Wow, thanks for the great feedback! Excellent responses. I’m glad no one seems to be having too dark monitors.
this is even better than GREP, which i quite liked.
Awesome, thank you.
has it really been a year since your last film?
Yes, sadly! This last year I’ve been hijacked by a full-time job at the visual department of a consultancy firm, so I’ve had little-to-no energy to spend on my own projects. Learnt a lot but had to say “enough is enough” and quit in May. I plan to always have a project in the making this year.
especially if you have access to good actors, which evidently you do.
Oslo must have some record for good actors in proportion to population. There’s a pretty remarkable amount of talent, sadly many going unemployed.
(was his real motivation supposed to be known only at the end?)
The reason his motivation is only hinted to in the opening scene but not made explicit is both that I wanted it to be a hook, and the practical thing of not wanting the motivation to be on everyone’s mind whilst the movie is going on, since the focus is on the transactions in themselves – what he gives and receives from other people. I felt that giving the motivation that early on would come in the way of what’s going on.
But at the same time I think it’s fairly easy to surmise from the opening what the deal is, it was just important not to set it in stone at that point. You’re bound to judge him, but hopefully there’s a sense or realization that this is being done without access to all the facts, which sort (hopefully) of knocks the heat of it.
we wonder how many times this has happened.. in light of this, starting the title with "to" might be appropriate. it feels like it starts mid sentence, and the ongoing nature of this guys problem seems deeper embedded.
This was exactly what I wanted to convey with the title
My favorite part was the lack of faces. Besides keeping the focus where it should be, it has the same effect a novel does, where you start to fill in the faces yourself and become sort of a collaborator.
That's a great thing to hear
Did you shoot this with all practical lights or did you use anything? fills possibly? either way i think the visual aesthetic was great.
Thank you! We didn’t use a single light, everything’s practical. Mostly out of necessity: we shot it very scatter-shot over a few months, and couldn’t afford to rent lights just for a scene that would take an hour at most to do.
Have you tried a cut without the music? The kind of stark realism you achieved so well is kind of taken away whenever the music track came in.
I thought more people would be saying this! The trance-track is meant to be a dip into his mindset there and then – how he perceives his mission, and to give a sense of what he listens to and maybe even where all his money goes (partying maybe?). I wanted it to jar a bit with what came before to maybe hint at a distance between his view of the world and what really going on. Originally the Bach-piece was the only music, and I’ve done a pass without, but in the end I liked the trance-version better because it throws things in a different direction for a few seconds.
At that point, the movie is the movie Axel would make about himself.
