Stephane Lafleur’s first feature film Continental, a film without guns first caught our eye when it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. With it’s use of mostly ambient sound, graphic compositions, quiet moments and soft subtle humor, Continental has been working it’s way through many US festivals including the AFI’s in Los Angeles and the most recently at the Starz Denver Film Festival. In Toronto our interview with Stephane was cut short because he had to rush off to catch a train but to our delight, we ran into Stephane at an AFI party and set up a time to pick up where we left off. On the patio of the AFI’s cinema lounge, overlooking the haze of downtown Los Angeles, we spoke to Stephane about being the one with the least amount of experience on the set, having a few too many locations and trying to keep actors from acting.

What’s your background? How did you get into filmmaking?

Since I was fourteen I knew I wanted to do this. One film that was really important for me was Léolo, it’s a Quebec film from Jean-Claude Lauzon – an incredible director that unfortunately died in a plane crash. He did two features actually, he did Un Zoo la Nuit and Léolo. What really interested me about Léolo was that it really wasn’t like clear story-telling. There was something really poetic about the film. Like just ideas and scenes – that I guess the director wanted to put in the movie – just glued together. There was a kind of story-telling, but the poetic aspect of the film was stronger than the story-telling. It was kind of a new thing for me to discover you could do that with films.

So then I went to film school to learn how to do these things. I discovered in film school that I was really interested in editing and I knew there were very few places to be a director. So editing was a good backup for me – not just a backup, it was a real interest. In a way, I think this editing work that I did for several years… really influenced my way of writing because if you see the film, it’s really like a collage of vignettes in a way.

There’s also another Quebec filmmaker that really influenced me. His name is Gilles Groulx and he did a lot of experimental stuff in the seventies. He worked a lot with the formal aspect of film and again, working with different ways to tell a story and to just use image and sound. So these people really influenced me… because I found that cinema could make our brain relax and just fly away.

How did you background in editing effect your shot choices?

The good thing about editing is that you see all the good and bad shots. You can see that a director really did well in that scene, but then he did really badly on that one. What I realized is that there’s a lot of camera movements that are actually useless. So I think it brings me to make a film with as few cuts as possible. But in another way, I didn’t want it to become dogmatic – like if I need to shots in a scene, I need two shots. If I need the close up, I need the close up – but not just cutting everywhere and doing fifteen shots for a scene if I don’t need them. The other thing is, this fixed camera [approach] was just compatible with the thematics, the mood and the characters of the film. So it was kind of natural to do it this way.

It’s funny to hear an editor say he wants to keep the cuts down to a minimum.

(Laughs) It’s because I’m lazy… and the advantage of doing less shots is that you spend more time on each of them. You have more time working with the actors. So with a small budget film and not a lot of time, I found it was an advantage…

What do you think sparked the idea for you? Like the idea of these four people and their need to connect but can’t really seem to.

I think what I wanted to do… a lot of people told me it was a film about loneliness, but I don’t think it’s a film about loneliness. It’s a film about living next to each other in our small world… and we need to connect in a way. The scene in the doughnut shop is a good example. He’s really trying to connect with this girl but she’s had a bad day, she’s at the end of her shift …

You’ve done some shorts before this feature that have gotten a lot of exposure. Is there a moment when you’re like “Ok, I should make this idea my feature.”

Well, it didn’t really happen like that because I write in such a messy way. I don’t have any techniques and I don’t start with, “I want to talk about this, so what would be the best way to start.” It didn’t happen like that. Just years of notes and books and then it just came naturally. It’s hard to explain but, this film started with the first scene actually, the guy in the bus. I wrote this idea like nine years ago, and you don’t know what it’s going to be – if it’s going to be a short or anything. Then you feel that it’s time to go from the short to the feature film. I think that the length and time that you can spend in a feature film… I needed that. I needed this time that you can’t always afford in a short film – where you have to get straight to the point – I wanted it to be a lazy film in a way. (Laughs)

Continental is actually the name of a dance right?

Yeah, it’s the dance you see in the film where all the people dance together. It’s a line dance a group dance where everybody does the same movements but doesn’t touch each other. I thought it was a strong image to describe the film because it’s four stories that don’t really… they touch each other, but just a little. That was the idea.

There were some nice subtle performances in the film. Did you do anything special to prepare your cast?

I don’t really believe in rehearsal, especially in this kind of film. We did a small rehearsal just to hear the dialogue one time before shooting – just to find the tone of voice we we’re looking for. Often when you do rehearsal you’ll realize there’s too much dialogue or the dialogue is not ok. So it’s a time where I can correct things. We did a lecture of the film with the four main characters and then a small rehearsal with each of them. Everybody had questions and they read their dialogue and I actually dropped a lot of dialogue between the script and the film.

There are also a lot of quiet moments in the film where the actor is just alone. Was it difficult to get some actors to just sit there and keep them from trying to act?

Of course. I’m sure it can be really frustrating for them, because they study, work hard and do theatre… do everything and then this guy with his first film says, “Don’t do anything. Just be there.” The other tricky thing in the film is that they’re almost always alone. They were always shot separately. They didn’t know what the other ones were doing. They didn’t have access to the rushes. So the only person who knew what was going on the whole time was me. So they really had to trust me.

Was the subtle humor of the film difficult to pull off?

The challenge of the film was really trying to walk a thin line between the drama the comedy. Which is really, really fragile. Working with the actor… you don’t have to play the goofy or you don’t have to play the joke. The joke is there. It’s either in the dialogue, or the situation, but you don’t have to underline it. Just do it or just say it and if people laugh, they laugh… if they don’t, they don’t. We were not always looking for the joke. Obviously there are some scenes, it’s true people will laugh but… The guy who presented the film at the Venice Film Festival said, “it’s a film where you laugh but you have the feeling your teeth are dirty.” (Laughs) I think that describes the kind of humor we were looking for.

We played on that thin line, and I’m really happy about the results. It’s hard to direct humor. I’m not used to it. Like the film had be selected in some festivals and they presented as a drama, and then we were selected in a comedy film festival. I really like the range of the film and different perceptions of the film. It is interesting that the same film can do that.

It must be the point of view of the audience and what they take from it.

Yeah... and I think it really depends on the context where you see the film. I think if you see it alone, it could be kind of depressing, but when you see in a room with two hundred people, something different is happening. Because when one or two people start to laugh it becomes contagious and everyone is like, “why are we laughing because this is so dramatic… such difficult times for these people.” But comedy and drama really coexist in life so I think it’s just representative of that in a way.

What were your thoughts with using minimal music in the film?

I knew from the beginning that I didn’t want to use a lot of music. So I used just a little, but as transition. What I wanted to do mostly was a soundtrack with natural sound. You know with the fridge buzzing and everything. I wanted it to become the music of the film and then add a little bit of music for transition. I didn’t want to use music to underline any emotional aspects of the film but I did the music myself and sometimes I wonder what someone else would have done with it.

Oh you did the music yourself?

For the transitions… it was a Wurlitzer (organ). I don’t play piano (Laughs), I play guitar. I found an old Wurlitzer. Super Tramp used these keyboards, it’s a seventies keyboard, analog, old sound. It’s not a modern keyboard… old stuff.

Do you still have it?

I still have it but I don’t play so I don’t know what to do with it. (Laughs)

Going back to the cinematography, where there things that influenced you while talking to the cinematographer to set up the shot?

I’ve got a visual kind of writing in a sense. I usually see the scene (how it will be shot) while I was writing it. So a lot of the scenes were dropped (at the writing) because I didn’t know how to shoot them simply. So I didn’t keep them because I didn’t know what to do with them. Some scenes did get to the shooting script, but I wasn’t satisfied with them and a lot of them were cut in the editing room. I shot them when I was shooting them but I wasn’t happy with them. This was my first feature and I learned you have to follow your instincts on these things, if it doesn’t feel good just don’t do it. So basically I did a storyboard for the entire film. When Sara (the DP) came, I had a pretty idea what I wanted, but I had no notion of lighting and everything, so she really got involved in the storyboarding. We started with what I had, but she suggested some things and she really understood what I wanted.

When we got to the locations we were always looking for where to put the camera and there were two major difficulties with that. A lot of the locations were very small, so we didn’t have a lot of room to put the camera. The other thing is that, shooting in super 16mm, what I learned in the process of shooting the film is that the lenses work differently, the feeling is different. We wanted the film to be kind of graphic and with super 16 lenses, you easily get curved lines. With the wide angle you can feel the walls start to curve and we didn’t want that. We were trying to stick with certain lenses but on the other end, there wasn’t a lot of room to put the camera, so we had to deal with that.

There were a lot of locations in the film. Did that make things difficult?

It was too much. The location director told me at a certain point that usually for a film of this budget, with the number of days we had [to shoot], it’s usually like twenty three locations – she went up to forty. While I was writing I was a little bit concerned about it, but I really thought I was in a comfortable limit. But I was way over that! I don’t know how we did it, but we managed to do everything.

We were able to use some locations… like one location became two locations, just by flipping the camera on the other side you’ve got a wall that’s completely different and you think you are at a different location. We were able to do that in certain cases, but at the other end, we needed three houses to do one house– because things didn’t fit, or one room was great, but the exterior wasn’t good etc.

What format did you guys shoot?

It was Super 16 and we blew it up to 35mm. The other thing we realized, doing testing with the Super 16, that when you get too wide, with certain lenses it kind of becomes blurry. So we were kind of limited on the kind of lenses we could use. But the advantage of the Super 16 it gives a feel to the film that I wanted. I wanted it to feel kind of atemporal… like you don’t know which year it takes place. But obviously it’s right now. It’s a contemporary film, but the Super 16 puts an old fashion film thing in it… just a little imperfection in the image. Shooting this film in HD for example, would have been a totally different feeling in the end I think.

What other kinds of challenges did you have in making the film?

Well working with the actors was a challenge because every actor is different you have to quickly find the way of telling them what to do and each actor needs different information. In a way, everything was a challenge because [it was] my longest time shooting. Before that, [my longest shoot] was three days in a row and this film was twenty eight.

When it’s a first-feature, you don’t practice a lot as a director. When you arrive on the set, the person with the least experience is you. So you have to build a sense of trust with all the team really fast. I felt that I really needed to come to the set ready and knowing what I wanted to do the first day so people would follow me. The other thing that contributed to that is that the DP, Sara Mishara, it was her first film too, so we were really so happy to do this film that people had to follow us.

What kind of advice would you give to new filmmakers?

You have to trust yourself. All the scenes that we dropped from the script were the scenes I wasn’t happy about. So I wasn’t happy at the script, I wasn’t happy at the shooting because I didn’t know why I was shooting them so we dropped them at the editing… I guess you have to follow your instincts. If something sounds wrong it’s just wrong.