Director’s statement
My primary intention was to create a film that harkens back to the classic Hitchcock pictures of the 1940s and 50s. I wanted to focus on a series of events occurring within a limited space and especially on the unspoken interactions between the characters. I wanted dialogue to be present but not the main way that information is conveyed to the audience, aiming to leave that to the camera framing and movement, which was a factor I was very mindful of during the writing process. My hope was to provide the viewers with the maximum amount of tension throughout the piece, by using a technique described as ‘stretching the rubber band’ or ‘revealing a bomb under the table’, wherein you’re elongating a moment for as long as possible before it has to break and release all of that tension.
I requested that we scale down the production quite considerably from our previous endeavours, as I wanted the filmmaking process to feel more like the collaborative effort of a group of people who trust each other, rather than each department operating independently of one another. This naturally presented some challenges, such as the inability to move as quickly as we may have liked and the limiting of certain resources, but on the other hand it enabled a clarity of communication that I found very useful. Another side effect of the lack of resources was that it forced us to work the same way as we had during some of our earliest films, finding the simplest method to get the effect we were looking for and working within our limitations.
Visually, I was very inspired by the warm, crunchy cinematography that was a staple of such 70s films as All the President’s Men (1976) and Network (1976), with their perfectly imperfect lighting which seemed to belong so naturally the setting yet always hit the actors in just the right way so as to feel stylised. My interest with this ‘stylised naturalism’ continued with the early works of Paul Thomas Anderson and cinematographer Robert Elswit, most notably Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999), which used highly exaggerated camera moves to great effect. I sought to recreate these classic aesthetics by sticking primarily to steady dolly shots or tripod setups, with clearly staged blocking and developing angles to reveal new information to the audience in a manageable, concise way. In addition to this, we also relied on harsh light sources for our lighting to give us crisp shadows and a lot of contrast, which was a lighting style famously used by Conrad L. Hall in films such as Road to Perdition (2002) and American Beauty (1999).