#simon killer

[tyger-land]

ʙʀᴀᴅʏ ᴄᴏʀʙᴇᴛ New York City, December 16, 2011, by Tetsuharu Kubota.

[mrfahrenheit92]

[wonderfulstills]

Simon Killer

[ Antonio Campos • 2012 ]

[conform-to-my-sins]

[conform-to-my-sins]

[each-frame]

POSSIBLE SPOILERS

Georges Simenon novels (Red Lights)

Brady basically spells out the ending as a reinterpretation of actual events by the main character. Implying Simon is a killer...

Just weeks after Martha wrapped, the pair was in Paris, prepping and then filming -- on a tight 24-day schedule with a crew of 10 people and for very little money.

"We never wanted to approach anything as a mumblecore movie," the director says, knocking the low budget, lo-fi films that have come from filmmakers in his own native New York. "There’s always this sort of thing that we consider cinema that we never want to cheapen, so there is that part of it that we aesthetically going to try, things that are formal and cinematic. And working with smaller budgets, it takes more preparation to do those things to be what you want them to be."

Along with the issues of a small budget and artistic preparation French system of filming permits and strong guilds presented a challenge to the pair, who were more used to guerilla-style filmmaking, which much of Simon -- with its dark and brooding shots on the streets of Paris -- appears to be. Location permits require a week in France, whereas in New York, it is just 24 hours notice. But each had lived in the City of Lights for a time, and so they had ins with crews and different government officials that could help smooth any difficulties.

Campos has said that he was partly inspired to create the character after reading about the murderous antics of Joran Van Der Sloot, who landed three decades in prison for killing a student in Peru.

At the AFI Fest screening of the film last fall, Antonio had described a high school project involving a series of interviews that led him as a filmmaker to “reinvent the closeup” by shifting the focus away from the expressions of a person’s face to other parts of their bodies. How has that style evolved over the years?

AC: It’s funny because for me, it’s not so much a style as it is just an interest in the human form and looking other places besides the face for emotion, embracing the fact that the human body is constantly signaling the way that we’re feeling. I don’t know why, but I find it really beautiful when somebody falls on the edge of frame or a piece of their body is just barely seen – whatever is right for the moment. One of the approaches to camera blocking that I’ve always been interested in is setting up a really perfect shot and then allow the actors to make it more interesting by messing up their blocking a little bit. That’s the way of making your frame feel alive to me and in that way, arriving at something more honest or natural. The perception of the frame being this one thing is not what filmmaking is. The possibilities are endless.

On this, we started with a melody. We had a feeling, a tone. We were chasing a concept. Honestly, you’re never certain that you’ve actually encapsulated the idea or the concept until you’ve edited the film, so hopefully all of the themes we were talking about exploring are quite apparent. Then you present it to an audience and it’s really left up to them. But you just make the thing and then the poetry comes in their interpretation.

https://thefilmstage.com/antonio-campos-top-10-films/

I grew up on narrative cinema. Story is important to me. It’s become less and less complicated—the plot points are very simple—but you need the story. My favorite Haneke films are the ones that have a strong narrative—Code Unknown, Time of the Wolf, The Piano Teacher. Dumont—his stories are so simple. I think the extreme of this is Liverpool, by Lisandro Alonso. He’s against sex, against violence. His stories—it seems like it’s going to build up to something brutal, but it doesn’t get to that. It just kind of lingers. The film just lingers. Nothing happens. No climax. And it didn’t hit me until the next day. It’s a hypnotic film. I felt like I had dreamed it. My favorite filmmaker is Stanley Kubrick, and I feel like story is very important to him, but he deals with story in a very economic way, especially in his later work. The experience of seeing the film trumps the story in a lot of ways. The story brings you through, but the real meat of the film is what you experience.

https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/this-is-how-we-live-conversing-with-antonio-campos/

The only filter we would use is a sort of Pro-Mist—I think it’s a half or a quarter Pro-Mist. It’s just a filter that gives a softness to the frame, and cuts the edge off an HD image. But we were taking our lighting cues from the environment. Carlo’s house [where Simon stays] is very cold and minimal, and that was how we decided on that light design. And we knew that we wanted Victoria’s world to be warm, so for her apartment, we looked for one that was cozy, and we found one on the top floor of a building, the old servant’s quarters, and it was mostly wood. So there was a natural warmth and earthy quality to it. And then the night scenes in Paris, what we fell in love with was the sodium vapor lamps and that stark, raw aesthetic. We didn’t light any of the street stuff. But we cast our streets based on where the best light was. Pigalle at night is like Times Square from the Seventies and Eighties the way I know it from movies and photos. That was one of the reasons I really loved Pigalle. So, one of the most striking-looking scenes, and one of my favorite scenes in the movie, is the final confrontation between him and her. There’s almost a bluish tint on it. We were shooting the last light of the day. That was all the light that was coming in from one window—there was no light in the room itself.

The thing with the Alexa camera, it’s so sensitive, and the way that it deals with color is so nice, that my DP Joe Anderson was making the most out of the very little light that we had. We decided that we were going to use practical lights, so we tested tons of china lamps and different bulbs. We had one or two Kinos that we could use to augment things, and then we had a lot of black wrap which he would use to kind of sculpt what little light we had. We really learned that with the camera, the less you do, the better the image looks and the less digital or HD it looks. That’s the way we were approaching everything: the less-is-more school of thought.

What are some films or filmmakers who work with expectation and payoff in ways that you like?

For me, Code Unknown was a major film for me, and Caché, also, is huge. I mean, Haneke in general.

Benny’s Video?

Yes, Benny’s Video. But, Caché had more of an impact of me, even though Benny’s Video is pretty striking. [Bruno] Dumont. Humanitéwas a big film for me at the time and still is.

Oh yeah. All the time. When I get into a scene, one of the things I like to do is trying to figure out how to communicate something by touching the actors in a certain way. I did it on Afterschool, but I did it more on Simon, and it’s really fun for me, because I do like acting a lot. With Afterschool, it was me digging my fist into Jeremy [Allen White]’s stomach to create this discomfort for a scene where he freaks out. For Simon, I would try to find the physicality of the scene itself with the actors. Like, when Victoria’s lying on the floor and she’s kind of contorted, we spent a lot of time lying on the floor and trying to figure out where she should be to position herself so that she could stay there, and also so she could come to feel something that would bring up the performance that we wanted. I also find that if you’re having a problem with the scene, if you find something physical to change, those things then change the performance. Then there’s also smell. There’s a lot of sniffing in the film, where Simon smells things.

[mydarktv]

Simon Killer // Antonio Campos

[favedifuca]

Simon killer (2012)

di A. Campos