Another night, another parade of the world's most talented filmmakers at the Times Bfi London Film Festival, and last night was the turn of two critical favourites. First through the doors, in to introduce his film The Death Of Mr Lazarescu, was Romanian filmmaker Cristi Puiu.
On one level the film is simply about the disarray of the health system in Puiu's home city of Bucharest, but the director's overall intention is to make six films about love – or the lack of it. In this first instalment, it's about love for your fellow man. Shot very economically, it follows one man through the last hours of his life, as he tries to seek treatment for pains in his head. Much of the film was shot on location, sometimes in functioning hospitals. "Yeah, the CT scan scene, and some others were filmed in an actual hospital. These take up about twenty minutes of screen time in the finished cut. Sometimes we had to stop when an emergency was coming – we didn't want to interfere in any way."
Most of the film was also shot at night – something we assumed would be to budgetary restrictions, but we were mistaken. "No, nothing to do with the budget, and a lot to do with the sound. Because I shoot a lot with direct sound – I'm not very good at faking it, and the city at night has a very special sound. So the story was always happening during the night. The other reason was that I wanted to have the actors naturally tired, to be in this state of fatigue.
Given the challenges of making such heavy material, is he keen to jump straight back in again? It would seem so. " I wrote the synopsis of all six films in 2003, so they are there. We'll develop them; some of them need to be refined, but they are there. I'd like to continue with them, but in cinema, you are forced to think in terms of money, and if you don't find money, you have to find luck. With this film, I was lucky. It's a long film, but it was well received by the critics, so maybe I will be in good stead for the second one? But I'm really afraid, because expectations are really high!"
Only minutes after Cristi had gone inside to introduce his film, Canadian arthouse powerhouse Atom Egoyan arrived, ready to share with a London audience his latest thriller Where The Truth Lies. And audiences might be surprised by the turn he has taken towards conventional genre filmmaking. "The moment that I decided to tell the story, I realised that the scale of it had to be different, and that a number of films that were an essential part of my cinematic upbringing that I hadn't really had the opportunity to homage to," Egoyan explained. "I wasn't aware necessarily of it being a bigger film, rather that I needed a certain type of canvas in order to make it convincing. And it also needed to have a certain pace, as well. You had to believe that you were in the world that they were talking about."
The first obvious difference for those familiar with the director's sparse, enticingly cryptic work, is the addition of voice over – and plenty of it. "Yeah, but the narration is in itself suspect… I'd come to realise that some of my favourite films have narration, and in my memory they didn't seem to. These films like Double Indemnity, or again Sunset Boulevard, where you have two sort of shifting narrative positions. Voiceover to me is very challenging, and I think that often it's used to explain things or to render the obvious, but in this case, it's essential to the psychological construction of the piece, because people, while they're telling us something, are not necessarily telling us what's going on, and we have to connect the dots."
The film suffered a minor setback in the US recently, being slapped with an NC17 rating. "It was just because of the sexual nature of the material that we had a lot of problems with the censor board in the States, but that's rapidly falling behind, so I don't think it's going to be a problem anywhere else. And it's an odd film, I'm realising, because it has commercial draws, but it is quite demanding as well. I love the way it's being marketed here, which is the poster, because it seems to be much more in-keeping with the tone of the film. I think that in North America we were playing it as a film noir, which probably is more esoteric."
For the fans of Kevin Bacon, Colin Firth and Alison Lohman who missed out on a seat to last night's screening, Where The Truth Lies is currently scheduled for a UK release from December 2nd.