Hélène Louvart, AFC, reflects on the shooting of “Motel Destino”, by Karim Aïnouz

Beberibe, a small town on the north-east coast of Brazil. Below the equator, the temperature is high and the climate very humid. After Héraldo arrives at the motel, an ambiguous relationship develops between him, the owner and his girlfriend, gradually turning into desire, suspicion and violence.
Starring Fábio Assunção, Nataly Rocha, Iago Xavier.

Going back to the roots

Hélène Louvart : Karim wanted to work in Brazil near his home town of Fortaleza. Since Invisible Life, which we shot together in Rio in 2018, returning to his country to create an independent film had become very important for Karim.

The challenge of shooting in film... when you can’t see the rushes...

H.L : Karim really wanted to shoot on Super 16, which he’d had to put aside for his last two films.
Because there are no longer any film labs in Brazil or Argentina, it was a challenge to choose this path. The film came from England and we worked with Hiventy to develop the negatives, telecine the rushes and make the final scans after editing.

We took the time to test the Arri 416 and SR3 (from São Paulo) well in advance of filming, sending our tests to France, which enabled us to check the whole chain with the forwarding agents, between England, Brazil and then Paris.

During the shoot, including weekends, the two flights a week and the time it took to get the film developed, we only saw our first rushes two or three weeks after we’d started shooting. Fortunately, Karim and I already had quite a solid experience shooting with film and trusted the process. It allowed us to stay very focused on the project, and perhaps also gave us the feeling that we hadn’t mastered everything, which was quite stimulating.

A relevant choice when the sun is harsh

H.L : Choosing to shoot on film was a great choice. To keep things as cool as possible, buildings are built with fairly small windows and very bright light entering through them. As a result, the interiors remain very dark. The choice of Super 16 helped us to recreate this contrast elegantly and to use the strong light from the windows as a narrative tool, rather than as a constraint.
Calculating the number of rolls of film per sequence is also a rigorous preparation and shooting process that Karim and I were perfectly comfortable with.

Juggling with different mediums

H.L : Yes, I like to mix media, as I did on Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, as a real artistic choice. For Motel Destino, we also shot digitally, because there were night scenes on unlit roads and on plains, and we would have needed more light to film them in Super 16mm.
We also shot some sequences on Super 8 to accompany some of Heraldo’s feelings and some of his poetic and nostalgic memories.

A motel unlike any other

H.L : Sex motels are quite common in Brazil, with rooms rented by the hour or half-day. Everything is done to maintain anonymity, and the place always has a secure access for clients and an opposite side for the employees’ work. We often filmed in the employee area, a long corridor with access to the 14 rooms, where the lighting is a "working light". In contrast, the lighting in the rooms hosting clients is extremely colourful. So, we recreated a "client" light and an "employee" light in a motel which closed for our shoot.

How to transform a place so that it serves the narrative

HL : Karim wanted to move away from the realistic look of ’cheap’ sex motels we visited during our location scouting. The only commonality we kept with them was the concept of the colourful rooms, which are lit up when they are being used.
The Motel Destino was entirely repainted : the facade, the customer-side walls, the reception, the rooms, with very bright colours (red, orange, yellow, purple), as well as the employee corridor, repainted green and pink.
With Karim, we amplified the colour saturation in the rooms, making them either "ultra-red", "super-violet" or "ultra-orange". It’s worth noting that we never saw green in any of the rooms we visited, probably because this colour isn’t flattering enough on the skin...

This ultra-saturation is quite disturbing for the eyes, it changes our perception, and we used it in on set to distort the characters’ reactions when they deliberately change the rooms’ appearance with lighting.

As for the staff corridor, it was painted in a different hue (green and pink) and without color saturation.

It must have been complex to shoot in rooms that are not at all ideal for filming !

H.L : The rooms are quite small and decorated with mirrors on the ceiling and walls, which doesn’t make it easy to shoot.
Sometimes it was impossible to frame through the eyepiece because although I could avoid the reflection of the camera in the mirrors, I couldn’t avoid seeing myself ! I had to frame with a small monitor to be a little further away from the camera during complicated movements.
The main set-up was based on LED lights on stands, using indirect light and tubes attached to the mirrors.
We didn’t shoot hand-held in Motel Destino, and that was a choice. These characters move around the sex motel, we are with them, accompanying them with dollies or pans, but we’re not spying on them, we are not invisible voyeurs, hiding in the walls, in the rooms, especially during the intimate scenes.

Post-production and the various media

H.L : We did all the post-production in Berlin at Post Republic, and we had to find a way to bring digital into the Super 16 domain, which was quite simple in the end. Making this third film with Karim allowed me to appreciate the richness of his storytelling and visual universe, which can change completely from one film to the next.

(Interview by Brigitte Barbier and translated from french by Chloé Finch, for the AFC)