It’s not uncommon for film directors to be referred to as “architects.” In many instances, these crafters have to build whole worlds and universes. Illustrator Federico Babina decided to take this turn of phrase and go someplace literal with it, fashioning visual imagery of what our favorite directors might look like if their particular styles were put into the form of houses. It’s fascinating to say the least.

Babina calls this series of illustrations “Archidirector” saying “Directors are like the architects of cinema. They are those that build stories that like buildings envelop the viewer and carry it in a different world. Each with their own style, language, and aesthetics think, plan design and build places and stories that host us for the duration of the movie.”

His collection includes 27 illustrations, ranging from Hitchcock to Fellini, Von Trier to Jarmusch. Check out the entire collection at Design Boom and buy the prints at Babina’s Society 6 shop.

Starting tomorrow, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival once again bestows upon the Bay Area some of the most rarified film experiences you’ll find in the world. It runs from May 28th-June 1st, and as always, the program is like a gilded treasure box lifted from the past, containing precious jewels you won’t find anywhere else.

Take, for instance, the special presentation of a film called Lime Kiln Field Day by Burt Williams. It was a 1913 production with an all-black cast that never saw the light of day due to its white producers slamming the door shut on it indefinitely. Jump forward one century to 2013, when MoMA found and reconstructed the film’s unedited reels so that we may enjoy and appreciate one of the earliest artifacts of black film history. The film will be playing as a special presentation called “100 Years In Post-Production: Resurrecting a Lost Landmark of Black Film History.” MoMA Associate Curator Ron Magliozzi will be presenting a variety of materials from the production as well.

Also on the lineup is the silent version of All Quiet on the Western Front, which many consider to be superior to the award-winning talkie version. Sherlock Holmes will be making an appearance as well in Sherlock Holmes, a pivotal piece of Sherlockian history once thought long lost. Contributing to the conversation of modern feminism are Why Be Good?, The Deadlier Sex, and Sweden’s Norrtullsligan, three films that serve as fascinating reminders that feminist filmmaking has had a long history. The Last Laugh, a must-see for any true film fan, also rounds out the program.

One of my favorite parts of the festival is the live instrumentation, and the lineup of musicians on-hand is typically tremendous. The world-renowned silent film players include Stephen Horne, Frank Bockius, Guenter Buchwald, Diana Rowan, Steve Sterner, Serge Bromberg, the Matti Bye Ensemble, the Donald Sosin Ensemble, the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, and Bruce Goldstein and the Gower Gulch Players.

I sat down for my annual chat with festival’s Artistic Director, Anita Monga, to talk about this year’s program and examine the silent era’s influence on modern filmmaking.

For more info on the festival, visit silentfilm.org

Farm-to-table dining is something that’s swept the nation but has always been a big part of San Francisco. It’s about artisans putting a lot of love and work and time into presenting the best ingredients with utmost respect. I think this festival is the film version of that, where everybody involved—the preservationists, the programmers, the musicians—really get their hands dirty to present an incredibly special experience.
Yeah, it’s a one-of-a-kind experience, each and every screening. People always say, “Aw, I’m not going to see The Last Laugh. I’ve already seen it a million times.” You’re not going to come to see it with the group of students from the Berklee College of music perform it once in your lifetime? Come on!

Right. I’ve seen some silents several times live, but it’s a different experience every time.
Absolutely. But I also have to say that masterpieces are worth revisiting again and again. There are some films that I’ve seen 20, 30 times. And it’s amazing to see them in a movie theater like the Castro with that amazing screen and people who also appreciate this live cinema. It’s an extraordinary experience. We’re very lucky in San Francisco.

We are. I was sharing a nice lunch with a friend here in the city today, and I was telling him that one of the best things about the festival is the crowd. Being with those people, you feel like you’re part of something special.
It really is special.

You mentioned masterpieces, and I’ve got to mention All Quiet on the Western Front. It’s interesting to me that the silent version is considered by many superior to the award-winning sound version.
That’s not completely unheard of during that transition from silent to sound. Films were often made in two versions because many theaters didn’t have the capacity to make that transition. We’re living through a relatively similar transition from 35mm to DCP. A lot of little theaters have had a really hard time making that transition because it’s really expensive. The answer during the transition from silents to talkies was that different versions were made. At the beginning of sound, it was very rudimentary. The silent version of All Quiet on the Western Front has a different kind of rhythm. It isn’t bogged down by the script.

The editing is the biggest difference.
Right, because you can’t have paragraph-long intertitle cards, so the story has to be told through the action and through the characters’ faces.

People seem to have forgotten what cinema really is. Most critique I hear from younger people is focused on the script or narrative rather than what’s actually on-screen. It’s like they’re writing a book review of the screenplay.
David Thompson wrote a piece for our book on All Quiet on the Wester Front in which he has a very poetic waxing. At the end of the essay he’s talking about ways of watching a film, and he did an experiment by watching sound movies with the sound turned off. Film is both a visual and aural experience. There are amazing things to be heard. When you have a modern film you think is being silent, if you pay attention, you’ll hear all of the sounds the filmmakers put in to suspend the film in a bath of sound.

Have you seen Mad Max?
I haven’t seen it yet! I’m so looking forward to seeing it.

I’m excited for you to see it because I think it pays homage to old-school movie-making. There are things like people wobbling on tall poles that really reminds me of Keaton and Lloyd. Really daring stuff.
That’ll be the first thing I see. I remember seeing the original Mad Max, and what a revelation that was.

I remember when you guys did the “Hitchcock 9” program, with all the silents he made. I loved it. I remember seeing a vignette where Martin Scorsese said he’d watch Hitchcock with the sound turned off.
Hitchcock is amazing, but I wouldn’t advise turning off Bernard Hermann’s score! [laughs] You watch a film like Vertigo, and there are whole parts of that movie that seem suspended in some kind of other world. There isn’t a lot of talking. The sound design of those movies is extraordinary. That “Hitchcock 9” thing we did was a real revelation to me because Hitchcock was at one of the earliest junctures of filmmaking. He was just born, fully formed as a storyteller.

I know Hitchcock mourned the end of the silent era.
Film is a marriage of technology and art, and any filmmaker would be happy with technology as it changes and enhances. The silent era was an incredible period for honing visual expression, but I think the best filmmakers embraced sound and technology. Who doesn’t want to be able to do something extraordinary that was impossible before?

Back to the festival: I just watched Cave of the Spider Woman. That was something else! The imagination on display was wonderful.
My mind boggles at how that print got to Norway. It was a very popular genre in Shanghai in the ’20s, that kind of spirit story. Films were made, but there are no prints left. This one was sitting in a library in Norway. The film was made in 1927 and imported and distributed around Norway in 1929. They burned the Norwegian subtitles on the cards, so the translations came from the Norwegians, not the Chinese. Our contribution was that we had a translator go back to the Chinese intertitles and translate those. The Chinese translator found that the frames were slipped, so the Norwegian subtitles would be printed on cards that would be flipped and upside down. It was a really difficult job.

This movie was a big hit when it came out, but there’s only the one print!
Right! Only one that we know of.

Sherlock Holmes is as trendy as he’s ever been right now.
The restoration we’re presenting was kind of the holy grail for Sherlockians because the person behind it was William Gillette, who convinced Arthur Conan Doyle to do this Sherlock Holmes film. It was years after Conan Doyle had killed off Sherlock, but Gillette was known as the major stage interpreter of Sherlock Holmes. He wrote a script that combined several of the Sherlock stories, and Doyle was impressed. That film was completely lost. A number of people went looking for it, and it was discovered in a vault at the Cinémateque Francaise.

I also caught The Deadlier Sex and loved it.
Good! That was a restoration that just happened at the Academy Film Archive. Blanche Sweet is pretty great. It’s a really small part, but it’s a really early role for Boris Karloff.

I love how nimbly that one switches from drama to comedy. It’s really modern in that way. Why Be Good is another one I really liked.
It’s really great. Colleen Moore plays an effervescent flapper, a “good girl” who the boss’ son falls in love with.

Feminism is such a hot topic today, as it should be. I think it’s important to look back at films like this to get a sense of how feminism has evolved over the years.
If you’re interested in that, Norrtullsligan has very strong female characters. It’s definitely a feminist film.

Let’s take a look at some other things on the program.
“100 Years in Post-Production” is going to be a really great presentation. Lime Kiln Field Day started production in 1913 and was shelved before it ever came to fruition. MoMA found the unedited reels of this all-black production. We all know what happened in 1915 with The Birth of a Nation, and it’s been speculated that that kind of put the kibosh on this film coming out. MoMA reconstructed it. Don’t miss Flesh and the Devil, don’t miss Pan…

I’m really excited for that one.
I love this film so much. It has a very strong, modern psychological sensibility that will be really surprising and revelatory to a lot of people.

As a bit of a musician myself, I always try to sit close to the musicians during the show. You can feel the sound from their instruments wrap around you in a really magical way.
Do you ever watch the musicians?

I do!
It’s so interesting. We have this wonderful photographer, Pamela Gentile, and my favorite thing she does is take a picture from the audience; you see the screen, the musicians, and sometimes you’ll see the musicians looking up and the characters in the film looking down. It’s beautiful.

For people who say things like, “I don’t want to watch old movies,” I say, at the very least, you can just watch the musicians. They’re incredible.
People who say they’re going to be put off by things being old…I get where they’re coming from. Some people have a problem with seeing a black and white film. I can tell you that you’ll forget that they’re not talking. Plus, there are plenty of bad films made in the silent era; we just don’t play those films. We have 20 films we’re showing every year. We don’t have to show the bad stuff. We try to show a breadth of the silent era, but every film has some relevance for modern audiences.

Paradise goes up in flames in The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden, a stranger-than-fiction murder mystery in documentary form. There’s something fascinatingly bizarre about the events surrounding the unexplained deaths that struck a handful of bickering European settlers that arrived at Galapagos in the 1930s. To tell the true-crime tale, directors Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller combine a veritable treasure trove of archival film footage of the actual participants with dramatic readings of their diaries by an international cast (Cate Blanchett, Diane Kruger, Josh Radnor) and modern-day interviews with the descendants and acquaintances of the original settlers. It’s an absorbing examination of the psychological effects of being a societal outsider.

Beneath the obvious appeal of the Hitchcockian unsolved murders are deeper musings about the pitfalls of human isolation. In 1929, a German doctor and Nietzsche devotee by the name of Fredrich Ritter and his lover Dore Strauch fled their civilized home of Berlin (and their respective spouses) to start anew, alone, on the Galapagos island of Floreana. Their pie-in-the-sky dream was to carve out a splendid existence on the island, with Dr. Ritter free to form and jot down his philosophies and Strauch free to…well, play with her donkey, her only friend. (Ritter’s view on the role of women made Dore’s life in Eden considerably less ideal, as he considers her affection for the donkey a “great disappointment to me.”) The resourceful couple build a nice island life for themselves, growing a garden and even building a working shower.

Their private paradise wouldn’t remain private for long, however, as word of their “modern-day Adam and Eve” story made its way to Europe. Just a couple years after Ritter and Strauch staked their claim on Floreana, another couple, Heinz and Margaret Wittmer, boated ashore, shattering the couple’s tropical solitude. Fredrich was not pleased. Even more invasive was a maniacal, self-aggrandizing Austrian Baroness who settled on the island not long after, bringing with her a rifle, two young lovers, and plans to build a luxury resort for the wealthy to indulge in. Fredrich was incensed. “We shall resist the establishment of any community.”

The combustible relationships between the three parties eventually led to mysterious deaths, ones that no one has yet to explain. Goldfine and Geller take a whodunnit approach to the unsolved incidents, using charts, photos, and speculative modern-day interviews with island residents to piece together clues and present the various motives each of the settlers may have had to commit the strange atrocities. This portion of the film tickles the inner-detective (and gossiper) in all of us.

The photos and videos at Goldfine and Geller’s disposal are astounding, particularly footage of a silent film the sinister Baroness shot with her two slave boys, in which she reenacts her version of her interactions with Dr. Ritter and the other islanders. Her affection for the camera is disturbing. The Baroness, the most outlandish character in the film, is the only main participant that we don’t get a first-hand account from, as she didn’t keep a diary like the others. This adds to her nutty persona in a way.

Goldfine and Geller accentuate the weirdness of the tale with the playful interplay between the old footage and the actors’ readings. It’s haunting listening to the settlers describe the events of the photos we see on screen. One typically feels a certain disconnect when looking at old black and white photos like these, but the readings bridge that gap and give the photos an eerie immediacy.

The present-day interviews provide further insight into the psychology of island life, while also attempting to puff up the legend the murders, but they only succeed in the former. Though The Galapagos Affair is entirely intoxicating, it never feels as suspenseful as one would expect from a film billed as “Hitchcock-meets-Darwin”. The film’s score, by Laura Karpman, is fittingly kooky and one of Goldfine and Geller’s best assets. The weirdos on Floreana deserve nothing less.

The Galapagos Affair trailer

In The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden, married San Francisco filmmakers Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller explore the dark human history of the titular islands. Filled with deceit, jealousy, and murder, the island lore has all the trappings of a juicy whodunnit, and the film is being aptly billed as “Hitchcock meets Darwin”.

The film centers on German settlers Dr. Fredrich Ritter and his lover Dore Strauch, who escaped to the uninhabited island of Floreana to build their own private paradise. They weren’t alone for long however, as the Wittmer family and an Austrian Baroness soon barged into Eden, marking the beginning of a cramped, combustible situation that ended in death.Mixing unbelievable archival footage of the European ex-pats (narrated by Cate Blanchett, Diane Kruger, Josh Radnor, and more) who settled there in the 1930s with interviews with their descendants and present-day settlers on the islands, the film weaves an almost fantastical murder tale while keeping itself grounded in real emotion.

Goldfine and Geller spoke with us in San Francisco about discovering the Galapagos mystery for the first time, finding the incredible archival footage of the settlers, why they incorporated modern footage into the film, the film’s strange musical score, and more.

What was it like stepping foot on the Galapagos Islands for the first time in 1998?

Dayna: Oh god. I wasn’t prepared for how emotionally moving those islands were going to be. You read about them, about Darwin…philosophically, in a theoretical way, they’re out there. But to actually go to those islands, be with those animals…It was one of those “ah-ha” moments like, “Yeah, I kind of understand Darwin now. This is how it all began.” Geologically, they’re quite young as far as islands go. In terms of the important history that’s happened because of them, it’s very profound, and you feel it as soon as you set foot on one of the islands.

Dan: I remember thinking, “How on earth could anyone really carve out an existence here?” It’s so rough. Beyond being isolated from the rest of civilization, it’s not an easy place to be. When we first set foot on the islands, I had no idea of this murder mystery, but I remember thinking, “Why would you want to come here?” I knew the lore of the buccaneers and the pirates and all that. They were whaling, and it made sense as a temporary stop. But to set up a life there, to me, was an astounding leap to make.

Dayna: I have a hard time thinking about even leaving San Francisco, because we’ve spent decades here and we have a very rich friendship circle. For me, what these people did, saying goodbye to family and friends and thinking you’d probably never see them again, was such an anathema. I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

You originally visited Galapagos for a different project, correct?

Dan: Yes. We were there as cinematographer and sound person, shooting footage for an interactive educational project for our friend Doug. We were there without any notion of the human history of the islands. That wasn’t part of his scope for the project. We were quite surprised to begin to realize that there were inhabitants in Galapagos, though not indigenous. That was surprise number one.

Dayna: It took a couple days of being on the boat and seeing this book, which was about the human history of the islands, to wrap my mind around that.

Dan: And then that fateful chapter you read…

Dayna: (laughs) Yeah. The fourth chapter was called “Murder in Paradise”. In these little twelve pages, it was everything you could imagine in a Hollywood fiction film. As I was reading it, I had to keep reminding myself that these were real people and this really happened. If half of this stuff really happened…What an incredible story!

What was it like meeting Margaret?

Dan: We weren’t supposed to be on Floreana at all. The itinerary for the trip we were taking had us going to other islands. You don’t willy-nilly stop off at an island in Galapagos. The National Park controls the itinerary of the boats very specifically. Dayna had read this chapter, and we knew that Margaret Wittmer was the last to stay alive on this whole adventure. Dayna kept saying, “Can’t we stop at Floreana?” the whole trip. Every day. Finally, the boat broke down, and the nearest island was Floreana. That’s how we wound up going there. Our park guide Miguel had known Margaret for many years and said, “Off limits. Do not ask her about this. She doesn’t like to talk about this.” We were unexpected guests, but we sat with her and had tea and cookies, of course wondering whether they were poisoned or not! (laughs)

Dayna: No we did not! (laughs) It was a joke! At the time, neither of us spoke Spanish. Even though her primary language was German, because these islands are owned by Ecuador, by the time we met her she spoke fluent Spanish. She said, “En la boca cerrada no entran moscas”. Miguel started laughing, but we didn’t know what it meant. He told us, and we were like, “Oh my god!”

(The English translation is “In a closed mouth, no flies will enter.”)

Dan: Nothing we were talking about with her would have made that comment make sense, except in hindsight. She had a little bit of a reputation for playing with the notoriety and the myth. You couldn’t ask her about it, but then she would do something sly like that. She had a sly sense of humor. She was toying with us.

The seeds were planted for this project in 1998. It’s been a long process. Talk about the watershed moment when you discovered that footage of the inhabitants in the book existed.

Dayna: The first inkling was when Doug called and said, “You know that story you were completely gaga over a couple years ago? This professor at USC told me about this little stash of footage.” Could this be real? We looked at this VHS tape that had five minutes of the footage that had been transferred, and we were like, “Oh my god! That’s what they looked like! They existed!” Then we thought maybe we could actually make this movie.

So that sort of sent you on your way.

Dan: Definitely. That and knowing that Margaret had written a memoir, Dore had written a memoir, and we found John Garth, who visited every year, kept a journal. Then there were the newspaper and magazine articles that Dr. Ritter and others wrote. Now we have all of these first-person accounts, Roshomon style. What if we made this film all from their point of view? They’re the unreliable narrators. It makes for a more intriguing whodunnit, I think. You can view the footage through their eyes. You can start hearing Dore say something about the Baroness, and while the same shot is continuing to play out, get Margaret’s take on it. Then the Baroness herself. It allows you to keep reinterpreting that footage. Who’s telling the truth here?

Dayna: After we finished working on our Ballets Russes film, we got back in touch with the USC professor who knew about the footage. We went down and looked at this room filled with disintegrating 16mm reels. It smelled like vinegar.

Dan: It’s called “vinegar syndrome” when the acetate devolves under its own age.

Dayna: We thought, we’d better get this footage transferred as soon as possible. It was clear that not all of it was going to be salvageable. There were reels that were just solid, glued-together blocks. We took as much as we could.

So you have this mountain of material to cull from. But now you introduce footage these modern subjects into the film, who live in Galapagos now. What was the thinking behind including them in the story?

Dan: These are people who similarly decided to leave civilization behind and move to Galapagos and therefore could speak about their psychology, emotion, and fear as well as about the murder mystery itself. There are people who were born to those parents, in 1940 or 1950, who grew up in what was supposedly paradise for their parents. We were curious: What is it like not just to leave civilization and go to a place like this, but to be born in a place like this? Is it paradise for a child? Do you hunger for civilization? It’s the backwards story in a way, and I think this and the archival element inform each other in a way.

Dayna: It was great to tell an unsolved murder mystery, but our films always have a meta theme that’s always above the obvious. In this case, there’s a lot of philosophical questions that come up when you go to these islands and you think about this story. Some of those are addressed in the writings of the protagonists from Floreana, but some of them weren’t so easy to scratch at. We knew the people on the island today knew about this and told campfire-like stories. Once we talked to those people, we found that they could actually speak to the more existential issues.

Dan: The counterweights in the movie are interesting to me. The more you know about the moderns, the more depth there is in the murder mystery. Otherwise, you could get distracted by the almost melodramatic, insane goings-on of the facts of the murder mystery story. It helps keep it focused on the psychology of why those people on the island were there and what they were thinking.

Dayna: We did do a cut of just the murder mystery, just to play with it, and it was very claustrophobic. As interesting as that story is, you need a break from it.

You have all of these components to juggle and assemble into a film somehow. Sounds like a headache!

Dan: We had a great editor! (laughs) Bill Weber edited the film, and it was highly collaborative, because it’s too much for any one person to try to pull through. It took a lot of trial and error. Bill’s an incredibly gifted editor. The team could steer this gargantuan project forward. We have work-in-progress screenings with 10-15 people who we trust to get a sense of how things are going.

Dayna: I always say to new filmmakers, don’t expect to get it right the first time. Or the second time. Or the third. It’s a process, and you’d better be patient with that iterative process if you want to make a good film.

At what point did the voice actors come onboard? Was the shape of the film already set?

Dan: By the time we started to record them, the film was at fine cut. We chose to have them read wild, meaning not to picture. They could feel their way into the roles, and we knew that we could bend the timing of the images to suit the performance. What carries the movie is the sense that these are real people talking to you. Why not let them record in a way that felt dramatically appropriate? After we fitted the footage around the performances, we could finally say we were done and give it to the composer to start playing with.

The score is so weird.

Dan: Good! I’m glad you said that. We were aiming for weird! We’d worked with Laura [Karpman] on Something Ventured, the most recent movie we made. We said, “Keep it weird.” We’d temped with weird music, like Trent Reznor. Laura said it also needed to have moments that are fully orchestral and chromatic, because this is a hybrid story. It’s a desolation story, but it’s also got romantic elements. She was able to pull both of those pieces together, keeping that essential strangeness but also introducing more lush passages. She’d do that through really cool instrumentation, with Indian glass bells, chromatic didgeridoo…

Dayna: Laura called us one day and told us she’d taken a position in Valencia, Spain at the Berkeley college of music. We were like, “How are we going to do this if you’re in Spain?!” She said to trust her and that something great would come out of it. When she got there, she’d Skype and email us and say, “I didn’t even know there was an instrument called a chromatic didgeridoo, but one of my students is an expert at playing it. I’m going to record it, and I don’t even know how we’re going to use it!” She started doing that with students from across the world.

Dan: This Russian violinist is brilliant. She plays the Baroness’ theme like someone possessed. She’s called out in the credits especially. She was roughing and temping with these riffs from her students, who were top instrumentalists, but she did write and compose a very specific score.

Do you think that because the mystery is still unsolved, the film is better for it? In other words, would it have been a worse film if you’d discovered the truth?

Dan: I like the idea that it stays mysterious. It’s not definitely solvable, but enough pieces are there that you can begin to assemble your own version or many versions of what you think may have happened. It’s not so shy of facts and accounts that you’re just left saying, “Well…I don’t know.” But you don’t get closure all the way, because wondering is half the fun.

Dayna: My favorite films are ones you want to talk about afterward. Because it’s not conclusively solved, people are going to discuss afterward in a way that they wouldn’t if we’d found the smoking gun.

In Arie Posin’s The Face of Love, we follow a widow named Nikki (Annette Bening) who meets a man named Tom (Ed Harris) who looks, impossibly, exactly like her dead husband. Memories of her husband come rushing back to her as she and Tom start a relationship. Is she falling in love with Tom, or falling in love with her husband all over again? The film also stars Robin Williams and Jess Weixler.

Director/co-writer Posin chatted with us about working with Bening and Harris, how the film is inspired by his mother, paying homage to Vertigo, making Los Angeles romantic again, and more.

The Face of Love opens this Friday in San Francisco and is playing now in select cities.

You have two incredible collaborators manning your lead roles. As a director and storyteller, what was it like having such seasoned talents at your disposal?

Arie: It was a gift, a joy. The summer that I spent editing this movie was the best summer I’ve had maybe ever. It was a season of pure joy. On set they’re just so true and authentic, take after take. I feel like my job on set is to be kind of a firs line lie detector. Do I believe what I’m seeing? Do I believe the emotions? In the editing room, you can see that there were 5, 6, 7 takes that are all true and identical in their believability, but they’re also all subtly different. [Annette and Ed] are able to shade things and give you dimensions. It gives me such freedom to shape the movie. But at the same time, the hardest thing to do was to edit, because there are so many wonderful takes.

The story of how the idea for this story came to light is pretty remarkable. It came from your mother, correct?

Arie: Yeah. Years ago, a few years after my dad had passed away, my mother would come over to see me. She said words that are pretty similar to what Annette’s character says in the movie. She said, “A funny thing happened to me today. I was by the museum, in a cross walk on Wilshire Boulevard. I looked up and I saw a man coming towards me who looked like a perfect double of your father.” I said, “What did you do?” and she said, “It shocked me. He had a big smile on his face…and it felt so nice. It felt like it used to.” That’s the story that stuck with me and that I began to obsess, dream, and eventually write about.

I imagine going through something like that, you must feel a little bit crazy inside. What do you think the relationship is between sanity and love?

Arie: I think it’s different for everyone. My thought on it for this movie was, in a sense, that kind of love you have…you know, she spent 30 years with her husband, and she had him ripped away from her violently, tragically, just when they were at this stage where they’re thinking, “What are the two of us going to do together for the rest of our lives?” Seeing someone again who wakes up those feelings would be almost like an addiction. You get a taste, and you want more, despite yourself and despite the fact that it’s a transgressive relationship. It’s a compulsion, an obsession.

In terms of sanity, that was one of the biggest questions for me in writing the script and even throughout production. Annette’s falling in love through the course of the story, but she’s also falling back in love with her late husband. The question is always, she’s on this journey towards madness, but where is she at? How do we chart that? Is she crazy here, not crazy here? And it went back to the story with my mom, which became a real touchstone for us. The truth in that situation is that my mom wasn’t crazy, you know? She wasn’t imagining it. She saw this guy that looked like my dad, and it shook her to her core. I thought it was important that Nikki be sane, but as long as we could bear it. Once she goes mad, the audience becomes an observer of that. But to really participate, I thought it was important for her to be sane, then spiraling eventually into madness, but being able to hold that off as long as possible.

There are obvious similarities between the plot of your film and Vertigo.

Arie: Vertigo is one of my favorite movies. Hitchcock is unquestionably the master. There’s so much film grammar that we take for granted that was first proposed and best used by him. We all owe a lot to him. Having said that, when we wrote the first draft of the script, we set it in a museum because my mom’s story happened at the museum. The best cinematographers ask, “How few lights can I bring to a location in order to catch the naturalness of it?” That’s where the museum came out of. It didn’t come out of trying to do a take on a Vertigo type story. It all evolved from a very natural, organic place. But once we had the first draft and read it, it occurred to us: there’s a double in Vertigo, and there’s a double here. There’s a museum in both. A friend of mine saw the movie last week and said there was more than that. He said, “Well, she jumps into the bay in Vertigo, and she jumps into the ocean in your movie.” There are other movies that we love, and we had to check and make sure that if we were stealing, we we’d be stealing deliberately. (laughs) Another movie we talked about was The Double Life of Veronique. There’s a double there, as well, and it takes this metaphysical look at people who look alike. It’s been done many times.

Although this is a romantic movie, I wanted it to be infused with tension and suspense. The premise doesn’t naturally suggests suspense and tension, and yet I love so many of those movies in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s that were romantic but also had a bit of tension. And that’s certainly true of Vertigo.

San Francisco plays a big part in Vertigo, and Los Angeles plays a big part in yours.

Arie: That was something that I was very much inspired by Vertigo about. San Francisco is so much a character in that movie. I’ve fallen in love with Los Angeles, and I wanted it to become a backdrop. I live here, and I feel the romantic side of the city. It’s beautiful, but I haven’t seen it in movies in a long, long time. That was my hope. There was actually a moment when a financier offered to make the movie with us if we shot it in Baton Rouge. We turned it down with hopes of staying in LA and using the city as the backdrop for our story, a character in itself.

What scene are you most proud of?

Arie: One of the most challenging scenes in the movie is the scene where the daughter comes in and discovers that her mom has been in a relationship with a man that looks like her father. From the moment Nikki keeps this secret, the audience is savvy enough to know that the secret is going to come out. The question is how and when, and who’s going to find out. On one level, you want to fulfill that expectation, but on the other hand also make it surprising. In that scene, you have three people in a very hot, violent confrontation, and what I wanted to convey was the three points of view. They’re each coming at it with their own point of view, and I wanted the audience to identify with all three of them. As we bounce around the scene, you know why each person is reacting the way they are, and you can see the story from their perspective. That was a real challenge in the writing, shooting, and editing.

It’s a big scene to carry on your shoulders. I had a director friend of mine say, “It takes some nerve to take potentially the biggest scene in your movie and put it on the shoulders of the least experienced actor in the scene.” On top of that, he said, “If that scene didn’t work, the movie would fall apart.” It was a really critical scene, and Jess (Weixler, who plays the daugher) played it so brilliantly, against two of the best actors that we have.