Brothers in Arms

Two men conjoined from their heads lie on a hospital bed. When anesthesia kicks in, they sink in to their last shared dream. One by one, they slowly wake up, in abandoned trench system at the battlefield. In the midst of fog of war, flying artillery shells and scavenging rogue soldiers, they’re only mission is to survive, together or alone.

BROTHERS IN ARMS, 16 minutes, NFTS 2013 Cast: Oliver Tillney, Michael Parr
Director: Pekka Saari, Producer: Daniel Negrat, Screenplay: Stephen Kaday
Cinematographer: Paul Özcur, Editor: Chiaki Suzuki

Reminisce

Brothers in Arms was a cinematic experimentation that allowed us to research everything that is beyond subtlety and realism. It’s an expressionistic art action war film (if such thing exists). It’s also the roughest piece of film I’ve done so far. Though our story was simplein it´s core, the two levels of reality, one of the the surgical operation, and one of the dream gave us headache. Stephen Kaday gave his all as a screenwriter and after lot of back and forth we settled on draft 10 (which is usual).

Design

One thing about making a war films is, that you get to play with all the cool props that goes with it. While scouting for locations and props me and my producer Daniel Negrat went a bit nuts with all the cool gear from the first and the second world war. As we were not creating a specific historic scenario, we were able to go and pick props and designs from any conflict we desired. At the same time our art departement was busy in work creating the trenches to suite our vision of surrealistic war zone. As we were running low on budget we had to build our own trenches, which sounds nuts, but shooting in a. I don’t know how, but Daniel got us a farm and an excavator, and so we dug ourselves some trenches. And I must say that standing in the middle of them with blown out wood and metal shielding everywhere was quite a stopping experience.

Shoot & Post

Shooting was a mayhem. We were constantly fighting against time, just about getting all the crucial shots we needed. Paul Özcur drove his camera crew hard to bring in the long steady cam sequences while our art director Paul Savulescu worked tirelessly to dress and redress every new sequence. Luckily there was no need for continuity or accuracy – we were creating a dream, and the environment was not meant to make sense. After 4 days everybody looked like they had been through a war – Mud was oozing up from the set and our clothes and our equipment, and we all needed a shower and some good sleep.

We always knew that playing the story on multiple levels would be tricky, but we also had some parts of stories that we had had to reorganise while shooting. This lead us into some trouble. After couple of cuts we understood that our troubles were indeed serious: there was a film, but it needed to be found in a completely new way. For example, our dreamworld of war always felt more real than our real world. Editor Sibila Estruch did a massive job in finding what the film needed to be, constantly questioning why we were doing what we were doing (which when done right is great thing that editor can do). After lot of experimenting we realised that we really needed to emerge the audience in the visceral feeling of the journey, and allow some confusion to stay with the story. The strenght wasn´t in the cleverness of our storyline, it was in the living it through. We needed to push the audience – make them scared and paranoid and keep them guessing what was going on. So we decided to push harder and louder, this was not quest for subtleness. Marton Kristoff went far out and did a bold and functioning soundtrack, which helped a lot. I guess in any war film, sound really draws you in to the action.

This idea continued in the whole post production. Composer Lyndon Holland found an way to do an orchestral piece with just couple of flutes and whistles which I thought suited perfectly our horroresque world. The final touches were done when colourist Boyko Stankov, who after some experimenting, came up with very rough look for the film. We would basically destroy our beautiful source images, throw most of the image information out and try to dig out all the grain and dirt that we could. Again, going almost overboard was the right thing for this film.