16/07/2024 - The Greek director opens up about his career and about working with Apple TV on his second feature, starring Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed, which closed Karlovy Vary

(© Film Servis Karlovy Vary)

Greek filmmaker Christos Nikou broke out internationally with his debut feature, Apples [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Christos Nikou
film profile], which opened the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival in 2020 and went on to enjoy an impressive festival run. Nikou’s second feature did not share the same fate: Fingernails, produced by Apple TV and starring Jessie Buckley, Riz Ahmed and Jeremy Allen White, screened at Telluride, San Sebastián and very few other festivals before its arrival on the streaming platform. Ahead of its screening at the recent Karlovy Vary IFF, where it served as the closing film, we sat down with Nikou to chat about his movies.

Cineuropa: There is a science-fiction element in both of your films, often linked to an altered societal situation.
Christos Nikou: Yes, in both films, I tried to do something that I love to see in other movies or in literature. George Orwell’s 1984 and José Saramago’s Blindness are two novels that have inspired me a lot. And then there are the movies of Charlie Kaufman, one of my favourites being The Truman Show. I love such allegories, as you can create a parallel world where you change only one small thing, but the world is not the same. And you play with that small difference and try to say things about how our world is right now. In the end, this parallel world is actually not so distant from the one we are living in.

Both Apples and Fingernails also tap into the emotional level when they talk about our world.
I don't think I can make something that’s not warm, functional and tender. In my films, I follow the main characters and their feelings, and I feel that there are no heroes or villains; the villain is society, and the characters are just trying to adjust and understand themselves. Both the main character in Apples and Jessie’s character in Fingernails are trying to find themselves and their role in the world.

How do these concepts come to you?
From personal experience. For Apples, it was a time when I was dealing with the loss of my father, and I was trying to erase the grief and pain from my mind, but I wasn’t able to. I tried to put myself in the shoes of this character, who is trying to deal with grief and to forget. In Fingernails, it was my attempt to understand love. In an era when technology is so omnipresent in our lives, people use their fingers and fingernails to tap around on dating apps, looking for love. That was the concept behind it.

Was it hard to get Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed for Fingernails? How was it to work with them?
They said yes almost immediately, so it seemed very easy, and it was great. They were both our first options, together with Jeremy Allen White. When we approached them, they said that they loved the script. And it was easy to work with them, actually. They're professionals.

What was your experience like working with Apple TV Studios?
It was fairly hard because we agreed on various things early on, and they didn't do exactly what we’d agreed. But they had the movie; it wasn’t mine. I don't even have the film as a file, and I don't have Apple TV – and actually, most of my friends in Europe don’t have Apple TV, so I cannot show them the feature. But I look at this as an experience. I strongly believe that for that film, and for most films, they don't belong to streaming platforms; they belong in theatres. I'm very glad that I'm here at Karlovy Vary and that we will present the movie after eight months. The feature has never had a proper theatrical release, and even in the USA, it opened in only two or three theatres, despite having real stars in it. And I would also like to add that I hope I will not hear about theatres closing ever again. It’s time to prove to all of the streamers that we love movies much more than that.

Will you keep on making films in the US industry?
I can make movies wherever I have stories to tell. And it's a bit harder to make movies in Greece – I'm not saying that Fingernails was any easier than Apples, but I just mean that by having more money, you can dream a bit bigger and you can do things that maybe you can’t do in a lower-budget production. The next story I’m writing at the moment also needs a higher budget. So, I think I will continue to make films in English.