Hans Canosa:
Two-Way “Conversations”
It’s easy to believe that a director who never got to see a feature film until he was 17 might try to squeeze everything he could into the first one he ever got to make. It’s easier still to believe this about director Hans Canosa, whose ambitious first feature, “Conversations with Other Women,” shot and cut entirely in split-screen mode, asks us to watch two movies — or, more precisely, two versions of the same movie — running side-by-side.
But you would be wrong to believe it. The too easy conflation of story and back story ignores the fact that Canosa, who grew up without movies in a family of conservative Christian missionaries, is an exquisitely careful director who spent two years storyboarding “Conversations” before ever shooting a frame, obsessively mapping angles and balancing visual freights and weights.
There was no room to squeeze anything extraneous into so carefully inventoried a film. And no need for it, either, since “Conversations” builds its story as much from deflection and omission in the words and actions of its two central characters — a lawyer played by Aaron Ekhart and a married substitute bridesmaid played by Helena Bonham Carter — as from accumulation.
Even the front-and-center split screen, which in other films has served as a mere binocular conceit, works here strictly in the service of the story. “I wanted the audience to relate to the characters and to feel something,” says Canosa. “So every time a flashy idea entered my head I just dumped it. My guiding principal was storytelling, not visual pyrotechnics.”
Story to Script
A simple question, deriving from personal experience, drives Canosa’s story: What would you do if you had a second chance with someone you once loved? But the complexity of the answer seemed to require his duplex method of telling it.
His new twist on this very old theme was the idea of balancing the man-woman equation visually on a split screen. When he passed along the idea and the anecdote to his screenwriting partner Gabrielle Zevin, whom he’d met while directing a play as an undergrad at Harvard, she combined it with a wedding story that she had been working on and delivered in three weeks the script that, with minor alterations, Canosa used to storyboard and shoot his film.
“It’s exactly the script that is on the screen in exactly the order she wrote it,” he says.
Zevin, it turned out, was as clairvoyant as she was fast. “Gabrielle invented lines that were actually spoken years ago,” says Canosa. The emotional relevance and reach of the script were confirmed later when both Bonham Carter and Ekhart confessed separately to Canosa during shooting that they were somewhat anxious about playing characters so close to themselves.
Script to Screen
As with many indie films, finding a story to make was significantly easier than getting it made. But through “Conversations” executive producer Kwesi Collisson, a collaborator on several previous projects, Canosa was able to connect with just enough money to bring off the project. “Kwesi knew someone who knew someone who got the financing, is the short answer,” says Canosa.
With a small but sufficient budget and a tight if unusual script, Canosa was able to attract major talent to his film, but always with complications. “It was a testament to the craft of Gabrielle’s screenplay that we always had somebody interested, but we never had two people interested at the same time,” he says.
By the time he eventually synced up with Bonham Carter and Ekhart, Canosa had only two weeks for preproduction before he needed to begin shooting. His obsessive storyboarding proved critical in efficiently completing the two-camera shoot, which dedicated one camera to each actor to feed the dual-frame format.
“The movie is mostly dialogue,” he says. “So I made sure that each shot in the movie, even close-ups and over-the-shoulders, was different from every other shot. There is no repeat even of focal length. If I’m on a 50mm in one scene, I might be on a 75 in the next just to lengthen that lens, flatten the image, take you a little bit more deeply inside that face.”
