5 Questions with Caspar Newbolt
The enigmatic and indelible “Leaving Hope,” by director Caspar Newbolt follows a woman who finds and takes heed of a mysterious book in the NYC subway. We asked Newbolt about working with his lead actress, creating beautiful black and white images, and what comes next for him…
1) Can you talk a bit about your background? And how you got into films initially?
I’m English but I've lived in New York for 14 years now, working mostly as a graphic designer. I’m one of two brothers and the son of two painters. My father was making us watch films by Piero Pasolini and Satyajit Ray at an age where we’d rather be watching THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, but by the time I started to really care about films this early exposure to poetic cinema came to form a foundation for my sensibilities. We had no real money to throw around when I was a kid and so as much as I might have wanted to get into filmmaking, we couldn’t afford even a cheap camera or that kind of additional schooling. This didn’t stop me writing endless terrible scripts of course, but when it came to getting a job I turned to one of the many hand-me-down computers we had kicking around the house and taught myself graphic design instead.
In 2011 the filmmaker Tim Sutton emailed me after he saw a talk I’d done on graphic design for films. He asked me to do the titles and posters for his first feature, PAVILION. This soon lead to me being his set photographer, and not long after that I was standing by the camera watching him create every single shot of his second and third feature films, MEMPHIS and DARK NIGHT. I wasn’t really cognizant at the time of what a priceless filmmaking education this was until I started to make LEAVING HOPE. Up to that point I’d certainly co-directed some music videos with Matt Sundin and Chris Dapkins — and learnt a lot from them too — but otherwise this was to be the first solo trip I’d taken in either the writing or the directing department.
2) How did this project in particular get rolling?
I’d met Laine Rettmer in 2013 as she starred in a music video I’d co-directed for a band called The Protomen. However it was in the making of this video — due to heavy amounts of green screen work and doing a lot of the post-production by hand with my brother — that my love for visual effects in cinema was absolutely destroyed. I simply couldn’t believe how much they sucked the life out of everything I’d once thought filmmaking was about.
Then, in 2014, a French graphic designer called Pauline Fourest came to work as an intern at my studio in New York. She was incredibly talented, full of energy and breathed new life into everything we were doing in the studio. At that same time — thanks largely to working on MEMPHIS with Tim — I’d started to fall in love with the films of Jean-Luc Godard. Pauline didn’t know his films and so we’d sometimes watch them together, and something about the connection I had with her and the in-camera effects driven, raw experimentalism of these 60s films re-connected me with filmmaking. Thus began my exploration of not just the French New Wave, but also Robert Bresson, Chantal Akerman, Louis Malle, Jean-Pierre Melville, Michelangelo Antonioni, Andrei Tarkovsky, John Cassavetes and Ingmar Bergman. The result was astonishing really — I started to see the world in an entirely new light.
Then in 2015 I worked on DARK NIGHT and every night after working on set I would have these panic attacks. They were brought on by a combination of knowing that I was finally ready to make a film on my own, and yet had an abject fear of doing just that. This in turn is of course where LEAVING HOPE’s core narrative came from: I wanted to talk about the parallels between being a non-actor — as I’d seen so many of them working on Tim’s film sets — and a 'non-director,' which is how I felt about myself and was what fueled my fear of making a film on my own.
3) It’s a fantastic performance from Laine Rettmer. What was your working relationship like? And how did you guys build the character together?
In 2015 at my casting director’s Allison Twardziak’s birthday party Laine surprised me by telling me that she’d be in any film I cared to make. 6 months later on the plane back from working on DARK NIGHT I opened my laptop and wrote the name LAINE at the top of a script document. A few weeks later I had a script that didn’t make me want to kill myself, but that was kind of about a time when I had wanted to kill myself. I sent it to Tim and he immediately told me to make it. I then met Laine in a coffee shop — having only just changed the name of the script from LAINE to LEAVING HOPE — and watched her with terror as she, at her insistence, read the script in front of me. It turned out that Laine and I were remarkably similar in some ways and that the story really resonated with her. She said “I’ll do it," and in that moment I found the confidence I needed to make the film.
As we closed in on the scheduled shoot days in early 2016 Laine and I began rehearsals. We’d meet in my studio and talk through the script, and then other actors would come in and we’d work through the scenes together. I’d then rewrite the script where necessary until everyone felt like it was theirs to own. During this process Laine and I got pretty close and developed a completely trusting relationship that truly blossomed once we were on set. When certain scenes weren’t working I’d tell her why I’d written them, what I understood to be the reasoning behind certain character behaviours and then ask her what her version of that would be. We’d then keep trying things over and over whilst the crew waited for us, and both knew immediately when we’d found a way of performing the scene that really sold the idea we wanted to convey. It was in these moments I realized that the things I feared the most about filmmaking — the spontaneity and the making mistakes in front of everyone — were the things I enjoyed the most.
4) The other element that immediately pops out is the beautiful black and white photography. I’d love to hear how you approached your visuals, why you decided on B&W, and how your worked with your D.P.?
Cheers. Well, around 2014 my father bought a very large, double volume of Paul Cézanne’s complete works. When he showed me these books I was stunned to see that all the reproductions of the paintings in both volumes were in black and white. I asked him how this was of any use to him and why he’d paid for it, and he said that black and white reproductions were better than colour ones. He then explained to my stupefied face that colour reproductions simply never matched the colours of the original painting. He said that with a painter like Cézanne, who brilliantly explained pictorial depth with the tonal value of flat colours, you were better off seeing the black and white than the colour reproductions, in order to understand the true architectural depths of his images. You see black and white reproductions never lied or faded in the same way their colour counterparts did. Then, if you wanted to see the actual colours as they really were, it was best to find the original paintings in a museum or gallery and enjoy them that way.
There was something about my father’s explanation that made me realize why I’ve always been more excited about black and white images, and had been so completely floored when I saw Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie for the first time playing silently on a television at a party in Fort Greene in 2014. It’s as if black and white films somehow talk about light, space and figures with a greater level of attention. As Bresson once said, “a black and white film comes closer to painting. For example the way it suggests the green of a tree comes closer to the truth of the tree than the fake green of colour film."
I met Shabier Kirchner in 2015 at a party at my producer Alexandra Byer’s house. He’d read my script already and asked if I’d found a DP for the project yet. Given his incredible talents it was flattering to say the least, and furthermore we were a good match. I told him I wanted it to be shot in 4:3 and black and white. He was into the black and white idea, but convinced me to try widescreen. Soon we were discussing shotlists in my studio and he was introducing me to film’s like Paweł Pawlikowski’s IDA and Denis Villeneuve’s INCENDIES. The funny thing is though that on the day of renting the camera out we couldn’t get the lenses we’d wanted, and so switched back to 4:3 at the last minute. It was almost like it was meant to be.
Once on set, more often than not my words to Shabier were, “just make it as beautiful as you can, man.” And he and his crew grinned and produced beautiful shot after beautiful shot.
5) There’s this very unique dreamy atmosphere in the film. It’s free to move between reality, fantasy and movie world. Can you you talk about these tonal shifts?
Thank you. It’s a funny thing when you finally get to make a film. You discover how much your reality differs from that of everyone else’s. I genuinely thought I was making a very straight forward and relatively realistic film. However the response I got from the script and from the final film was that — just as you describe — I had a rather dream-like story that relied largely on a level of magic realism that I’d not really paid attention to before.
Looking back I can now see that I have more of my parent’s approach to working than I had perhaps ever credited them for. It seems I tend to make films more like paintings than anything else. Each shot or scene I write or cut together is more about putting two colours together to either transform both colours, or to form a new colour, than worrying about the beats of a plot. Whilst I certainly have a very logical reason for everything that’s shot, and have a clear sense of what the intended story is, I don’t care a whole lot about how much I might mislead people narratively. The way I see it I’m genuinely trying to recreate my life experience, and to date I’ve never found my life had a plot or that certain characters appeared to me for any particular reason. To that end I’m far more interested in making something beautiful that gives you time to just be with certain characters. If you then want to find connections between these things you can, but it’s not essential and I won’t feel I’ve failed if you don’t.
Bonus question: What else ya working on at the moment?
I’m working on two feature film ideas. One is a desert-based, rather psychedelic piece that I’m half-way through writing with Matt Sundin, and the other is finished. The latter project is more of a direct extension of LEAVING HOPE, and will likely star Laine again. She’s an opera director and brilliant video artist these days and a continues to be an immense source of inspiration for me.
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