Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1543981
A P R I L 2 0 2 6 I 3 — continued on page 4 Paula reveals that she was with a guy who got run over and then she ran away. We were blocking actors to frame tension. Here, the mother is trying to reach Paula while her daughter is receding inside herself and falling away, literally out of the frame. It was all about trying to get the most with the least. So, we tried to play to our strengths. I think digital wound up the best thing because we had these two small cameras that let us get really close, so performances became incredibly realistic. We avoided too digitized a look by using smoke in the interiors. We had "A" and "B" cameras shooting continuously, not doing everything as a different setup. We were using mostly available light and shooting from different sides of the room. The actors were doing the whole sequence through so there wasn't a lot of start and stop. It pushed us much more into the editing room and into taking a documentary approach. 3 Paula is secretly pregnant so when her boyfriend comes home with wet laundry to hang it over the radiator, it's the last straw for her — they live in semi-squalor so she panics and they fight. The idea of making sequences out of still frames like this was born of necessity because we could shoot whole sequences quickly, without worrying about sound. But it was also a way to deepen an image and rip out the expository stuff we think we need. It was saying, "I'm just going to tell you what I want you to focus on." The frames are stuffed with information, just in a different way. I think it's both more alienating and yet brings you closer to the experience because it makes you think about it. It was really important that this feel like how Paula is experiencing life, which may be in a state of shock. 4 We're approaching the climax, when the car kills the guy she met. First, a car goes by and splashes her so they switch places. The lenses for these cameras really couldn't handle wider shots. We learned a lot by watching Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration, which we saw as our forerunner — you could see how the digital image fell apart in the wider shots. So, we didn't want to do too many of these but we needed to give a sense of Paula and the guy within something big and impending, so we couldn't stay in close-up the whole time. I think all we had was a light on their faces. We shot 12 hours a day. If you wanted to go half an hour over, you had to ask everybody on set if they could please let you go half an hour more. 5 First, we hear the gunshot; then the squeal and crash of the car. Then we go back to her and she says, "I sat up and he was nowhere." This is where you see how much you can do cinematically with very little. How do you shoot an accident when you have $2.50? All we had was two people walking down the street, yet you had to believe this immense accident happens where he is killed by a car being driven by a dead man. The imagination of the viewer partners with the visual information — police lights in a puddle, a shoe — her off- and on-screen dialogue, and the sounds of the gunshot and car. I used a lot of texture throughout the movie because she's really in a fugue state. I wanted the viewer to be disoriented the way that she is. 6