Couple in a Hole opens on our screen this week. Jason Wood, our Artistic Director of Film, speaks to director Tom Geens about the film…
Jason Wood: When Couple in a Hole was screened at The Toronto International Film Festival much was made of the connection between your earlier shorts and Menteur in terms of your wishing to push genre boundaries and straddling the line between psychological realism and the disturbingly absurd. Do you recognise this connection and how does the new work expand upon this interest?
Tom Geens: Yeah I never want to make purely naturalistic stories. I’m always interested in pushing them into another realm or injecting some other dimension. Each time it comes out differently. You’re The Stranger Here (a 2009 short) is an outright dystopian allegory whilst Menteur starts off feeling more like an urban docudrama but then, because you are in the main character’s head all the time, it slowly turns into something else, more like a bad trip.
Couple In A Hole is in essence a naturalistic story about a couple working through a trauma, but because it is set in a hole amidst magical and bountiful nature and because of the paired down nature of the story, I guess it takes on more the form of a bleak fable. I always had the idea of starting it as a fantasy, a re-enactment of the Adam and Eve story, almost making the audience dream, “Ooh I might like to live like this…” and then gradually turning it into something inhospitable and nightmarish. But that’s probably as far as the strategising went in terms of the writing process. Often you don’t really know what you’re doing – you just go with your gut feeling. It’s all in the post rationalisation that observations like ’straddling the line between psychological realism and the disturbingly absurd’ come out.
JW: I was impressed by the non-reveal. It takes a while for you to subtly explain why the couple are living the way they do and in doing so I think you both accentuate their grief and add a sense of realism to their situation. Was it important for the film to unfold in gentle layers?
TG: As I was writing Couple In A Hole it became for me a really exciting challenge as to how I could sustain an engaging feature length drama with as few tools as possible? I always wanted the start to be a quiet observation of the way they live and to give it the time and space it deserved, so the audience can really feel something has happened to the couple without having to be told. Through creating continuous intrigue and mystery, I tried to goad people deeper and deeper into the story. But you have to be careful at each stage to relieve some of the mystery before you create new mysteries because I think (in contrast to the way mainstream cinema treats people) we all relish to get involved but there’s a limit: if something remains unresolved for too long, people can get irritated and switch off. So it became a real juggling act regarding what and when to reveal all the information. Also, in this skeleton scenario you have nowhere to hide and the smallest change can have massive impact. It was a tricky process and took a long time to get right.
It really is a film that demands immersion and participation, you either buy into that world or you don’t. This is exciting because a lot of the story becomes quite personal to the viewer as it only takes on full form when it’s in their heads and they will do a lot of the unfolding of layers themselves.
JW: Paul Higgins is perhaps best known for UK audiences for his role as a very angry man in The Thick of It. He’s a revelation here in a much more nuanced role. He captures John’s grief and concern for his wife perfectly. How did you come to choose Higgins?
TG: Paul made a big impression on me from the first time I saw him. I guess it takes a very nuanced actor to play an angry man so believably. We were in a sterile casting room in Soho somewhere but he made my producer Zorana Piggott and I forget about that for a while. It’s really exciting when that happens because I always spend a lot of time on casting and more and more you realise that that process is all about waiting for your characters to turn up (and of course learning to spot those moments in the first place). That definitely happened when Paul walked in. From the moment he agreed to do the film, he took total ownership of the part of John and investigated his world far more than I could ever have done. He fought tooth and nail for John and would only do something if it felt true to the character. What more can you ask from an actor?
In a way for all the cast I can’t imagine anyone else playing those parts. That is a good feeling looking back.
JW: Kate Dickie is more recognisable to UK audiences and there is something about her and her choice of roles that remind me a little of Katrin Cartlidge. Dickie gives herself totally to this performance, both in terms of emotion and physicality. Could you say something about working with her and also how you wanted the dynamic between the characters of John and Karen to play out on screen?
TG: I would agree that she is definitely in that category of people that relish putting themselves on the line. Like Paul (and Jerome Kircher and Corinne Masiero too), she totally committed and gave herself to the part. She truly has an inexhaustible enthusiasm for what she does and is up for trying anything. It made it such a pleasure to work with her. It’s exciting to know you’re working with people who are lifting the film to an entirely new level.
As to the dynamic between John and Karen, I had a clear idea in my head as I was writing it, but ultimately that is just fantasy and means nothing until you get your real actors. So in a way I’m always very open how dynamics between characters in the script might be filled in and evolve. The actors will inevitably ‘rewrite’ what you’ve done and impose their dynamic.
JW: In many ways the woods function as another character. Without wishing to make the film sound like The Revenant it must have at times been an unforgiving shoot but also, and more importantly, how did you collaborate with Sam Care (Director of Photography) to achieve the look of the film? The woods seem a place that whilst all too real also have a dreamy, fairytale element to them. I was reminded a little of Philip Ridley’s The Passion of Darkly Noon in fact….
The Midi-Pyrenees, our main location, are stunning but also brutal. You can have four seasons in one hour; some places are hard to get to, steep climbs up and down, rarely a comfortable flat surface to put your camera on. I remember ploughing through mud for days at the one location. Yes, the shoot was unforgiving quite a lot of the time. It was very physical, but also very unpredictable, and nerve wrecking because we never knew whether we’d be able to do what we set out to do. It was like we were constantly fighting the mountain. It did give the film an extraordinary energy I think. You are right, in the end the Pyrenees became more than just a setting, it became the 5th character in the film, the silent observer in the background.
Sam and I talked a lot about the look of the film during the prep. But once we were on location a lot of that chat went out of the window, purely because of the environment we were in. The overwhelming prominence and beauty of the Pyrenees and also Burnham Beeches in London simply imposed its own look, and there wasn’t that much we could do about it. Both places offer an abundance of strong imagery wherever you looked.
I think through our on-going debate we came up with the right selection for the film. As I mentioned before, I always had the idea of starting it off as a paradisiacal place and then becoming more and more dirty/earthy as the story progresses and the couple’s situation starts to unravel. The grade obviously helped to realise that, but a lot of it was in camera. As the shoot went on, we learned to be more and more flexible in order to adapt to the constantly changing environment. We were always checking the weather forecasts and tinkering with/changing the schedule accordingly.
JW: The BEAK> soundtrack is another essential component. What were you seeing in terms of the film’s aural texture? I love the way the score often throbs ominously in the background…
TG: When I work on a script, I’m also always listening to music. It really is an integral part of the development of my scripts. The two feed into each other. So when I first heard BEAK>, I got really excited. In the edit, I like to combine scenes with very different energies as it creates rhythms that jar and this gives really interesting and surprising dynamics. I felt this in the music of BEAK>, it’s full of very jarring rhythms that constantly fight each other. They manage to make great music out of sounds/rhythms that would feel wrong on their own. The more I listened to it, the more I felt it was right for the film. It would also be totally unexpected, because I guess for a film like this with these beautiful shots of nature and the theme of grief, the obvious choice would have been a classical score.
In the end I think it almost is the soundtrack for what goes on in John’s head, the reflection of his troubled state of mind.
Couple in a Hole screens here at HOME from Fri 8 Apr. Book tickets, watch the trailer and find out more here.
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