Konstantine Frangoulis, how did you shoot a psychological thriller in Samos?
The director answers our questions on the occasion of the Athenian premiere of his first feature.
After four short films, with "Fishbowl" you make the transition to the long feature format. When did you feel it was the right time for this transition?
I didn't feel it's the truth, it just happened. The thought about the script started in quarantine when I felt like someone had kidnapped us and mocked us from the TV. In the meantime I move to Samos where I come from. After a strong earthquake hit the island, I put myself into a writing routine, more for mental exercise. I wrote a short film with a friend from a distance and within about a month I also had the first version of the script of "Fishbowl".
You use Samos as your base. Did the fact that you were there make the film difficult at all?
In the end, distance was not a major obstacle to the film's production. I would say the opposite. I know this place so well that I had no trouble finding a house, which for the sake of the film was turned into a film studio. The local community immediately embraced our project, opened up every space as part of the research we did on where our scenes will be filmed. Many of the actors of the film are members of the Samos Theatrical Group as well as three of its main contributors. Most of us met for the first time on the set where we lived. This fact united us, since from the time we woke up for breakfast until after 12 hours of shooting and fatigue, we were all there to do the best we could for the film.
Really, what was your inspiration behind the film?
The isolation I felt during quarantine, as well as the issue of female abuse that unfortunately keeps in the news, built the characters of the film. The intense institutionalization as supposedly countermeasures by our state, resembled a thriller like Stephen King's "Misery", where a nurse gives us the pill to forget and thus came the idea for the protagonist's amnesia.
By extension, tell us about your choice to adopt the style of a thriller. Genres, in Greek cinema at least, are something we rarely see directors adopt and you, in this case, manage to create a convincingly evocative atmosphere.
Horror movies are my favorites and with the creation of a long feature film, I felt obliged to "speak" to more people now with a recipe as classic like thrillers, but in a performance of my own. I'm not a screenwriter, so I wrote a movie that I would "watch" myself and have a good time with. Horror movies contain a genetic code that I myself love: weird photography, fantasy, and awesome music.
Were there any reference films that you trusted for the creation of "Fishbowl"?
I wanted to make a mosaic of my influences. Some of them are "Wake in Fright" by Ted Kochev and "Spoorloos" by George Schluizer, which we already saw together with the actors to inspire the atmosphere of the film. Roman Polanski's trilogy of "Aversion", "The Tenant" and "Rosemary's Baby" is also a favorite, my favorite of the three. Reports went as far as Ingmar Bergman's "Persona," David Lynch's films and Japanese thrillers. Finally, in the montage "The Lost Island" by M. Karagatsis, it was a narrative-manual on how to break the third dimension in the film.
As the plot progresses, the boundaries between truth and fiction blur. It seems as if the loss of control is what pushes the heroine to absurdity. Is this her biggest fear?
The return of the hero to reality is something that has always scared or disappointed me many times in the movies. The heroine's fear is a constant struggle over whether she wants to face her own truth. When the protagonist remembers what has happened to her, she answers us with a riddle, a code that the viewers are asked to solve at the end of the film, as well as what it means to them. "Every soul must light a candle, a light in the wild night."
Maria Damasioti gives an impeccable performance. How did you approach her role and whether there was room for new things to come up on set?
When Maria came to the first meeting, she said to me: "I read the script and I think I understood what you were talking about". Then at the hearing I asked her to read an irrelevant text that had to do with the psychology of the hero and she read it as if she knew when to smile or darken her gaze. Then I felt like I was talking to someone who just sprang up from the story I wanted to tell. We had meetings where we just talked, since I was interested in getting to know her better. We started rehearsing, I wouldn't say there were many, so soon we moved to Samos where we did additional rehearsals at the shooting site for two days. We didn't have time, as the film was shot with minimal money in a fortnight, which is a feat for all the contributors. I didn't want to tell Maria what I really had written, we tried together to see the story as two separate personalities and luckily we silently agreed on who the heroine is and where she wants to go. On set, several new things came up that actually defined the end of the film.