Film Drifter Reviews

Interview with Ate de Jong on the production of Fogbound (IMDB,TMDb). For the video review click here.
Held via Skype call on 08/01/18

FD: I would like to start with questions regarding the inception of this project. Where were you at that time and what sort of ambitions did you have? Did Michael Lally's story came to you or did you find it yourself, or how was it?

ADJ: No, it was my story. It was quite some time ago so I have to think very sharply when it started. I moved to America, to Hollywood, in 1986. First I made Miami Vice, then Highway to Hell, immediately followed by Drop Dead Fred, and I thought: "Wouldn't it be nice to make a small artistic American film." So I started writing Fogbound while I was in America around 1990. Many people liked it, the agency liked it, everybody liked it, but I didn't get the money. I couldn't get the money. Then at a certain point, I gave it to Michael Lally. Just to update the script. So the original is mine, the first drafts are mine. Michael rewrote it. But as I like Michael a lot, and particularly his dialogue additions were marvellous, I just shared the credit with him. All the time I was trying to make the film but it didn't work. Sometimes I had half the money and then I had three quarters...and all the time, I never had the full budget, it just didn't work. Then at the very end of the nineties, there was this Dutch tax shelter scheme. We put the film Enigma in there and Discovery of Heaven and the financiers wanted a third film and I said: "Oh, well, I have Fogbound!", and that's how the financing fell into place, for a lot more money than I ever wanted. So it was a project that I had for something like 10 years. And all the time I changed, and I rewrote, and added new scenes, and then suddenly there was an opportunity and we all jumped on it.

FD: How much did your original story evolve with Michael Lally's input?

ADJ: Not that much. The whole structure of the original story, the core of the original story, is three people in a car, in the fog. They start to tell each other stories from the past, and then the stories interweave with each other. That is the essence of it. That structure was there from the very beginning. In the dialogue, Michael had a very strong influence because obviously, he is an American, he is a poet, he worked for Gus Van Sant. So most of the influence he had was not story structure, it was the dialogue. He improved the dialogue enormously because his knowledge of the language is of course a lot better than mine.

FD: How much did you have the movie formed visually, stylistically at the start? How did this change until the very shooting?

ADJ: That changed a lot, because it took so long. It was more than 10 years that I tried to make the film. So first, I wanted to make the film, as I remember it, let's say more traditional. Then I wanted to make the film totally against green screen. So you only have to shoot the actors. I thought, okay, we're going to shoot four days maximum with the actors, against green screen, and we put in every background the way we want later, you know, that sort of thing. And then we were going to make it like Dogma, before Dogma existed, just in Dogma style. In all honesty, the style was first driven by the possibilities. If there was a company who said, oh, we're going to make the film, but you have to make it for $750,000, then I found a way to do it for that budget, and that influenced the style. I always thought the film should be ideally made for two and a half to three million dollars, we suddenly had five million because of the tax shelter, and that gave us more creative possibilities and gave us more financial possibilities in the art direction. So actually, then, with production designer Ben van Os, who had done films with Peter Greenaway, we said, okay, we're going to make the film 100% in the studio except for the very first scene and the very last scene. The very first scene when they drive their car, we shot somewhere in the Alps in France, and the very last scene at the cemetery, and that's a real cemetery. But all the rest is done in the studio, whether there's a car, a street, or the cliff in the mountains, this set or that or whatever, we build it all in the studio for stylistic purposes.

FD: Given the expanded budget, did you in the end still feel your vision was constrained with the available funds?

ADJ: I originally might have wanted "bigger actors" and bigger actors come with a price tag. I remember that we were talking about Keanu Reeves at the very beginning, when I was still in LA. And I definitely wanted Molly Ringwald because I thought Molly Ringwald had this, on one hand, very warm look, and on the other hand a very cold, distant look. I talked to her a few times, but at that time the film didn't get the financing. Molly Ringwald was not a superstar anymore, but she was certainly still asking for something like $750,000. The actors I first wanted costed, at that point, like a million or a million and a half. So in retrospect, I think, yeah, if we had bigger actors, A list actors who wanted to do an art film, that we probably would have been selected for a major festival. Now that we had lesser known actors, not of that high PR value, we didn't really get into a big festival. Because festival appeal these days is actors walking the red carpet. So if you look back on it, we either should have divided the money slightly differently. So take a million or a million and a half and give it to one actor and then you know, give a little bit less toward art direction or camera or whatever, and increase our chances in a festival. But this is hindsight. You know, we were not that smart at that point. It would have been better for the film if it had been shown at a major festival. We did show it at few very nice festivals, but never on an A level festival. Important festivals looked at it, and they actually said it, if you had an actor that could walk the red carpet we would have taken the film, because we like the film, but the film is not going to give us much publicity. That was a very harsh thing to hear, I must say.

FD: Well, despite the fact that this resulted with film not getting a bigger exposure, I think you were really lucky with the casting. That was going to be one of my questions. What are your impressions from today's point of view on the cast and their performance? Mainly Brady, Perry and Daniels? How was the experience working with them and are you satisfied with their output?

ADJ: To be honest, I liked Luke as a person, very, very much. The other two actors liked him in the beginning, but they became a bit displeased later in the shoot. It is so long ago now, I can speak honestly about it now, who cares. Ben and Orla looked a little bit down on Luke. They treated him like "he's a TV actor from Hollywood", and they were both British stage actors. Ben is doing a lot of TV series in England now, he did Law and Order UK. I still think Ben is a super fantastic actor and Orla...I don't know what happened to Orla, I was in touch with here for a while, but I certainly liked her. So in the beginning it started well, but I started to notice that the actors..they didn't hate each other. I made films where actors hated each other, and that certainly didn't happen during Fogbound, but it could have been a warmer relationship between the actors, though it would not necessarily have increased the quality of the film. All three are far too professional to let their personal feelings influence their work. However, I also feel that the film is not necessarily driven by the interaction of the actors. It is driven certainly by the actors, but not necessarily by the interaction between them. It is the weirdness of the story and the intellectual dilemmas behind it that actually drives the story. So the quality of the interaction is not the most dominant issue of the movie. There was certainly a difference in acting style between the actors, you know. Luke was a bit more on his own. He felt he was doing a film abroad and for him, it was a bit of a departure. He came from Beverly Hills 90210, so he was used to a kind of star status. I mean, we treated him well and, weirdly, we had a studio in the middle of nowhere, but there were always like five or ten girls standing at the gates, and he liked that, but he was used to 50 to 100 screaming fans, of course. But in the middle of nowhere in Europe there are not going to be that much. I regret that Molly Ringwald didn't play the part. Yeah, sometimes you have a dream, you know. And that was the dream. I say this with all the love to Orla, because Orla did absolutely well.

FD: My perspective is different because I only know Brady, Perry and Daniels as these characters and I really liked their performance. So, it's difficult for me to imagine someone else as those characters.

ADJ: Honest to God, don't trust the director when he says something, they have ulterior motives and I really like Ben and I liked Orla, and I got along with them, and I like actors in general. I love to work with actors. It's one of the most pleasurable things. But there was a difference. For example, Orla and Ben are in essence theatre actors. Most British actors are theatre actors. Luke was really a film actor. He had a certain way. He would say to me: "Talk to me during the shot." He said: "I like it when you talk to me during the shot", which is something that a stage actor will never do. So when we did a shot, obviously not when the others were in the scene, when Luke was alone, he wanted me to tell him what he had to feel. I was literally talking during the shot. I said to him while the camera was running: "You feel worried, you think about this, you think about that. You think why is this not happening? Would that happen? Could this happen?" And then he reflected that in his face. He wanted the instructions on the spot, he didn't want to dive into the character and bring it to the foreground like Daniel Day-Lewis does. You know, Lewis is so deep into the character, he can only act as the character. Luke very much understood that film acting is thinking, and at the moment I forced him to think, he believed that if I talked to him, he would only respond as the character. But that was a very different way of acting than Ben Daniels did or Orla Brady, because they're far more theatre actors who get much more involved into the character via rehearsals.

FD: Since we are talking about the actors, do you remember the actors that played the count's twin children, when they're teenagers. I just checked before this interview and I see that they have continued acting, both of them.

ADJ: Particularly, Stephanie Leonidas, I found her fantastic on the set. She played a very big part in a very celebrated TV series a few years later. She was young when she did Fogbound. She was like, 15 or so. She was there with her mother, who was being treated for cancer, so it was a difficult, heavy time for her. But I thought she was fantastic. She had a power that stunned me. And later I saw her in a science fiction TV series in the UK which got a certain kind of a cult status. The boy, I don't really know what he did later. Stephanie's acting career is not a surprise to me, because you could see what a great actress she was even at a young age.

FD: Would you like to share a few impressions on principal photography, on the actual shooting? What was that process for you?

ADJ: When I first started the film, when I was still in Los Angeles, I was very close to a lot of people there and one of them was Bob Robertson, who is a phenomenal cameraman. He did a few films for Oliver Stone, and he wanted to shoot the film. And then later I made Drop Dead Fred, and our cameramen Peter Deming who did most of David Lynch's films, wanted to shoot the film also. He even wanted to come to Europe and do it for a low fee. But then his agent said he can do it for a low fee, but he has to get first class airplane tickets and he has to get his own crew from the US. And you know, it became so difficult that at a certain point, we took a gamble and I did it with a DOP that was basically a lighting man. He had been the key gaffer of a lot of Dutch cameramen, it was a big gamble. To help him, we got a separate camera operator.

We took a gamble on the visual style by saying, okay, we're going to shoot everything in the fog on 16mm film, with a handheld camera and everything that is not in the fog we'll shoot on 35 mm film more steady. We'll have a handheld small camera and even if it is a close up, we always attempt to reflect the unrest of the characters. On the other hand, we stylize the memory scenes, the fantasies, in a more constructive, contemplative, way. Besides that we tried to do every visual effect on the set. For instance, like, when they're standing at the window and outside the revolt starts, that was done with light changes on the set so we in the end never used any CGI effects. I have to look at the film again, there might be one or two very small CGI effects. Like when they are in the bedroom, and then you see L.A outside the window, that was green screen. So there's a few small things. But in essence we tried to do everything in camera and on set. My feeling is that if he had made the film in America, even in the same style, everything in the studio, we probably would have gotten more experienced camera people. But the fact that they were less experienced, but extremely eager to invent a new style gave the film a lot of originality.

FD: Yeah, I think the movie looks quite unique. How did you generate the fog the on the set? What did you use?

ADJ: I could probably find what the material was. We tried different things, we did a lot of tests. And the main thing was we had to make sure that the fog stayed there, and that we still could find our way around the set. Because, at a certain point, you couldn't see anything anymore. We had to test it also to check if it was dangerous or not, toxic, do we need people walking around with gas masks. So we had the fog tested by an official institute of technology and one element was a bit toxic. Then we tested another type of fog, that had the least amount of toxic components, but it smelled very unpleasant. Ultimately, we found a useable fog. Every day before the first shot we had to fill up the whole space. Fog is basically smoke, it would first rise to the roof, so we had to start 2 hours earlier to fill up the whole space. We built enormous walls around the set where the cliff was build. There was basically a water pool inside the studio which is used to do underwater shooting. And we used the edge of the pool as the cliff. Around the pool we build walls of the mountain, so we could shoot looking up standing inside the pool, and we made the road next to the pool. And around all of that we put enormous high black stuff. We built like a studio within the studio to contain the fog, because if you had to fill the whole studio, that was so enormous. Of course it leaked through these walls, but very slowly. We basically build a tent, high enough so the lights could stand somewhere. It was quite an operation you know. It's so easy to write it in a script: car at edge of a cliff.

It's like in Gone with the Wind. The first sentence of Gone with the Wind is "Atlanta burns". That's two words. But that's like 3 million dollars further. And here in Fogbound, "the car stops in a dense fog". It's not "Atlanta burns", but it is an enormous thing to get done. But that is a challenge of filming.

FD: They would probably use CGI today for the fog.

ADJ: Well, we tried it with CGI, but the difficulty with CGI is that CGI is still not three dimensional. If you have a person, you can do anything, you can put fog behind them. But you need to put fog around them. And then if you do that, and you will do it against a green screen, it becomes so complicated that you better do it live. This film was shot in 2000. It's now 17 years later, it is very possible that the technique has advanced so much that is easier now with CGI. But in general, everything you do on the set always has more believability, still. Christopher Nolan's does not believe in CGI. In Dunkirk, he tried to do as much in camera as possible.

FD: I'm quite impressed by the look and feel of the film. What was your inspiration for this visual language? Did you have any inspiration?

ADJ: I give a lot of credit to both the cameraman and to the production designer. Ben von Os, our fantastic production designer passed away a few years ago. He was a very baroque person, you can see it in the films of Peter Greenaway, and he did Sally Potter's Orlando. He usually referred to painters. Before we started Fogbound he referred to romantic painters of the 19th century. We talked particularly about 18th/19th century romantic painters which veer towards the baroque. And baroque in that time is a little bit toward Gothic, so the inspiration came from that angle. In all fairness Ben deserves the credit for the look more than I do. I am not the most sensitive towards style. I know what I like but I can't necessarily explain why I Iike it, while the production designer of course can, he has more knowledge of styles and yeah, he did that magnificently.

FD: You said you took a risk with the DP. How much input did the DP have on the visual style of the film or was he mostly directed by you?

ADJ: The last, he was mostly directed by me, but obviously whoever you work with they have an influence. But generally, there are a few basic rules that are more true than other rules. You know, nothing is untrue, but some things are more true than others. It's a little bit like George Orwell's Animal Farm. Some animals are more equal than others. One of the truths is, in film acting is thinking. Another truth is that the camera tells the story. It is not the script that tells the story. The script has the structure of the story, but the camera tells the story. It's not the actors who tell the story. The actors may think that they are the centre of everything, and I love actors, but it's the interaction of the camera that tells the story. The camera has to reveal something either about the character, about his or her intentions, about the suggestions behind it, and it's the camera that does it. Even if it's a normal close up, just a close up, then it should never just register the actor. At the moment that the camera only registers it is not cinema anymore, it is television. At the moment that the camera reveals something, and it can be a closeup because it needs to reveal a thought in the look of the eyes, while in a wide shot it reveals the body language and the relationship to the environment and therefore the intention, it's cinema. The camera always has to reveal something. That can be also be done with camera movement, it can be with a tilt, it can be with a travelling shot, it can be a locked shot, whatever, but the camera is the basic storyteller. And the camera in that sense is the tool of the director. So I never understood directors who say: "oh, he's the cameraman he decides the shots", because that's not how you make a film, that's not how you make cinema. TV drama registers much more the story and veers much more towards the emotional side, while cinema envisions thinking and a theme. I always came on set with a shot list, and I always said I want to do it like this, and I want to do that and I want to have that camera move exactly at that moment and then clearly the cameraman said: "oh, if you want this, what do you think about that and that", and if it's a better idea, we would immediately do it. Sometimes, as a director, you just give the structure of the ideas and then somebody else makes you better. The crew makes you better. Fortunately.

FD: Yeah, it's a collaborative process.

ADJ: Yes, exactly. But the collaborative process has to start with one person's mind. That's a weird thing. As a director you are in a weird way a dictator, but you are an enlightened dictator. Doesn't mean you have to be mean. You know, you can collaborate and use everything that is good for the film. The only thing that counts is the film. It's not even the director that counts. It's the vision that is channelled through the director that counts.

FD: Can you tell me a bit a bit about the post production process, the editing and putting it all together? Did the movie change much in that stage, or were you very precise in getting the shots you wanted to piece together later?

ADJ: I was very lucky that I had Nigel Galt as the editor. Nigel had just edited the last Stanley Kubrick film, Eyes Wide Shut, and I knew Nigel from previous films that I made in the UK. He always did sound editing for Stanley Kubrick, and then he became his editor as well. Of course, Kubrick decided everything, but Nigel was a very clever man to discuss storytelling with, and he's technically extremely skilled. So he edited the film. It was a very pleasant collaboration because he sometimes said: "Well, you know, story-wise this happens according to the script, but it just doesn't work, and we should try to change it to this and this, and such and such." So things have changed out of a sort of balancing need, because sometimes the weight was not at the right place, and we changed things around, but in my memory not that much has changed.

At the same time when I directed Fogbound, I was also producing Discovery of Heaven with Stephen Fry in the lead. On that film we had another editor first, but it didn't work, so I hired Nigel to take over and we changed a lot more in that film, because the story didn't work and if the story doesn't work, the reality is you start rewriting in the editing room. Because the script is always written three times. First time the script is written as a script, second time during the shooting, you know, the influence of everything, actors, camera, and all that, the script is basically rewritten without you knowing it, and the third time through the editing.

Weirdly enough, if you have specific problems in the script before you start shooting, you will find those problems back in the editing room.

FD: What's your opinion on the film? Now, in retrospect, are you happy with it? Would you like to change something?

ADJ: It's a film very close to my heart. I'm not superstitious at all, I don't believe in the occult, but I've always felt, before I started the film, that I had lived in another era, and I could never explain it. And I don't try to explain. Fogbound was a very personal film where I was looking for the edges between nature and nurture, what is bad and what is good. What if you treat one child very good, and the other very bad? Does that make you a bad person, do the children turn against you, what happens? Of course, because that's the irony of life, the person you treated very well is turning against you, because you never treated this person with honesty. The film has a deep psychological content for me. It is an existential search for the value of life. I've always been very proud of the film, and of the style and looks that that you referred to. I thought it looked phenomenal, I thought it was psychologically intriguing. I was very disappointed the film didn't get more acclaim. It got acclaim at a few festivals, but it never really reached a wide audience. Now, 10-15 years later, I understand that the film was maybe too intellectual in its presentation and not emotional enough, and the audience these days want an emotional story, even if it is an intellectual film. But that is hindsight. And I'm just trying to find explanations. As I said in the beginning, that if there had been a big name cast, then people might have accepted it. I think the ideas in the film are very special, and I hope, I always call it The Van Gogh syndrome, that the film will be rediscovered in 20 years.

FD: Regarding the story. Do you think you were trying to communicate something that didn't translate to the final cut? Or do you think you succeeded in communicating everything you wanted?

ADJ: Well, that's a very good question. The film was released such a long time ago, so I don't have to pretend anymore. On the one hand, I think the film does reflect the ideas I wanted it to reflect, but the reality is that it didn't communicate well to the audience. You can always wonder why. Is that because PR wasn't good, or the film wasn't promoted in the right way and the distributors didn't do their job right? Or was it me, who didn't do it right? You know, it is always so cheap to shift blame, it's so easy to say, oh they --the others-- didn't do the right thing. I think I might have been a bit too highbrow with Fogbound. I think it is sad I wasn't able to communicate better with my potential audience. I mean, it would never be Star Wars or ET, it's not that kind of movie, but the movie deserved a wider audience and there is a wider audience for these movies. There are many people who prefer stylized intelligent films, they just have to know the film exists. And I have not succeeded in reaching that group as a producer and made it too highbrow as a director. Now we have Netflix and Amazon, they strangely enough have the potential to reach that group. If they would buy the movie, it would be so great if people can see the film. If they promote the film well, then the film will still find its audience, because I think it has not dated very much.

FD: If you would allow me once more to return to the Leo character and his past memories. I know you already elaborated partially on it, but it's sort of a curious supernatural element in the story. Do you consider it a psychosis of sorts, or a real memory, or did that even concern you story-wise?

ADJ: It's just what I said, I don't believe in the supernatural. But I always had a feeling that there was something else. And it's a bit the same with Leo. So he accepted that the memories he has really happened. But he also knows it is just a story and he's just telling a story to his two companions in the car. The word psychosis is not wrongly chosen. It is psychosis without being dangerous, because it is only a fantasy. It's however, in the end, dangerous for himself.

FD: What were the challenges with the distribution of the film?

ADJ: I have been complaining a little during the interview, but we were actually lucky, because it was made thanks to this Dutch tax shelter. We financed three films at the same time via the tax shelter. Enigma was one of the three films. Enigma was a film of Intermedia, which was a very big British company, and Enigma had Kate Winslet in it and it was produced by Mick Jagger and all that, I was the co-producer. Because we could access tax money, the quid pro quo was that we would get the money for Enigma, but Intermedia would then become the sales agent of Fogbound. They were such a powerful sales agent. They made a promo reel of Fogbound before the film was finished, they spent a $100,000 on the promo reel, showed it in Cannes and sold the film to 20 countries as a thriller. So the film was actually sold to a lot more countries than we normally would have been able to reach. So actually, I should not complain, because in a weird way the film did get sold to many countries and did get a DVD and a VHS release, and therefore it did reach an audience. I still feel it could have reached more audience, but just because of the power of Intermedia, the distribution actually wasn't that bad.

FD: I read on your website to that there is a novel in the works or finished, based on the film. Can you tell me more about that?

ADJ: Yeah, the time when the film came out, I said I'm going to write a novel based on the movie. It's not exactly a one on one copy at all. It had a lot of other scenes, but it's in Dutch. I wrote it and it was published. The novel came out the same time as the movie came out. I should actually consider translating it, because I've never done anything with it anymore.

FD: Thank you for this interview.

ADJ: My pleasure.

Copyright by Film Drifter 2018