Carice van Houten was named best actress at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival in New York for her role as the South African writer Ingrid Jonker in Black Butterflies.

Congrats, Carice!!!

Cinespect sat down for a Q&A session with director, Paula van der Oest, and actress, Carice van Houten, to talk with them about their new film, Black Butterflies, which is competing in this year’s Tribeca Film Festival in the World Narrative Competition. Both director and star talked about the preparation and execution involved in bringing the story of South African poet, Ingrid Jonker, to the screen.

When reading about the crafting of the screenplay it mentions that once you, Paula, came on board the film “moved away from an apartheid-driven biopic into a feverish insight into the creative mind.” Why the shift in focus?

It’s not that the first time someone has asked me this but it was not more of a political film, it was more a love story (between Jack Cope and Ingrid Jonker). But I thought there’s more to tell about this woman than her relationship with her lover, Jack Cope. I was more attracted to the fact that she had this very difficult relationship with her father. In itself the relationship represents her and the political situation is represented in Ingrid and her father. He was a part of the censorship board and she was the artist, the free spirit.

When you, Carice, were thinking about how to play Ingrid Jonker was there any one key to the performance be it a poem, a conversation with someone, an article of clothing, a photo, a performance, etc.?

Well, yes, maybe. We talked forever about Ingrid because she’s so unpredictable and sometimes you cannot grasp her and for an actress you want to understand everything so we went through everything. We had a really nice talk with a woman that used to know her and all of a sudden we felt like she’s actually a child. She never grew up, she’s just a damaged child and if you see it from that perspective everything sort of fits.

Now if you hypothetically could have spent a few hours or days with Ingrid Jonker, in some alternate universe, how do you think you would have felt and thought about her, as regular people, not as people telling her story?

van Houten: I think she was definitely somebody that you wanted to get close to. And unpredictable, interesting and probably not easy but I think she was a lot of fun as well.

van der Oest: I think there was the fun side, which, of course, we didn’t show much in the film. But she was also completely in love with literature, she wanted to learn. She was not completely self-absorbed and only doing her little thing. She also discussed literature, the world. I think she was intelligent, sensitive and yes, unpredictable. I would have liked her.

For van der Oest: would you be able to name films, notable figures or anything at all that directly inspired your approach to “Black Butterflies” and where are such influences most prominent?

It’s hard to mention them. What I did with the cinematographer is take the poems as a reference for the cinematography. So whenever we didn’t know how to do something we just went back to the poems and we decided we wanted two things. First, we wanted to show the importance of nature. We also didn’t want to make it too glamorous. To be very close to Ingrid. So the camera was always on an easy rig so it was always moving a little bit. You hang the camera so that it’s kind of over you like a shower. So there’s always a little bit of movement, a little bit of life. We also watched a lot of different films like “Into the Wild” for the shots of nature. We watched a lot of love scenes. I remember a day when she and Liam Cunningham were talking with me about doing the love scenes, that’s always a bit difficult. We watched endless sex and love scenes on DVD in a room. People coming in the room must have thought we were watching pornography (laughs). So far as films examples come from everywhere. I looked at “The Hours,” the Edith Piaf movie, just to see how other portraits were made but then finally we chose our own style.

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There have been so many films set in South Africa that have covered the decades of Apartheid over the years one would think there’s very little ground to cover, but Black Butterflies, directed by Paula van der Oest, who helmed the Oscar-nominated Zus & Zo, takes a different approach by looking at the country’s civil unrest through the eyes of one of the country’s great poets, Ingrid Jonker.

Taking place in the early ’60s at the height of Apartheid, Jonker is played by Carice van Houten (Valkyrie, Black Book), as the film follows her turbulent relationship with author Jack Cope, played by Liam Cunningham, from their first meeting. At the time, Jonker was rebelling against her racist father, a high-ranking official who was in charge of the censorship of literature, and who is played in the film by legendary Dutch actor Rutger Hauer. After Jonker’s death in 1965, her poems were embraced by the anti-Apartheid movement, and one of them was even read by Nelson Mandela in 1994 at the opening of the first democratic Parliament.

ComingSoon.net sat down with the director and actress for a quick interview at the Tribeca Film Festival, which you can watch below. (Our apologies to the ladies for the noisy setting and if the lighting wasn’t as flattering as we normally like for these interviews, but we had to make a last-minute change in venue.)

Black Butterflies is playing two more times at the Tribeca Film Festival, on Tuesday at 3:30pm and Friday at 10pm, both at the Clearview Chelsea Cinemas.

The uncompromising power of Ingrid Jonker’s poetry runs like a pulsing vein through Black Butterflies, a 1960s-set drama whose several strong points include the angry intensity of Carice van Houten’s fearless perf. Highly intelligent, brilliantly thesped English-language entry from Dutch helmer Paula van der Oest (Zus And Zo) never entirely escapes the curse of the hindsight-driven biopic, particularly with the “South African Sylvia Plath” analogy hanging over its heroine’s doomed head. Nevertheless, arthouse prospects loom large for this sexy, highbrow, anti-apartheid period piece.

Like most of van der Oest’s heroines, Ingrid registers as intransigent, contradictory and unforgettable. None of her men know quite what to do with her. The two most important writers/lovers in her life complain that she “drains” them. Her father, Abraham (a chilling Rutger Hauer), a racist conservative minister heading the Censorship Board, loathes her, constantly denigrating her work and her bohemianism and granting permission for shock treatments that would still her poetic voice. If anything, Greg Latter’s script and Hauer’s nuanced interpretation soften Abraham Jonker’s callousness: Upon learning of his offspring’s death, Jonker reportedly remarked, “They can throw her back into the sea for all I care.”

Early on, Ingrid is saved from drowning by novelist Jack Cope (Liam Cunningham, quietly commanding as in Hunger and The Wind That Shakes The Barley). Their tumultuous relationship becomes the film’s romantic lodestone, as Jack constantly picks up the pieces after Ingrid’s father has shattered her.

Ingrid swings from one mood to another sans any boundaries or perspective, as Jack struggles with her open sexuality and emotional neediness. A caring mother to daughter Simone (portrayed by a succession of actresses from infancy to young girlhood), Ingrid is periodically driven to drink and neglect. Though institutionalized at various stages, she only clearly manifests madness in her tendency to repeatedly seek affection and validation from her father, the one person guaranteed to withhold them.

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Yesterday, April 23, Carice attended the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival in New York City to promote her new movie, Black Butterflies, which had its first US premiere:

GALLERY LINKS:
• Public Appearances: 2011 Tribeca Film Festival: Black Butterflies Premiere

On my way back from Germany I spent a couple of days in Amsterdam and lucky me I got to sit down with the amazing actress Carice van Houten as she prepared to head to the US for the premiere of her new film Black Butterflies at the Tribeca Film Festival this weekend. The premiere is Saturday, April 23rd at 9pm. This is the first in a series of interview I did with Carice and the film’s director Paula Van Der Oest.

Source: Women and Hollywood

And here are the HD screen captures of the interview:

GALLERY LINKS:
• Miscellaneous: Black Butterflies interview with Women and Hollywood – April 21, 2011

28 Weeks Later director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo goes more of the psychological route with his new fright film Intruders. The Spanish director unveiled the first trailer and discussed the movie at the Malaga Spanish Film Festival yesterday.

Clive Owen, Black Death‘s Carice Van Houten, Inglourious Basterds’ Daniel Brühl, Pilar López de Ayala, Ella Purnell, Izan Corchero and Kerry Fox star in Intruders, and according to The Hollywood Reporter, Fresnadillo describes it thusly: “The film centers on the origin of the monsters that are born in childhood and are passed on by the family. Clive looks like a normal man, even heroic, who has a range that can take him to do the dark side and allows him to travel the entire trajectory of the character.”

The $13-million film is currently in post-production, and though a distributor hasn’t been signed yet, “We have many suitors,” Fresnadillo says.

Source: Fangoria