I believe that if a character is fully realized, if their psychology and emotional state are carefully constructed, then all you need to do is place them in situations where they either must make a choice or have no choice at all, so the audience, in one way or another, is afraid for them. That creates drama. And with just a note of absurdity, drama can very quickly become comedy, especially when elevated by actors who deeply understand tone, rhythm, and comedic timing.
I believe in contrast, in the positive and negative charges of narrative structure, as well as of the image itself. Filmmaking places the director, cinematographer, writer, and others into a constant state of observational adjustment. The ability to feel when you are hitting the audience over the head with exposition, preachy monologues, or false emotion is everything.
For me, the time between words is often as important ( sometimes more important) than the words themselves. The same goes for a gesture or a look an actor gives, which the camera quietly observes and enhances.
The idea of “total cinema” has always been my goal, the Bressonian notion of pure cinema that communicates through its own language and methods. So the line I never want to cross has several dimensions – the line is a boundary which stops us from being dishonest, being preachy by speaking the themes the film is about, succumbing to instant gratification by not letting the audience think with the characters, and making sure that the filmmaking is invisible.
What was it about Kimberly-Sue Murray that made her the perfect casting? What were you looking for prior to meeting her?
We knew from the very beginning that this film would live or die based on who played Kathy. We were initially looking for an actress who perhaps had immigrant parents or someone who understood what it means to have an accent and deal with all the connotations that come with it.
“If a character is fully realized, all you need to do is place them in situations where they must make a choice.”
The early lists we made reflected that thinking, but eventually we realized we might be limiting ourselves and potentially overlooking actors who could still deeply understand the role without sharing that exact background. Ultimately, I felt that whoever played Kathy had to understand the problem of foreign language and the struggle with identity in a broader emotional sense at least.
When we finally decided to go with Kimberly-Sue Murray, it was because she had a deeply intimate relationship with accents herself. Her survival as an actress depended on losing her French accent. She went through an enormous personal and professional journey to accomplish that, working with numerous methods and accent experts over many years.
Speaking a clean version of a standard North American accent took her a long time to achieve, and then, years later, a Bosnian director with an accent asked her to speak a perfect Bosnian-American accent, probably one of the rarest combinations imaginable.
But Kimberly knew how to get there because of her own experience losing her native accent and, equally importantly, because she took it incredibly seriously. We brought in an accent coach, and I constantly recorded conversations with my Bosnian friends and family and sent them to Kim on a daily basis. It was hilarious but incredibly helpful.
She would ask me to read and record paragraphs from the script or other writings. I would read songs, sometimes sing them terribly, in Bosnian so she could absorb the rhythm and pronunciation of the language, and ultimately learn the jewel of all Bosnian songs: Emina.
If Kimberly had not been as fantastic and precise as she was in this film, none of it would have been believable. That reality genuinely kept me up at night for months.
What are the challenges you face in the editing process for comedies?
I strongly believe that you make the movie on set and in prep, and then enhance it in the edit room. One should not try to reinvent the film in the edit room, that’s failure.
Of course, I failed in many scenes, and our fantastic editor Julia Blua saved me repeatedly with unassuming ease, gentle reassurance, and enormous humility. We approached scenes as pieces of a much larger whole and prioritized the rhythm of the film above everything else.
