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Why did you decide to have two directors of photography on the film?

That was because of a theory of mine that was proved completely rubbish. I was obsessed with creating contrast, because there is just one character. So I had what I thought was a brilliant idea was to have two cinematographers and they would be different. Especially because one of them is from Northern Europe, Anthony Dod Mantle, and the other one is Latin American, from Ecuador, Enrique Chediak. I thought they are bound to be different. One would be black-and-white, the other in color. Didn’t work at all. You can’t tell the difference between their work at all. What I hadn’t realized was, that more important than anything I was setting up was their relationship with James, and their reaction to how he moved. That’s what the cinematography is in the film.

I thought one would have a fall out with James and there would be one who he’d like, so it would be good cop, bad cop. None of that. They both had a very good relationship with him. There was an advantage to it, because I didn’t want to stop when I was filming, so we were able to shoot seven days a week. They could work split shifts so I could keep going and not stop filming. James had to have a day off legally, but he didn’t really, because he’d go to New York to show his face at these university courses, and then he’d fly back overnight to be with us. He was as obsessed with the filming as I was. We had a couple days off for Easter and that was all. If you keep going like that, it will have an energy that eventually will come across in the texture of the film was my theory.

Water seems to be a recurring theme in the film.

We thought in the beginning that we wanted to make it as pleasurable as possible, because this is his character, taking all pleasures for granted. So you have everything in the beginning. You have music, you have movement, you have energy, you have girls with water dripping off their bodies. It is delicious. Everything is delicious. And then it stops and he doesn’t have any of those things now. Except that he has a bit of them on the videotape. To torture himself with. That he could have gone with them. And the water is everywhere except not quite in his reach anymore. So that’s the whole idea of it, really. I thought, you’ve got to make the beginning as pleasurable as possible, because virtually the rest of the film you are gonna suffer like he suffered. The pleasure he took in himself was enormous and like all of us, we take it for granted until things like this happen.

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