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Noud Heerkens • Regista

Last Conversation

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Audacious one-take film Last Conversation, by Dutch director Noud Heerkens, shows a film-long phone conversation of a jilted lover driving in a car from 25 different angles. It is part of the Variety’s Critics’ Choice: Europe Now section at the 2009 Karlovy Vary Film Festival.

Cineuropa: How has your background in video and installation work influenced your first feature?
Noud Heerkens: I started off doing experimental work in the late 70’s, exploring the moving image and its intersections with other disciplines, including theatre and dance. The challenge is to explore new ways of telling stories and making films, and in the last ten years I have started to concentrate on a more conceptual approach that finally led me to make a medium-length film that in the end became a feature-length project.

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The film was shot in one take. Was that idea there from the beginning?
The idea to shoot everything in one long take with 25 cameras was one of the starting points of this project. Though the locations of the cameras, the screenplay and the acting could be worked on beforehand, the final result depended a lot on chance. Each of the cameras records its own autonomous reality, including the weather and other traffic on the road. The film doesn’t tell a story but shows a moment in which different realities converge. The images of the trees, the road, the car, and Anne on the phone all tell their own stories about that one moment. The fact all these different views happen at the same time creates the film’s meaning.

How did you develop the story?
I was inspired by writers, directors and architects including Bernhard, Cocteau, Antonioni, Gehry and Koolhaas. Screenwriter Jacqueline Epskamp then wrote a first version, that I then changed to suit my vision, and with this new version actress Johanna ter Steege and I started rehearsing so we could lock the film’s final shape.

When did it become clear that is was necessary to only see one side of the story, and only via the phone?
It was clear from the start the viewer would only see and hear Anne; we are constantly close to her, also visually. She is fighting a battle between her emotions and her need to control her own life. The relationship between her and her lover aren’t the subject of the film. It is about why and how this woman tries to deal with the rejection and resulting heartache so she can move on with her life. I directed Johanna, but it is her character Anne who directs the unseen man in a way, there is an added virtual reality there. When she drives through a village, she imagines herself in her lover’s bedroom, which turns the film into a search for unity of place, time, action and, as an added dimension, a virtual world.

How did you decide on the quantity of cameras and their positions?
The number was part of the original concept, which was to create a movement within a movement. Instead of moving one camera alongside or in the car, a series of shots from cameras in different positions could also suggest movement. DoP Richard van Oosterhout and I spent three days looking for the right places to point the cameras, fragmenting the space in and around the car. In the editing room I then tried to emphasise this fragmentation at the start of the film, so it only slowly becomes clear it was shot in one take.

Do you think your future films will similarly be different than “normal” features?
The starting point for my next film is again a conceptual idea that plays around with the conditions of recording and narrative perspectives.

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