(2019-2020)
Original Idea
As soon as I graduated film school, I knew I wanted to direct again pretty soon. To maintain and improve my skills, as well as for pure enjoyment. My film school shared its building with an acting school; during my two years of study there, I established good relationships with many of its students (in fact, I picked several of those in all my previous movies), especially the 2018 intake. I really wanted to work with that group and the feeling was mutual.
So we started to talk about it, and I presented them a few ideas.
Creative Process
I knew the scale of the shoot couldn’t be big – I was self-financing everything – so I decided to be as practical as possible. I quickly got in the directory of photography from State of Vertigo, with whom I had kept working regularly (as his assistant camera) after my first film.
I wanted to shoot before the end of the year for practical reasons and it became quickly clear that the acting students I wanted to work with would have a very busy schedule, given that they were about to graduate by then.
We quickly agreed to meet at least once a week for half an hour to keep the interest alive and progress the work step by step. For the first time, I chose on purpose to start working with actors without a completed script, using their regular feedbacks to set the direction of the story.
Once again, I worked with the same composer than all my previous films. Bouncing ideas with him is always one of my favourite parts of the filmmaking process. It’s like our brains are connected during that stage.
Outcome
Given the various constraints I had to deal with, I am a very happy with the result. Also, everyone had fun on the shoot and that was great to feel such amount of positive vibe again 🙂
