5 Questions with Celine Layous & Quinn Else
1) Can you talk briefly about your backgrounds, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
Celine: I’m a cinematographer from Beirut, Lebanon. I graduated with a BA from Institut d’Études Scéniques Audiovisuelles et Cinématographiques in Beirut. I moved to Los Angeles in 2017 and recently completed my Cinematography MFA at the American Film Institute Conservatory. I have worked as a cinematographer and camera operator on various formats in the MENA region. Now based in Los Angeles, I continue to build my career in the visual arts.
A film that helped shape my taste and narrative inclinations is “Barton Fink”. All the aspects of the film that build the main character’s spiral into madness have inspired me to enhance my cinematography through in-camera and practical lighting effects. I try and create bold, dazzling and when appropriate, disorienting visuals. My attraction to these images stems from the lessons I’ve been granted from a combination of the people, experiences and conflicts I encountered growing up in Beirut. People tend to look away from the obscure and I believe filmmaking has an ongoing power to guide audiences' eyes towards these disregarded realities.
Quinn: I’m inspired by real people and places. Rather than make documentaries about these subjects, I like to reimagine them within genre films and to use established genre conventions as tools to explore subjective experiences. My first short film UFO Days (thank you for sharing on NoBudge!) was shot on location at a UFO festival in Wisconsin and starred a real-life UFO conspiracy theorist named Bill Johnson. Rather than simply document the person and place, the film attempted to imagine a science-fiction narrative in which Bill is visited by an extraterrestrial at the festival, immersing him in the ufology he espouses. I recently made a war film called Fort Irwin that distorts action film tropes by placing an amputee veteran actor into an obviously fake military reenactment, but photographs the reenactment like a Hollywood blockbuster. I’m more interested in the conflict between films and reality than trying to recreate reality in a film. Turn On reflects that tension.
2) What was the initial idea and how did it evolve from there?
Celine: It has become a rite of passage for the post-war generation of Lebanon to consider leaving the country in search of a better life. Many did leave, I am one of them. I know very well that feeling of collective despair, that stubborn belief that the reality will never change. Intriguingly, this same despair has bred a sense of solidarity, a collective desire to escape. Turn On is a reflection on my last two years-leaving Lebanon and the joys and fears that come with that journey. They say you cannot hate Beirut, unless you love it first. I’ve fallen in and out of love with that city - as a resident and expat - more times than I should. This film is dedicated to my family and friends who chose to stay. It is a visual essay on my longing to reconnect with my community but also a gratefulness to be far away from it.
Quinn: The United States is an isolated place. This geographic, social and political isolation leads us to not truly pay attention to other countries’ hopes and fears. While Turn On takes the negative ecological and economic realities of Lebanon and reimagines them in the West, it also tries to capture a type of community that is rarer in the USA. Escapism in the United States has become a solitary activity aided by the internet, not a communal gathering. When I visited Lebanon I felt a part of something bigger, even if it was just a way for young people to forget about conflict. It was a type of group connectivity that was inspiring.
3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And generally what part of the creative process do you enjoy the most?
Celine: It was challenging to try to take a very specific regional story about my experience in Lebanon and reimagine it in a more universal environment. While Turn On is atemporal and does not belong to any particular space or time - its essence, the grim environment, the trash, the power outages, even the smoking habits, are all inspirations from Beirut. These simple elements reflect an ongoing and repetitive loop of real world issues that most locals have lost hope in resolving. Our hope by casting Western actors, and setting it in an ambiguous industrial area in Los Angeles, was to assert that these issues, economic and environmental collapse, can happen anywhere.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
Quinn: Celine showed me “Paris,Texas” recently, which I’d never seen and is one of her favorite movies. Beyond its marvelous cinematography and technical execution, “Paris,Texas” took road movie and western film tropes and reimagined them in surprising, moving and haunting ways. Travis’s arc is remarkable. We first meet him as a sensitive and vulnerable man, only to have his monstrous past revealed, concluding with his redemptive but pyrrhic victory. Complex, real characters! His and Jane’s relationship is stunning.
Celine: Robby Muller is a reference for his intuitive style. His compositional skills are elegant and thought provoking, adding greatly to our understanding of the characters in the world. In “Paris,Texas” specifically, he used color as a metaphor, maintaining an emotional continuity without overwhelming us;
Red, White and Blue alluding to society, family and the American dream versus the color Green, whether artificial or out in nature, representing the alienation of man and the distress of leaving home. I hoped to develop a similar approach to mixing colors in Turn On, to create images in which the visuals take on a more elaborate meaning in context of the story.
5) What’s next for you?
Celine: We recently made a short horror film called JANE that should be released on TV around Halloween 2020. I shot it and Quinn directed it. It’s about the strange, mystical and terrifying art of forensic sculpting. Beyond that, I’m navigating the American film industry, and working towards earning my artist visa.
Quinn: I’m working on a short documentary about the wildfires in California, and the strange spectators that gather to watch the natural disasters.
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IG: @celinelayous
IG: @_quinnelse