There is Only Time and Place: Discussing Romance and Cinema with Shaun Seneviratne

One of cinema’s many powers is as a tool to frame and display what is right in front of us,exalting the ordinary. Our lives are cinematic, and there is art in everything our eyes behold, but because we are busy living our lives, it can be easy to overlook how the soundscape compliments the landscape, the meaning in how we arrange our possessions, or the staging we naturally assume when we interact with one another. Two people have a conversation outside. It is summer. Dusk is falling and the buzz of insects ebbs and flows. A pack of cigarettes and a fan sit on the sill of an open window, an encrusted palimpsest of rental paint. Salsa music plays somewhere. These scenes are blank slates, but they flood the viewer with memories and associations. Cinema accomplishes this more succinctly than literature and with more texture than a photograph. 

For director Shaun Seneviratne, life is cinema and cinema is life. A longtime fan of the naturalistic films of the French New Wave, his directorial impulse was spurred by events in his own life, which he aimed to explore cinematically by recreating the conditions in which they played out and giving the actors room to find where those conditions naturally led, relying more on shot lists than strict dialogue to find the story’s emotional beats. His first feature film, Ben and Suzanne: A Reunion in Four Parts, which debuted at SXSW this year, places the viewer as a fly on the wall, witnesses to a week in the life of a couple’s attempt to figure out their future. It is the result of a fourteen-year-long filmmaking process. The film is not flashy, it is not loud, and it is an homage to its influences, but it is not a copy. It’s a beautiful, bittersweet exhalation of the ordinary. 

I sat down with Shaun at SXSW to discuss his influences, his process, and his thoughts on genre and philosophies of cinema.

Hyperreal Film Club (HFC): I know you've been working on this film for 14 years. Truly an independent filmmaking endeavor. Can you talk about the production process and the difficulties you encountered along the way?

Shaun Seneviratne (SS): It's based on a true story, a real experience that I went through that I thought would be a cool movie. And so my filmmaking career developed alongside this. The reason I make movies is because I wanted to make this movie. I didn’t start out wanting to be  a director. The spark was really making this birthday video for my girlfriend when she was at this NGO in India. I edited it and wrote the music for it. And that led to shorts on the same theme and it just got bigger. I’ve always been working on this movie. 

Writing took a long, long, long time, because every time I approached it I also approached writing in a different way. There was a period when I was writing scenes that felt like poems because I wanted it to feel like poems. And I went through a period when I was revising it to be my idea of what a screenplay is supposed to be, in a very rigid sense, but it didn’t work, it felt formulaic.

But I’ve always had a strong aesthetic sense, so I had to articulate to myself and realize that for me it’s not just about the story, it’s about the experience of the film. That’s when I started to let myself think in terms of shot lists. It was kind of a big moment to realize I could just write a shot list, the French idea of a decoupage. That, actually, you can do whatever you want as long as you’re financing it yourself. 

The biggest thing that helped with the process of making a feature independently was first making the short films that explored the themes or moments that might eventually lead to the feature. You have a lot of freedom in a short to be non-linear—we made one that was just kind of a tone poem, and one that was inspired by the line in Before Sunset that talked about a story that takes place within the span of a pop song. We did entire films that were flashbacks. That’s also how I met my actors, and that made things really concrete in terms of who these people are and also the project being on a trajectory. 

HFC: I feel like shedding the rules is a huge moment of creative freedom, and I know that sounds very cliché and pretentious in its own way, but I feel like with screenwriting in particular, the rules can be overwhelming and maybe a little inhibiting.

SS: With feature-length screenplays there’s obviously a lot of focus on structure. I feel like we can kind of be prisoners to the three-act structure. And there are all these competing screenwriting methodologies and schools. I’ve done every method and style.

HFC: I have, too. There are so many competing branded ones.

SS:  They can feel a little like a pyramid scheme.

HFC: It’s so easy to fall for them and feel like that’s what you have to do. And I print out the little map, and I put all my plot points on it, and it took awhile for me to realize that it’s much harder for me to write that way.

SS: What have you found to be the method for you that works?

HFC: Honestly, and this may sound hokey, but just to go and not worry about it and edit it later. Because if you're telling a story—not that everything has to have a traditional narrative structure—but if that's what you're setting out to do, if you're telling a good story, it's going to naturally have a beginning, middle, and end. It doesn’t matter if you hit a certain plot point by page 10. The map can be a story-killer sometimes. 

SS: It turns into connecting the dots. It’s so fucking stupid. And there’s also what I think is the pitfall of screenplay contests and labs. Some labs are legit, but it can be hard to navigate. 

HFC: Have you ever paid for feedback when you’ve applied to contests and labs and grants?

SS: Yeah, and processing that feedback is also something you have to learn how to do, but that’s actually been a good process. I’ve gotten some feedback from people that clearly don’t get my vision or what I’m trying to do and they’re trying to steer me to make something different from what I want to make. 

But I’ve gotten some really thoughtful feedback like, “I think doing this too early makes us lose trust in the character,” which is something you kind of need an outside person to see for you. That is really, really helpful.

HFC: I definitely saw the influence of [Éric] Rohmer on this film, and then I saw that you thanked him in the credits. I thought that was a beautiful way to honor an influence.

SS: Yeah, they're the fabric of what informs the thought process. I think it's always important to have a philosophy for a project, a guiding light. Rohmer’s films have always provided that for me. He and his films have in a way always been my teacher, more so than many people I’ve known in real life. He was definitely the greatest influence on the cinematographic style, that almost documentary style. 

My heroes are Goddard, Wong Kar Wai, [François] Truffaut—these directors that are not writing scripts. Wong Kar Wai would have the location and brainstorm ideas and write some dialogue the morning of. Goddard would give his actors the earpiece, and then just be feeding them the lines. That way of working has always been interesting to me. But it takes a while to build up the confidence to do that. You have to get everyone else in the crew on board with working that way. 

And that’s what I ended up doing; we didn’t have a finished screenplay, I gave my actors a lot of notes at the beginning of each day. There’s that François Truffaut [quote]: “I want everyone on set to be operating like they have a 104 degree fever.” You’re just in the moment and doing.

We had a very strong visual language that was pretty developed. I'm not a coverage director. I get bored with it. And I'm not interested in it. I don't think it adds to the story. I very much subscribe to [Robert] Bresson’s philosophy that one shot equals one moment. So then you have to look at a scene and find your moments, and that’s where the shot list comes from. A moment could be one line, or a moment could be half a scene.

The whole idea was that we need to just be observational and have it feel objective, so there’s not a lot of cutting back and forth between them. I didn’t want to show Ben’s perspective, or Suzanne’s perspective, I just wanted to present them going through this. We don’t have any real POV shots.

HFC: Are you cognizant of the edit as you’re working?

SS: I think in editing, yeah, absolutely. I feel like there’s always one other filmmaking craft that one feels close to as a director, whether it’s writing, cinematography, set design, acting. For me, it’s definitely editing. I like to first make a silent cut of the movie. It’s ostensibly just for fun, but it tells me a lot about what the film is. It can become pre-editing.

HFC: I saw a video circulating online a few months ago of somebody interviewing John Waters and asking what advice he’d give to young filmmakers. And he was like, “Watch movies with the sound off, then you'll understand how movies are made.” 

SS: Whenever I go on a plane, I never put headphones in. Yeah, watch the movie visually. Then you can ask, “Is this shot communicating anything?” That can reveal, “Oh, this was just a shot of an actor talking.” Or you could be surprised by a cool shot. Not because it's a pretty shot, but because it's saying something. He's absolutely right.

HFC: You shot this film in Sri Lanka. How did you go about finding a local crew and scouting locations?

SS: We did a location scout dread in February and it was my lead actress, Anastasia [Olowin], and I, and we were traveling with my brothers and my dad. Sathya [Sridharan], who played Ben, arrived after everyone, so the actors had an experience a little bit parallel to the film because she got to know the country without him and he was kind of playing catch up.  

On that trip, we met a production company and they took care of so much. And once you pay that first check, it's like, a ball is just rolling. They did location scouts and sent me pictures. We did a tech scout a week before shooting. We went to these locations with the cinematographer and just going to these locations and talking to people was how I ended up meeting some of my other actors. I knew I wanted a non-actor for Muhammad, the driver character and the guy who happened to be our location scout driver was perfect, so we cast him. 

HFC: Can you talk about the choice to shoot on partially on film and partially digital?

SS: I always knew I wanted to have the texture film. But you can’t rent film cameras or buy film in Sri Lanka, so we would’ve had to ship everything and try to get it through customs, which was too much. I did bring ten 100 ft spools of 16mm over cause we could manage that. And we brought a Bolex rental with us, which had a PL mount, so we were able to use good cinema lenses on it. We had a vintage Cooke 25-250mm zoom. But we had to pull focus manually and without a monitor because it was an old Bolex. 

For the digital portion, we still wanted to create texture. We had the vintage lenses and we had Pro-Mist filters and in post, the colorist was able to add grain. And that’s when I learned that it’s more than just a single grain overlay, more than a filter. Because highlights, mid-tones, and shadows all react differently to grain, so it gets super complex in order to accurately emulate the look of film. 

HFC: This film is about the dissolution of a relationship. It rang so, so true to me as that moment where you realize, “I do love you, I do care about you, and I do have affection for you. And all of that is real and genuine. And also, we both feel it, but this has just run its course.” And I feel like that's not a type of breakup that is explored very often. A petering out without any big drama. But those are sometimes the hardest and the most protracted breakups. And the film is following that and yet it’s very much a romcom. 

SS: We definitely followed the tenets of the romcom. And in many ways it is one, because they’ve been separated for a significant period of time. We’re seeing their reunion, so in a way, they’re meeting again and getting to know each other again in this new environment and figuring out if it’s gonna work. The genre-ness of it was all intentional. That’s why we wanted the big emotional climax to be the classic running to the airport, with the pyrotechnics and the saxophone, because it is following that same emotional arc, it just has a different ending. 

But it departs from the genre in storytelling style because I wanted it to be realistic. I didn’t want anyone to walk away from the film thinking anyone was at fault or in the wrong. Everyone has their reasons, as Jean Renoir says. There’s always complexity to what we go through, so I didn’t want the audience to be Team Suzanne or Team Ben, or Team Stay Together or Team Breakup. But it is interesting to hear people’s different reactions, because some people will say, “Oh, it’s good that they broke up, they clearly weren’t meant for each other.” People project their own experiences and feelings onto it. 

I actually don’t believe in the idea of people being meant for each other or not. We choose each other. The human element of everything we do is choice. When you defer to destiny you kind of choose to not consider the complexity of circumstance. Maybe at another time in another situation, things would have been different, but in this time, in this situation, this is how these people related to each other. I think it’s bittersweet. Maybe if they’d been together another week, things would have been different. Who knows. The timing was the timing. 

There’s a [Haruki] Murakami quote I like about us being satellites to each other, and that sometimes we’ll be in each other’s orbit and sometimes we’ll be out of each other’s orbit, and maybe you’ll come into each other’s orbit again. 

And there’s also that T. S. Elliot quote from Sans Soleil: “There is only time and there is only place, and there is only one time and one place.”

HFC: I’m not endorsing the idea of fate, but that sounds like fate. 

SS: Well, no, because we’re all reacting to our time and place. We’re all making choices. It’s just that, of course choices always could have been different, but we can generally only make one.

HFC: I don't feel the impulse to want to push them in any direction, I was just kind of watching them.

SS: Watching them walk away. 

HFC: Thank you so much for your beautiful film. We’ll be following your work. 

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