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Interview By Tristan Sinns
First, what is the general synopsis
of No Right Turn?
The movie has a rather intricate
story-driven plot, so please take a deep breath…
Nina is the voluptuously alluring
girlfriend of Johnny, a charming but delusional crook.
To escape from her weary life she casually sleeps with an
old friend, Teddy, but is fed up of her current lifestyle
especially the drunken dreams of Johnny. One night after an
argument with Johnny, she storms home where she is abducted
by a pair of thugs and is fortunately rescued by a timid and
guilt-ridden girl, Monella.
Even though they are from two very
different worlds, they quickly become close friends and
sooth each other lives. Johnny hearing about Nina's ordeal
with the thugs, sadly attempts to win her heart back by
going on a crazy revenge spree. Nina eventually tells
Monella of her ploy of escaping from Johnny’s seedy world by
conspiring to steal his much talked about hidden stash,
stored in a safety deposit box deep in the neon city.
Monella reluctantly agrees to
help...and we follow each of their dangerously entangled
lives until their ultimate and bloody fate.
Could you tell us a little about
the actors behind the characters?
Of course, casting the movie was
very hard and took a long long time, almost a year of
castings until we found the right talent for what we were
looking for. Funny enough, Sira Stampe, who plays Monella,
she was one of the first auditions, but we weren’t convinced
at first, so we called her in on various readings, around 3
times in all, and in the end she turned out to be perfect
for the role. Sira had been acting in a couple of bigger
productions such as Hideous Kinky opposite Kate Winslet and
also a lot of BBC drama stuff. Laura Bach who plays Nina,
that was a tough role to cast, because there is so many
rough and tough scenes with her and a lot of drama, Laura
comes from a background in acting from South Africa of all
places, but she is originally from Denmark, she had done
several feature length movies here in Denmark that played in
theaters so she is well known in Europe anyway.…she keeps on
giving me a hard time because she thought this was the
hardest role she has ever taken!
Indeed, it was really hard role and
admire her courage! The Johnny character is played by Tao
Hildebrand; he actually lived in New York for many years and
was heavily involved in the acting scene there, although for
this role, I told him to loose the “New Yawk” accent because
it doesn’t fit in with the fantasy world we were after. But
Tao was great, he is a real method actor, to do background
on his character, he hung out with a couple of pimps and
drug dealers, a very dangerous thing to do, but he wanted to
do it to try get a feel for his character’s world. Lars
Lippert is a legend here in Denmark, he is now head of the
Actor’s Union here, he is mainly from Theatrical background
himself, doing lots of Shakespeare and shit. He brought some
amazing things to Teddy to make him a larger than life
character, he is the most evil character in the movie but
folks love his scenes, he has so much fun with them!
Where was it filmed?
It was filmed in Copenhagen, in a
few different locations; of course we disguised the area as
much as possible to give the feeling of a surreal fantasy
universe.
When might we get a chance to
see this film in theaters, or on DVD?
Hopefully both at some stage not
too far into the future! Once all the post work is done, we
will talk a little more with distributors and possibly
showcase it in a few festivals that are into these types of
movies, expect later this year, if all goes well.
You are also the writer for this
story. How did this story come into being? What is its
inspiration?
Well, it’s kinda strange. I had
written a script after finishing my little underground
shock-fest Last Exit, that I wanted to shoot, it was a more
of Japanese inspired revenge movie, but then Kill Bill came
along, and that pretty much covered all the homages…so out
of frustration I had this other script that I wrote a couple
of years back, which was more character and story driven,
rewrote that and developed it more and really worked hard to
make a great little script. Really proud of the script now,
it’s the best I have written so far, and I think the
characters are very colorful even though a little twisted.
Movies such as Wild at Heart, The Hunger, Blood Simple, and
visually, cinema from The 80s, Tom and Jerry cartoons,
Scorsese films are all put into the mixer!
Your underground film Last Exit
also contained an interesting existential subtext especially
in the dialogue of the main character's pot dealer. Does the
film No Right Turn also contain any similar subtexts?
Well, yes and no, it’s a totally
different movie, “No Right Turn” is more mature in everyway.
It has different sub texts, of love, forgiveness, truth and
loyalty but it’s told in a different cinematic way that
pushes the story forward much better in my opinion but still
has an artistic edge.
What lessons did you learn from
the first film have you applied in making No Right Turn?
With No Right Turn, I wanted to
make a bigger and better movie on every level, with Last
Exit, we were really tied down by our lack of funds and fast
shoot and it showed unfortunately but it is was it is. I
have got my underground movie out of my system (laughs). For
No Right Turn I assembled a proper crew, some of the best in
Denmark, so visually it’s great, I also spent more time on
casting as already mentioned. Having an experienced crew to
help to do things on the set is great, it frees up time to
spend with actors etc which is what it’s all about. Also set
out a 5 weeks shoot so there is no rushed shots (although
there are always rushed shots!) but compared to a 10 day
shoot this was heaven.
Another thing often overlooked on
indie filmmaking is production design; we got a really great
production designer and crew to dress out characters, dress
the sets which is so important when you want to have a
consistent style and mood for a 90 minute feature. To
summarize we had a better script and bigger and better crew
with longer shooting time and this helped us to pull off
this movie, our goal was to make the best indie movie
possible and I think we achieved that and cannot wait to
show to an audience!
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Writer/Director
David Noel Bourke
