Hans Canosa:
Two-Way “Conversations”
Two Frames, Many Cuts
After a smooth if intense shoot, the project went briefly off the tracks when the editor decided to leave soon after assembling the footage. After unsuccessfully interviewing editor candidates for three weeks, Canosa talked the producers into letting him cut the film himself — a significant risk, since his experience amounted to some co-editing of student films on a Steenbeck at NYU film school. “This would be the first time I’d sit at a computer to edit a movie,” he says. “I really had no fingers-on experience.”
The task was further complicated by the requirements of the film’s two-track presentation. “I had twice the opportunity to cut because I had two frames to work with,” he says. “Each cut inflected not only what came before and after it in the edited frame, but also everything that was going on in the other. And if I chose to cut on both sides at the same time, that was very powerful.”
With only a few hours of instruction from Collisson in Final Cut Pro, chosen because it was inexpensive and because it could handle multiple video streams, Canosa was able to edit his entire movie — both sides of it — to his satisfaction.
“Final Cut is so user friendly,” he says. “Although I didn’t learn every command and shortcut, I didn’t need to know them. What I desperately needed at that time was to get my movie going.”
Homemade Effects
Off-the-shelf Mac software proved effective not only for editing “Conversations” but for implementing the surprisingly large number of special effects. “This movie is two people in very intimate situations, no dinosaurs, no explosions,” says Canosa. “But there are 117 visual effects shots in the movie that we hope you’ll never see. In a way, because of the dual frames, you could argue that our entire movie is an effect.”
When the initial estimates for these invisible effects topped $1 million, and when even their low-ball bid came in at over $300 thousand, Collisson, a veteran effects artist, decided to do most of them himself on the Mac editing station, including a jaw-dropping green screen composite for a complex ballroom scene.
French Kiss
In 2005, Canosa and Collison entered the finished film in the festival circuit, where it received plaudits from Roger Ebert at Telluride and a Special Grand Jury Prize in Tokyo. And since opening in France, the film’s first theatrical release, it’s received mostly raves, aside from one critic’s complaint that the director had violated the film image by tearing the screen in half. Nonetheless, the film will be opening in 35 countries.
“I’ve always said this is my French film, two people talking about and having sex,” says Canosa. “But I also said I don’t know if you’re going to sell it anywhere foreign because you’ve got two people speaking English for 84 minutes. Yes, there are two minutes and fifteen seconds of sex, but everything else is dialogue.”
Awaiting the film’s domestic release, Canosa is not overly worried about opening the film and genuinely happy that it is opening at all. “As I said to my producers, unapologetically, unabashedly, this is an art house movie,” he says. “And some portion of the art house is not going to get it, either.”
Later this year Canosa will shoot “After Dark,” a vampire love story that almost everybody will get, from a script he co-wrote with Zevin. He’s again doubling as director and editor, but in this film, in a nice meta-twist, not only Canosa but his video editor protagonist (the love interest of a female vampire) will be cutting in Final Cut Pro.
After that, he’s booked to shoot yet another Zevin script, “Margarettown,” a romantic comedy adopted from her novel of the same name. And he plans to stay booked. “I had 17 years without movies,” he says. “If I’m lucky, the rest of my life will be filled with making them. I don’t need any time off.”
