Speaker 1: Oh he is Bote. It's showtime.
Speaker 2: People say good money to see this movie.
Speaker 3: When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas,
Speaker 3: hot popcorn, and no monsters.
Speaker 1: In the Protection Booth, everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Speaker 4: Done it off.
Speaker 1: These fumes.
Speaker 2: It's surreal.
Speaker 1: We're getting too high, does it?
Speaker 4: When my wife has gone away over from La it's
Speaker 4: a belated honeymoon.
Speaker 2: Here's to you.
Speaker 4: Welcome aboard.
Speaker 1: I guess it might just be us.
Speaker 4: Hi, your timing is perfect. Champagne's the quickest way to
Speaker 4: escape your problems.
Speaker 1: You momases, you don't remember me?
Speaker 3: Really?
Speaker 1: What are you talking about?
Speaker 2: How you're not getting away with this?
Speaker 5: May day?
Speaker 4: May day?
Speaker 2: We have to get to that road.
Speaker 6: We're going ahead.
Speaker 1: Hold on, are you crying not?
Speaker 2: Hey, folks, Welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth.
Speaker 2: I'm your host Mike White. On this episode, I'm talking
Speaker 2: with Claudio Fay. He is the director of the new
Speaker 2: film Turbulence, which is now currently available for your rental
Speaker 2: and viewing pleasure. It is a thriller that is set
Speaker 2: aboard a hot air balloon. Had a great time talking
Speaker 2: with mister Faye, and I hope you have a great
Speaker 2: time listening to it. Enjoy the interview. Can you tell
Speaker 2: me a little bit about your journey into filmmaking, because
Speaker 2: I know you've done a little bit of a lot
Speaker 2: of things.
Speaker 1: I have a story that many filmmakers have where I
Speaker 1: was thirteen or fourteen years old and discovered that you
Speaker 1: can do short films with a video camera and the
Speaker 1: first short fie that I made, which was with toys,
Speaker 1: and it immediately a light went on and I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is what I want to do for the rest
Speaker 1: of my life. Little did I know I got myself
Speaker 1: into but it stuck. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I saw that you not only direct and produce, but
Speaker 2: you also do visual effects.
Speaker 1: Is that right? My movies always have a good amount
Speaker 1: of visual effects in him. And there was a phase
Speaker 1: where I did help out with friends with visual effects
Speaker 1: because I just had a natural knack for it. But
Speaker 1: my passion definitely lies in directing whenever I get a
Speaker 1: chance to do it.
Speaker 2: What is it that attracts you to certain projects because
Speaker 2: you have such a diverse body of work.
Speaker 1: To be perfectly blunt and pragmatic about it, it's whatever
Speaker 1: I get to do, not not whatever I get to
Speaker 1: do of course I do turn things down that don't
Speaker 1: connect with me, But I like the idea that I
Speaker 1: can get myself into things that I'm optimiliar with and
Speaker 1: explore and find the discover new things. I think curiosity
Speaker 1: is the thing that is great to be able to
Speaker 1: live in your job and as a director, if you're
Speaker 1: not curious, then I think give the all the place.
Speaker 1: So discovering new things and exposing myself to new challenges
Speaker 1: with each movie is part of the reason why I'm
Speaker 1: doing this.
Speaker 2: There are a lot of challenging titles on your resume,
Speaker 2: and how do you follow up, Paul Verhoven do Holloman two.
Speaker 1: That's a challenge? Yeah, that was a huge job. Again,
Speaker 1: it was an opportunity that was given to me. And
Speaker 1: at that point we're going, oh, if they allow me
Speaker 1: to do this movie, of course I will. And then
Speaker 1: inside the process he goes, oh, my god, how do
Speaker 1: I how do I do this and not make a
Speaker 1: completely fool of myself Because we're talking Paul Verhoven. It
Speaker 1: is one of the one of the most one of
Speaker 1: the best, smartest, most celebrated filmmakers ever. And then we're
Speaker 1: given like a tenth of the budget to a follow
Speaker 1: up movie a hacking one succeed, But these are the
Speaker 1: challenges that sometimes are what this is all about. Well,
Speaker 1: it feels too.
Speaker 2: That you're exploring space a lot, especially your last film
Speaker 2: before Turbulence with No Way Up. People are trapped in
Speaker 2: the space and Turbulence very similar as far as they're
Speaker 2: just being this small space in your bottom of the
Speaker 2: ocean up in the great outdoors. How is that? As
Speaker 2: are you throwing up challenges for yourself when you're working
Speaker 2: with Andy Mason on these projects.
Speaker 1: It originated with Andy I having had a great time
Speaker 1: on No Way Up. And he also wrote and note
Speaker 1: wrote and produced No Way Up. So after all we
Speaker 1: up to call me up? So how about we do
Speaker 1: a follow up movie on a hot air balloon? You're crazy,
Speaker 1: but yeah, and I think that's the pee. That's a
Speaker 1: big part of the appeal to see can we create
Speaker 1: a story in such a confined space as big you
Speaker 1: ten by ten and four people in it. It's a box.
Speaker 1: And granted the box travels so it goes through quite
Speaker 1: epic landscapes and is on our journey, but that aside,
Speaker 1: it's four people in a box, and I restrict myself
Speaker 1: from cutting away to anything else. I'm always there, I
Speaker 1: can I'm stuck. He has the whole story, and then
Speaker 1: that and then taking that on board and understanding how
Speaker 1: can we make this interesting. It reminded me of the
Speaker 1: movies that I a movie, a specific movie, or movies
Speaker 1: that I had, or such as Dead Calm if you
Speaker 1: remember that, the philips into a Noise and I call
Speaker 1: Kim and Sam Neil three characters on a boat to
Speaker 1: the most part of the movie, and it's fantastic grip
Speaker 1: me because these characters are really interesting and you could
Speaker 1: explore who they are and what the layers are and
Speaker 1: what they're holding from each other. And the same was
Speaker 1: the case with Turbulence. That was the goal as right.
Speaker 1: So that's a tremendous challenge as a filmmaker to restrict
Speaker 1: yourself that way and see if you can make it
Speaker 1: interesting and also inevitably maybe they could bear it to
Speaker 1: no way up. But similar in the sense that people
Speaker 1: were stuck in a place, but these sharks coming in.
Speaker 1: Sharks an external threat, which is fine, but it puts
Speaker 1: you in a certain corner of a genre and a
Speaker 1: certain trope. Now this one doesn't have any shark. There's
Speaker 1: no sharks. I'm thick. The threat comes from within. The
Speaker 1: threat comes from the characters, and characters are the elements
Speaker 1: that propelled the story, that caused the story to happen
Speaker 1: in the first place. And this is actually a character
Speaker 1: driven story by definition. So I think that was interesting
Speaker 1: to me. It was different from what I had done before.
Speaker 1: And I knew that I had to find really good
Speaker 1: actors because that's all I had. Yeah, I had to
Speaker 1: dolomite and all that, sure, but that's icing under cake.
Speaker 1: I had the actors, and in a little bit, I
Speaker 1: know that I didn't have good actors. I had greats.
Speaker 1: That was then reading a lot of fun.
Speaker 2: So how does the project come together for you? You mentioned
Speaker 2: talking with Andy as far as getting the follow up
Speaker 2: to No Way Out? How are you going to do
Speaker 2: a sequel to that? But once you talk with him, like,
Speaker 2: how does the project proceed from there?
Speaker 1: That is probably really a question for Andy because he
Speaker 1: has this, he works, he has his own sort of
Speaker 1: superpower to just will things into existence. I tell you,
Speaker 1: it's gotten so hard to get a movie made. It's
Speaker 1: often frustrating and difficult to keep your good spirits on
Speaker 1: in this sort of industry. Where things are getting so
Speaker 1: difficult to get, so many obstacles.
Speaker 2: Thrown your way.
Speaker 1: But Andy has a way of just setting his mind
Speaker 1: to He also has a talent and knowledge and the
Speaker 1: company and all of that behind himself that he mastered
Speaker 1: over the years. Practically speaking, you do pre sales. You
Speaker 1: put a package together which consists of the script, a
Speaker 1: couple of actors, and then you go to foreign sales
Speaker 1: markets and you secure foreign sales and give you a
Speaker 1: certain amount of money if the movie gets made. So
Speaker 1: with those contracts, you go to a bank or a
Speaker 1: financier who cash flows the project and also gets some
Speaker 1: on the top on top of it as a premium
Speaker 1: because it's high risk money. And then you combined it
Speaker 1: with tax credits and shoot it in places where you
Speaker 1: do get tax credits, and you gobble it together and
Speaker 1: it falls apart a couple times and then resurrects, and
Speaker 1: then you hope for the best and pray. It's a
Speaker 1: very nerve wracking process often til you actually start rolling
Speaker 1: cameras and it's fraught with lots of pitfalls, and then
Speaker 1: of course he goes, oh wow, this is so much
Speaker 1: money we had to get, And then you're starting them,
Speaker 1: but it's nowhere near enough money. Every is what that means.
Speaker 1: We have twenty two days to shoot. This is how
Speaker 1: I'm supposed to do this, and everybody expects higherate quality Blois,
Speaker 1: but I have twenty two days. And yes, we're trying
Speaker 1: our best, and you have the best people. It's a
Speaker 1: constant battle, which keeps our lives interesting.
Speaker 2: So how and where do you shoot this? Obviously you're
Speaker 2: talking about the Dolomites, but you're not flying people up
Speaker 2: and a gondola and shooting them under a hot air balloon.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you saw through that. We did shoot in the Dolomites,
Speaker 1: but we did go with a helicopter and acquired all
Speaker 1: the background plates and with very complicated aerial rig with
Speaker 1: an array of cameras that lookstraight sixty degrees, and we
Speaker 1: flew through the path that the balloon eventually takes in
Speaker 1: various shapes and forms. So that allowed us to at
Speaker 1: any given time look every everywhere in the sky except
Speaker 1: for straight up and straight down. But we could look
Speaker 1: everywhere and amass all this crazy footage. And then we
Speaker 1: start pre production in London and shot almost the entire
Speaker 1: movie on assass Sate to twigging them studios in twicken
Speaker 1: Is in London, and we had a basket that was
Speaker 1: suspended in the air inside the studio and we do
Speaker 1: waft wind and blow wind and all the rest of it,
Speaker 1: but shot it against blue screen, and then that required
Speaker 1: I think an unusual amount of imagination from the actors
Speaker 1: as well as the filmmakers to always understand where we're
Speaker 1: at within the journey, what the ranges that were flying
Speaker 1: up against, what the weather is, how it changes. Because
Speaker 1: if you look and you mentioned that, there's a there's effort,
Speaker 1: there's a there's this theme of space in my last
Speaker 1: two movies. Anyways, we think it's true. It's the manipulation
Speaker 1: of space that I think is the definition of what
Speaker 1: a director does, compress space and time into a different form.
Speaker 1: So in this sense, if you look at it, they
Speaker 1: take off in the morning and it's seventy minutes later,
Speaker 1: without ever having a time jumped in the movie, they
Speaker 1: land and it's night. So somewhere in there all day
Speaker 1: passes and then the weather changes and it has to
Speaker 1: be seamless act Like I said, I can never cut away.
Speaker 1: I'm always there, so themeless transitions. In essence, it's just
Speaker 1: one big scene, right, there's not a death to nail,
Speaker 1: so how to break it up and how to create
Speaker 1: these transitions. It was very difficult for the actress also
Speaker 1: to bring their imaginations into this and understand the level
Speaker 1: of intensity at every given point in time. So that
Speaker 1: that was the mechanicals of our challenge of it all.
Speaker 2: Once you get those actors and that gondola, are you
Speaker 2: allowed to shoot chronologically or do you still have to
Speaker 2: jump around from seeing the scene.
Speaker 1: So I wish we'd have done the movie chronological. One
Speaker 1: would think that this kind of a movie is a
Speaker 1: movie that should be able to be shot chronologically. We
Speaker 1: couldn't do this because of actor availabilities. So that added
Speaker 1: another complication. Okay, so how badly is she aarbs? We
Speaker 1: haven't shot to burn yet. We tried to keep it
Speaker 1: as chronological as possible, but it was not all the
Speaker 1: way through, So that add another that would have been
Speaker 1: something that I could have lived without. I would have
Speaker 1: loved to be able to shoot it again, but it's
Speaker 1: just reality. They're all busy people that they're all working
Speaker 1: other things to go with it.
Speaker 2: Well, and I imagine two with that gondolas that you
Speaker 2: have to be able to have pull away so that
Speaker 2: you can get the camera in there along with people.
Speaker 2: Again that Patonus has to be incredible.
Speaker 1: We said, together with the cinematographer Jimi Renoso, is a
Speaker 1: very close friend of mine, we said, we want to
Speaker 1: be inside of it. So the smaller the camera is,
Speaker 1: the smaller the footprint of a lighting setup is, the
Speaker 1: better it is. The more we can be fluidly inside
Speaker 1: the circle of action and look every which way at
Speaker 1: every given point in time, The more we really counteract
Speaker 1: the in built, inherent artificiality of the whole concept, so
Speaker 1: that we're hopefully inside the characters enough for people to
Speaker 1: go with the characters and be interested in them. And
Speaker 1: because again it's all about the level of layers or
Speaker 1: the rooting we have in the characters. Right, It's almost
Speaker 1: like we watch a stage play that has to be
Speaker 1: interesting regardless of what the surroundings are, So try to
Speaker 1: capture that and really depending to building it on the
Speaker 1: characters was the goal.
Speaker 2: I imagine you were talking about the budget. I don't
Speaker 2: imagine there was enough to shoot this with the big
Speaker 2: volume going on around it.
Speaker 1: We consider that at this is it's why the movie
Speaker 1: fell apart before it kind of resurrected the beginning, there
Speaker 1: was this sort of desire by a bit volume metric
Speaker 1: company to shoot this as a almost like a show
Speaker 1: piece for what virtual production can do. I have come
Speaker 1: to understand that this would have been the death of
Speaker 1: this movie anyways, because I believe, and maybe that's too
Speaker 1: big a statement, or maybe of suddenly misinformed or uninformed
Speaker 1: in our world, I know we would have shot the
Speaker 1: wall and not the actors. The wall still comes, and
Speaker 1: I have shot like against the Walls still comes with
Speaker 1: a heavy burden of a huge crew that it's required,
Speaker 1: and it does limit you in terms of what cameras
Speaker 1: and what lenses and what kind of camera movies you
Speaker 1: can use. And I go this enough limitation, and I
Speaker 1: think there's a danger that technology which is supposed to
Speaker 1: liberate you, actually restricts you in ways that it shouldn't.
Speaker 1: And I think every movie, we go to the movies
Speaker 1: because we want to see characters, we want to be people,
Speaker 1: and that the most important thing, the most valuable thing
Speaker 1: for a filmmaker on the day. So if I can't
Speaker 1: focus on that and can't keep if i'm that's what
Speaker 1: I'm supposed to fill, not the background, and rather a
Speaker 1: duty background and posts. Now with all the money in
Speaker 1: the world would have been great.
Speaker 2: Well, how was it working with your actress? Like you said,
Speaker 2: you had to have very good actress on this to
Speaker 2: be able to pull off being stuck with them for
Speaker 2: so long.
Speaker 1: I felt incredibly fortunate with the four then I will, Yeah,
Speaker 1: what can I say? They're all legends, They're fantastics, and
Speaker 1: I got to the point where they gave me still
Speaker 1: much for this movie. Olga in the Starmut Olga, Olga.
Speaker 1: I haven't seen her being bad in any he Ever,
Speaker 1: he's amazing and I understand why and how she does it.
Speaker 1: She comes all her heart, She gives you everything, and
Speaker 1: it's just wonderful. And she has a way of even
Speaker 1: playing a character. If you look at her character, very
Speaker 1: flawed character, very strange, just decisions, and she somehow takes
Speaker 1: them on board rather than questioning. She finds a way
Speaker 1: to embrace those and make him part of her character
Speaker 1: and gives you all the emotion that you could ever
Speaker 1: wish for. Then Jeremy as this really tricky part of
Speaker 1: being a jerk, but there's many Copona fam that make
Speaker 1: him not very sympathetic. Yet he's the one that we
Speaker 1: root for the most part of the movie or want
Speaker 1: to find out. We need need him to be interesting
Speaker 1: to us, and he finds this fine line of walking,
Speaker 1: this fine line of not having us exactly what is
Speaker 1: writing him. And then we have Hair who's exception an
Speaker 1: exceptional actress, and she's able to do things like She's
Speaker 1: able to do things in a natural way that I
Speaker 1: think is magical, as like uncanny. I don't know how
Speaker 1: she does it, but all. And then of course we
Speaker 1: have Kelsey, who's like an old hand. He knows exactly
Speaker 1: what these kinds of movies make and need, and he
Speaker 1: delivered any a gentle person in the process. So I
Speaker 1: felt in extremely good hands. And they allowed me to
Speaker 1: communicate with the characters, now with the not with the actors.
Speaker 1: I spoke with the I felt like I knew the characters,
Speaker 1: and by extension, that told me where to put the
Speaker 1: camera in order to keep the story interesting. So I
Speaker 1: felt they Yeah, I felt incredibly blessed with this cast.
Speaker 2: It talks about how difficult it is to make a
Speaker 2: movie in today's environment, and I'm curious, how many projects
Speaker 2: do you have going? What are you waiting on to
Speaker 2: catch fire? And next or do you just work on
Speaker 2: one project at a time.
Speaker 1: That's a tricky thing. I know that there's some directors
Speaker 1: who managed to do multiple movies and multiple stages at
Speaker 1: any given time. I find that very hard because I
Speaker 1: find once I am in the middle of the movie,
Speaker 1: it's all consumed me. I can't do anything. You have
Speaker 1: ass It takes up absolutely twenty four hours of my
Speaker 1: day and certainly all of my bandwidth. So you both
Speaker 1: so deep into these movies and all through app With
Speaker 1: this one particularly, post was very consuming, very difficult, and
Speaker 1: then challenging. So I just don't know how I would
Speaker 1: find time in the day to focus on putting something
Speaker 1: else into prep. Having said that, I did, in fact,
Speaker 1: because of overlapping schedules, just finished a movie in Switzerland
Speaker 1: to where I shot at European TV movie in the
Speaker 1: summer while this one was still the end of post production,
Speaker 1: and that brought me to the brink of what I
Speaker 1: could do. I need a little bit of a break
Speaker 1: until the end of the year, and then you never
Speaker 1: quite know. I've been lucky with the last two or
Speaker 1: three movies that they come about fairly quickly, but it
Speaker 1: can easily go the other way where you think something
Speaker 1: instead of going to prep next month, and then two
Speaker 1: years later he's still not in prep. So it's difficult, sir.
Speaker 2: Best of luck with turbulence. And I can't wait to
Speaker 2: see the other film that you just directed. So I
Speaker 2: hope you have a great holiday season.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Mike. When I pleasure to talk
Speaker 1: to you, thank you. Which I too.
Speaker 6: Big and.
Speaker 3: Flowed among the stars together you went, We got.
Speaker 6: Up and away, my.
Speaker 5: Bas the world's a nicer place by it's nicer things
Speaker 5: about you can't sing the songs and along the silverst.
Speaker 6: I've been away if I have this time you say,
Speaker 6: you said.
Speaker 3: Buy some change, You buy yourself bad.
Speaker 6: Way.
Speaker 3: I've been the oh my change, your dream across this
Speaker 6: By oh me down, didn't didn't te