left to fend for himself, aren’t commonplace. But in poorer, developing countries — like Mexico and some in Eastern Europe — they’re a reality. To prepare for the film, Mundruczó and Miller thoroughly researched the lives of street dogs around the world. In a documentary about Mexican street dogs, they learned that the dogs had trained themselves to obey traffic lights — something that was incorporated into the film. In Moscow, the dogs had learned how to use the metro. Miller noted, “These dogs learn to travel. They’ll get on the tram. And you’ll see people just reading. They’re used to it. These street dogs just run loose. We don’t have that a lot here.” Learning the skills for living in a city then became part of the narrative of Hagen’s survival story once he’s abandoned in White God.
“I would like to create something that’s visually unique that you’ve never watched before. This is very much the spirit of the cinema,” mused Mundruczó. “If you watch a Kurosawa movie, a Kubrick movie, then there are unique images.” One of the challenges he faced was finding a way to make each of the scenes where the dogs gathered together in a large group memorable. In the scene where the dogs flee the pound where they’ve been captured and imprisoned, the production design team added water on the ground at the entrance, creating a large puddle, in order to create a new image: it’s an absolutely visually dazzling scene. As they make their escape, the dogs kick up the water in the puddle, making it all the more cathartic.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘I would like to create something that’s visually unique that you’ve never watched before.'” quote=”I would like to create something that’s visually unique that you’ve never watched before.”]
But perhaps the most iconic image of the film is its first image, of Lili riding her bike in an abandoned city, only to be suddenly followed by a large pack of dogs, chasing after her at full speed. The film actually starts in the middle of the story and then we back-track to the beginning. “One of the first, main images in my head was the opening image,” said Mundruczó, “I had this [idea of] classicism, this Viennese classicism, from the monarchy time of Budapest, [the] Habsburg Monarchy time. And the dogs are together, how they come together — it’s a really surrealistic image somehow. When you watch those buildings, which is the ratios, which is the classical minded: all the buildings have a soul, all dogs have a soul. This is a huge contrast, and a huge fight, and a huge contradiction in between. That was one of my one main images that I really wanted to create. This is also why I put it iconically at the beginning of the movie.”
Using Liszt’s famous “Hungarian Rhapsody” to bookend the film — Lili plays it with her orchestra at the beginning, and then plays the melody solo on her trumpet, at the end — was also a crucial part of creating the romanticism of the film and helping to develop its political message. The themes from the piece also crop up in the film’s score by Asher Goldschmidt.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘All the buildings have a soul. All dogs have a soul.’ – Kornél Mundruczó” quote=”All the buildings have a soul. All dogs have a soul.”]
“The soul of Liszt,” said Mundruczó, “is really, he’s creating this piece of music, with lots of solidarity. He was against the Habsburg idea. He identified himself as Hungarian, but he was not. He was German. But he was living in Budapest. He wanted to be a rebel, as Hungarians are against the system. He’s writing this music because of that. At the same time, slowly, he became part of the Hungarian nationalism — this piece of music, which is totally not about that.”
“That’s why I use it,” he continued. “Because how they play it, at the beginning [of the film], especially with this authoritarian conductor, it’s quite empty. It means nothing. But if you combine it with the running of the dogs [in rebellion], then you feel that’s what this music is really about. At the end, when she’s [Lili] trumpeting out the main melody of it [to the dogs, to calm them in solidarity], you understand what this piece is really about.”
“We have an original score composed by Asher Goldschmidt, who is an Israeli and Hungarian guy — very young, like mid-30s and a newcomer. This was his first feature. He did really well. I think he’s a really talented composer. His music is really part of this world inside the movie. He used lots of the harmony from Liszt, [trying to not stray] too far [from] the main idea. Liszt, if you play it well, is really romantic. It can be easily sentimental, but the main intention was romanticism. It’s the same like with Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff and those composers: if you play it in a soft, too sugary way, then it’s sentimentalism. But if you have a real romantic attitude, then it can be very strong. This movie is also a romantic movie, in the ancient meaning of the word, like Byron.”
Like Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody,” when done right, White God is moving, heart-breaking, and rousing, but never sentimental. Although the story of the dog’s rebellion is an allegorical one, the heart of the film lies in the deep bond between Lili and Hagen, a bond of love and understanding that is stronger than any hatred or fury. And that is romantic but never drippy. It’s also a bond that every dog owner will recognize immediately.
Directors Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter discuss their documentary about today’s Moscow street dogs and those of the past that were sent into space.
Roads to nowhere: Kelly Reichardt’s broken American dreams is an ebook that will take you on a journey through Reichardt’s filmography.
It’s also the only place you can find interviews with her and all her collaborators, which together reveal Reichardt’s filmmaking process like never before. This includes an interview with animal trainer Lauren Henry on how you get animals to act.
In this interview, Yann Demange discusses his first feature, ’71, shooting on digital and 16 mm, working with the super talented Jack O’Connell, and more. This interview with Yann Demange was one of the first conducted on ’71.
Read our review of the film ’71 here.
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After a year-long tour on the festival circuit following its premiere at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival to rave reviews, the political thriller ’71, by British director Yann Demange, is finally opening in cinemas. Set in 1971, at the height of The Troubles, the film follows neophyte British soldier Gary Hook (Jack O’Connell in another star-making turn) on one fateful night in Belfast, when he finds himself injured and separated from his unit, deep in IRA territory. He spends the night struggling to survive, desperately trying to differentiate between friend and foe: the lines are constantly being blurred.
It’s a tense and thrilling film about an under-equipped soldier, thrust into a war he doesn’t fully understand, by a well-meaning commanding officer who doesn’t fully grasp the situation: mistakes get made, people get crossed, and as Gary starts to see the humanity in the other side and the cruelty in his own, he starts to lose the conviction to fight this fight.
Although this is Demange’s first feature, he’s already had a long and fruitful career in British television. Since the film is opening on the heels of Unbroken and Starred Up, it may seem like yet another film in which Jack O’Connell gets beaten up (can’t he just wear jeans and tell jokes, like Tom Hiddleston wants to?), but O’Connell was actually cast in ’71 first, which was shot just two weeks after Starred Up in spring 2013: they actually had to shoot the film backwards since dark hours were in increasingly short supply.
During the Sundance Film Festival, I sat down with Demange for an interview to discuss shooting digitally and on 16mm, creating the film’s tone and pace, collaborating with the writer and director of photography, and O’Connell’s remarkable performance.
Seventh Row (7R): Although the film ’71 is very much about The Troubles and steeped in the politics of that time, there are no title cards to explain the history or background. You’re thrown right in.
Yann Demange: I made a conscious decision not to try to explain to everybody, so you experience it with him [Gary], really. There isn’t that kind of political overview. Even in the U.K., nobody really knows the history, because they don’t teach it in schools. I knew, because I grew up with Thatcher talking on the news. But my niece and nephew — she’s 23, he’s 21— have just gone through the London schooling system: they don’t have a clue.
They still don’t teach it: 80% of the people we’re going for, who are going to the cinema, would know nothing about The Troubles. Do you take time to explain an overview and take everyone to school? And then start the story? I decided not to in the end. It’s actually a virtue, because it makes you more committed to Jack’s experience.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘When I’m in the riot, I sort of smash you across the face. It’s frantic.’ – Yann Demange” quote=”When I’m in the riot, I sort of smash you across the face. It’s frantic.”]
7R: You chose to shoot parts of ’71 handheld and very shaky, which I so often hate, but I loved it here. Can you talk a bit more about that decision?
Yann Demange: It’s because it’s not all handheld. I think people think of it as a handheld film because of the riot, but actually, the whole front of the film, I’m on the sticks or Steadcam: quite still, quite steady. I mix up all the styles. When I’m in the riot, I sort of smash you across the face. Everyone remembers the riot, the chase. It’s frantic.
I mix a lot of styles. When the film goes nocturnal, as the sun goes down, I wanted to transcend realism a bit. I tried to make the lighting get a little mythic. It takes a little bit more [of an] impressionistic quality, at times. I actually see it as quite a lot of SteadiCam work, a lot of dolly work, a lot of tracking, still shots. But we mix it up. There are definitely lots of handheld moments, too.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘When the film goes nocturnal, I wanted to transcend realism. It gets an impressionistic quality.'” quote=”When the film goes nocturnal, I wanted to transcend realism. It gets an impressionistic quality.”]
It’s a film where somebody’s constantly moving. He’s chased. Even when it slows down, when it’s on the estate, it’s cat and mouse. It’s still movement. There’s quite a lot of Steadicam. I don’t like it when the camera becomes too distracting.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘We talked about why and how the camera moves, knowing the camera would almost constantly move.'” quote=”We talked about why and how the camera moves, knowing the camera would almost constantly move.”]
Style and content have to go hand in hand. Me, the cameraman, and the DoP, we’ve been working together 10 years now. We talked a lot about why and how the camera moves, knowing that the camera would almost constantly move. The camera behaves differently with the MRF, for the soldier guys that are chasing him, and we use certain lenses. We mix it up a bit.
7R: What was the thought process behind changing the look of the film ’71 depending on where we are in the film?
Yann Demange: Every storyline had its tone. I didn’t want to do something that was overstated, like different colours, but it has actually its own little language, its own set of rules. There a logic to how we’re shooting each character’s storyline.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘There a logic to how we’re shooting each character’s storyline.’ – Yann Demange” quote=”There a logic to how we’re shooting each character’s storyline.”]
We talked a lot about how the colour palette would change, as the story progressed, and how the camera movements would change, and almost counterintuitively get slower and slower in the film.
After you have such a visceral, fast chase, the convention is often, in what could be perceived as an action film, for the set pieces and the action to get bigger and stronger at the end. But we wanted to counter-intuitively do it the other way.
I get action fatigue when films do it like that. I like sparseness. Anything can become monotonous if it lasts too long so attempting to try and keep it fast and fast and frantic and loud, I think would have been a fallacy, it would have become monotonous.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘To keep the tension, we slow it right down, and we change the colours subtly.’ – Yann Demange” quote=”To keep the tension, we slow it right down, and we change the colours subtly.”]
To keep the tension, we slow it right down, and we change the colours subtly. We change the whole tempo and mood of the film so it almost becomes a different genre. That was the logic and the sort of things we talked about.
We created a tone book, a tone document, with music references, film clips, photographs, colour palette references, paintings. All the heads of departments were invited to contribute to the tone book, so we all feel invested in creating the world together. It’s like a blueprint. We all know that we’re trying to make the same film.
7R: The light at night gets impressionistic. How did you create that?
Yann Demange: We mixed formats. We shot 16 mm film for the day scenes, because the textures, the skin tones, and the grain felt right for the period. We liked the way it rendered the uniforms. During the day, it’s very much reds and greens: red bricks, green uniforms. We tried lots of different formats. We did screen tests with full costumes on locations. And 16mm just felt like the right format. It’s a lovely camera to handhold. It felt right for the riot. Almost all the news footage of the time was shot in 16mm. It felt like the format of the time, of the era, but they shot in black and white.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘We shot 16mm for the day scenes. The textures, skin tones, and grain felt right for the period.'” quote=”We shot 16 mm film for the day scenes, because the textures, the skin tones, and the grain felt right for the period.”]
At night, we didn’t want to use any fill lighting. We just wanted to use a mercury light. We wanted to capture the sense of a city that’s pitch black and just have the occasional mercury, sodium lightbulbs, streetlights, just sparse street lighting. We wanted to capture that and not create a sort of moonlight effect that some films do. That meant that film — the stocks aren’t fast enough. We decided to go with the Alexa at night, shoot digital at night, so it could really work in low light conditions.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘The 16mm, in the day. gave us better continuity of light…when the weather keeps changing.'” quote=”The 16mm, in the day. gave us better continuity of light…when the weather keeps changing.”]
The 16mm, in the day. gave us better continuity of light. When we were shooting the riot scene, for instance, over three or four different days, and the sun kept coming in and out, 16mm is much kinder with the highlights. Creating a kind of continuity over day scenes. when the weather keeps changing, and more importantly, I preferred how it was on skin tones.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘At night, we used period lightbulbs, the sodium and mercury lightbulbs they had at the time.'” quote=”At night, we used period lightbulbs, the sodium and mercury lightbulbs that they had at the time. “]
At night, we were using period lightbulbs, the sodium and mercury lightbulbs that they had at the time. We had a few period light fittings. We’d put up our own street lights with our own bulbs. They just looked like practical lights, but then we wouldn’t add any fill. Occasionally, we’d have to add little light so you can see the star’s face, but very minimal.
7R: Jack O’Connell gives an amazing, often silent, performance in the film.
Yann Demange: Jack was the only person that could do this role, I felt. He’s just got this old school masculinity. He’s like an old soul. There’s something soulful about him, and you know he’s felt pain. He’s in that perfect period of his life, on the cusp of manhood. He understands this character. He grew up wanting to be a soldier or a football player. He’s not affected or pretending. He understands this kid.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Yann Demange on Jack O’Connell: ‘There’s something soulful about him. You know he’s felt pain.'” quote=”Yann Demange on Jack O’Connell: ‘There’s something soulful about him. You know he’s felt pain.'”]
He has this wonderful ability to communicate thoughts, to give you a sense of what he’s thinking and feeling without having to rely on dialogue. That’s very rare for someone his age. He can really hold a silent moment and give you the space to project onto him. It’s very sophisticated, that performance, and brave. He’s not vain. He’s not afraid to show his vulnerability and go there. He’s quite committed. I think he’s a star. I hope he has a big future ahead of him.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Jack O’Connell ‘can really hold a silent moment and give you the space to project onto him.'” quote=”Jack O’Connell can really hold a silent moment and give you the space to project onto him.”]
7R: How did you collaborate with the writer and your director of photography (DoP), especially when it came to choreographing the cat-and-mouse chase at the end of the film?
Yann Demange: A script isn’t a film. It’s not a blueprint that you go off and cover. A film is an ever-evolving thing. And the writer, Greg [Gregory Burke], is very collaborative. Even when I was shooting, he would be rewriting scenes, because I might have changed something when I shot a scene, and it might have a knock on effect. The whole film was forever evolving, so re-writing.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘We went on location — the DoP, the writer, and me — and choreographed where everybody would be.'” quote=”We went on location — the DoP, the writer, and me — and choreographed where everybody would be.”]
When it came to the cat-and-mouse sequence on the estate, on the housing block, we went on location together, the DoP, the writer, and myself, and choreographed where everybody would be. We wanted to have a geographical sense, for people to have a sense of reality, of what was going on, for it to play out, but also to create tension. But we had to play it out, literally act it out. How he’d [Gary] end up starting, where he would be coming from, where he’d be going down the stairs. It was all too complicated to be doing in our bedrooms, or in our office around our table. We had to go walk the location, and that would inform the writing.
Read more: In addition to our interview with Yann Demange, read our review of the film: In Yann Demange’s ’71, a British soldier is lost in IRA territory >>
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British writer-director John Boorman has been making films since the 1960s, and has said that Queen and Country — a sequel to his autobiographical World War II-era story of childhood, Hope and Glory (1987) — which opened on Friday, will be his last. Set nine years after Hope and Glory in 1952, our hero Bill (Callum Turner) is now a man of 18, still living in the country with his family after his London home was destroyed in the Blitz, waiting to be called up for military duty in the Korean war.
A cinephile, rebel, and hopeless romantic, Bill is ill-suited to army life, where he finds himself assigned to teach typing rather than sent into battle, and to contend with a martinet superior officer who served in the second world war. He bonds with his best friend Percy (Caleb Landry Jones) over a love of “Casablanca,” spends his days off chasing an unattainable icy blonde (Tamsin Egerton), even though there’s a much more wonderful nurse waiting (Amy-Ffion Edwards) waiting for him to take notice. He starts by seeing the world in rose-colored glasses, but by the end of his army service, learns that there’s more to everyone than meets the eye, and is finally ready to get behind the camera himself.
Few directors have assembled as diverse a filmography as Boorman’s, which includes the the thriller Point Blank, the King Arthur tale Excalibur, and the cult classic Deliverance: the final image of Queen and Country pays homage to the last two. He’s been toying with the idea for a sequel to Hope and Glory since he made the film almost thirty years ago, but it was only recently that the timing and funding all fell into place. Boorman was honoured at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose on Thursday, and in town on Friday for a Q&A on opening night. I sat down with Boorman to talk about Queen and Country. Here are eight pieces of advice about directing that Boorman has amassed over the course of his long and fruitful career.
1. Make sure actors understand their characters and each scene before the shoot
I always rehearse before shooting starts, but I don’t block out the scenes. My rehearsal is all about defining the characters, and then also communicating to the actor and discussing with them what the scene is about and what the aim is of the scene. Where do we want to get to, in terms of the narrative of the story? From the beginning of the scene to the end, what have we gained? Where has that left us?
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘I always rehearse before shooting starts, but I don’t block out the scenes.’ – John Boorman” quote=”I always rehearse before shooting starts, but I don’t block out the scenes.”]
2. Manage the pacing of each scene during the shoot, taking into account how the preceding and following scene will flow
I always time each scene, and then I have the continuity or script coordinator do the same, and we go over the timings. And as soon as we finish a scene, I say how long was it? And if it was over-length, I shoot another take faster.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘I always time each scene. If it was over-length, I shoot another take faster.’ – John Boorman” quote=”I always time each scene. If it was over-length, I shoot another take faster.”]
Sometimes, I say to the actors, “I need another take. I need it a lot quicker.” And they say, “Well, but it felt right like that.” I say, “Yes, I know, but the scene preceding it, and the scene following are both very fast-moving scenes that will make this scene feel slow. We’ve got to increase the pace to match the flow of the whole film.” That’s something that you have to be very careful about.
3. “Kill your darlings” and be brutal with paring down your script before the shoot
Having written a scene, I play it in my head with a stopwatch, and then that’s the length. When I’ve timed all the scenes, I add everything up and see what it comes to. If it comes out at two-and-a-half-hours, well, I have to cut something. I edit as I go along, and one week after I’ve finished shooting, I’ve cut the film together. I mean, made a cut. Then, there’s a lot more work fine-tuning and so forth.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘I edit as I go along, and one week after I’ve finished shooting, I’ve cut the film together.'” quote=”I edit as I go along, and one week after I’ve finished shooting, I’ve cut the film together.”]
I always tell students this: if your first cut comes out at three hours, and you’ve got to cut it down to two, it means that a third of the time you were shooting, you wasted, and if you’d timed it better, you could have spent that time on the scenes that were going to remain.
Time is always at a premium when you’re shooting a film. The most expensive part is how many days you shoot. If you eliminate all those scenes that are not going to be in the film right at the beginning, then you’re half ay there. It’s a funny thing how an awful lot of directors won’t face up to it, that the script is too long. It’s so much easier to cut a script than to cut a film once you’ve shot it.
[clickToTweet tweet=”It’s so much easier to cut a script than to cut a film once you’ve shot it.” quote=”It’s so much easier to cut a script than to cut a film once you’ve shot it.”]
4. Be economical with what you’re shooting when on set
There’s a lot of good films made where directors shoot each scene from many angles in many sizes, and build the scene in the cutting room from having multiple angles. I prefer to just shoot what I’m going to use.
If you do too many takes, too many angles, the actor is saying, “Well, this one won’t be in the film.” And I always say, “Everything we shoot is going to be in the film. So you better be ready and you better be concentrating.”
[clickToTweet tweet=”If you do too many takes, too many angles, the actor is saying, ‘this one won’t be in the film.'” quote=”If you do too many takes, too many angles, the actor is saying, ‘this one won’t be in the film.'”]
Because a film is so stop-start, it’s very hard for actors to switch it on and switch it off again and be ready, and holding your concentration is very, very difficult. I try to make it a bit easier for them by doing it quickly and not wasting time.
5. Come to set prepared. What actors really want is a director who knows what he wants.
If you’ve planned your shots for a sequence — you’re confident, you know how to do it — [then] if something comes up on the set, if an idea comes up, you can absorb it. Because if it doesn’t work, you can always go back to your plan.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘What is very difficult for actors is if a director says, ‘Let’s play around with this.”” quote=”What is very difficult for actors is if a director says, ‘Let’s play around with this.'”]
What is very difficult for actors is if a director comes on and says, “Let’s play around with this. Let’s see what we can do.” They get confused. Although actors will tell you that they like to have the opportunity of improvising, what they really like is if you put a chalk mark down and say “Stand there. Hit your mark. And then move to over there. Hit your mark over there.”
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘What actors really like is if you put a chalk mark down and say, ‘Stand there. Hit your mark.’ ‘” quote=”What actors really like is if you put a chalk mark down and say, ‘Stand there. Hit your mark.'”]
6. Use the time you’ve saved from only shooting what you need to focus on lighting.
When a director says, for instance, “Oh, I did 70 setups in a day,” I say, “Oh you were stealing the time from the actors and the cameraman.” It means that each take was only done in 10 minutes. Depending on what the scene is, how complicated it is, placing the lights, fading them, bringing them up, is very complicated, and can take a lot of time. All you have to work with is light.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘When you’re looking for locations, you always want to be facing South so you get some backlight.'” quote=”When you’re looking for locations, you always want to be facing South so you get some backlight.”]
For me, it all starts with light. Looking for locations or selecting sets, it all starts with light. Where the light comes from, what shadows are casting, you build around that. When you’re looking for locations, you always want to be facing South so you get some backlight or half-backlight, whereas if you’re facing north the light is flat.
7. Use the editing room for fine-tuning not building up from scratch.
[The editing processes involves] fine-tuning, polishing, and then of course, you are laying up all the soundtracks. I also go through, with the actors, and post-sync a lot of the dialogue. Sometimes, you have to do it, because it’s bad quality. But also I give them the opportunity of looking and improving it, if they want to.
8. Make the beginning and ending of the film count.
[In Queen and Country,] I wanted a shot to show a little boy becoming the bigger boy, and also to show that he was still living by the river as he had after moving out of central London. When he finishes his army [time], and he comes back to the river again, that was also easy to come to that conclusion. It becomes a little symbolic — in the sense that you see the mother coming out, and she goes to wave to Mack [his mother’s former lover to whom she used to wave], and there’s nobody there, and on that shot, we hear Bill’s voice saying “everything was different now.”
In the previous scenes, he went back to see Sergeant Major Bradley [David Thewlis] to kind of apologize and discovers that his rigidity came out of this way of holding himself together, so we find him learning things and growing up a little bit. And then you see the girl in the water, and see her arm and hand above the water looking for help.
And that rather echoes the end of Deliverance, where his hand comes up out of the water, and the hand that brings the sword in Excalibur out of the lake. That’s always been a very significant symbol for me. Under the water [represents] the unconscious, and the hand that comes up is somehow focussing the dreams, the unconscious. Then, we see Bill filming [at the beginning, he was watching someone else filming a film while he was swimming in the lake], which is what he then did for the rest of his life [laughs] and then the camera stops, which was my way of indicating that this was my last film.
Queen and Country is now playing available on VOD.
Sally El Hosaini’s directorial debut, My Brother the Devil, is a touching and sensitive story of two Arab brothers in Hackney, London. During her sojourn in San Francisco as the San Francisco Film Society’s Artist-in-Residence, I sat down with El Hosaini to discuss her writing process, working with non-actors, her shoot, and her approach to the film’s aesthetic. Here are some of the highlights of our conversation.
[Read more…] about SFFS Artist-in-Residence Sally El Hosaini on writing and directing My Brother the Devil
