Søren

Mhmm.

Cezil

They kind of turn it off. You know, Andrei Tarkovsky said for his films he would intentionally make everything very slow and boring for the first 30 minutes so that he could get all the people who weren’t there to see the movie to just leave. So then people who were really “there” could then watch it. But yeah, it’s cool that –

Lydelle

That we even got a response at all –

Cezil

Yeah, that people were like I wanna check this thing out. That there was even an interest. And maybe, as cliché as it sounds, maybe this film is for that one person who’s like, “Oh wow, that was different.” You know, as opposed to it being something for millions and millions of people.

Søren

It’s interesting that you framed it like that. Experimental films are a very divisive genre – if you can even call it a genre. I think by its very nature that it has that game-changing or visceral hatred dichotomy.

Cezil

You’re right, there’s definitely that divisive nature of it – to experiment. So you have to kind of embrace what it is. The rep for the film from Real Suspects – a phenomenal company – he explained it to us saying [The Taking] is “video art.” Which is interesting because we’ve never heard someone define it as that.

Søren

I see.

Cezil

I guess if you present things in different spaces and look at it with different lights, there’s a certain openness that starts to unfold. And I think one is able to go into something and accept things and say that this is the filmmaker giving us this reality. It’s not something that you may have some other way of putting together yourself. You may not have those certain patterns you’ve gotta watch in other movies. And you’ve gotta use the filmmaker’s sensibilities in understanding it.

Søren

Maybe if this was shown in an experimental or avant-garde setting, it might have had a different experience. Hollywood films attempt to hide the filmmaker. And it tends to be that the most successful directors are those who manage to hide the director, camerawork, editor, etc. from the audience. Conversely, in experimental or avant-garde film, there’s no effort made to keep you immersed in the movie. So it’s really interesting that you opted for this route.

Now back when you were making The Taking, what did you feel you wanted to do with the film? Were you trying to challenge genre conventions?

Lydelle

We went in wanting to do something different. And we wanted to do something that would fall into this “arthouse” fair – so that was our approach when creating this. We wanted it to be bold. We wanted you to feel the filmmaker’s hands inside the film. We wanted sound to be very striking, very prominent – excruciating.

This type of filmmaking lends itself to something very impressionistic. I think it’s a misnomer when people label the film as “existential.” I don’t know where those references are coming from – I was never big into existentialism or anything like that. But more than philosophy, it’s more about the form and use of filmmaking techniques to make a presentation. The story itself is very simple and a very morality-based tale. It’s not like a mindf*** story.

That’s why we like to call it an “experience of light and sound.” The best way to experience the film, if not in a theater, would be in your home with a really nice sound system, on Blu-ray, so you can really feel it.