The Guests

Director Shane Danielsen

Court Métrage, Festival de Cannes 2015

“The Guests is set in the late 1960s. A young woman has just moved to a far corner of Europe with her husband and new baby. She doesn’t know this new city, nor anyone in it; she doesn’t speak the language. Her husband has been away, travelling on business, and she’s anxiously awaiting his return. There’s a knock on the door… she goes to answer it, thinking it’s him. But it’s not.”- director, Shane Danielsen

GFM:
The Guests is your first film as a director. How did the production come together?

Shane:
It happened mostly because of a state-subsidised fund from Screen NSW in Australia, for emerging filmmakers. Each year it funds three shorts to a value of AUD30,000. Which is not a lot of money, but it’s definitely useful. We were one of the three projects selected for 2014. I also work part-time as a creative consultant at Hopscotch Features in Sydney, and they also put in a little money, because they believe in me and seem to want to make a feature film with me somewhere down the line.

It was important to me that everyone got paid. I didn’t want to call in any favours, and I also wanted to have a good crew, because it was the first time I was doing this. I’ve never directed anything before, and I wanted a crew that would support me and who I could learn from. New filmmakers always talk about being ‘protected’ … I didn’t need that. I wasn’t frightened to do it—quite the contrary. But I did want knowledgeable professionals around me to help me and teach me.

 

GFM:
Would you say that you’re drawn to supernatural thriller stories, or was it a one time thing to try that style with The Guests?

Shane:
I enjoy them as a reader. There’s a British supernatural fiction writer named Robert Aickman, who I think is one of the great unknown writers of the 20th century, and in some ways I think The Guests is similar to his work, which makes me happy because I admire him a lot. But the way I wrote it was very strange. I was at the Venice Film Festival—this was in 2011—and I’d just returned to my hotel after a full day of films. I’m a pretty voracious reader, so I had a novel I was reading, and one line in it made me stop and think. And then The Guests just appeared in front of me. I grabbed my laptop and opened Final Draft and began writing. And twenty-seven minutes later I had the script.

I think in the end we cut one line of dialogue and added another, but otherwise that was what we shot. It was weird. It felt like I was transcribing a movie that I was seeing in front of me; I could barely type fast enough.

I should add that The Guests is not a trailer for some feature I want to make some day. It’s complete in itself; it could only be a short film. To be honest, I don’t usually like shorts very much, but I’m proud of the fact that this one is at least a proper example of the form—one that is and only can be the length it is.

GFM:
Matilda Ridgway was fantastic as the lead in the film. How did you approach directing her?

Shane:
A friend of mine who’d seen her on stage recommended her to me. An actress that I was originally considering for the role wasn’t available, so my friend Harry suggested that I check Matilda out. He said that she has this rare ability to be, in his words, ‘a complete goofball’ until the very moment she’s called upon to act—and then suddenly she transforms into the part. And I saw that on set. It was astonishing to watch. She’s done mostly stage work, and is just an incredible, singular talent.

But I was very aware of the fact that, while I have strong ideas about performance, I’d never directed actors before, and I explained that to her and to Cate Wolfe and Gertraud Ingeborg, her co-stars. I told them that I wanted it to be a good experience for them, and while I had a good idea of what I wanted, there had to be a dialogue between us to achieve that. So we spoke a lot and didn’t rehearse very much.

GFM:
The suspense you build within the film was meticulously crafted. Can you talk about your editing process?

Shane:
Well, I can’t imagine that a director wouldn’t want to be in the editing room—though I’m told there are many who just want to be shown a cut. Which to me is just weird. Partly because I had a very clear idea of what I wanted, and partly because it’s just so much fun, watching it come together. And if you’ve got an editor who you both respect and get along well with—as I did with Simon Njoo—it’s a terrific experience.

Anyway, the editing process was slightly unusual, as almost all the scenes in The Guests are single-camera, single-take shots. So there weren’t a whole lot of options to play with. We had multiple takes, but no real coverage. Which meant the assembly took four hours to prepare: we had to select the best take, and that was that. The entire editing process took three days. There was some room to mess around and try different things, in terms of the rhythms between shots, but I knew what we had, and what I was trying to get, and we just had to achieve that.

GFM:
What project will you be working on next?

Shane:
The next film I’m doing as a director—touch wood—is a feature which I’ve already written and am hoping to direct in Berlin next year. It’s a family drama, in German, called Vatersache. I lived in Berlin very happily for five years, and I wanted to do a German movie as a tribute to my time there. It’s being produced by Causeway Pictures in Sydney, and I’ll be working with the same DoP as The Guests, Anna Howard, the same editor, the same production designer and costumer. The whole thing for me, with The Guests, was to not just make a short film as an end in itself, but to put a team together that I could then take forward into the features I want to make.