Every film you make has the ghost of the film you didn’t make
hovering around it. The scenes cut, the locations not used, the experiences
behind the camera sometimes as telling and potent as the material which
ends up in the finished film. These experiences go unrecorded, in any
organized or formal way—even ‘making of’ documentaries
tend to concentrate on life on the film set, by which time there have
already been countless untold stories. However, there are usually some
traces: photographs, notes in a diary, perhaps some video footage: more
often just the memories.
Here are some fragments and traces from the evolution of Yes.
(Click on the thumbnail to see bigger picture and caption)
Yes
started life as a five minute short—which in the end turned out
to be a ‘pilot’—stimulated initially by an invitation
to participate in a project called Paris, je t’aime,
in which twenty directors were invited to produce a film in each of
the twenty arrondissements (districts) of Paris. I chose the sixth,
as it is where I usually stay (in the small, shabby, legendary, Hotel
Louisiane—the hotel where Simone de Beauvoir once lived, and where
Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote Nausea, it must be the only hotel left
in a major city which does not have television in its rooms—a
blessed absence).
I
invited cinematographer Alexei Rodionov to join me for the first time
since we worked together on Orlando. I missed his unique presence
and was eager to work with him again. Jean-Paul Mugel (the remarkable
sound recordist I have worked with on three films now) and Carlos Conti,
designer extraordinaire, would make up the tiny production team.
I
was obsessed by the idea of looking at the protagonists’ feet
as they pounded the Paris streets, the gutters flowing with water, though
the film was to be filled with text; we were to hear their thoughts
as well as their spoken words in a continuous overlapping stream. The
two characters were to walk towards a rendezvous (in the Jardins de
Luxembourg) each holding an imaginary argument with the other in their
heads; a bitter conflict of misunderstanding. I had started writing
the text on September 12, 2001, in direct response to the terrible events
of the previous day; but these two characters, a woman from the West
and a man from the Middle East, though locked in conflict, were to be
lovers, and the film would end in the triumph of love over hate. And
it was written in verse. It was winter, and the obsession with feet,
and with the ground, led to Alexei lying on the Paris pavements in icy
conditions.
Some
months later, after casting the charismatic, extraordinary Simon Abkarian
as the male lead, I had used the five-minute film as a springboard for
a feature-length script. On one of our casting and financing trips (the
film was proving tricky to fund) Simon came with me to L.A. We stayed
at the Chateau Marmont. The night we arrived he went out with some of
his Armenian friends and indulged in some heavy drinking. The next day
I took some photos of his lovely hungover ragged face.
Yet
more months later, in New York, Simon and the luminous, magnificent
Joan Allen met and read together for the first time and the chemistry
between them was immediately obvious.
A
few months later we travelled to Beirut to look for locations. I was
struck by the scars of the war evident on so many buildings, but also
by the apparent integration of so many religious and 
ethnic
groups. The blazing white sunlight hovered over the city as we careered
at terrifyingly high speeds on the highways through the city. Lara,
our driver, had the interesting habit of driving hands-free, talking
into her mobile, smoking, and turning around to talk to us in the back
all at the same time. But we survived, nonetheless.
By
the time we came to shoot the film, it was impossible to use our Beirut
locations. We had become un-insurable as the invasion of Iraq had just
begun: so we had to shoot ‘Beirut’ in Havana, one of the
other locations in the story. But then we couldn’t take Joan,
a U.S. citizen, to Cuba, due to recently legislated restrictions, so
we filmed her ‘Cuban’ scenes in the Dominican Republic.
In the finished film even I sometimes forget these behind the scenes
gymnastics. The footage edited together seamlessly and the problems
with the logistics and the locations even inspired some new ways of
shooting and cutting. But I regretted some of the Cuban locations I
had planned for Joan that we could not use; in particular, a beach club
preserved from the ’50s and ’60s.
Perhaps
the ghost-traces of the film not made is like a parallel reality; a
life guessed at but not lived, a ‘could have been’ universe;
or one which in some platonic and absolute sense exists, at least in
the imagination. When making a film you hold it for so long in your
head before it finally manifests, that you feel you are simply making
something visible for others that is, in reality, already there. Of
course, once it materialises, it looks and sounds a little different
than the one you have been watching for months or years in the secret
projection room in your mind. Which can be a lovely surprise, like meeting
a stranger who is somehow familiar. An old friend, re-discovered. Yes.
