Frédéric Noirhomme, SBC, talks about the filming of "L’Intérêt d’Adam", by Laura Wandel

Adam, aged 4, is hospitalised for malnutrition following a court ruling. Lucy, the head nurse, allows Adam’s mother to stay with her son beyond the visiting hours set by the judge. But the situation gets complicated as she refuses to leave her son. In the best interests of the child, Lucy will do everything she can to help this distraught mother.

We enter the film and are immediately drawn in by the real-time narration.

Frédéric Noirhomme : Laura likes immersion. This isn’t the first film we’ve made together, and each time her narration is based on very little downtime, a very tense form of narrative that traps the viewer in a small place and time. It’s almost unbearable for the viewer ! Even though these shots may be edited at the end, the pace adjusts to maintain this feeling of movement that you can’t escape.
The entire film is shot in a series of sequence shots, with the exception of one scene, the discussion in the small playroom towards the end of the film. In this scene, there were so many characters and interactions that it was impossible to cover it in a single shot.
Besides, we also grouped together three or four sequences from the script that took place in the paediatric emergency room to shoot them in a single continuous shot. I believe three or four cuts in editing were necessary to shorten movements and go from one take to another... But it really was a shot that took us three days to do, with lots of extras. The camera moved from the paediatric ward to the general ward to the waiting room...

Did you shoot in a studio ?

FN : It’s actually very difficult to find a hospital to shoot an entire film in. But I think the studio solution was beyond our budget. And the studio is not an option for Laura, whose methods are rooted in reality and the constraints of natural settings. The only options for us were abandoned establishments or parts of buildings. Here, we were able to shoot in two hospitals, one completely disused in Liège for the emergency room scene I just mentioned. And a second one in Huy, which was still in use but was due to be repainted, so it was temporarily emptied of patients. We took advantage of a very narrow window during the renovation work, shooting six days a week for five weeks. The filming naturally accelerated once the hospital gave us the green light. We had to get started very quickly, without any real rehearsals beforehand, taking advantage of the beginning of each day to find the scene. I watched Laura set up the action with the actresses, refining some of the movement dynamics with her so that the shot would work. The end of the morning was devoted to further rehearsals with the camera, with the shots generally being taken in the afternoon. Given that Laura does between 20 and 30 takes per shot, we finished the sequence at the end of the day.

That’s quite a lot, isn’t it ?

FN : I mean, during the first takes, everything is still very fresh for her, I think, as it is for me. She then works on things little by little, depending on the essence of each scene. It’s very precise work where she can slightly modify a line of dialogue or her intention, a movement... As each shot generally covers the entire set, the crew hides in a room with the monitor. I’m alone on set with the key grip and the boom operator. And many takes are abandoned for acting or technical reasons. We then have to start the scene from the beginning...

How did you light the set ?

FN : The lighting is fully integrated into the set. I was able to replace most of the existing light sources with LED panels, which are better balanced and easier to control. To do this, the set design team built false ceilings that blended into the natural decor, into which we installed Versatile 60x60 two-colour DMX LED panels. All the corridors and rooms were equipped with these false ceiling lights, which allowed me to unify the quality of the light on the set.

A word about the white coats and walls, which quickly became a real headache during colour grading. When you find yourself finalising a shot in a hospital, I can tell you that sometimes you want to tear your hair out ! The notion of white in the image keeps changing as the hours go by, locked in front of the film... Your eye gets used to a shade so quickly, or something you’re looking for at the beginning, that everything can go wrong very quickly from shot to shot. The only valid method is to be very strict with your reference images – and to go back to them – to avoid this particularly insidious kind of drift !

Were you still able to control a certain evolution in the light ?

FN : When you choose this narrative form, with real time on screen, you are forced to respect the lighting language of the place. In a way, we’re telling the story of the hospital as much as we are telling the story of the character. The only way to intervene a little is through the position of the light sources... But, for example, the passing of the hours, the transition from day to night, isn’t obvious. The job of a nurse in a hospital, where you spend your time going from one corridor to another, is quite cut off from the world and from natural light. So much so that at the end of a shift, you sometimes go outside and are surprised that night has already fallen. To mark the passage of time, we played around with our ceiling lights. We changed the rhythm at night, for example by turning off every other light. Night is also subtly signified in the few backgrounds we were able to show. At the end of the corridor, for example, a view of the outside – always blurred – has been created by installing a backdrop photo from Rosco. This is a photo print that can be used during the day with front lighting and at night with back lighting. One of the challenges of the film was to appear ultra-naturalistic, but with a lot of work by the team behind the scenes.

Would you say that the film is a mock documentary ?

FN : For me, in a documentary, there is a relationship with reality that takes over the filming. This can create a sense of distance and observation. With Adam’s Interest, I think it’s quite the opposite. It’s a fictional story, and you have to keep the viewer in suspense from beginning to end. So we recreate a story, in conditions very similar to a documentary, but with all the tools of fiction.

The shadow of Rosetta also looms large over this film...

FN : Yes, of course, the Dardenne brothers’ films are a strong inspiration. You could say that in our generation, with Laura, we’re all children of Rosetta ! And then Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne are also co-producers of the film... When we’re preparing with Laura, we always think about their films and their way of shooting performance. Sometimes it’s small details, movements, postures. Long shots that stay on the back of their necks say so much ! For me, it’s a kind of quiet strength, something that conveys determination. And this film is really a story of willpower. Lucy is determined at all costs, she gives herself this kind of mission. I think it made sense to work on the film in this way.
I should also mention Cristi Puiu’s Romanian film The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), a film we talked about during prep. It’s a deeply moving story in which an old man is dragged from hospital to hospital by a female ambulance driver who has made it her mission to try to save him. There’s something similar of Lucy’s journey in there, and that same energy and determination.

Filming a story in real time, even if it’s not done in a single sequence shot, still raises the question of the rhythm given to the film by the camera on set... how did you approach that ?

FN : No matter how careful we are about the pace on set, our perception ends up being skewed by fatigue, familiarity with the location, and inevitably lots of other things... so we’re bound to get it wrong. Editing is there to correct all those things and maintain the breathless feel, the immersion I mentioned earlier. The presence of our young actor also prevented us from capturing everything in real time. Legislation imposes very limited hours for children on set, so we had to arrange his scenes with possible cut points. This was absolutely necessary so as not to leave him on standby for too long when he wasn’t on screen. Another trick was that our young actor Jules had a twin brother, who didn’t look much like him, but who was able to replace him from behind at certain moments. Anyway, it was a real challenge to shoot these scenes with him on set, with constraints that were very different from the rest of the scenes....
Another thing about achieving rhythm was a day of additional shots, filmed much later, after editing. For this, we returned to the abandoned hospital in Liège that we had used for the emergency scenes. We reconstructed a few small sets that matched what we had filmed previously and shot a few transition sequences. These were mainly shots of Lucy alone, which helped to emphasise her state of mind. As her character is constantly in action throughout the film, we realised during editing that we needed a few quieter moments to better understand where she was at. Little moments of solitude, introspection... in front of a mirror in a bathroom. Very simple things, little moments that helped a lot the editing.

Let’s talk a little about the handheld camera... how did you do this tour de force ?

FN : At 6’1’, I almost always end up framing the actors from above if I put the camera on my shoulder. It’s difficult to get to their height, or simply to be in their line of sight. Of course, you can always cheat a little and bend your legs or hold the camera in front of you, but over the course of an entire film, it quickly becomes very uncomfortable. So I used exactly the same setup I had used on Laura’s previous film (Un monde), which was mostly set in a schoolyard and required me to film at children’s height. This solution is an exoskeleton that relieves muscle strain on my arms and keeps the camera at an intermediate height. I should point out that this solution does not involve any stabilisers, such as Ronin or similar devices, and that the slightly raw feel of the shoulder-mounted camera is retained. The frame continues to breathe, while remaining strictly at the height of the characters’ necks or eyes.

The downside is that it makes the cameraman look a little bigger, and passing through doors—especially backwards—can be particularly tricky ! In terms of cameras, although I had opted for the Sony Venice with a remote head (Rialto) for Un monde, this time I preferred to shoot with an Alexa 35. This choice was justified by its rendering, which is perhaps a little closer to the film look that Laura loves so much. Firstly, the size of its sensor, which is identical to that of classic 35mm film, but also its choice of texture, which can evoke the character of film without much post-production manipulation.
Laura would undoubtedly have liked to shoot her film on film, but the number of takes she usually does took this option out from the start.
For the lenses, we went with Leica Summilux, because Laura really likes to work on her staging with a shallow depth of field. Of course, Leica are not the only ultra fast lenses, but I find the softness of the background blur very subtle. It was undoubtedly our way of further reinforcing the determination of the character on screen. Focus on the character and leave the environment a little abstract. During the only day of costume rehearsals we were able to do just before shooting in the hospital, I remember focusing almost exclusively on finding the right combination of focal length and distance to film the characters. By having them walk successively further away and closer, we ended up determining the ideal scale for the shot in that location. This became our reference point during filming, around which we were able to slightly widen or narrow the frame depending on the scene.

There is also a feeling of getting closer and closer to Lucy as the story unfolds...

FN : Indeed, as the film progresses, the camera gets closer and closer to her, further reinforcing her determination on screen. We also worked on increasingly wider stops, but this is more subliminal. In the opening of the film, Lucy’s character is perhaps a little more permeable to her environment, but as the film progresses and she becomes more determined to help Adam and his mother, she isolates herself more and more with this reduced depth of field...

(Interview by François Reumont for the AFC)