GreenCine | article

You've clearly established a framework in The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes that works extremely well for your style of filmmaking. More so than Benjamenta. The animated sequences and the live-action sequences are more fluid in your latest film. The narrative is essentially established within the first ten minutes. You know where the story's going to go - it's telegraphed from the very beginning - but it's the journey of getting there that is important.

Stephen Quay: Yes. That's fantastic.

From what I can see here, you're in the midst of something new. What is the inspiration for this project?

Timothy Quay: It's Bruno Schulz's Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. We're starting mostly with puppets but we do want to expand it. We want to use Schulz's writing as a loose framework to bring in a lot of other elements and scenes that we're working with.

Stephen Quay: We've been animating for about six months.

About how long of a piece will it be when it's finished?

Stephen Quay: This is a no man's land.

Timothy Quay: We can make it a short or we'd be willing to bump it up to 70 minutes.

A fully animated 70 minutes?

Stephen Quay: No, no, no. A lot of live action is involved.

Timothy Quay: More like The Comb or In Absentia, with animation followed by a live action scene. Very chamber-ish.

What would it take? Is it merely a question of Keith coming in to raise the necessary budget?

Timothy Quay: Keith now says we're just meant to run off a bit of it. A trailer, basically.

So that investors can look at it?

Timothy Quay: Exactly.

I presume that the financial element is out of your hands.

Stephen Quay: It's out of our hands now.

Timothy Quay: It's something we could give to Keith because he's quite good at all that. He's in a good mood right now and he's very keen to help out. In Rotterdam, we had a meeting with Sandra [den Hamer], who runs the festival there, and Pierre Audi, who runs the Holland Festival. Holland is a music festival and they're doing a collaboration with Rotterdam. They want us to work on an [Alfred] Schnittke piece. We're selling it for next year, to do a film on a little stage for a 20-minute piece called Three Scenes that Schnittke wrote. It's really strange and eerie, so we're very excited to do it. Keith and Sandra have to look for money, but they basically want to do it. But it suddenly hit me with a flash, "Great! We'll take that 20 minutes and put it right into Sanitorium. Drop it in; load it in by helicopter."

Stephen Quay: We'll just do a few cut-aways as a reminder. There are five puppets.

Timothy Quay: And then we've got 20 minutes of core section right there.

That sounds like an excellent way to get the financing together. Three-for-one. One, then another and then all of the shorts combined. For the Rotterdam screenings of Piano Tuner, do you feel that the audiences responded well to the film?

Timothy Quay: We don't know.

Didn't you introduce any of the screenings?

Timothy Quay: The first night we arrived, we meant to introduce it. We went upstairs [to the theater] and the girl at the door said that it wasn't necessary. We said, "We think it is." She made a call and said, "No, it's not necessary." When [IFFR director] Sandra found out, she freaked.

That's very strange.

Stephen Quay: It is.

The festival brought you there.

Timothy Quay: It did. And then we said, "Well, what about the Q&A afterward?" And she said, "No." She thought that it was such a late program and that people just wanted to get home.

Stephen Quay: And then, the next morning, the same thing happened. We walked in and the girl said, right away, "It's not necessary. We weren't told about any introduction."

Timothy Quay: But then somebody said that there was a microphone set up and everything. By then, we got so depressed that we decided to forget it. We were happy to be with Jan [Svankmajer] and that team of people. We liked the producer [of Lunacy, Jaromir Kallista] so much. Such a lovely man.

What was your impression of Lunacy?

Timothy Quay: I think we were both really surprised. We started to really engage with the actor [Jan Triska]. [Svankmajer] was able to get a wonderful performance from the Marquis.

Stephen Quay: From all of them.

Timothy Quay: Yes, right down the line. It's just beautiful and sensuous, something you don't normally think of.

It was interesting to discover that he had written it 30 years earlier because it owed a great deal to the films of that era, the so-called Czech New Wave, in the way that it was constructed. I was amazed. I truly felt that, next to Faust, this was probably his greatest achievement as a feature filmmaker...

Timothy Quay: I agree.

... and largely because of the acting. It shared the same issue with Benjamenta that the animation and live-action are incongruous, but still fit nicely together. They served as counterpoints.

Timothy Quay: The animation, his gung-ho double-framed animation, is somewhat floppy, but it functions like comic relief. It's always a refrain.

Stephen Quay: It just works so brilliantly in Faust and some of his other ones where he's working with food. Even Conspirators of Pleasures, where it's all a bit ropey...

Timothy Quay: He said that Conspirators was originally meant to be just a short film. I don't think it works as a feature. It's too programmed. All of these beautiful objects work much better in the imagination.

In instances in which "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," there are very particular ways in which you manipulate or shift the framing and dissolve into black. In commercials, you regularly see this referenced, or rather "stolen," from your films. It clearly originates with your techniques. It's distracting when it appears in the work of others [such as the music videos of Fred Stuhr].

Timothy Quay: It's creating a language of rhythm. We're going to a certain point and then we're going to deprive you light, like a form of a pause in a visual language.

This is the same with your use of depth-of-field, gradually pulling things in and out of focus.

Stephen Quay: [As he demonstrates...] You can see, if you focus the lens tightly on an object, everything else just drops out of focus. That's actually at F16, as high as you can get, and there is no way you can keep that focus. It's nice because it just makes you really feel the primacy of the image. It just looks like the model of fluidity.

Although you're working with digital video on Piano Tuner and Sanatorium, would you prefer to shoot in 35mm if your budget allowed for it?

Stephen Quay: I think we feel at home with 35mm but we've really come to like digital.

Timothy Quay: If you shoot on film, you'd still have to stick it back into the computer somehow.

There is a certain level of convenience. It's progressing to the point where, in Piano Tuner, it's getting very difficult to tell whether it's film or video.

Timothy Quay: Few people even notice that we shot it in hi-def. We shot the animation to match because it fit well. It was a way that the whole budget could be kept down a bit.

You were also using some matting techniques that you hadn't used on Benjamenta.

Stephen Quay: We had a model that was used for the island [in Piano Tuner] and then we just dropped in the people.

Timothy Quay: We dropped in the actors, we dropped in the sea and we dropped in the sky. We even did the light coming in but that's the simplest kind of matting. We wanted to keep it visible.

Stephen Quay: And atmospheric.

Timothy Quay: The only one bit of CGI in the film. The opening scene where you see the roots of the flower take sustenance from the frog. These roots shoot out and the orchid blossoms, almost like an erection. That's the first time we ever asked for CGI.

Stephen Quay: We animated the orchid ourselves. We had an oven here and we'd shoot one frame and then put it in the oven for thirty seconds. We'd take it out and shoot it again.

Timothy Quay: Then, of course, we played it in reverse and it blossomed.

ADVERTISE on GreenCine!

New