Sundance is ostensibly a place of excitement and discovery—point origin for films that’ll define the year to come and filmmakers who’ll become leading lights years, decades hence. This, of course, isn’t how it pans out; only the odd premiere is even worth watching. It was clear from afar that one such exception would be Georgia Bernstein’s Night Nurse, plaudits for which were couched in excitement that this emerged through a wholly unknown, debut director.
Night Nurse engenders its fair share of shocks without straining for surprise. A central turn by Cemre Paksoy, for whom the overused term “breakout” in fact seems usable, does so much to hide as it does to suggest whatever actually fuels this protagonist’s eyebrow-raising relationship with a charismatic older man (Bruce McKenzie). This, even as Bernstein lets scenarios take their scariest and sexiest possible routes; the film often evokes a bad situation you’ve let yourself get into before really torquing its dramatic potential. If her debut is too assured to suggest the backhanded “calling card” label, one still watches it hoping this is an initiation point.
I was glad to speak with Bernstein on very minor particulars of Night Nurse‘s production and the larger, thornier matter of landing in this moment—particularly as that relates to no less a figure than Catherine Breillat.
The Film Stage: You had real success out of Sundance—success of your own accord and merit and whatever you want to call it. The IFC acquisition is part of that. I’ve worked in distribution for many years so I know that they’re a real company.
Georgia Bernstein: They are a real company. Yeah, we’re really happy to be with them. They’ve been awesome.
The movie starts with an onscreen credit for IFC. When a film is acquired out of a festival, the movie is finished and the company only puts their logo at the very front, not over an image. Did you keep a space open in the opening of the film for a distributor?
For sure. We were hoping to be bought and so… you know, I actually didn’t totally leave space for them because I did sort of think in my head, “Well, we could just, like, do it over black and expand the beginning maybe a little bit.” I did add a couple seconds, but yeah: “IFC Presents” was always the goal.
You extended the image as it appears in the film?
You know, I added five seconds of black. I tortured myself in wondering if I should add three seconds or five seconds. [Laughs] I ended up with five and I felt that, you know, why not? That’s so funny that you… well, when you worked in distribution, did you not do, like, “company presents” when you would buy a film?
We’d put our logo at the front. And that’s a whole weird industry. There’s a highway robbery if you don’t know how to make a DCP yourself: you bring it to a post house and they’ll charge you exorbitant amounts just to have your logo added. Many releases ended up not having one because we weren’t going to pay to make another DCP.
We were always going to pay to make another one. Also, I did some really minor adjustments to the film after we played Sundance. I stabilized the opening shot and I did some color tweaks—nothing that I think an audience would really totally clock unless they’re, like, a super fan. But we were always going to make another one.
When and how did you decide that you were going to make those? Was it actually watching the movie in the theater and feeling like something was off?
Yeah. I’ll reveal that I am a crazy perfectionist. And, you know, when we found out that we got into Sundance, we were not finished with the film—as many people aren’t when they find out. So we raced to the finish line. I think we had to submit by, like, beginning of January. And then I just sort of had to say, “I can’t fix these couple little things I really want to fix for Sundance.” So I just said to myself, “I’m going to fix them for when we hopefully get bought.” And then when IFC bought us it was like, “Okay, perfect—I can finally implement.”
The main thing was just that I really wanted to stabilize this opening shot which, you know, we shot on a robo-arm in a garage. And I hadn’t seen it projected on a screen until we were testing our DCP for Sundance. And I was just like, “I wish this was a little bit more stable.” It was because the robo-arm itself is programmed with code and then it’s going… we’re shooting with a probe lens with our actor’s real body, so we’re doing it over and over and she can’t move, and every time she moves a little bit, the arm itself of the machine would bump into her body. There’s just little imperfections that I wanted to perfect in that opening sequence. So that’s getting into the weeds I guess, but yeah.
No, the opening shot was so cool. Part of me thought it would be a stupid question to ask “how did you do it,” because part of me doesn’t want to know. It’s a wonderful way to start the movie. Night Nurse is filled with surprises, and one thing I wasn’t prepared for is that Cemre just has this incredible face. It feels like a director or DP would kill to have an actor with that kind of face. And you’ve known her since the beginning of college, right?
Yeah, we met on the very first day of college, which is, like, our cutie-pie backstory. And we were both theater majors. We went to Northwestern. They try to make it a conservatory, so you’re in the same acting class for three years with the same people and the same teacher. So we did that whole course together, and we like to say we developed a shared language around performance and tone. A lot of our taste… not taste, but the way we talk about performance came from that class.
But yeah, I mean, we always say she’s the most beautiful girl. And it’s funny you say that a DP would love her face because—she’ll be so embarrassed by this—she is really photogenic and we would always say on set, everyone would always comment, “The camera loves her.” I just think it’s a combination of: she just has these really big eyes and they’re so emotional, and she’s kind of angular. The camera loves her.
Do you think you accrued, over the years of being around and observing her, this philosophy of how you’d photograph her before you even began production?
I truly have never thought of that. Had I thought about it? Honestly, I wrote the part for her, but mostly because I think… you know, outside of her just being an incredible performer, because this is my first feature, I really wanted to make it with people that I know and love, and who I know would really be down to do what we needed to do to make the film at whatever size it ended up being. I think I felt like I could really count on her and I knew we also just had, as I’ve been saying a little bit, a really… I think we ended up, after college, developing a shared sense of taste where we love a lot of the same movies. So I felt like when I sent her the script, I felt like she would understand the tone. And she really did. She brought so much of that to the film. We would talk about references, and then I think she just intuitively understood what I was going for.
The first phone call scene made me genuinely guffaw. It’s a testament to the framing and the staging and writing of it, and I think part of it is because I couldn’t get a grip on what it might be trying to convey to me tonally. I wonder if there was a specific mood—sinister or sexy or maybe both—in mind for an intended feeling, and if that at all evolved between rehearsal, shoot, and editing.
So we did all of our intimate scenes the first week. Every scene between Cemre and Bruce—like, every single one of those [Laughs] important scenes—were shot the first week, which was mostly just a scheduling issue that we had to do it that way. But I think in the end it was really great, because I think it set the tone for the whole movie—where it was like, okay, “We’re going to treat this very seriously and these scenes sort of represent the whole movie.” But I guess your question is sort of about process, like: how did I come to that tone of that specific scene.
We did a couple days of rehearsal where—because we shot the whole film in my grandmother’s real house—I would rehearse the scenes with Cemre and Bruce, and then we’d bring in my DP and we would photograph the scenes so that we knew some angles that we liked, and then me and my DP would go off and finish the shot list. But we really rehearsed it and blocked it all ahead of time so that we knew, on the day, that we could just focus on performance and that we could put the lights and set the whole thing and kind of be done.
But yeah: I think for that scene in particular, I love—I say this in a lot of interviews so hopefully it’s not boring by now—Catherine Breillat and I love her love scenes that she does. So I watched those scenes a lot and tried to understand how she was playing with power dynamics, and then how that translated to her blocking. I think I wanted the tone to be like—to put it in the simplest, dumbest terms—she wants it, but she doesn’t want to say yes. And that was, like, a very murky [Laughs] territory. And I think that’s kind of what Catherine Breillat movies are like, too—that’s the feeling of watching it—and so I wanted to evoke that feeling as well.
Would you believe that I have a follow-up question for this and it involves Catherine Breillat?
Oh, well, had you already known that that was a reference?
Yes.
Okay. [Laughs]
What you’re saying goes to something that Breillat said to me when we spoke a few years ago that put me in mind of this movie. Maybe I’ll just quote it to you and we can take it from there.
Please.
She said that she wants people watching her films to “be questioned” and “maybe be fascinated or transfixed in a way that they don’t want to be.” Which kind of goes to what you’re saying: this character wants it but she doesn’t want to say yes. Breillat also spoke about this idea of “a terrifying moral order that is a fascistic single-thought route”—kind of a big idea. And Night Nurse feels riskier, more risqué than I think a lot of movies that would play at Sundance and get proper distribution in an English-language, American context. Was there any extent to which you saw this film as a reaction against a certain evasiveness or safety in modern movies?
Hmm. Well, I think I was lucky in that I had the opportunity to work with an amazing producer, and I was really lucky that I got to make exactly the movie I wanted to make. And, you know, without having to think too much about being commercial, but truly, we made exactly what we wanted to make, and I feel super lucky to have had the opportunity to do that. When you’re talking about the Catherine Breillat quote, I don’t even know if this answers your question, but basically: when I was conceiving of the film, I was like, “I want it to be about a young woman and an older man and a dynamic sort of like a Catherine Breillat movie, but I don’t want it to be, like, a pastiche, or I don’t want to do something that’s been done a bunch of times. So how can we push this to be to its… how can we push this?”
So I guess, in a way, I was thinking of how can we push this idea, but not, “How can we be controversial?” I just was like, “How can we do something fresh?” And so I was like, “It would be interesting if it’s a young nurse and the love interest is in a nursing home and he may or may not have dementia. That would be pushing it, the age gap—whatever—to the extreme, which would be sort of a fun experiment. And how would that work? And would it work?”
And I think it was just sort of like… yeah, totally works! [Laughs] I really wasn’t trying to push boundaries, and I don’t think the film has that sort of tone. But I do think it… you know, it’s not a John Waters-type tone. It’s more grounded.
Sure.
I don’t know. I don’t even know if that answers your question.
What you’re saying about having a supportive producer resonates, because this seems like a movie that wouldn’t be easy to get over the finish line. It goes to so many scary places; it pushed past where I expected it to go. I’ll put it that way.
Okay. That’s cool. Another thing I want to say, though, is that I was thinking—and I am thinking a lot now, as I’m developing future projects about erotic thrillers—how do you make a contemporary erotic thriller? So maybe this is sort of getting at what, you know, Catherine Breillat was trying to… the terrifying moral order. So I, of course, think she’s brilliant and I think that’s all true, and I think she really is doing that. What I was trying to do… basically, I think the contemporary erotic thriller actually is a lot more withholding and is full of restraint. And so it’s funny to hear you talk about how you feel like the film is pushing boundaries—which it totally is, in a way—but I also feel like I actually was trying to be super withholding. I think we’ve lost sight of what the erotic thriller should be, because in our culture where everything is permissible, we need to hold back.
You said you recently watched L’Avventura as inspiration. In talking about writing another film, I don’t know if you were watching it specifically for that purpose.
Oh, yes, I am. And I love that film. Yeah, Cemre and I are developing a script right now that’s an erotic thriller set in a small town in Turkey, so we were watching L’Avventura as sort of inspiration for that project.
Wow. That’s a very powerful combination.
Thank you. [Laughs] Let’s hope. And yeah: it’s hard to compare to Catherine Breillat because she’s so… first of all, she’s made so many films, so she’s really making a statement with all of her films. But I try. I’m trying.
Well, keep going. The title of “American Catherine Breillat” will fall on you eventually.
One can hope!
Night Nurse enters a limited release on Friday, July 10.