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.

I was wondering if you would care to talk about the preparation and execution of two of the most powerful scenes in the film, namely the scene where Ingrid and Jack make love in the room where Ingrid’s writing is scrawled on the walls and the scene where she witness the child die. Also, do either one of your have a favorite scene?

van Houten: Well I think…she just had this conversation with her father, which hits something very deep and then somebody comes in that she loves and she just cannot deal with that I think. She projects her father a little bit on him (Jack). She wants to hear that he loves her but she wants to hear it from her father as well. When somebody tells you that and you don’t really believe it you get angry because you don’t trust that person anymore. It’s not a love scene, that’s why it’s so good, it’s an inner fight almost and you see it in a love scene but in fact there’s so much more going on.

van der Oest: Also, the choice of showing the lines, the poetry lines, in between makes it more than just a love scene because you realize the things going on in her head. And the other scene, the child that was shot dead…well, originally, in her real life, Ingrid Jonker read about it, went to the police station and looked at pictures of boys shot dead. For a movie it’s not a very dramatic, convincing thing to just show someone looking at a picture. And I really wanted the audience to feel what she felt. And also show what happened during apartheid. Younger audiences might not be aware of what happened during apartheid or audiences living on the other side of the world. So I chose to make it more intense and also what I liked about it—we discussed endlessly how to shoot it—is the fact that we’re in the car from their perspective. It also tells something about how frustrated and powerless they felt, helpless. So it was really a choice to let them stay there and watch it through the windshield.

For van Houten: your first language is, of course, Dutch. Talk about the preparation involved with doing a part in English; was there a lot more prep work involved than usual?

Oh yea! (laughs) Because normally I would focus on British or American English. In this case I had to sort of have a British accent but with a little bit of Australian; it felt like there were two languages at the same time. It was very difficult I thought but great to work on because I’m quite a perfectionist. It added something, it made it even more of a character for me.

How would the two of you describe your working relationship?

van Houten: We did a lot of talking in advance. A lot of talking on the couch. I wanted to know everything so we talked for forever and ever and ever until I think we got the same idea. Then I think we didn’t really need words so much. We did a lot of stuff on intuition.

van der Oest: After all those conversations after she did a take I thought, “Wow, yea, that’s it,” or I thought, “let’s try something else,” but it was always within the range of what we had decided Ingrid Jonker would be.

For van Houten: were there any performances that you looked at to prepare?

No. I focused on the books and everything I could read about Ingrid but I don’t remember watching anything. That’s not really how I work.

van der Oest: That’s the good thing about her performance. She’s looking for something inside herself and she makes a connection with the character that she is playing. Therefore it’s so layered and so intense.

Now, I understand that you, Carice, got involved with Black Butterflies about 4 years ago and you, Paula, even further back than that.

van der Oest: Yes, 6 years ago (laughs). When films come out the audience of course never knows how long it took to make the film and sometimes it can take this amount of years. And that’s because financing is always difficult. It’s a piece of art, it’s about a poet, it’s not a highly commercial subject, though, I think a lot of people would love to see it. So that took a long time. It was an expensive film because we had to shoot in South Africa so we had to find financial partners in different countries. It’s mainly Dutch and South African financing with a little bit of Germany.

Source: Cinespect