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Hey, folks, Welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth. I'm your host Mike White. On this episode, I'm talking with Claudio Fay. He is the director of the new film Turbulence, which is now currently available for your rental and viewing pleasure. It is a thriller that is set aboard a hot air balloon. Had a great time talking with mister Faye, and I hope you have a great
time listening to it. Enjoy the interview. Can you tell me a little bit about your journey into filmmaking, because I know you've done a little bit of a lot of things.
I have a story that many filmmakers have where I was thirteen or fourteen years old and discovered that you can do short films with a video camera and the first short fie that I made, which was with toys, and it immediately a light went on and I'm like, oh, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. Little did I know I got myself into but it stuck. Yeah.
I saw that you not only direct and produce, but you also do visual effects.
Is that right? My movies always have a good amount of visual effects in him. And there was a phase where I did help out with friends with visual effects because I just had a natural knack for it. But my passion definitely lies in directing whenever I get a chance to do it.
What is it that attracts you to certain projects because you have such a diverse body of work.
To be perfectly blunt and pragmatic about it, it's whatever I get to do, not not whatever I get to do of course I do turn things down that don't connect with me, But I like the idea that I can get myself into things that I'm optimiliar with and explore and find the discover new things. I think curiosity is the thing that is great to be able to live in your job and as a director, if you're not curious, then I think give the all the place.
So discovering new things and exposing myself to new challenges with each movie is part of the reason why I'm doing this.
There are a lot of challenging titles on your resume, and how do you follow up, Paul Verhoven do Holloman two.
That's a challenge? Yeah, that was a huge job. Again, it was an opportunity that was given to me. And at that point we're going, oh, if they allow me to do this movie, of course I will. And then inside the process he goes, oh, my god, how do I how do I do this and not make a completely fool of myself Because we're talking Paul Verhoven. It is one of the one of the most one of
the best, smartest, most celebrated filmmakers ever. And then we're given like a tenth of the budget to a follow up movie a hacking one succeed, But these are the challenges that sometimes are what this is all about. Well, it feels too.
That you're exploring space a lot, especially your last film before Turbulence with No Way Up. People are trapped in the space and Turbulence very similar as far as they're just being this small space in your bottom of the ocean up in the great outdoors. How is that? As are you throwing up challenges for yourself when you're working with Andy Mason on these projects.
It originated with Andy I having had a great time on No Way Up. And he also wrote and note wrote and produced No Way Up. So after all we up to call me up? So how about we do a follow up movie on a hot air balloon? You're crazy, but yeah, and I think that's the pee. That's a big part of the appeal to see can we create a story in such a confined space as big you ten by ten and four people in it. It's a box.
And granted the box travels so it goes through quite epic landscapes and is on our journey, but that aside, it's four people in a box, and I restrict myself from cutting away to anything else. I'm always there, I can I'm stuck. He has the whole story, and then that and then taking that on board and understanding how
can we make this interesting. It reminded me of the movies that I a movie, a specific movie, or movies that I had, or such as Dead Calm if you remember that, the philips into a Noise and I call Kim and Sam Neil three characters on a boat to the most part of the movie, and it's fantastic grip me because these characters are really interesting and you could explore who they are and what the layers are and what they're holding from each other. And the same was
the case with Turbulence. That was the goal as right. So that's a tremendous challenge as a filmmaker to restrict yourself that way and see if you can make it interesting and also inevitably maybe they could bear it to no way up. But similar in the sense that people were stuck in a place, but these sharks coming in. Sharks an external threat, which is fine, but it puts you in a certain corner of a genre and a certain trope. Now this one doesn't have any shark. There's
no sharks. I'm thick. The threat comes from within. The threat comes from the characters, and characters are the elements that propelled the story, that caused the story to happen in the first place. And this is actually a character driven story by definition. So I think that was interesting to me. It was different from what I had done before. And I knew that I had to find really good actors because that's all I had. Yeah, I had to dolomite and all that, sure, but that's icing under cake.
I had the actors, and in a little bit, I know that I didn't have good actors. I had greats. That was then reading a lot of fun.
So how does the project come together for you? You mentioned talking with Andy as far as getting the follow up to No Way Out? How are you going to do a sequel to that? But once you talk with him, like, how does the project proceed from there?
That is probably really a question for Andy because he has this, he works, he has his own sort of superpower to just will things into existence. I tell you, it's gotten so hard to get a movie made. It's often frustrating and difficult to keep your good spirits on in this sort of industry. Where things are getting so difficult to get, so many obstacles.
Thrown your way.
But Andy has a way of just setting his mind to He also has a talent and knowledge and the company and all of that behind himself that he mastered over the years. Practically speaking, you do pre sales. You put a package together which consists of the script, a couple of actors, and then you go to foreign sales markets and you secure foreign sales and give you a
certain amount of money if the movie gets made. So with those contracts, you go to a bank or a financier who cash flows the project and also gets some on the top on top of it as a premium because it's high risk money. And then you combined it with tax credits and shoot it in places where you do get tax credits, and you gobble it together and it falls apart a couple times and then resurrects, and
then you hope for the best and pray. It's a very nerve wracking process often til you actually start rolling cameras and it's fraught with lots of pitfalls, and then of course he goes, oh wow, this is so much money we had to get, And then you're starting them, but it's nowhere near enough money. Every is what that means. We have twenty two days to shoot. This is how I'm supposed to do this, and everybody expects higherate quality Blois, but I have twenty two days. And yes, we're trying
our best, and you have the best people. It's a constant battle, which keeps our lives interesting.
So how and where do you shoot this? Obviously you're talking about the Dolomites, but you're not flying people up and a gondola and shooting them under a hot air balloon.
Yeah, you saw through that. We did shoot in the Dolomites, but we did go with a helicopter and acquired all the background plates and with very complicated aerial rig with an array of cameras that lookstraight sixty degrees, and we flew through the path that the balloon eventually takes in various shapes and forms. So that allowed us to at any given time look every everywhere in the sky except for straight up and straight down. But we could look
everywhere and amass all this crazy footage. And then we start pre production in London and shot almost the entire movie on assass Sate to twigging them studios in twicken Is in London, and we had a basket that was suspended in the air inside the studio and we do waft wind and blow wind and all the rest of it, but shot it against blue screen, and then that required I think an unusual amount of imagination from the actors as well as the filmmakers to always understand where we're
at within the journey, what the ranges that were flying up against, what the weather is, how it changes. Because if you look and you mentioned that, there's a there's effort, there's a there's this theme of space in my last two movies. Anyways, we think it's true. It's the manipulation of space that I think is the definition of what a director does, compress space and time into a different form.
So in this sense, if you look at it, they take off in the morning and it's seventy minutes later, without ever having a time jumped in the movie, they land and it's night. So somewhere in there all day passes and then the weather changes and it has to be seamless act Like I said, I can never cut away. I'm always there, so themeless transitions. In essence, it's just one big scene, right, there's not a death to nail, so how to break it up and how to create
these transitions. It was very difficult for the actress also to bring their imaginations into this and understand the level of intensity at every given point in time. So that that was the mechanicals of our challenge of it all.
Once you get those actors and that gondola, are you allowed to shoot chronologically or do you still have to jump around from seeing the scene.
So I wish we'd have done the movie chronological. One would think that this kind of a movie is a movie that should be able to be shot chronologically. We couldn't do this because of actor availabilities. So that added another complication. Okay, so how badly is she aarbs? We haven't shot to burn yet. We tried to keep it as chronological as possible, but it was not all the way through, So that add another that would have been
something that I could have lived without. I would have loved to be able to shoot it again, but it's just reality. They're all busy people that they're all working other things to go with it.
Well, and I imagine two with that gondolas that you have to be able to have pull away so that you can get the camera in there along with people. Again that Patonus has to be incredible.
We said, together with the cinematographer Jimi Renoso, is a very close friend of mine, we said, we want to be inside of it. So the smaller the camera is, the smaller the footprint of a lighting setup is, the better it is. The more we can be fluidly inside the circle of action and look every which way at every given point in time, The more we really counteract the in built, inherent artificiality of the whole concept, so that we're hopefully inside the characters enough for people to
go with the characters and be interested in them. And because again it's all about the level of layers or the rooting we have in the characters. Right, It's almost like we watch a stage play that has to be interesting regardless of what the surroundings are, So try to capture that and really depending to building it on the characters was the goal.
I imagine you were talking about the budget. I don't imagine there was enough to shoot this with the big volume going on around it.
We consider that at this is it's why the movie fell apart before it kind of resurrected the beginning, there was this sort of desire by a bit volume metric company to shoot this as a almost like a show piece for what virtual production can do. I have come to understand that this would have been the death of this movie anyways, because I believe, and maybe that's too big a statement, or maybe of suddenly misinformed or uninformed in our world, I know we would have shot the
wall and not the actors. The wall still comes, and I have shot like against the Walls still comes with a heavy burden of a huge crew that it's required, and it does limit you in terms of what cameras and what lenses and what kind of camera movies you can use. And I go this enough limitation, and I think there's a danger that technology which is supposed to liberate you, actually restricts you in ways that it shouldn't.
And I think every movie, we go to the movies because we want to see characters, we want to be people, and that the most important thing, the most valuable thing for a filmmaker on the day. So if I can't focus on that and can't keep if i'm that's what I'm supposed to fill, not the background, and rather a duty background and posts. Now with all the money in the world would have been great.
Well, how was it working with your actress? Like you said, you had to have very good actress on this to be able to pull off being stuck with them for so long.
I felt incredibly fortunate with the four then I will, Yeah, what can I say? They're all legends, They're fantastics, and I got to the point where they gave me still much for this movie. Olga in the Starmut Olga, Olga. I haven't seen her being bad in any he Ever, he's amazing and I understand why and how she does it. She comes all her heart, She gives you everything, and it's just wonderful. And she has a way of even
playing a character. If you look at her character, very flawed character, very strange, just decisions, and she somehow takes them on board rather than questioning. She finds a way to embrace those and make him part of her character and gives you all the emotion that you could ever wish for. Then Jeremy as this really tricky part of being a jerk, but there's many Copona fam that make him not very sympathetic. Yet he's the one that we root for the most part of the movie or want
to find out. We need need him to be interesting to us, and he finds this fine line of walking, this fine line of not having us exactly what is writing him. And then we have Hair who's exception an exceptional actress, and she's able to do things like She's able to do things in a natural way that I think is magical, as like uncanny. I don't know how she does it, but all. And then of course we have Kelsey, who's like an old hand. He knows exactly what these kinds of movies make and need, and he
delivered any a gentle person in the process. So I felt in extremely good hands. And they allowed me to communicate with the characters, now with the not with the actors. I spoke with the I felt like I knew the characters, and by extension, that told me where to put the camera in order to keep the story interesting. So I felt they Yeah, I felt incredibly blessed with this cast.
It talks about how difficult it is to make a movie in today's environment, and I'm curious, how many projects do you have going? What are you waiting on to catch fire? And next or do you just work on one project at a time.
That's a tricky thing. I know that there's some directors who managed to do multiple movies and multiple stages at any given time. I find that very hard because I find once I am in the middle of the movie, it's all consumed me. I can't do anything. You have ass It takes up absolutely twenty four hours of my day and certainly all of my bandwidth. So you both so deep into these movies and all through app With this one particularly, post was very consuming, very difficult, and
then challenging. So I just don't know how I would find time in the day to focus on putting something else into prep. Having said that, I did, in fact, because of overlapping schedules, just finished a movie in Switzerland to where I shot at European TV movie in the summer while this one was still the end of post production, and that brought me to the brink of what I could do. I need a little bit of a break until the end of the year, and then you never
quite know. I've been lucky with the last two or three movies that they come about fairly quickly, but it can easily go the other way where you think something instead of going to prep next month, and then two years later he's still not in prep. So it's difficult, sir.
Best of luck with turbulence. And I can't wait to see the other film that you just directed. So I hope you have a great holiday season.
Thank you so much, Mike. When I pleasure to talk to you, thank you. Which I too.
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