So my feeling about this was to take the relationship to operatic heights and to photograph it in the way that a filmmaker in the 1950s or very early 1960s might have. What’s interesting about it is that there’s a misunderstanding sometimes, when viewers find themselves frustrated by a film’s lack of subtlety. And yet, the 1950s was not a particularly subtle time for cinema. Because the film owes this debt to films that were shot on VistaVision, and both the protagonists and antagonists in that era, that’s the reason that it’s handled in the way it’s handled. If I ever make a film that more closely resembles a docudrama or a neorealist movie, I think I would handle things very differently.
And I mean, they’re also surrounded by Greek statues. [Laughs.] It is this mix of what is contemporary in the film, and what is classical, and this strange brew that makes the movies what they are. Because they’re both.
Can you give me a few words on why you picked that wonderful, wacky Italodisco song for the credits?
“One For You, One For Me,” it’s sort of a double entendre. There are three reasons. First reason is it’s an Italian pop song from 1979, and the movie ends in 1980, so that of course feels appropriate. “One for you, and one for them,” is this trope that we’re all very familiar with from Hollywood.
And the third thing is, if you pay very close attention to the lyrics, they’re very sexually coercive. They’re suggesting that whoever this man or woman is, who the character is singing to, he keeps encouraging them to have another drink and stick around a little while longer. So given the fact that this is a movie about not just Adrien‘s character, but an entire family that has been violated… I mean, one of the first lines in the movie is Erzsébet’s (Jones) voiceover, she says, “It’s neither better nor worse than you might have imagined, I kept myself mostly to myself.”
And then, of course, it’s heavily implied that Joe Alwyn’s character made some sort of a pass at Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) in the forest… So that cycle of abuse and trauma that the film is exploring, for all of those reasons, the song felt absolutely correct.
Finally, I wanted to touch on the Respeecher story that circulated recently. I’m not going to go over it again, I know that you’ve responded with a statement already — but I’m interested in how you felt when the story first got out there. It seems like there was this maelstrom of sensationalism, which is understandable with the present fear around AI, but it can’t have been a comfortable position for you to be in.
Well, I have to say… Because this was not news to me, for me it wasn’t a very big deal. [Laughs.] I was scouting in a micro-climate in Portugal for a job that I’m doing next week, so luckily I was off the grid for a few hours, while all of this was exploding.
And then you finally get to look at your phone, and you’re like, What the fuck?
You know, here’s the thing. I have so much respect for Respeecher. They are using this technology in a very ethical way. They’re a company based in Kiev, Ukraine. And this involved an extraordinary amount of manual labour. It created jobs; it didn’t eliminate a single job. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of disinformation out there about what this is, but it was very important to Adrien, Felicity and myself to honour the nation of Hungary by making all of their off-screen Hungarian dialogue absolutely perfect.
