TIFF50
At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, we sat down with director Nanouk Leopold and actress Natasha O’Keeffe to discuss their new film Whitetail. This exchange is presented as part of The Interview, a series of dialogues with filmmakers and actors.
Quiet Axis: So you discuss the landscape as almost as another character. The landscape is transformative for Jen, and as a director you hope that it has the same effect for the audience. You mentioned that you grew up in an urban environment, and for that reason, the countryside really appealed to you. What did filming in that natural landscape give you that an urban setting couldn’t?
Nanouk Leopold: I grew up in the Netherlands, in Rotterdam, and I’ve made films in my own town, and we don’t really have landscapes in the Netherlands so coming to Ireland and experiencing this vastness in the landscape, this broad view, it does something to you, and it goes both ways. It also isolates you from the rest of the world, so it’s like you’re on your own, but it’s also like you’re being part of something that’s nature, and something that’s not. It’s forgiving because it doesn’t ask you to do anything else than live and die and that’s okay. You can do that, and nature does it, and it’s all fine, and there are no worries about that. So that gives you peace of mind. I experienced that myself when I was there, and I really wanted to put that into the images, into the frames that we were showing the people. I was trained as an artist to work with space, and space conveying emotion, and that’s what I was trying to do also in this film, the story of Jen, which is this whole healing process of a person who has not moved for a long time and starts moving, and actually breaks free of herself and can breathe again in the end. I tried to put that also into the images, in the different pieces of woods we would find, because it’s all patched together from different kinds of woods and landscapes.
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