Carol
Where the DNA of Carol travels
Films that shaped it
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David Lean's Brief Encounter was a seminal point of reference for me when making Carol.
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Naruse’s WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS (1960) is extraordinary. A woman, a bar madam in the Ginza district of Tokyo, tries to make her own way in the world, against a system that wants her to continue to be dependent on men. She’s beautiful, she’s fragile, she’s so determined, and she fails every single time. It’s devastating and beautiful. I’ve seen it many times, and it moves me every single time. It's a completely unsentimental film.
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I think Agnès Varda, especially with Cléo from 5 to 7, was so brilliant at capturing the interiority of a woman, not through voiceover, but through the camera’s gaze, through the very fabric of the film itself. That sense of identification and observation is something I've always aimed for.
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I was looking at the way Scorsese used narration in The Age of Innocence as a way to clarify information and deepen the irony, but also the way the camera moves to reveal the hidden emotional architecture. And how the details of that world, the costumes, the manners, become part of the repression.
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There are films that do it incredibly beautifully and artfully, from Kiarostami’s Certified Copy to Linklater’s Before Sunrise series, that engage the viewer through the sheer experience of watching people talk about something, watching people perform something for each other through their language. And the ambiguity of their relationships becomes the subject in and of itself.
