Conversations with Other Women
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| Conversations with Other Women | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Hans Canosa |
| Produced by | Ram Bergman Bill McCutchen Kerry Barden |
| Written by | Gabrielle Zevin |
| Starring | Aaron Eckhart Helena Bonham Carter Erik Eidem Nora Zehetner |
| Music by | Starr Parodi Jeff Eden Fair |
| Cinematography | Steve Yedlin |
| Release date(s) | August 11, 2006 |
| Running time | 84 min. |
| Country | USA |
| Budget | $450,000 (estimated) |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Conversations with Other Women is a 2005 film directed by Hans Canosa and starring Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter.
The film won a Special Jury Prize and the Best Actress prize for Helena Bonham Carter at the 2005 Tokyo International Film Festival.
Screenwriter Gabrielle Zevin received a nomination for Best First Screenplay at the 2007 Independent Spirit Awards.
The film, an independent production budgeted at only $450,000, was sold for distribution in more than 30 countries.
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[edit] Release Information
[edit] Theatrical Release
Conversations, Hans Canosa's directorial debut, premiered at the 2005 Telluride Film Festival.
The film's international theatrical premiere was on June 7, 2006 in France. Released by distributor MK2 Diffusion under the title Conversation(s) avec une Femme, the film played theatrically for five months to both box office success and critical acclaim.
Released on August 11, 2006 in the United States by Fabrication Films, the film played in fourteen cities, garnering modest theatrical box office and critical acclaim.
[edit] DVD release
The Region 1 DVD was released in the United States on January 9, 2007 by Hart Sharp Video. Special features include:
- Audio commentary by director Hans Canosa
- Interviews with Helena Bonham Carter and Aaron Eckhart shot at the 2005 Telluride Film Festival
- Director's demo - a video demonstration including storyboards and test video footage created by the director to explain his intentions for the film before it was made
- Why Split Screen? - a featurette detailing the use of split screen
- Made on a Mac - a presentation by visual effects supervisor Kwesi Collisson and director Hans Canosa shot at the 2005 Telluride Film Festival
[edit] Production
Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter shot 82 pages of dialogue in only 12 days of principal photography.
In order to facilitate the split screen presentation of the film, two cameras (one on each actor) were used throughout principal photography.
For the sex scene, the director asked the actors to stay in bed while the crew quickly changed camera positions to get all of the coverage. The entire scene, including 10 camera setups and a complex dolly shot, was completed in 45 minutes.
Aaron Eckhart wore his own Armani suit and Calvin Klein underwear as part of his costume, while Helena Bonham Carter wore her own Prada shoes.
The hotel room, the interior of the elevator and the interior of the cab(s) in the final shot were shot on a sound stage in Culver City, CA.
The hotel ballroom scenes were shot in the ballroom of the Park Plaza Hotel, adjacent to MacArthur Park near downtown Los Angeles, CA. Other films shot at that location include Barton Fink, Chaplin, Nixon, The Fisher King, Wild at Heart and Bugsy.
Many scenes were shot in the the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner building, which has been used almost exclusively as a film location since the notorious Los Angeles newspaper, once owned by William Randolph Hearst, closed down in 1989.
[edit] Post-production
This is the first movie in which Apple Inc.'s Final Cut Pro logo appears in the end credits.
An editor was initially hired to cut the movie. After putting together an assembly, the editor quit, citing the difficulties of editing for the two frames. The director, who had never cut a film before, learned to use Final Cut Pro editing software and became the editor.
The final shot in the movie was the only one captured with a single camera. Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter were shot in the back of one taxi on set. In post production, the shot was digitally divided in two; digital movement was added for each car and two separate background plates were composited to create the illusion of different taxi interiors.
The film contains 117 visual effects shots, all of which are designed to be "invisible". When the visual effects supervisor, Kwesi Collisson, solicited bids from VFX houses, he received an initial estimated VFX budget of over $1 million, followed by a $400,000 "low budget" estimate. Mr. Collisson decided to execute all of the effects himself, spending four months using Adobe After Effects and Shake (software) to complete the necessary shots.
3 apparent B-roll shots of the supporting characters in a ballroom full of dancers were actually created using visual effects. When the line producer asked the director the minimum number of extras needed for these shots during principal photography, the director requested 50 extras. When only 7 extras showed up on the ballroom shoot days, an alternate solution became necessary. The visual effects supervisor found takes which included empty sections of the ballroom. Taking several high resolution stills from those takes, he created 3 background plates. During a day of additional photography, both the supporting characters who would appear in the foreground and pairs of dancers who would appear in the middle ground were shot against a greenscreen. The visual effects supervisor then composited up to a dozen elements to create shots which appear to contain the bride, her bridesmaids and the young man and young woman characters in the midst of a ballroom full of dancing couples.
A potential continuity error was fixed with visual effects. Due to the short shooting schedule and lack of control of the sound stage, the soles of the actors' bare feet became soiled while shooting on the hotel room set. Shots captured included views of the actors' dirty feet as they got into and out of a clean bed, which would be unlikely in a carpeted hotel room. The error that was not caught by the script supervisor on set. During post production, the director/editor discovered that 5 shots included in the final edit would include dirty soles. In order to address the problem, the visual effects supervisor rotoscoped the bottom of the actors' feet to delineate the parts of the frame that needed to be replaced. Since shooting replacement soles against greenscreen in the precise size and angles necessary to fill the rotoscoped sections would be cost prohibitive, the digital compositor searched the Internet for replacement feet photographs. He discovered that the best and highest resolution images of feet were on foot fetish websites. Thus the replacement feet in those five shots are "pornographic feet".
The director cut a single-frame version of the movie for television.
[edit] Soundtrack
The film's soundtrack is as unusual and precise as its visual design. Although the film contains no traditional score, music plays for almost 40% of the running time.
The scenes in the wedding reception are accompanied by "wedding band" music composed by Starr Parodi and Jeff Eden Fair.
Three songs from the 2003 album Quelqu'un m'a dit by popular European recording star Carla Bruni perfectly complement the tone of other sequences in the film. The song "J'en connais" accompanies the opening title cards and the juxtaposed narrative images, and then recurs in the final scene through the end credits. The feeling that this track conveys is remarkably different at the two ends of the film: in the opening, the song plays as a wry and quirky introduction to the action; at the end, the same song conveys a bittersweet melancholy. The song "Le plus beau du quartier" plays over the scene in which the woman asks the man to help her undress, fashioning a playful romantic interlude. The song "L'excessive" serves as an energetic yet wary accompaniment to the transition from the hotel room to the roof. These three songs suit the film for several reasons. The French lyrics not only avoid conflict with the English dialogue, but also evoke intimate French films about love and sex (such as Claude Lelouch's Un homme et une femme (1966)) that Conversations resembles. Carla Bruni's passionate, rueful vocals and expressive, no-frills guitar feel like the film's third voice, part of a trio with the two characters.
The unprecedented sex scene, which brings the man and woman together in the present with the lovemaking memories of their former selves, is played to the song "Ripchord" from the 2004 album More Adventurous by the Los Angeles-based rock band Rilo Kiley.
[edit] Split screen
Conversations with Other Women represents an innovative development in the long tradition of experiments in split screen (film). In 1913 Lois Weber employed the technique in the short film Suspense, a one reel thriller. The visionary French director Abel Gance used the term "Polyvision" to describe his three-camera, three-projector technique for both widening and dividing the screen in his 1927 silent epic, Napoléon. The term "split screen" was coined to describe the many uses of the technique in films of the Sixties. More recent uses of split screen include Mike Figgis' 2000 film Timecode and the Fox TV series 24.
The most common function of split screen is to show simultaneous actions in different places. The classic, and simplest, example of this function is showing two sides of a phone conversation, as in the 1959 film Pillow Talk starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson. Another common use of the technique is to show two separate but converging spaces (such as contrasting shots of predator and prey) to create tension or suspense. The filmmaker most associated with the latter use is Brian De Palma.
Conversations simple yet brilliant innovation in split screen is the juxtaposition of shot and reverse shot of two actors in the same take, captured with two cameras, for the entire movie. The film represents a new kind of viewing experience that enlists the audience as a perceptual editor. The filmmakers allow the viewer to choose how they watch the film, following either character or both simultaneously. Seeing both characters act and react in real time lets the audience follow the emotional experience of the characters without interruption.
The two camera system presented an unprecedented challenge to the actors during production. Unlike traditionally shot and cut films, the actors knew that all moments of a take could end up on screen, and thus 'acted through' every take. The acting adage 'in the moment' was constantly demanded of the actors. The resulting split screen (film) presents the actors' work in the way musicians play in a duet, with action, dialogue and reaction running on both sides of the frame in real time. The movie represents two remarkable achievements in screen acting.
The shot/reverse shot function of split screen comprises most of the running time of the film, but the filmmakers also use split screen for other spatial, temporal and emotional effects, some of them unprecedented in film history. Conversations' split screen sometimes shows flashbacks of the recent or distant past juxtaposed with the present; moments imagined or hoped by the characters juxtaposed with present reality; present experience fractured into more than one emotion for a given line or action, showing an actor performing the same moment in different ways; and present and near future actions juxtaposed to accelerate the narrative in temporal overlap. Further semiotic and perceptual study will be necessary to evaluate how the film's unique editing functions for and on the experience of the audience.
