The Journal.ie's Friday at the movies: Juanita Wilson's 'The Door'
Niamh Creely talks to filmmaker Juanita Wilson about her Oscar®-nominated short The Door, which explores the legacy of Chernobyl, and finds out just how helpful the nomination has been for her debut feature As If I’m Not There.
Niamh: The Door had a very impressive festival life. Was there a point when you realised it was really taking off?
Juanita: Yes. Well, The Door kind of started slowly. It got mentioned in Galway. And then it won an award in Cork. The first festival that it won Best Short in was Foyle, which was fantastic. And literally on the same day, it won Best Short in Bilbao. That was kind of, ‘wow, okay!’ In two parts of the world at the same time, with a programme of international shorts, and it’s won! Every award after that was an absolute bonus, but particularly the Academy nomination, the access to the audiences in the States and the feedback from there as well.
How do you go about qualifying as a short for the Oscars®?
Well there’s two ways you can go about it. One is to win one of the Academy-affiliated festivals. As it happens both Bilbao and Foyle are affiliated. Winning at either of those would have qualified The Door to be on the shortlist, which I think is about 70 films. And from there the Academy select the 10 and then they select the 5. But you can also screen it in LA for a couple of days in some cinema and I think that will qualify the film.
So the nomination really opened up the American audience for you?
Well, I’ve watched this film now kind of in different parts of the world with people who speak different languages. I watched it in Macedonia, in this tiny little town called Strumica. The people there couldn’t speak English or Russian – they couldn’t understand the dialogue or the subtitles. But the feedback afterwards was incredible. It also won Best Director at the Grand D’Or festival in Poland, which I would say is steeped in the European tradition of cinema. So then to be able to go to America, LA, the home of Hollywood, and get the feedback we got there was amazing. Perhaps it’s the lack of dialogue that makes it universal.
I’d assume it was also useful from a professional point of view.
Yes, because you have a track record. But then, to be honest, in this business you’re always starting off from your next project. No matter what you’ve done before, it’s the next one that people have to be interested in. But I would hope it means you are knocking on a half-open door.
So what was the hardest thing, then, about going from a short to a feature?
The Door was a very good preparation, because we were very ambitious. We shot on 35 mm, used professional actors, travelled out to those locations. To be honest, the team that I had on The Door were so fantastic that to have them again made it so much easier. Both Tim Fleming, my dop, and Nathan Nugent, the editor, are such a wonderful support and team. But the main thing about shooting the feature is there’s just… so much more. You need more locations, more cast – quality control is harder because you don’t have as much time or as much money. You have to make hard choices along the way. And because it’s a longer piece of work, you have to make sure that it can sustain itself. I mean, I think the short film is a wonderful thing in its own right. It’s a lovely, lovely medium.
So would you see shorts as artworks in themselves or as stepping stones?
I would happily do shorts for the rest of my life. And a lot of the material I come across would only work as shorts. With a feature, they’re more expensive, so you have to tailor yourself a little more to the market. A short gives you more freedom.
Do you feel you’re kind of expected to do a feature, then?
No, I suppose it’s a natural progression. The reason I ended up doing As If I’m Not There is that we commissioned it nearly ten years ago with a view to producing it. I just loved the book, the story. We tried to get directors and actually commissioned a writer but things didn’t work out. So eventually I decided I’d have a go at writing a draft myself. Then from there, after I made The Door, there was nobody lined up to direct it, so it looked like I could have a go myself. I was really thrilled.
What in particular attracted you to the material?
The book is so compelling and it feels true. It’s written by a Croatian journalist, Slavenka Drakulic. It’s the experiences of one young woman. She watches what goes on but it’s not really telling you how to feel, it’s just telling you what happens. Most importantly, even though it’s very hard-hitting and quite difficult, it’s structured in such a way that at the end it’s positive. You’re not just asking an audience to sit through something very bleak, saying, ‘well, this is life.’
And then of course you were casting, rehearsing and directing in another language.
Yes. The casting was really interesting. We went originally to Minsk for The Door, totally on spec, with no money, no funding, no nothing. The first two actors, more or less the first morning, were Igor and Juliet – they didn’t know each other. I called them back that night and we did a kind of an improvisation. We muddled through a whole story, a whole scenario. It was absolutely incredible, in this tiny little hotel room in the middle of Minsk. It was quite moving that they trusted it so much. I continued casting and went to Kiev – just in case. But I always came back to those two. When we met up in Kiev to shoot the film more than a year later, we didn’t need to go back over anything. They knew who they were. And it really helped, particularly for me as a first-time director, to have had that access to them.
And the casting for As If…?
Oh my goodness. We did a tour of the Balkan region looking for a young actress who was strong enough, yet vulnerable. We looked everywhere and it came to the weekend before we started prep. On the Friday I saw a picture of this young girl from the part of Macedonia that we happened to be shooting in. There was something about her that I liked, even just from the photo. As soon as I saw her on the screen, I knew. She had a huge screen presence. So I threw her in the deep end and got her to read some of the scenes for Samira, the main character. Over the space of five or six scenes, she went through a whole character arc. She came in looking like a young girl and then by the end of it she had grown into a woman. Up to that point I would have always tried to bring together the actor Fedja Stukan with any of the potential actresses, because I wanted to make sure they had good chemistry. But with Natasha I felt she was so right we didn’t have to do that. She has to carry the whole film and she was only 19 or 20 when we cast her, so it was very daunting for her. But she did a fantastic job. She’s a real talent.
So would you have been working through English?
Natasha spoke some English, but Fedja Stukan had very little. So we had an interpreter. It was always good to have an interpreter because sometimes there are nuances. The hardest part was when you had a lot of extras. Then you’re trying to go through the ADs, who are then going through an interpreter… That was a bit challenging at times. But it’s funny. Even though I personally wouldn’t know exactly what the actors were saying, I would know what the line should be, just from their body language and from the kind of tone and the delivery. I would feel reasonably confident that that’s the right performance. There was a lot of pressure at one point to do it in English, to cast maybe an American actress, because it would give you access to a much wider audience. But then it becomes something else. I mean, it’s not true to say it’s 100% authentic in the sense that it’s 100% from the Balkans. But at least I am endeavouring for it to be authentic to its own culture. I had a full-time person with me, who was coaching them in the accent because a lot of the actors were from Macedonia, which has a different language to Bosnia. So not only was Natasha acting for the first time, she had to act in a language that wasn’t her own, in the right accent.
Wow. So there were lots of extra layers going on there.
Yes, there were. But we kind of muddled through. I think naivety is a good thing at times!
You worked with Tim Fleming on The Door and again on this feature. How did your working relationship begin?
I had been looking for material to do a short for a couple of years, but more importantly, I had been looking for a team. James Flynn told me I had to meet Tim Fleming. I had seen Small Engine Repair that he shot and I was very impressed. As soon as we met we were just on the same wavelength. It was the first time I actually felt I could make the film. With a DOP and director, you both need to trust each other’s instincts. Having somebody you can bounce things off, especially as a first-time director, or that you can ask stupid questions or whatever, without feeling judged, mattered just as much as his talent in terms of the visual images and things like that. That was really important when we went down to Macedonia. The pressure was huge but he really guarded our vision of the film. It was great to be able to say even something stupid like, ‘does that hair look right?’ When somebody is so on board, it allows you to think out loud.
Did you find there were any different editing challenges, going from a short to a feature?
The Door ended up coming together fairly easily. We shot all the set ups and we more or less used all the set ups. Working with Nathan on both The Door and As If… has been fantastic, absolutely effortless. Everything can be discussed. Everything can be thrown out. It’s very open.
And for As If… Sorry, is it As If I’m Not There or As If I Am Not There?
The book is called As If I Am Not There. But if you have any ideas for a good film title let me know!
No, I like it! It stuck in my head anyway… So did you have any issues with that edit?
Well , the script was fairly pared down. But even still, when we got to putting it on screen, we were pretty ruthless. I hope some of the actors won’t be too unhappy… At the end of the day what really matters is the pacing — the pacing and structure. Nothing really should affect them. If the pace is wrong, you can’t ask an audience to sit through something, no matter how wonderful you think it is. It’s not meant to be an endurance test. We always wanted it to be as short and swift as possible and to move at the right point. And to try our best to not be sentimental.
Do you think that edit has changed the way you’ll approach scripts in the future?
You hope you’ve learned something. I certainly kept diaries and wrote as many notes as I could to try and teach myself something! But I guess what you learn is that less is more, always, always. And that just being simple is best.
So how did you start out in filmmaking?
James Flynn was responsible for both films happening. He made me take that first script out from under my bed and kept applying to the Film Board even when I had lost hope, and put me on the plane and really believed in it and pushed it. I had initially gone to art college and then studied journalism. I was always interested in true stories. Then I started developing scripts with James and kind of became a producer not knowing what that meant. I thought I was a filmmaker, I didn’t realise there are all these boxes, and once you get into one it’s very hard to get out. So we jointly produced two films. But at the end of that I felt that creatively the producer gets so little fulfilment. So I thought I’d try and direct. But I was scared I might fall very publicly flat on my face! It was a bit scary to be honest, especially because it ended up being a Short Cut IFB/BSÉ-funded scheme. You can’t really hide, then.
But you went ahead and did it anyway.
Yeah. It’s a cliché, but if you’re passionate about something, you can’t let yourself be put off. Because there are so many people who will knock you. Or the indifference itself will numb you. You just have to remember that there are other people who will respond to that passion, you know.
So do you have any particular strategy at this point, for launching the film itself?
I don’t know what festivals we will make. It’s a little bit of pot luck. And of course, you submit and you may or may not get in. In some ways there’s no point in having a strategy, because it’s out of your hands. It would be great if it got a little bit of notice. But it’s a hard subject. I’m not fooling myself that there’s going to be queues of people at the box office. But I’m hoping because it’s an important story that people will come and see it.
This article originally appeared in Film Ireland issue 133 Summer 2010.
Related Posts
Category: News
