Where did the inspiration come from for Day Night Day Night?

It started with a story that I had actually read in a Russian newspaper about a girl who was wandering around one of Moscow’s main streets with a bomb and it didn’t quite go according to plan. I was captivated by the basic structure of this story… things not going the way you’re expecting it to go, how the world kind of gets in-between the plan and the actual reality.

Was it difficult to find funding for the film because of its topic?

It’s always difficult to find funding (laughs). I don’t think it was because of the subject matter. The film was primarily financed with an award from NYU and with German television money. I didn’t really seek out funding in the States, not necessarily because of the political subject matter, but more because I think in American cinema right now there’s this pressure for resolution, redemption, for these kinds of things. And I imagined the kind of pressures that I might be subjected to. I imagined somebody going,"Lovely idea but how about at the end… blah blah blah," and I kind of pictured the route that might take. So I didn’t really pursue it because I didn’t want to get stuck in development hell for a long time and have those pressures. I wanted to be able to make the film I wanted to make which doesn't have a kind of redemptive resolution.

So you were looking for funding outside of the U.S.?

Primarily yeah… Maybe I just didn’t give it enough of a chance but you know we had a small budget and we were able to get this funding from ZDF. I preferred to make it for a small budget and retain the control that I needed to have over the film, [rather] than to deal with the kind of pressures that I imagined I would be subjected to. That may have been an incorrect assumption…

I thought Luisa Williams was great. The film relies heavily on that main character and how she expresses herself. So did that make casting a tough process for you?

Casting was a huge challenge because without the girl we didn’t have a film. Until we had the girl we couldn’t schedule anything, there was no talk of any kind of production. She had to be exactly the right kind of girl, and it took me a while to find her. I looked through about 650 girls. That would be about 649 wrong ones -- that weren’t even a maybe -- and one right one.

Were there certain things you were putting them through in the casting process that really helped you make that decision?

We looked at non-actors a lot. I wanted the girl to be an unknown face, a tabla rasa, somebody that you could project onto. So we had a really huge open call, I saw tons of girls, and the basic first step was really a screen test because the girl doesn’t have very much dialogue in the film. I was really looking for somebody who could work with almost nothing, somebody that I wanted to look at doing nothing, somebody I could watch for almost two hours… because enough was going on in her face. One way I described it, I wanted somebody who was completely transparent at the same time she’s trying to be completely opaque, so her face is constantly changing at every moment. And that’s a very hard quality to find because really it just depends on how much can you see through somebody’s skin, how much are they giving away inherently. It was a screen test where it wasn’t them speaking that was so important, but how somebody looks while listening. How much can you see the thoughts going through their minds just as they’re listening? Some people are more transparent than others.

What were the things that you and Luisa went through to help her get into the headspace of this character?

We had a lot of time on our hands between casting her and getting the rest of the shoot together. So we spent a lot of time doing things together. We put together a huge binder of research. There were articles with failed suicide bombers. Looking at Joan of Arc films. Looking at things that we thought might be connected. I would suggest movies that she should see that might have something to do with this… Then we would work a lot on physical activities…we went to shop for her clothes together, and so Luisa would begin thinking, "Well she’d never wear that," and really contributing to that process of developing this character. We never really played scenes before the actual shoot. We never rehearsed in the traditional sense of the word. But we would look at small physical details like how would this girl walk, because Luisa for instance, walks in a very loose way, and tends to kind of swing her hips (laughs). This girl (main character) doesn’t walk like that, she’s very constrained. One thing I told her, that she said really helped, was that she (the main character) doesn’t want to disturb the air around her. And so she (Luisa) tried to practice ways that she wouldn’t disturb the air around her. At some point I told Luisa to practice talking at half of her normal volume.

So there were a lot of physical exercises like that that were really about creating this person on a very physiological basis, and that physiology was based in a kind of psychological motivation of this girl that we imagined between the two of us, how she would be and how that would affect everything she does. Louisa reminded me that at one point I made her wash my dishes (laughs). At first she was quite resentful, but then she said that it was a real revelatory moment [because] it was helping her to focus on a very physical activity. How does this girl wash dishes? How thorough is she? Does she find small ways of entertaining herself in this banal activity?

It was interesting that the story wasn’t totally laid out for you. What are your thoughts about not giving the audience any backstory?

Well, I think often there’s a tendency to provide these very simple cause/effect backstories -- that would tell you exactly what lead her to this act, to pretend to know why in exactly, point-by-point, so that we know psychologically what happens with her family, we know politically what happens, and I wanted to shy away from that because often that becomes over-simplified. People say "Oh yes, she’s avenging the killing of her mother, or this is how she came to these kind of extreme political beliefs," and things are often much more complicated than that. Sometimes when you read newspaper articles about when these things actually do happen, all their neighbors are saying, “He was such a nice boy and he liked soccer and he liked pizza and blah blah blah…”  -- there’s always some element that doesn’t compute. So I thought it was more interesting to let that play out in the imagination of the audience rather than to pretend to know and give these easy simple path answers. I thought it was better to leave that outside the frame. And of course there’s nothing in the story that suggests that she has no political motivation or no religious motivation. I mean there’s definitely a sense that she’s doing it for a reason. It’s just the specifics of that reason had to be, for me, left outside the frame. I think generally people would feel safer if they had a very clear “why,” they would feel much more comfortable.

But I didn’t want to be cheap about it, I didn’t want to just say, “Ok she’s Arab or she’s a Muslim,” –- you can’t just say that, to me that's not enough. You’d have to go much deeper into the motivations, and that would be another movie, a  movie that would be all about the motivations.

So rather than reduce it and treat it in a cursory way, I thought it was more interesting to focus on the story of the film itself, which is this girl who sets out to do something that she believes in -- you don’t know what she believes in, but you do know that she believes and that she sets out with a sense of purpose -- and then the way that belief is battered away at in a way by just the real world coming in…

But what we found was once we made that decision to leave out the big things, then we couldn’t even bring in little bits of information because in a vacuum of information any tiny bit information becomes "a reason," becomes overvalued. At some point in the film there’s a mention of a photograph of her little brother, and it’s just that she happens to have a picture of her little brother in her wallet. Now I’ve had people say, "It’s all about the little brother! She’s avenging the little brother!" And I’m like, "No, she’s just has a little brother." So any tiny bit of information becomes completely weighted down when you take away the bulk of it. Because people do tend to look for reasons, people tend to look for very direct answers.

I don’t think we realized how much people would grab onto the tiniest shards that in any other context might suggest to you that she has parents perhaps or she happens to have a little brother. There’s no particular weight given to those things but people look for incredible importance in these things, like they're trying to solve a mystery. It’s like, "Oh here’s a tiny clue!" And the "clues" themselves are fairly vague, they don’t really tell you anything.

It’s nice those things aren’t spelled out for you because it really helps you get more involved. You’re really going through the motions with her and experiencing it like she would with very little information.

I wanted to put the viewer very much in the position of how she feels. I don’t remember that we ever sat there and said, "Oh this will really put the audience on the edge of their seats, or this will make them jump, or..." I thought this is how she feels at that moment. She’s come to this hotel room; she doesn’t know when exactly they’re supposed to show up. She’s supposed to wait. She doesn’t know what’s going to happen there. And so we always kind of thought of things from the inside, how does she experience it, how does she hear the world, how does she see it.

What about these moments where she’s talking to herself? Is she praying or reciting something that helps give her the strength to keep moving forward?

It was important to me to have a sense that she is somebody who believes in what she’s doing. So there is this very kind of intense inner relationship that she has with this object of belief… with that purpose, whether it would be a sort of faith, political or otherwise purpose. And I think in those… I guess they’re "prayer" sessions... "prayer" is a very specific kind of thing, but in these kind of "incantations", I suppose is a better word for it, she’s sort of in this moment where she really gets the closest to a kind of “why”, which is a conflicted kind of dialogue because there is doubt in those moments. In the very first one she goes through different types of possible deaths and then she says, "I want my death to be for you." You never know what that “you” is… Then at the middle [of the film], she says, "How do I know if I’m doing it for a pure reason… I want to make sure that it’s pure."

Those were actually taken, very much paraphrased, but they were taken from research that I had done on actual suicide bombers. The first one where it lists different types of deaths was taken from a video that a suicide bomber had made. He talked about being trampled by a donkey or trampled by a horse, all these strange forms of death… [and he says] I have made up my mind I have chosen this kind of death.

The second one where she talks about her doubts, was actually taken from an interview that I had read with a Palestinian suicide bomber who had backed out of it… a girl, and she said at some point that she started to doubt that she was doing it for good reasons. She started to think, "Maybe I’m doing it because my boyfriend broke up with me and maybe once I do it, Allah will see that my reasons were not pure." So I was interested in that. A lot of the stuff in the film actually comes from various newspaper articles like this, but they’re tiny little details, they’re always not the main story but the details on the sidelines that I was always interested in. Like I thought, how strange that this girl really questions herself -- "I want to make sure it’s for the right reasons and not some boyfriend."

So it’s more about what those people were like individually and the things they were thinking about more so than the actual event… but the things that they go through to get to that place?

Right. A lot of the research I took from stories was very individualized, but I also took things that were actually very generalized. For instance pretty much any account that you read from a female suicide bomber, the ones who failed or the ones that backed out, most of them tend to talk about, for instance, being dressed up. The emphasis placed on clothes and appearance and this image -- you see this both in the video that they make and also in the clothing that they wear for the actual mission. That’s something in almost all the stories that you read.

One thing I was kind of interested in was in the video -- there’s a scene in the film where you see them setting up to make a statement video, which is almost inevitably a part of these acts… But I didn’t want the actual statement video. What I wanted was the construction of the image of the video, the transformation of this somewhat mousy and tiny girl into somebody that looks like a fighter. You actually do see that in actual real videos of suicide bombers. Like one thing I noticed was they’re almost always pictured with a machine gun even though what they will do won’t have anything at all to do with using a machine gun! They probably don’t even know how to shoot a gun. It’s this image of militancy. The other day they found the statement video of Mohamed Atta. Sure enough Mohamed Atta is standing next to a machine gun. So it's the way these symbols are created that are sometimes not about the act itself, but all the imagery about the act.

It was interesting when they’re putting the gun belt on her and switching out the background because it didn’t look right.

The thing is that’s how these things seem to go... I mean it was very creepy watching the Mohamed Atta tape that I was looking at on the web yesterday. At the beginning, before the actual statment, he’s putting on this hat adjusting it and laughing, and then he decides to take the hat off. You know? "Should I do this in the skull cap or not?" For me these banal details make the act even more terrifying because somehow when you see the video itself and when you see only the put together performance it’s one thing, but when you see the cracks behind it, the cracks in the armor so to speak, then it becomes more terrifying because you see that it's this person who is worrying about how he looks in this hat.

That was another thing that was great about the film. It shows you behind the scenes… I mean you hear about these things happening on the news… but it’s almost more frightening to see how calculated it really is.

One of the things that I read in my research was an Al-Qaeda handbook that was published on the CIA website. It had all these detailed chapters on how to use a gun, how to poison people, but a lot of it was dedicated to things like, please check the parking signs and make sure to pay your post office box fees on time. It would provide cautionary tales, for instance, of an assassination that went wrong because the guy didn’t check the oil in his car and his car stalled on the way to the assassination. It’s kind of funny, but it’s not funny. Of course you kind of go ha ha at first but the way that this is thought through is kind of terrifying. Because it is thought through to the most minute detail, these little details where you can foul-up -- it literally tells you if you’re meeting somebody and your cover is that you are an architect meeting with a client, make sure to bring architectural plans.

The other part I thought was interesting was that the people that were surrounding her in the hotel room, when they spoke to her, they were very calm and accommodating. They weren’t barking any orders at her…

They were very polite. It’s a professional relationship and I wanted to highlight that. They all are engaged in something, and they’re not forcing her into anything. There is definitely a power structure, but she’s not a prisoner. Again videos that I’ve seen from actual research tend to be that way. That’s how people behave when among colleagues. They behave politely; they really focus on the task at hand. They also have this kind of interesting relationship with her that mimics the relationship of an actress and a director, in the sense that it’s their show but she’s the star. So that’s reflected in the way they treat her. I mean they do need her to do things in a certain particular way and she can’t really deviate from that, but at the same time they want to make sure she’s comfortable, she has what she needs. They don’t want to scare the hell out of her.

That politeness was so important in the film. There’s an interesting moment that I experienced during the initial French translation for Cannes. My French is pretty awful; I have about a 60-70% reading comprehension, but the dialogue in the film is pretty simple like, "Please, thank you," -- that’s definitely within my French knowledge. In the Film everybody speaks in the incredibly polite way. For instance, she orders egg rolls and she goes, "Hi can I have three vegetable egg rolls to go please? Thank you." And the French translation said, "Three vegetable egg rolls to go." And I thought, this is completely different! Because it is about a girl that says entirely too many "thank you’s," entirely too many "pleases," who would never say, "Three vegetable egg rolls to go." It’s not about the egg rolls. And it’s the same way that they translated all the guys' dialogue. For instance, they call her and say, "Please don’t go outside again, please close the window." Instead it said, "Don't go outside, close the window." They thought this is language that doesn’t matter, sort of filler language, but it’s actually the filler language that’s really important because that establishes the relationship they have. It’s all about the "please" and the "thank you" much more so than the actual facts of what they’re saying. So we had to have it completely retranslated before the festival!

The sound design played a pretty major part of the film. Particularly the bathing scene where she’s scrubbing herself, the sound of the soap really gives you a sense of a hyper reality. Was that just another thing you were trying to use to bring people into the story?

My background is radio and sound art, and I'm interested in a lot of electronic music, so sound is a very important aspect of film for me. From the beginning, I knew it wouldn’t have music. I didn’t want violins swelling as she’s preparing to press the button. To have some kind of music heightening this tension seemed very artificial to me. So I needed sound design to function as a kind of musique concrète, using the actual sound of the world.

So I worked with sound designer Leslie Shatz who did the last few Gus Van Sant films. He’s very well known for being almost a composer of sound effects. He does these incredible soundscapes. Leslie is LA-based, so I actually recorded all the sounds here in New York, in the actual locations. So Luisa and I went back to the hotel and she did her own foleys. We were very literal-minded so when we needed the bathtub scene sounds, she just got back into the same bathtub and I mic’d it very close up. We just repeated the actions and mic’d them extremely close for the first half and focused on all the details. In the first part of the film, we kept the sound mono so you have no sense of space. The sound in the first part of the film is really about the impact that she makes on the world, the sound of her disturbing the world around her. You hear everything in this kind of exaggerated way, like when you’re alone somewhere and your afraid every motion you make becomes amplified to you, because there is no other sound, you sort of pay attention to these little sounds. And we didn’t add any atmosphere to that, we really just focused on motions that she’s making. For instance when she cuts her fingernails and her toenails, it’s just silence and the sound of the toe nails being cut, which makes this very disturbing sharp sound. And that is actually the sound of toe nails being cut!

And then once it gets into the second half, where the film goes out in Times Square, then the sound functions differently. I wanted it to be the city coming in and almost a mental battle between her concentration, her inner world, and this city which is coming in from all sides, this barrage of sounds. She’s a girl who’s coming to Times Square for the first time. I thought about how does this place sound? How does this feel to a person coming here for the first time, who’s never been in that kind of density of stimuli before?

All the sounds were recorded in Time Square, but then Leslie and I worked very carefully to sculpt them. We structured the sounds very precisely, and Leslie was really fantastic about that; he would recognize and remember what gave a particular bit of street recording a certain kind of feel. Sometimes we’d hear a low bus hum and think that’s really appropriate for this moment because it reflects the mood there. It might be bus brakes coming in at a certain moment, or a passing bit of conversation, or a car horn -- then sculpting something with those sounds that were actually recorded in Times Square.

There was a lot of steady cam work in Times Square. Was it difficult shooting that way on the streets of New York?

That would be just plain hand held (laughs). There was a Glide cam in the hotel but not in Times Square. That was just Benoît’s shoulder!

Forty percent or so of the film takes place in the middle of Times Square, in the middle of the densest crowd that we could find. It was actually really thrilling to shoot. Times Square is an amazing location. The production design is fantastic -- it’s been done for you! And it’s fantastically cast, all these great faces! Most of the time when people shoot in the street, the first thing they do is block off the street. They take out the real life and they replace it with artificial life, they bring in extras to look like regular New Yorkers. I wanted to do the opposite. I wanted to surrender to the energy of the street and film in the middle of this dense crowd to put this fictional character out in a documentary world. A lot of the time it was just me, the cinematographer and the actress moving through the crowd. It was like surfing really…

Now what you have to keep in mind is, Times Square probably has the highest concentration of cameras per square foot of anywhere else in New York, probably of anywhere in the States, maybe in the world. You have MTV, news cameras, tourists, surveillance cams… We were filming with an HD camera that was the size of a large consumer camera. People hardly seemed to notice. Walking through Times Square, most people treat cameras like a kind of annoyance, sort of like cockroaches, a necessary evil. So people didn’t pay any particular attention to our camera when there were so many other cameras around. Sometimes there are these very brief passing glances where people confront the camera, and to me, that heightens the sense of realness in some way. We cut out sections where people waved to the camera and said, "Hi mom." but surprisingly, there were not that many of those. People really just sort of went about whatever they were doing, just making their way through the crowd themselves.

We did add some of our own extras where we needed people to stand there for a long time for the detonation attempt scenes, but we cast them from Craigslist, which is a kind of virtual extension of the city. They were mostly people who had never worked as extras, who just answered this ad on Craigslist. We looked to reproduce the feel of Times Square and have this incredibly ethnically diverse crowd. Sometimes when we needed to fill out the extras, our producer would run off and grab some people off the street and say, "You want to stand here for a few hours and be in a movie? We’ll pay you thirty bucks!" I just cast people on the spot in Times Square to give her directions, ask her to take their picture. If we needed a pretzel vendor, we just asked the pretzel vendor if he would mind being in the movie.

There’s one scene where she asks people for money, so I said, "Ok, Luisa you’re going to go and beg for money!" We followed her with a boom mic and a camera, as she actually tried to beg for money on the street. So those we’re actually people who responded. She approached them and it was filmed documentary-style. Then one guy came over and actually offered to give her money, and that just actually happened. They would give her the money and then our AD would chase after them and get a release and Luisa would try to give the money back, though nobody took it .

What would you say is probably the most challenging aspect of the film for you?

Everything. It’s hard to think of something that was especially… I think that just making my first fiction film -- I had done a feature documentary before -- there was kind of a theory that I had about how I wanted it to go, but it’s only a theroy. The script is only a map, and what I wanted to do was to stay "on" and alert during the shooting and to be responsive to the things that were happening during the shoot and allow that to really shape what you’re doing. Every day of shooting you wake up and you think, "Oh my god this is all going to fall apart." And then while you’re in the midst of it, you sort of think, "I think this is working, I think this is working." But everyday you think the next day is going to be an absolute disaster.

At one point when we had a rough cut… we screened it for people and there were things that sort of got in the way. It was a matter of purging the film of all these things that I considered impurities. But it’s beautiful because you need to give yourself the permission to experiment and pursue absolutely wrong directions, and then you throw them out. I got very exhilarated throwing things out, making it lean, getting rid of all the fat and all those things that seemed unnecessary. For me, that was one of the most exhilarating weeks of editing. My editor Michael was like, "Oh wait, I want to hang on to this," and I was like, "No it’s going, get rid of it!" (laughs)

So what would you say are some of your influences as a filmmaker?

I watch a lot of movies, so it really runs the gamut. For this I looked again at a lot of Dreyer, Bresson… some of the obvious things. Godard is a filmmaker who means a lot to me. Recently it’s been a lot of Soviet films from the 60’s and 70’s, Kira Muratova, Larisa Shepitko, and a lot of Asian stuff. Probably the film in the last year that I’ve gotten the most excited by was Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. So it ranges. I like things that are very minimal. I just watched Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent, which in some ways has a lot of parallels to this film. I found that thrilling, it was his first film and I liked it much more than I’ve liked others. I’m excited by films -- whether it’s Dziga Vertov or Park Chan-wook –- that carry through an idea to an extreme… But I like a lot of American films [too]. I love Howard Hawks. I love Billy Wilder.

What advice would you give to new filmmakers out there?

Oh boy. I think there’s a presumption of what makes a good American indie film, and I don’t necessarily subscribe to that presumption. I think a lot of people are afraid to push at these things… I mean you look at the kind of films in Korea now versus the kinds of films that come out of the US. I think there’s a kind of thrill of experimentation (with films in Korea), a kind of giddiness that comes across. You have a sense of radical ideas that are pushing at margins. I think most films in America kind of follow a formula, like I hate to say it, but you see the kind of films that come out of the Sundance Lab… There is a way that things add up, you get to the end of the movie and you know exactly what caused what, you know when the love interest comes in, you know where the redemptive moment comes in. And as a viewer, I don't find that very satisfying to watch.

So my advice, this may sound terrible (laughs) but… I want people to make more films that I really want to watch! That don’t follow that formula, that don’t look for a complete resolution where everything is explained. I’m so sick of these movies that have this kind of pop psychology mentality. It’s like they’ve all gone through the Oprah-mill, that you know what happened in the character's childhood that lead very directly to this moment in their adult life and everything just seems so simple. And life is just so much more messy than that. To not give in to those pressures and find other ways of making films. I think the pressures to do it are tremendous. What happens is people make these very stylistic experimentations, but at the core often the story is the same added-up, redemptive thread, sometimes dressed up more than others. But if you look at films that are made in Iran or in Korea or other places, there’s a lot more going on in film and a lot of other ways to make a film, and to not be afraid of that. You’ll be poorer (laughs) but… I think there should be a lot more room in American film for different kinds of voices.