Saskia Boddeke • Director of Inside My Heart
“The first time I saw the Kamak group on stage, it felt like I’d been hit in the face”
- The renowned Dutch multimedia artist and stage director’s astonishing second documentary explores the process of artistic embodiment and its impact on an actor’s personality
Saskia Boddeke’s Inside My Heart [+see also:
interview: Saskia Boddeke
film profile], recently shown in the »Film Forward International Competition of the Thessaloniki International Documentary Film Festival, captures the rehearsals of the Dutch theatre group Kamak – a professional ensemble of actors with intellectual disabilities – while they work on Furia, a baroque drama written in verse.
Cineuropa: How did you come up with the idea to make a film out of the rehearsals for Furia?
Saskia Boddeke: The first time I saw the Kamak group on stage, it felt like I’d been hit in the face. It was a performance that mocked Down syndrome. On stage, the actors were slow and needed to take their time to think and reflect; it’s not like in the film, where I compressed time. I found myself being forced to change my attitude as a spectator, since I was not being offered light entertainment. Adapting to them was a profound experience, and I cried throughout the performance. I was not sure why I was so touched by them, so I started following all of their work in order to find out. Not that I like all of the performances they put on, but in each of them, there is a magical moment. I put some serious effort into persuading people to work on this project, and I brought many different producers to see Kamak on stage.
The actors are constantly reminding themselves that what is happening is not real, as if to protect themselves from overly intense emotions. How did you keep the emotional register under control during the shoot?
When the actors perform, they are completely immersed in their roles, which can be very overwhelming. If they stop acting, some of their identification with the role can stay inside them. They do exercises to help them shake off the role and leave it where it belongs. On the film set, it was a bit more difficult to create this differentiation, so I had to remind them as well.
Perhaps the most moving part is observing the cathartic states they go through.
For me, the best example is Tim, who publicly opened up about his gay identity throughout the filming process. He had never experienced anything like that, and I felt sad that he did not have access to that world of love and relationships.
Inside My Heart is also visually fascinating – some scenes bring to mind Dutch Golden Age paintings. Since it is a hybrid film, you also worked with one cinematographer for the fiction part and with another for the documentary part. Why?
Furia itself is a performance conceived in a baroque style, so the painting-like side came about somewhat naturally. As for the different cinematographers, the hybrid nature of the film required differing approaches. For the documentary moments, the DoP had to become part of the crew, and the camera had to disappear – but not entirely, because I also wanted them to perform to the camera and to feel its presence. I knew I had to keep it very slow. The DoP became part of the family and used more easy-going, over-the-shoulder shots.
On the other hand, for the fiction part, I had a big crew. While the documentary part had to be more fluid and the camera was able to shake, I wanted the fiction segment to be rather static, more formal and more picture-like, also in terms of the use of light, as it fitted in better with the baroque costumes. A more modern camera approach, which we see a lot nowadays, wouldn’t have worked.
The score, originally composed by Luca D'Alberto, is also a powerful component of the film. How did you work with him?
I started working with Luca some 15 years ago, when he was very young. There is a lot of trust between us, and we are loyal to each other. He would give me ideas for all the film layers so that the editor and I could play with them. Then, we would make a sketch with the imagery and go back to Luca. Every day, it would be back and forth like this, until we found what we were looking for. I never showed him a specific image for which he had to compose a piece, but rather, I described the sound effects I wanted to achieve, such as tiptoeing, for example. He would compose things starting from my description, and then we tried it out. I would receive these pieces overnight – he’s really fast. The ending is so beautiful, and he really composed that piece from one day to the next. At first, I wanted a baroque waltz for the end, and he wrote one, but I used it for something else. Then, he composed a new variation in no time at all. He is so gifted, and I am lucky to be able to work with him.