Director Tarsem Singh talks to Fest Track about thematics, narrative license and visual texture in regards to his new dramatic film: "Dear Jassi" playing the Platform section at the Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto, Ontario.
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Short filmTranscript
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00:03 Making a film is such a big undertaking, you know?
00:29 And this one seems even more so.
00:32 Even though you've done the big movies,
00:34 this is a big movie in all of its themes
00:37 and all these things.
00:38 Can you talk about that?
00:39 Because the psychological places people need to go in this
00:42 is really very intense.
00:44 Have you seen the movie?
00:45 Yes.
00:46 Wow.
00:47 OK.
00:48 Yes, it's hard to describe.
00:49 When you tell people "Romeo and Juliet,"
00:51 I think there was a friend, Mark Romanek, who looked at it.
00:55 And he just said--
00:55 I said, it's "Romeo and Juliet."
00:56 He just said, no, you need to get a little bit more license.
00:59 When you pull the rug, he said, it's incredibly disturbing.
01:02 And he-- this was when he saw an earlier cut.
01:05 Then I put the mystic saying the words to do the setup.
01:08 So hopefully the film does it for you.
01:10 Because he just said, no, it can't be "Romeo and Juliet"
01:12 because in that one, they die from a misunderstanding
01:15 of pills and that information.
01:18 I wasn't ready for a machete attack and a gang rape
01:21 and a blah blah.
01:21 And I went, OK.
01:22 So he said, you don't want the audience to hate you for not
01:26 giving them a heads up.
01:28 Then the problem is I overboarded and tried
01:30 to set it up too much up front.
01:32 And I realized the clock was out of the bag so early
01:35 that you didn't.
01:35 I said, no, I'm going to go with the Groucho Marx thing, which
01:39 is you make audience fall in love with it.
01:41 I mean, his take was you let the audience outgrass you,
01:44 and then you double cross them.
01:45 So you tell them it's going to get dark.
01:47 And then you kind of like show you how they fell in love.
01:49 You believe the situation.
01:50 OK, I'm not going to do anything.
01:52 And then you do that.
01:53 And then you come back to cathartic again.
01:56 So I kind of went for that particular circle.
01:58 And it took only tweaking because there was no coverage.
02:01 Blanc asked me one particular time, do you have a close up?
02:04 I said, there is no close up.
02:05 I shot everything.
02:06 That's why there is no editor.
02:07 I edited it in 48 hours.
02:09 It was done.
02:09 It's just medium shots.
02:11 I looked at the performances.
02:12 And I just said when I shot it, I used the cliche of it's--
02:17 imagine, Hanukkah wrote a script.
02:19 And Shirin Nishad, not even like Asfar Ali,
02:22 like Shirin Nishad directed it.
02:24 So it's very tabloid shot.
02:26 But what's happening inside the flame is not tabloid.
02:29 It's naturalistic.
02:30 So the two schools don't mix, Hanukkah and Shirin Nishad.
02:34 Then I just said, no, I'm going to put that together.
02:36 And the structure will be that.
02:40 I want to stay here with you for a--
02:44 [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
02:46 [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
03:10 Yeah, it's funny.
03:10 You bring up Mark.
03:12 Because I talked to Mark both when "One Hour Photo" came out.
03:14 But then he and I talked many years later again about it
03:17 after Robin had died.
03:18 And it was interesting because what you were talking about,
03:21 it's sort of like lulling people in and pulling out the rug,
03:23 but giving them enough room to form their own perceptions.
03:28 He used the great word.
03:29 He said, like he said, I think the word always people use
03:31 is license.
03:32 But did you have a license to go there?
03:34 And then I overbought the license
03:36 by putting some of the darkness up front.
03:38 And I just thought, like, no, I don't
03:40 want you to think you know where it's going.
03:42 I want to tell you in research that this is what you see.
03:44 And also, you have to remember, my friends
03:46 had heard nothing about it.
03:47 Mark and everybody thinking, oh, you made a little--
03:49 it's a Bollywood Hollywood.
03:50 And he came in, and he was like--
03:52 he said, I can't fucking breathe.
03:53 You need to set this up.
03:54 And I just said, OK, but people who will see it in the thing,
03:56 it'll say, dear Jesse, hopefully they
03:58 would have seen a trailer.
03:59 They would know it's Robin Juliet, and it'll go there.
04:01 So now it's playing much better, thanks to notes from, I think,
04:05 Mark, phenomenal, from Fincher, and from best ones,
04:12 I would say, but really poignant ones.
04:13 One from Fincher's wife, Sian.
04:16 She was articulate about it.
04:17 And also from Bennett Miller.
04:19 I just-- I've never done it before,
04:21 because these guys--
04:22 I've had these guys for friends, and they always
04:24 show each other rough cuts and talk on how to tweak.
04:26 Whenever they showed me a rough cut, I'd be like, great.
04:28 I just thought they want me as an audience.
04:30 And when I showed them, they just looked and said, no,
04:33 you need to ding, ding.
04:34 And I'm like, oh, so that's what you wanted from me?
04:36 I wish I'd given it to you earlier.
04:38 Unfortunately, the kind of films that make us so visual,
04:41 in the beginning, that whatever is not working,
04:43 I go, I'm going to solve that visually.
04:44 Is this going to be allowed?
04:45 That's why you're not feeling it,
04:46 because I'm going to do x, y, z.
04:47 In this one, there's nothing I could do.
04:49 That was it.
04:50 The movie is very visual, but not fantastical.
04:54 And I've never done that.
04:55 When I went with that, I just said,
04:57 what I intend to show, you can see.
04:59 So if it's not working, tell me.
05:01 And I couldn't have shown it to a better group of five people.
05:04 So they just dinged at me with that, and I went like,
05:07 oh my god, they solved every problem
05:09 that I thought I was having.
05:10 They told me what the problems were,
05:12 but Sian told me a particular solution, and that happened.
05:16 [VIDEO PLAYBACK]
05:16 [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
05:18, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
05:46 [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
05:58 - Now, you were talking about naturalism.
06:00 Sometimes that's the hardest thing to direct,
06:01 because organically, you have to find that.
06:04 And between your two lead actors,
06:05 I mean, one who really hadn't acted before,
06:07 you have to sort of balance that with an organic sort
06:10 of nature of, OK, here's where the camera is, per se,
06:13 I would think.
06:14 Can you talk about finding the right direction in this style?
06:17 - It's quite difficult. That's why the brief that I gave
06:20 to them was that I don't want actors.
06:22 I said, I will look for the person who's poignantly right.
06:25 What I did in the fall was to look
06:26 for that girl who had the language barrier, who had XYZ.
06:29 In this particular one, I said, I don't want an actor.
06:31 And they just said, oh.
06:32 And when I told the producer, I mean, there's no music,
06:34 but there is no background music.
06:36 And I think the writer's thing was, so how will you know when
06:38 it's scary?
06:39 And their emotional part, I said, acting, hopefully.
06:43 And so I just didn't want any background music.
06:45 So it became all the more important
06:46 that the people that I cast were--
06:51 the genuine article.
06:52 So when they showed me all the actors, it never worked.
06:55 Then when I saw this Kabaddi player, they said,
06:56 but he can't act.
06:57 He's done nothing.
06:58 I said, it's OK.
06:59 Now we treat him like basically a child.
07:02 And he was so smart that-- but I did
07:05 create exactly the same environment
07:07 that I did for the fall.
07:08 But the first time they meet, the first scene is shot first.
07:11 The second scene is shot second.
07:12 Third scene-- so basically, I built their relationship
07:15 on that.
07:16 But somewhere when about 70% of it was done, he got it.
07:19 And then I could help production a bit
07:21 by shooting certain scenes out of sequence.
07:23 But until that particular point, I just said, you can't.
07:26 The guy is a sportsman.
07:28 He's coming.
07:29 He's doing everything I'm asking him.
07:30 Let's make his life comfortable.
07:33 [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
07:35 I can't live without you.
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07:57 But on the reverse with Jessie, you have to show her just
08:00 longing, but also her understanding of the world,
08:03 per se, and yet not understanding the world.
08:06 I had that good language barrier,
08:08 which the real girl did, too, that her English was
08:10 much better than the Punjabi's, very broken.
08:13 So you kind of give the other person a lot more benefit
08:15 of the doubt.
08:16 The problem was that even all the other actors
08:18 and all that they gave me, they were all actors.
08:20 And it was horrible.
08:22 So it couldn't work.
08:23 So in these particular time when I would get it,
08:25 I said, only one thing you have to do
08:26 is keep him away from actors.
08:27 And keep him away from-- because he's
08:29 coming from a different school.
08:30 And I'll get that naturalism out of him.
08:32 They should learn from him.
08:33 But the thing is, in the last scene, which is quite intense,
08:36 those people are incredible theater actors,
08:39 because there is nobody inside.
08:41 They're just on the phone doing a play in front.
08:43 I rehearsed it on location about 18, about 23 times.
08:48 And we shot one take, because I didn't want the mystic
08:52 to hear what's happening.
08:53 I said, he will never go in the zone.
08:55 He'll never give me that shot to tell me somebody and walk away.
08:58 And that's exactly what happened,
09:00 because I brought him over yesterday.
09:01 And for the first time, he saw the film.
09:03 He was supposed to go outside the theater and sing.
09:06 He saw that film.
09:07 He just didn't get up from his seat.
09:08 He just said, I can't.
09:09 And I said, OK, OK, send everybody home.
09:11 So I knew that's what would happen.
09:12 So those people are theater actors.
09:15 So it worked.
09:16 But I wanted them nowhere near the people
09:18 who were doing this stuff that was being made up
09:21 and moving along.
09:23 [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
09:24 But that's why the dichotomy of the shots,
09:46 like the last shot, which I want to give away,
09:48 the last shot with her and the way
09:50 that looks with the pan, and then going to them
09:53 and the singing and the way that book ends it.
09:56 I mean, obviously, it's--
09:57 [INTERPOSING VOICES]
09:58 --shot that, I was gutted.
09:59 I walked away.
10:01 And I just-- this thing, one of my friends said,
10:03 I think I've shot the best shot I've ever shot.
10:05 And the guy said, oh, is it incomplicated?
10:07 I said, it's a pan, actually.
10:11 It's a pan.
10:12 But I just thought it was--
10:13 the sun had to come up at the right time.
10:15 These guys, I told them, whatever happens,
10:17 this mistake, we'll get one chance at him.
10:19 Because when I asked him, can you do this?
10:20 I've seen you sometimes do this.
10:22 And his answer was, if it feels right.
10:25 So I had no idea what he's going to do.
10:27 I told him, OK, when you go, just walk off to the road,
10:29 go wherever you want.
10:30 He said, OK.
10:31 So when we did the thing, I knew we had one take.
10:33 But when the pan happened, the sun came up behind him.
10:36 It takes seven minutes to come out from behind the tree.
10:38 It's an 18-minute shot.
10:39 I cut out the last six minutes because I
10:41 thought on the big screen, you could see him till the very end.
10:44 But you can't.
10:45 Once he goes to the right, people--
10:47 but it needed that thing to decompress.
10:49 So I left the length of that shot,
10:51 because people are quite like Mark.
10:53 They were like, what did you just do?
10:55 When I showed it to him, there were no titles.
10:56 He was just thinking, I didn't know when to stop
10:58 and if I should stop.
10:59 And I just said, OK, I had to tweak
11:00 where the titles go to allow you enough time to decompress.
11:03 I tried taking out that section.
11:05 And it was like, hey, it would turn into a Gasparnoay film,
11:09 which is just when you hit it, bang, you go, OK, out,
11:12 finished.
11:12 And I didn't want to end there.
11:14 I think people needed a breather.
11:16 So I left that length in exaggeratedly.
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