Kassandra's Images - 3

New photos from Kassandra's set.

See more pictures here and here.

Shooting Renata Stein

Leandro Lefa (right) ready for action

Cinematographer Pablo Chaseraux and director Ulisses da Motta Costa

Watching the "film inside the film"

"And... Cut! More blood!"

About the cast: Leandro Lefa

He’s the last one on the presentations. Doesn’t mean he’s less important: Leando Lefa plays one of the main characters in Kassandra, a weird and nameless neighbor which represents a threat to the leading character. However, the actor was the last one to be confirmed in the movie.

According to director Ulisses Costa, the difficulty was to find someone different from the other men in the cast. “Roger Monteiro, the writer, imagined someone older and possibly ‘bigger’”, he remembers. “But I was really afraid that the character was confused with the Big Man”.

Ulisses chose Leando Lefa also because their long friendship. He was one of the actors of  The Screamer (watch it with english subtitles), the director’s first short movie. The promise that they would work together again stood and more than one project was thought to continue the partnership, but none worked out. Another point well considered about Lefa was the fact that he already had done a horror movie – played a role in the almost legendary Beyond the Grave, a zombie movie shooted in Porto Alegre, never released commercially.

The construction of the character had to be really specific. Even with a tight schedule, Lefa was able to email pictures to the crew, showing some ideas of costume, make up, facial and body expression (pic). “Despite the lack of time to rehearse the way we did with Renata, for example, Lefa’s dedication was essential to make the character as ready as it was in the day of shooting”, tells the director.

“Ulisses’ merit: with intelligence and sensibility, he knows exactly how to say what he wants and then things just flow”, says the actor. “All I needed was the script, one coffee and three minutes of improvisation exercise where enough for me to feel completely safe and comfortable with my character and the whole crew, particularly with the rest of the cast.”

Coffee? Yep: on his first scenes, Lefa needed to look dirty. Art director Ana Gusson, suggested that a shirt was stained with coffee, to make the filthy look on the black and white photography. After that, the actor wore a wet shirt with a strong smell of coffee for several hours, what resulted in many jokes from Renata Stein.

About working in more than one horror movie, Leandro says: “I wanted to create a guy without deepness, driven by sex, who thinks is fun being grouse and repulsive. It’s interesting that in Beyond the Grave I also played a man intellectually limited and who didn’t know how to act like a person, but the characters are completely different”.

About the cast: Maico Silveira

We already talked about Renata Stein, the leading actress of Kassandra. Now, it’s time to talk about the other cast members. One of them is Maico Silveira, who plays the therapist that takes care of Kassandra.

Maico is a brazilian actor who’ve been in France and Spain. Despite his acting in several short and feature films, he usually prefers the stage. Or whatever can be turned into a stage: his monologue O dia em que aprendi a dizer não (The day I learnt how to say no, in english) requires nothing more than a small room to be performed.

Now you may be questioning yourself: how did a theater actor, used to the stage, got in this project? Maico is an old friend of director Ulisses da Motta Costa and of most of Kassandra’s crew (like composer Chico Pereira and producer Roberto Coutinho). The actor worked on their first short movie ever, O Gritador (The Screamer, in english - watch it with english subtitles), back in 2006. By then, Maico auditioned for three different characters and played them all good – which made the director say: “This guy has to be in the movie. I don’t know what he’ll play, but he IS in the movie”.

In Kassandra, Maico has a small participation. His presence, however, was essential to bring to debate the concepts of acting and to develop the work of preparation and rehearsals. Being a theater thinker, he used to discuss different ideas of acting with Ulisses, differing the stage acting and the work in front of the cameras.

 “At a certain point, we talked about Hitchcock, who said that was essential that, on suspense, the actor could play neutral eyes, so the director could build in the editing the meaning he wanted the character to have” , says Ulisses. “Maico, then, started to exercise this neutrality, playing really soft nuances of intention in some chosen moments. “This level of subtlety is pretty hard to reach”.

“At the rehearsals’ beginning I told Ulisses about some acting habits and asked him to don’t let me do those on the film”, the actor says. “I think he made a great work guiding us in a very subtle way to the whole meaning of the movie. No one had ever act in a suspense film and the suspense itself teach us a lot about acting in movies.”

Maico also appears on the “movie inside the movie” in Kassandra. But that’s another post.

When three ideas unite

Ulisses da Motta Costa here, director of the short film Kassandra.

A movie is like a child with several fathers and mothers. One of these genitors need to produce the original zygote, so to speak, need to light the first flame that begins the project. In this case, this blame is mine to bear.

Kassandra came up to my mind in the last winter, in a rainy period, when I was taking a few days off. That’s when three long-time different ideas blended in a surprising amalgam. The ideas were:

  

1 – I’ve always wanted to make a film based only in the visual narrative, a film with very few dialogs. I’m a silent movies big fan, but all of my other films were quite verborragic. So, for me, the best character for a visual narrative is one that could’t speak.

2 – On the other hand, I’ve always wanted to shot a film in black-and-white, to think not in colors, but in light with a primitive state of constrasts between darkness and brightness.

3 – At last, the third idea was born in a conversation with score composer Chico Pereira. We’re talking about how difficult is to listen a non-cliché music for horror films. We’re sort of decide that one day we would make a flick with a soundtrack different from what one’s used to hear.  

Those three concepts were sparked togheter one night, probably inspired by Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness (the book I was reading at that time). Like three twisted creatures, they gathered in an indissociable maner. From this primordial mix, new ideas breeded: a charecter, her name, tarot cards, family photos, a scary shadow, a bathtube filled with blood.

Finally, the confusion founded an order when the face of actress Renata Stein appeared in Kassandra’s silhouette. She was the first invited for the Project. She told me: “I’m in, but movie had to be made”.

Her wish is an order. Through this blog, we will tell you how the production is going.

Be welcome.