Fest Track On Sirk TV Interview: DEAR JASSI [Toronto Intl Film Festival 2023 - Toronto, Ontario - Remote] - Part I - video Dailymotion

Fest Track

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.

Transcript

00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]

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.

07:37 [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

07:39 [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

07:41 [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

07:42 [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

07:43 [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

07:46 [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

07:49 [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

07:52 [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

07:55 [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

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.

11:19 [MUSIC PLAYING]

11:22 [MUSIC PLAYING]

11:26 [MUSIC PLAYING]

11:30 [MUSIC PLAYING]

11:34 [MUSIC PLAYING]

11:38 [MUSIC PLAYING]

11:41 (upbeat music)

11:44 [MUSIC PLAYING]

Fest Track On Sirk TV Interview: DEAR JASSI [Toronto Intl Film Festival 2023 - Toronto, Ontario - Remote] - Part I

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