(Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo, on the set of her first feature, After.Life.)
The first feature of Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo, a Polish-born, Paris-trained director, After.Life is an eerie, evocative story of death and life given a vibrant flesh and beauty by the immaculate, tightly-wound Christina Ricci.
In another of her risky, commanding performances Ricci plays Anna Taylor, a young, beautiful though unsettled woman who awakens in the basement of a New York suburban funeral parlor following a car crash. Her body broken, but her spirit apparently alive, Ricci’s Taylor insists she remains a whole, breathing and quite living being.That stance puts her in conflict with the stern, unforgiving mortuary clinician and director Liam Neeson, who is either a pernicious criminal subjugating her for his own questionable means or a kind of visionary who’s able to commune with the newly dead in their transition from one state of being to the next.
The movie has gotten an unfairly obscure specialized release around the country. Check it out. It marks an intriguing new talent. We recently talked about her influences and movies and the making of her debut.Light Sensitive: Was the genesis of the story about this exploration of consciousness, and the tension between the material and supernatural worlds?
Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo: My father died when I was ten. He died on Christmas Day, and I was the one who found him. Death had this profound effect on me since I was a child. Having experienced that, I was not only terrified by death, but I was also strangely curious about it. I always wondered what happened [after death], not only with the body and the spiritual sense, but also what happens with consciousness and what if maybe there is this transitional period where your soul and consciousness are still intact and it gives you time to reflect on your life and come to terms with your death.
Light Sensitive: Before the particulars of the story kick in, the opening mood is very eerie, from a sex scene drained of any eroticism to a sense where everything feels off and on edge.
Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo: That’s exactly what I was going for. We have this couple, and you sense immediately something’s not right there. It’s also the visual motif with the color red, the blood, the red dye. I like the idea of having a story that’s kind of anchored in reality, but I give it a heightened reality feel. Here’s the school where Anna works, the corridor, and there’s an unnerving quality, a feel of unease there, which I was going for.
Light Sensitive: I understand you had a very tight production schedule. How did that impact the aesthetics and dynamics of making the film?
Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo: We had 25 days, and I was just trying to get everything covered and shot. The movie suffered a little because a lack of time. Creativity to set the world of Anna, and this idea that she was just going through the motions, and I wanted to juxtapose a dull anonymous suburbia with the lushness of the funeral parlor and that world, and you get a feel the two worlds are going to collide. We meet this young boy Jack, who is lonely and strange and he doesn’t get on with anybody us. [Anna’s boyfriend] Paul [Justin Long] means well, but he speaks before he thinks.
I wanted to right away show she’s almost a ghost, the early scene with the shower, this glass partition or barriers between them; the combination makes you feel it’s not going away. You feel these characters are each hiding something. When you follow Anna, she’s self-medicated herself, she’s breaking down. If Eliot does have this supernatural [ability] to speak to the dead, he might also have this eerie recognition of who’s about to die. That’s why he’s so curious about her.
Light Sensitive: How did you conceive the material visually?Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo: I storyboarded the whole film. I knew exactly what I wanted. On such a tight schedule it really paid off. I was very prepared, but started timing the shots and how long it would take to cover. We had to shoot eight scenes a day. In some cases I had a storyboard that would take a whole day to shoot. I had to scale things down.
That was the reality I had and I had to make the best of it I could. I looked at the storyboards and I look at the finished product, and there were distinctive things I always wanted: the red dye and Elliot takes the slip away. They were shot exactly the way I storyboarded it. We got exactly the shots I envisioned.
There were things I had to simplify the coverage and just basically go with the flow. I hope the movie still has a distinctive quality to it. I feel I see things differently. I love working with the camera; you have to have time with that. In terms of the coverage we didn’t have many takes. The actors were very prepared and everybody worked extremely hard to see my vision. It was tough when you saw the actors doing something amazing and you didn’t have time to cover it. It’s like heartbreaking. I never liked compromises. It’s about prioritizing: the production design, the costumes, everything was helping the very limited shooting schedule.
Even if I didn’t get all these, I had a strong vision for the look and feel of it, even if everything wasn’t executed because of lack of time.
(Christina Ricci and Liam Neeson, in one of their several riveting face offs, in After.Life.)
Light Sensitive: You talked about the red motif. It’s quite striking, the blood, the color dye, and also that very alluring red slip that Anna wears through much of the middle of the film.
Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo: I like working with color. It can be so evocative. I kind of choose to symbolize certain things. With Anna, the color red not symbolizes life and also love, but it’s kind of this color connects her with the world of the living. As soon as she accepts that she’s dead, Eliot takes the slip away. At that point she’s almost a total corpse.
The letting of the blood is kind of dying. What happens in the hair salon foreshadows what happens when she’s in the funeral home. Anna is this kind of person, she’s dressed in grays and blacks, and she’s almost afraid of color and fully living. She’s not in touch with her sexuality, the lovemaking and the shower; she’s just going through the motions. She’s not able to be intimately open.
In an interesting way she finds life through death. She’s never been more alive than when she was in that prep room. The film is about life, about people that sleepwalk through life. What I’m trying to get at is this idea, what is the difference between the people who are dead and the people who are alive. Can you be physically alive but spiritually dead?Light Sensitive: The movie works in different modes and genres. It could be read as a captive film about entrapment, socially or sexually, of the man trying to enslave the beautiful young woman.
Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo: I feel the film has been put in this deadly position of strictly horror. For me it was always more a psychological thriller; using certain horror staples but I’m giving them a different spin. Anna doesn’t know if she’s dead or alive. That changes because of the type of information that Elliot gives her. How you interpret certain moments in the film you’re going to gravitate toward certain explanation. They’re all plausible; there are clues whether she’s dead or alive.
They’re subtle, but they’re there. It’s a mind film, and it keeps you guessing.
I’m taking that risk, and the movie is about the whole nature of life and death and how thin and blurry that line is between life and death. Eliot is a guy who has this curse or gift, and he’s dealing with people who refuse to believe him when he tells them they’re dead. His motives are much darker, and you’re not sure whether he’s manipulating Anna into believing.
Light Sensitive: Christina Ricci again takes a lot of risks with the part. It’s an interesting performance because, sexually she is out there, and she’s naked for long stretches of the movie, but it’s never sensual or voyeuristic. Again, it’s more like a state of being.
Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo: I’m glad you said that because I’m getting a lot of flack about the nudity, and some people think it’s there for the shock value. It’s not something I would do. Early on meeting with Christina, listening to her think about the role and brainstorming with me, we always knew you’re born naked and you die naked. It would be strange if she had that slip on. The nudity or her being nude was something much more than the reality of what happens. We’re dealing with a very corporeal and the spiritual.
We both really liked this idea that she has this beauty, she has this dream, but she’s insecure, and she’s always jumping to the wrong conclusions. She doesn’t know herself and she doesn’t know her body. She finds this life in death, in quotation marks. The nudity wasn’t very voyeuristic; this is her being. Is she flesh and blood or this apparition; there wasn’t anything kind of sexual about it. You’re not looking at her because she’s naked but what she’s going through.
It was never anything to draw attention, but it was about being vulnerable. It’s like peeling these layers.Light Sensitive: You were born in Poland, you studied in France and now you’re making movies in America.
Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo: I think I have a somewhat different sensibility. It’s more European. At the same time I love American cinema but I’m trying to make movies that are entertaining, chilling, but also thought provoking. I’m taking the European sensibilities, like nuance of character, and applying it to more American storytelling. I want to make films that people see but also they find through provoking. I like things that are off-kilter, like Polanski’s early films, Repulsion, Cul-de-sac and later, The Tenant. There’s always this unnerving, off-kilter feel to them and that’s almost natural to me
Light Sensitive: Are you a Polish filmmaker, or a filmmaker who’s Polish.
Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo: The second one. I’m a filmmaker, and it doesn’t matter if I’m Polish or a woman. I’m a filmmaker, a storyteller. The types of movies I grew up on, Polanski, Fellini, Bergman, Tarkovsky, had an early influence on me.
I’m a filmmaker first. That’s the best way to put that.
(Supernatural: Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo, through a dark lens.)
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