CraveOnline: The blocking of the film must have been really important too.
[Both laugh]
Eugenio Mira: That’s a great question.
I haven’t even finished it! How did you each coordinate the sequences on stage, backstage, the split screen between the balcony and the stage…?
Eugenio Mira: That shot particularly is like a movie itself. When I read the script for the first time, I like to take notes about the first things that pop up. I saw the opportunity to relax a little bit of the tension of being all the time with him. How can I step out of the theater and go into the corridors with this character that wants to establish contact, but at the same time getting back to him and not feeling like it’s cutting? I didn’t want to cut and I started to play with it. What if, what if? That damn thing, the what if. What if? What if? How long can I? How long can I? That’s the birth of it. I wrote it down. Okay, so we’ve got the split screen that is not a true split screen, it’s just the set, then it zooms in and we see the same corridor. That is something I just wrote down the first time I read the script.
I always set rules when I make a movie. Okay, I’m just going to use tight shots for this character. Or, I’m not going to use steadicam unless it’s for this, and it’s going to pretend to be a dolly track instead of a steadicam. I set all these very, very strict rules and of course then there’s always margin to betray those rules, but only when it feels natural and stupid not to do it.
There’s no semantics anymore. There’s nothing that has less value than the cut, from one shot to another. You see it and you just don’t care. You don’t know why they do that with most movies nowadays, something that you can say from the ‘70s, ‘80s or ‘90s. So I’m very keen on those things. It’s all a combination of internalizing the whole thing, rendering the scene in your brain, knowing your knowledge and the fact that you’ve seen so many movies so oh, this is like that. Oh, this is like that. So it’s like a little reference, and then that’s very useful to share it with your crew and the actors. Then it’s like okay, let’s go for it, you time it out, it works.
Are you happy or annoyed when people describe it as “Phone Booth in a concert?”
Eugenio Mira: No, because I didn’t write the script. I think the script is in that tradition but its really ties in more with suspense than a thriller, kind of if you don’t do this, you will die. It’s more about mystery. I think it has a quality almost of a radio show, like The Crimson Ghost or something. I’m okay if you want to talk about the genre of the movie itself and how it’s typecast in a way. You’re fine.
It’s a shorthand way of telling people that you pulled it off for 90 minutes.
Eugenio Mira: Of course. It’s a good movie, right? Phone Booth. Nick of Time is more like that too. There are more movies based on coercion. What am I supposed to do? What was that Gary Cooper western?
High Noon?
Eugenio Mira: High Noon, totally, I didn’t know the title in the U.S.
Elijah, you worked with another Fantastic Fest filmmaker, Nacho Vigalondo, in Open Windows. What do you get to play in his movie?
Elijah Wood: I went from one technical job to another it seems. Open Windows was extremely technical as well. The premise is extremely simple. The entire movie takes place on a computer screen and it’s about a guy who gets coerced into allowing this person, this actress that he loves, to get kidnapped. It’s by his own accidental actions at his hand that she gets put in peril. So he tries to reverse this peril she’s in. That’s the premise. There’s all sorts of twists and turns to it.
But all sitting at a computer?
Elijah Wood: It’s all on a computer screen. It’s all interactions on webcams and cell phones. It almost looked like it wasn’t going to work out because he was originally supposed to shoot that, it was supposed to overlap with Grand Piano and it turns out that they got a little bit delayed in their film and he asked if I wanted to do it. It was mind-blowing to me because I met Eugenio and Nacho at Fantastic Fest and always wanted to work with Nacho as well. I’m a big fan of Timecrimes. So I jumped at the chance and there was literally a week, like I left Barcelona, went home and then flew back to Madrid, I was there for a month. He came and visited. There’s all this great Barcelona/Madrid overlap. It was incredible. Now we’re going to Sitges to show our film there.
Eugenio Mira: Two years, it feels like a decade, and like two months at the same time.
Was that a different way of working, using the webcam to actually make a film?
Elijah Wood: Well, I think what was complicated about it is that literally the camera is a fixed thing that you are looking at and talking to. It’s no different than if you would pull up your laptop and be talking to someone on Skype or Google Chat or whatever but that’s the movie. So all of my interactions, most of the time I didn’t have a computer there. The whole structure of ours, timecode, this person is talking to you then, all of it was very, very similar. There was a version of Ade[la Gutierez, script supervisor] on that film as well who had to keep it all straight. So there would be long uninterrupted takes where I would have to move a file to this place and interact with someone while I moved the file and open it up, all things that are not physically happening. That was the story of that movie.
Did you shoot Cooties yet?
Elijah Wood: Cooties is finished, yeah. It’s in post right now.
Do you play one of the teachers?
Elijah Wood: I’m one of the teachers, yeah. I’ve seen a cut of the film. Miraculously our first rough cut was only an hour and 40 minutes which is astonishing, so we’ve actually got room to build on it.
Maniac must have been another technical task for you.
Elijah Wood: It was. I seem to really love technical movies.
Even Sin City was new at the time.
Elijah Wood: Yeah, I like working that way. I just find it really exciting.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Shelf Space Weekly. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
