Finding some value in Nothing

Italian-Canadian wunderkind filmmaker Vincenzo Natali unleashes another quirky movie

In 1997 one of the strangest Canadian movies to be made debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival. Titled Cube, the Kafkaesque drama about six characters who wake up one morning to find themselves thrown into a strange maze made up of identical, symmetrical cube-like rooms, the film was the brainchild of Toronto wiz-kid Vincenzo Natali, and became a cult video hit around the world (especially Italy).
Seven years later, and Natali is back with an even more imaginative and offbeat picture, Nothing. The movie centres on Dave (David Hewlett) and Andrew (Andrew Miller), lifelong friends with diverse personalities who can't live without each other. But one day, as terrible circumstances begin to surround them, they magically manage to "wish" everything away... everything. Now the two are left alone in the universe with absolute nothing.
Tandem talked to Vincenzo Natali from his home in Los Angeles about Nothing.

I read in the press notes that you were intrigued by the concept of nothingness. Can you explain that?
"Sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it? I think I'm interested in a lot of things that are abstract. In my films I like to take a story that is in many respects very conventional and then juxtapose it against an abstract setting. So in Cube it was really a prison-escape story set in a geometrical world. And in Nothing it's really a buddy comedy but in a completely blank universe. I just find that those two things, the kind of dynamic between combining those two things, can be really interesting."

How did you sell this?
"Well I'm not sure that the people who bought it quite understood what we were selling. But I think they had a lot of faith in me and the people that I work with and really to their credit, they gave us complete creative control. And that was the only way to make this movie because we make, I think, in a hopefully exciting way, a lot of unconventional choices. And truly this film is an independent movie. Most of the money came from Japan and Germany, with some help from Telefilm. But honestly, I'm amazed that somebody let us do it. Honestly, living in such a conservative time, it's so hard to get a movie financed. And if you were to spend any time in the world film market, to find out and see what kind of material is made, it's very hard to do original material. So I think we were extraordinarily lucky to do the film we did and to make it with the kind of controls that we had."

This [film] is basically a two-hander, so you had to put a lot of faith into these two actors because they go through these transformations. Was there a concern that this wouldn't work?
"We definitely thought it was an experiment. I mean there's no question that this movie is going out on a limb. And really in writing the film, actually in conceiving the film, we didn't have a reference point. There really are no other films that you can directly compare Nothing to. So I think for all of us we thought it was a bit of a tightrope walk. But at the same token, that's exactly why we wanted to do it, because we thought it was really original material and I just wanted to see it on the big screen. In terms of the actors, the idea came to me as a vehicle for the two actors. They're very close friends of mine, I've worked with them for many years, and I wanted to make a two-hander with them. And in fact I had been juggling with many ideas and none of them seemed to me was the most interesting one. And I had always conceived of it as not only as a film that they would act in, but that they would help me write. And as it turned out, Andrew Miller (Andrew) is one of the writers. He and his writing partner Andrew Lowery actually wrote the screenplay. The raison d'être of the movie was to make a movie with David (Hewlett) and Andrew. I never had any doubt as to whether they would be able to carry it."

When you presented them with this idea, nothing around, nothing even to distract us, did they jump at the chance or did they look at each other and think, this is crazy?
"I was impressed by how confident they were because it is a scary thing for any actor. I mean, in essence they were performing on an empty stage and there wasn't a lot for them to distract... there wasn't a lot for them to use for the performance other than just themselves. But they're just great actors and they have great roles. I think David and Andrew are two really interesting, fun characters. We didn't have any concern about that really. Also we were very careful about the way we made the movie. We actually, in the early stages of making the movie, shot an early version of the video, a kind of workshop version on video. And we spent time with the story and with those characters. So by the time we were shooting the film I think everyone was pretty confident. "

The sets are pretty ingenious...
"One of the reasons I wanted to make this movie was the concept of making the film in a virtual world, which is essentially what nothing is. And I love the control that grants me as a director to go through the film almost entirely through the studio to design a film from the ground up. Those are my two favourite things. And I have an incredible production designer and an incredible visual effects company that I work with."

With Cube, you've become a sort of international name with a cult following...
"The geeks like me. (Laughs)"

Cube was greatly received by audiences, but you still make these little films. Is this a choice?
"It's very hard to make a big interesting movie because once you get into a certain budget range, the kind of material that you can work with becomes very limited. And I think that's part of the reason that I made three relatively small films in a row because I do want to push the boundaries a little bit and try different things. And really that's the only way to do it, at least for me at this stage in my career. But believe me, I'd love to have more money (Laughs). At the same token, it's very hard to make these films because on the one hand they appear to be small. You'd think that a film about two guys and a whole lot of nothing would not be a very technically complex or ambitious film to make, but in fact it was like a Chinese puzzle, it was phenomenally complicated. And we're doing a lot of things technically that I don't believe have been done before in any movie of any size. All these movies in a way are really little epics and when you make them with the kinds of budgets that I work with you're really working without a safety net. That can be exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. We're very lucky at the end of the day we were able to just squeeze it in within the budget we had. It was very, very tough."

Now you're living in L.A. We've lost you too.
"Well no, because I will always continue to make films in Toronto. And some of my films will be 100 percent Canadian, some won't. Some will be hybrids, like my film Cypher, my second film, has an American producer, but is basically cast and crewed in Toronto. And in many respects, I was working with many of the people I was working with on Cube. So you definitely haven't lost me. And in many ways I feel even more devoted to making films in Canada because there is so much more freedom there and I think I've accumulated this incredible group of people that I work with that I rely on. Hopefully, I'll have the best of both worlds."


Nothing is currently playing in local cinemas.

Publication Date: 2004-07-25
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=4202