Things We Do For Love
about / vision
On ‘Things We Do For Love’ I had the luck of being selected to be part of NISI MASA & FEST’s Borderline project. The project explored immigration issues in Europe through film. During the project we spent a month touring all through Europe with actors and crew to shoot our film, all the while being mentored by the great team behind the project.
The film is about Nuno, a 23 year old guy from Portugal who has to choose between two worlds: stay with his new found love Sophie, and be miserable and a stranger in Paris, or go back home to where his life and career is, leaving her behind. Will a promising road trip bring them together or tear them apart?
expertise
We had a very tight deadline to deliver the final draft of the script, so to make that happen I brought on board writer Hsin-Chi Berenst, we worked around the clock to polish the story. Then when we got the okay we started the casting process, and were very lucky to get two great actors to play Nuno and Sophie: Henrique Feller and Tiziana Benguerbi.
We had some key scenes which were quite big scope, so to be able to film those we shot them in Holland. This way we could have extra actors, banks of lights and an army of extras and film crew. All of this would not have been possible without producer Stephan Bolderman of Uncompressed film. On the road though we had no producer, which was very demanding, not only was I working with the actors on the scene and rehearsing for the next but I had to sort out things like the practicalities of where we were going to stay the next night, I was responsible for the guys.
experience
This project was probably one of the maddest I have ever experienced. It takes a lot to set up a project like this going across Europe filming city to city. It was a great adventure, travelling, adapting the story to the situations that formed. It felt very organic in a way. In the end I’m very happy with what we were able to achieve with the time and means that we had.
Sylvestre’s Story