Julia Loktev The Loneliest Planet

Julia Loktev The Loneliest Planet

Cast: Gael Garcia Bernal, Hani Furstenberg
Director: Julia Loktev
Genre: Drama

Synopsis: Set against the breathtaking backdrop of Georgia's Caucasus Mountains, the award-winning new drama from rising talent Julia Loktev tells the story of a young couple on the journey of a lifetime, and an incident that irrevocably transforms their relationship.

The Loneliest Planet
Release Date: 21st of March, 2013

Directors Notes

By Julia Loktev – Writer/Director

Tributaries

Growing up in Russia, I remember seeing photos of my mom trekking through the Caucasus Mountains as a student, of my parents traveling together in Georgia before I was born. Georgia was the vacation paradise of the Soviet Union, with an almost mythical reputation for its hospitality as much as its beauty.

I first travelled to Georgia a few years ago, with a boyfriend. He was embarking on a solo bicycle trip across Georgia and Armenia, and I had coincidentally been invited to a film festival in Batumi. After a week together, a week in which nothing very dramatic happened but at the end of which he wasn't my boyfriend anymore, he got on his bike and I got on the eight-hour bus to Tbilisi. On the bus, a short story I read a while back drifted into my mind. Oddly, only after I finished this movie based on the story, I remembered that he'd read it too, that we had talked about it the night we met.

The story, by young American writer Tom Bissell, is about a wealthy unhappily married couple trekking with a guide in Kazakhstan. I loved the short story. And I also hated it. I loved the core incidents. And I hated the people the story happened to. I wanted to turn it inside out, to imagine the same incidents happening to very different people, with very different implications; to see if at the heart of story's inherent brutality a tenderness might be found. Bissell's couple refers to their trips as 'Expensive Trips Nowhere," which is the title of the short story. It was the first thing I changed, since it has very little to do with this film.

Alex and Nica are young backpackers -- they travel cheaply, they live for these trips. They can survive on street food and sleep on any surface as long as it's horizontal, they seek out unusual destinations, would pick Georgia over Thailand any day, try to make contact with locals, and manage to communicate with smiles, hand gestures and five phrases of the native language. (Alex and Nica's Georgian vocabulary consists of 'hello", 'thank you", 'please", 'how much?" and 'cheers!") Traveling, when done right, is about constantly making a fool of yourself, about not knowing, wanting to know, leaving yourself open, vulnerable. I travelled alone across Central Asia from Turkmenistan to Kazakhstan for half a year when I was 22, and I've spent a lot of time accidentally making a fool of myself in various parts of the world since. I sense I've met this couple on my travels.

The couple in the short story are married, bored and disillusioned with each other. In the film, I imagined the same events happening to a couple who are very much in love, engaged to be married in a few months, are looking forward to a future together, are full of optimism and joy. Traveling may be the thing that brings them together, the thing they share and love most. When we first meet them, it may just be one of the happiest times in their lives.

The basic premise of travellers trekking with a local guide happens every day in different parts of the world. In fact, due to financing, we briefly tried to relocate the film to Xinjiang, the Uighur region of China, near the Tajikistan border. In the end, we came back to Georgia, the place where the idea began. Some of my experiences on my first trip to Georgia found their way into the first half of the film. The tourist industry in Georgia is still nascent, so the relationship between tourists/locals is not so strictly defined along commercial lines. You might stay in a family house, you might spend an evening drinking and dancing with local guys.

I usually get mistaken for Georgian there, until I open my mouth, and for me Georgia feels very close to home. Despite the recent conflict with Russia, there's still a sense of shared history, shared cultural references. Most Georgians over 25 still speak Russian fluently, though this is quickly changing with the young generation. I felt shy addressing people in Russian, but the response was always welcoming. Reminders of political tensions persist. We were shooting right near the border, could see Russia just on the other side of the mountain, but it seemed an ocean away. The border was closed, except to Armenian trucks using it as a trade route. Yet interacting with Georgians, I experienced incredible kindness and warmth, a familiality.

And then there's the landscape, so unlike mountains I knew growing up in Colorado or any mountains I've seen. These emerald mountains are imposing yet velvet soft, lush yet naked. There is nowhere to hide. There are no trees. Only green grass, veined with orange sulfur. It would have been a very different film if we set it in a jungle or a harsh desert. The harsher the emotions in the film, the more enchanting the landscape becomes. Having seduced Mikhail Lermontov, Arthur Koestler, Knut Hamsun, this landscape now seduces us. The landscape stretches out and rises up, traps us. Cinematographer Inti Briones and I had a rule about the sky. We didn't want to see the tops of mountains, to allow the sky give us an escape. The sky could only come in slivers.

I thought about a Russian film where landscape plays a character, Kalatozov's The Letter Never Sent, I thought of Stalker, but maybe only in a superficial way -- there is green everywhere, there is a guide. But the film I probably thought of most was Rossellini's Voyage in Italy -- there is a couple, they are on a trip, they come apart, perhaps they come together.


Flow

When I approached Gael García Bernal to play Alex, he said he had dreamed of going to the Caucasus ever since he read Lermontov's Hero of Our Time in grade school. Hani I found accidentally, looking through Israeli movies, but once I saw her, I couldn't see anyone else as Nica. I loved how they fit together. Both Gael and Hani are very physical actors, comfortable using their bodies to communicate, playful yet not afraid of silence.

Casting Dato the guide, I saw nearly every middle-age Georgian actor, plus nearly every professional guide or mountaineer. I liked the idea of casting a real guide. A guide would likely speak English, would know how to behave in the mountains, but most importantly, a guide is a kind of actor, a guide puts on a performance on every tour. The nature of the relationship between guide and guided is inherently complex. A guide is both entertainer and protector. He's someone you've hired, someone doing his job. At the same time, you're on a fun trip together in the middle of the wilderness, so you become friends. Next week he'll likely have new friends.

All the mountaineers pointed me to one man, Bidzina Gujabidze, the top mountaineer in Georgia, who has climbed six 8000m peaks, including Mt. Everest twice. The only problem was, Bidzina had no interest at all in acting and was busy planning an expedition to the Himalayas. He made a misstep though, inviting me to dinner with his wife and kids. They got so excited by the idea of the movie that they wouldn't leave him alone until he agreed to do it, postponing the expedition. Bidzina's family became part of our team -- his daughter worked on production design, and his son was our 2nd AC -- and we became part of Bidzina's family.

There's a beautiful absurdity to casting Georgia's top mountaineer to play an ordinary village trekking guide, a man who hikes in sneakers and worn dress pants. For Bidzina, the trek in the film is a stroll in a park. Bidzina brought a depth and veracity to the character, an innate sense of how to move, how to be in the mountains. Our rehearsal consisted of an overnight hike on Mt. Kazbeg. Bidzina advised us to take just one tent to save weight. So Gael, Hani and I slept together in a 2-person tent. Bidzina insisted on sleeping outside under a sheet of plastic. We woke up in a rainstorm and ended up with all four of us huddled in that 2-person tent.

I incorporated jokes and stories Bidzina told me into the script, and I based the guide's other anecdotes on things other people had said to me in Georgia. I like weaving threads of documentary through a fiction, working off stories I hear, throwing actors into a real world setting, creating a situation and watching it play out. For example, for the guesthouse scenes, we spent a day filming Gael and Hani at a family's home in our base village. Of course, I then weave threads of fiction into the documentary, I change the curtains, guide the situation, alter the stories that I hear.

Shooting in the mountains was even tougher than I imagined. We had to hike to most locations, taking the equipment on our backs, sometimes with one or two horses for support, and we spent many nights camping. Our small amazing crew was a mix of film professionals and local mountaineers, who knew these mountains inside out. And then there was the 'crew" in the sky, which was less cooperative. Filming in mountains, you're minutely aware of every change in light, entirely at the mercy of nature's moods. When we scouted, there were clouds and lovely diffuse light. During the shoot, we got slammed with a historic heat wave. To avoid the glaring sun and get the right look, we had very limited hours to shoot. DP Inti Briones developed extensive technical light charts for each location, detailing the exact time the sun would hide behind mountains; for example, we could film a particular location between 6:15am and 8:15am, and pointing the camera only in one direction. We would spend hours waiting for the right light, preparing, then try to shoot very quickly before the light changed again. When we switched to nights near the end, it was a relief to film all night and not wait for the sun. Along with the sky, the ground was a challenge too. Most scenes were shot in long takes, and required the camera operators and actors to move through elaborate choreography while hiking on rough terrain.

We shot on the RED camera, using vintage Soviet Lomo prime lenses. Inti and I looked at a lot of old Soviet films as a reference. The Lomos had a certain softness, a magic. We found them gathering dust in a box. A very kind man rescued them from the garbage when the Georgian state film studio shut down. Converting the Lomos to use with the camera involved some international intrigue. We had to send them to Russia, but it's impossible to travel directly from Georgia to Russia. So our Armenian art director took the bus to Yerevan, and then her mom flew to St. Petersburg with the lenses.


Confluence
I'm not interested in bad things happening to good people. I'm interested in good people doing bad things. Neither Alex nor Nica acts how they would ever expect themselves (or each other) to act; neither acts how they would want to act. The central rupture catches them off guard, throws them off course. They are not who they thought they were, not who they want to be.

I'm struck by how differently people respond to the central moment. I worried viewers would find the act unforgiveable, would write Alex off forever, 'He's not a man." And some people do. Yet others say, 'What's the big deal? He tried to correct it. Why is she so upset?" I'm starting to realise the way people respond to the film tells as much about them as about the film, is really based on their own cultural and personal background. I hope it might lead to some interesting date conversations.

I'm interested in the core question of masculinity, what does it mean to be 'a man." I think it must be very confusing to be a man now, at least for most men I know. The expectations are not so clear. In Georgia, things seem much clearer. When we were shooting the rain scene, with the three of them huddling under a plastic sheet, I tried to position Gael in the middle. Bidzina refused, 'No, the woman goes in the middle." He said this with the same certainty he might say, 'Water is wet." There was no question. This was an absolute. The woman must be protected from the rain. The woman goes in the middle. I realised this would never occur to most men I know. I'm not sure if this is good or bad, but it is telling. And as a woman, I'm not so clear on what I expect from a man. Like Nica, I like to think of myself as independent, strong (the nature of this job consists of telling people what to do), and yet I catch myself wanting to be protected. The desire unnerves me, embarrasses me a little. For all my feminist education, I admit the story would be entirely different if the roles were reversed. There would be no story.

The central moment really is just a moment, a momentary gesture. Alex attempts to undo it. The danger passes. They are more than one day's hike from town. Nica makes the decision to keep going. So they keep going. But where do you go from here? What do you do next? What is there to do? What is there to say?

The first words in the film are, 'Sorry, sorry, sorry," Alex apologising for the delay in bringing the hot water kettle. We say I'm sorry every day, for the most insignificant offenses. Are these same words adequate now? Or do they trivialize the transgression? The stronger formulation is 'forgive me," which has an almost religious connotation of absolution. It's interesting that in some languages like Spanish or Russian, there's a common form of apology that literally means 'remove my guilt." But what if you do not want your guilt removed? What if you don't feel you deserve to be forgiven? After the initial shock wears off, could it be easier for her to forgive him than it is for him to forgive himself? But how do you forgive someone who does not want to be forgiven?

He doesn't ask for forgiveness, leaving her little room to move. She doesn't reproach him, leaving him little room to move. He might prefer that she yelled at him, but she does not. There is no opportunity for catharsis. We did film a scene where Alex and Nica eventually try to talk, a scene about the impossibility of talking -- everything they said sounded hollow, trite. Ultimately, it was more interesting to imagine what they could say, to imagine what they really couldn't say.

In any case, they have little opportunity to talk. The entire second half of the film passes the same day as the incident. They don't have time to process what happened, and in the middle of this vast landscape, they don't have the space either. They have no chance to be alone. They're always with the guide. He has seen everything, continues to see everything. They are all trapped together in this vastness. Even if they turned back, it would take them more than one day to walk to the village. They might act very differently if they were alone, if they were at home, or if the whole thing happened in a city, if they could go back to the hotel, if they had even a few minutes to be alone or to be alone together. But they don't. Maybe later they will act differently, but for now we just have this day.

For now they don't know what they feel, what they want, what to do. So they just do whatever they can manage to do in the moment, and it keeps shifting from one moment to the next. Unable to talk, they make little attempts to communicate through small physical gestures, lifting a backpack, offering a dried apricot, gestures that might otherwise mean nothing, but that suddenly come to mean everything. Sometimes the movement of a hand, the slight shift of a body, interests me more than anything someone could ever say. Alex and Nica take turns attempting to close the space between them. But they are out of sync. Each time one tries to come closer, the other pulls away, like magnets that can't quite touch.

They engage in this dance of failed tiny gestures, Dato the guide is always there, complicating the plot. From the beginning, Dato is a slippery presence, a jester, a protector, maybe a destroyer, maybe a redeemer. The guide comes with his own narrative, his own story, a story based loosely on old friends of my parents, fellow Russian immigrants, whom I knew as a child. Dato is the mystery element, a little like the Holy Ghost in the trinity -- we're not quite sure what his role is. Nica and Alex need Dato. Without him they would be lost, they would never find their way out of here, and maybe he does point a way out in the end, maybe not in the most obvious way.


Julia Loktev was born in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), Russia. When she was nine, her family immigrated to the U.S., settling in Loveland, Colorado. While in university in Montreal, Julia was a DJ at an alternative radio station, which led to creating her own audio art works. Following half a year traveling alone through Central Asia, she moved to New York to pursue filmmaking. Julia's first feature, the documentary MOMENT OF IMPACT, won several prizes including the Directing Award at Sundance, the Grand Prize at Cinéma du Reél in Paris, Best Documentary at Karlovy Vary, and screened in many festivals including Locarno, New Directors/ New Films and Pusan. Her fiction debut DAY NIGHT DAY NIGHT premiered in Directors Fortnight at Cannes in 2006, winning the Youth Prize, and went on to win the Louve D'Or at the Montreal Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Best New Director at the Chicago International Film Festival, the Someone to Watch prize at the Independent Spirit Awards, and two Gotham Award nominations, Breakthrough Director and Breakthrough Actor. Julia also makes multiple-screen video installations that have been exhibited in a visual art context, including at Tate Modern in London, P.S.1 in New York, Haus der Kunst in Munich, Bienal de Valencia, Mito Art Tower in Japan. She was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Julia lives and works in Brooklyn.