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Interview with Director Phillip Van: The Making of "High Maintenance"

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posted Feb 15, 2010, 17:30

Check out this article in the print edition of StudentFilmmakers Magazine, August 2006. More photos in the print version, including production stills, scenes from the film, and storyboard sketches. Subscribe to the Magazine Today!
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Interview with Director Phillip Van
The Making of "High Maintenance"

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This feature interview appeared in the August 2006 Issue of StudentFilmmakers Magazine. Director and cinematographer Phillip Van is named the 1st Place winner of the 2006 Eastman Scholarship for film students at the 60th Annual UFVA conference in Orange, California. Van receives a $12,000 scholarship for his film, �High Maintenance.�

What is �High Maintenance� about?

It is about a woman who is dissatisfied with her monotonous marriage and decides to exchange her husband for an upgrade. In the near-future, husbands are modified and can be bought on the consumer market. The film uses hi-concept ideas to really focus on a small inner-personal story about a woman on her search for fulfillment through a man. Of course, it doesn�t turn out as she expected it to, and she has to deal with the consequences.


Phil composes his frame. Photo by James Nicholls.

Could you talk a little bit about the origins of the production?

I made this film through the Berlin International Film Festival. Every year a student-oriented part of the festival called the Berlin Talent Campus admits around 500 filmmakers from approximately 3000 applicants based on their work. From the 500 filmmakers, three are selected to make short films during the week of the festival. The films are fully funded by a production company in Germany, and are made in a single week. The three films go into competition at the end of the festival and the 500 filmmakers in addition to industry guests vote on a winner. It�s the largest jury vote in the Berlin film festival and this year my film, �High Maintenance,� won the competition.

Could you talk about one or two interesting things that happened during pre-production?

I was asked to direct one of the talent movies based on the work I submitted. They called me a few weeks ahead of time and I accepted the opportunity immediately. I was pre-producing in New York for a few weeks � working on storyboards, breaking down the script and casting from New York by communication with the production company in Germany. They would send me DP and editing reels and headshots as well as video reels from the actors. All the actors we were looking at had extensive T.V. or film backgrounds in the German film industry, so they were very accessible through their work. My actress, Nicolette Krebitz, starred in some great films in Germany and Europe. I watched her in an epic sized production called The Tunnel, about tunnels that Germans dug to help their loved ones escape from East Germany under the Berlin Wall. She had some extremely powerful scenes and it was clear to me she was a serious ing�nue. It was just wonderful to be able to base my decision to work with her on these kinds of films.

The last week of pre-production was in Germany. I was staying there and dealing with the initial culture shock, and at the same time, trying to get the film off the ground in the dead of winter. And that was an amazing experience, going every day to the production company and to the little office they had set up, and speaking to an entire team of Germans. They were all incredible. English is a heavily spoken language in Germany, so it was easy to communicate and get around, but there were still so many cultural differences. It was great to be thrown into the fire, so to speak, with a crew from a completely different culture. I storyboarded every shot ahead of time, and the images helped a lot, especially in the few cases that crew members didn�t speak English. I was able to communicate with them in a very exacting way, irrespective of the language barrier, through pictures, and that was awesome.

How many days did it take to shoot?

The film was shot completely in two days. The entire film was made, with breaks, in about eight days. We shot in two days, edited in about two-and-a-half to three days, and then we did final sound design and mixing in two days. The movies that the Berlin Talent Campus commissions are all made in the limited span of a week. It wasn�t like a 24-hour competition, where the time span is necessarily taken into consideration by those who view the final film. We had to make what would essentially take a thesis grad film student three to six months. We had to make that quality and standard of a film in a week. That was the energy in the air and it was absolutely my goal and expectation. It was the shortest time I�ve ever made a full short, and it was difficult but compelling. I didn�t sleep very much. Maybe about twenty hours the entire time. It was an intense situation.

Could you share one or two lighting tips or tricks that you used in �High Maintenance�?

Our location was on the 12th floor of an apartment building, and we had to shoot day for night. The whole story takes place at night. We were dealing with a full wall of windows in the living room, with no porch or access from the exterior. We put ND 1.2 gel on all these windows, but alone, it felt bland visually. We decided that if it was night and we were in a metropolis-based environment we should see building and city lights outside. We couldn�t get a crane to suspend a light outside the window, because we were too high and on a budget, and of course, none of the buildings were lit because it was the day.

I work as a DP in the city in addition to the work I direct, and my great DP, Felix Novo De Oliveira and I collaborated pretty intensively on our lenses, f-stop, light units, all facets of photography before the shoot. We basically just used the simplest New York trick in the book � we strung up a set of Christmas lights behind the window sheers and in front of the ND, and then taped some of the bulbs to create different shapes with the light. By throwing the windows slightly out of focus in the background with longer lenses and an open f-stop, it looked convincingly like a city lit at night outside of the windows. It was a true no-cost solution and it was very effective.

In researching the look of the film, I decided that I wanted it to be softly lit but to have a high contrast ratio, with graphic lines and sharp, bold blacks. This dynamic aesthetic felt fundamentally related to the story, which I visually equate to an off-kilter mix between a romantic dinner, the film noir genre and a horror or scifi tale in a graphic novel. Soft light felt romantic, while dynamic contrast ratios came from the world of sci-fi and film noir and worked well with the uncanny and sometimes eerie tone of the film. The intermingling of the two was the way we married the visual world of the film with its narrative influences.

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