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Interview with Marianela Maldonado, Director

You normally write and direct your films. What attracted you to this project and how did you find working with a screenwriter?

I thought “Breaking Out” was a very touching and different script. It deals with the internal experience of depression and it does so from the point of view of the person who suffers from it. It was a challenge, but the piece explores a theme that interests me very much - the power of the human mind. To be honest, it took me a few days to fully understand the different layers that this twelve-minute script explores. I think it is complex and subtle at the same time.

What attracted me most was the fact that the script had a powerful abstract metaphor in a very realistic setting. In a few pages, Pippa managed to tell so much about a real character, Jessie and, at the same time, comment on faith and depression.

This is the first time I worked with a writer. And I must say it was GREAT! First, the theme was beautifully expressed and secondly, the structure of the script was already there when I started working with Pippa on the script. I felt we were working very much in the same direction and we both agreed that our main priority was to convey Jessie’s inner world.

How is it different from writing and directing your own material?

I think it was a great experience. It gave me enough perspective to look an the material with a “fresh eye.” The theme and the structure of the piece were clear from the beginning, and it gave a lot of freedom to concentrate in the visual approach.
I wanted to approach the story from a very subjective point of view, so that the audience could feel what Jessie is experiencing: the sickness of melancholy. And working closely with Pippa and Paola, we managed to find small details, which helped us tell the story in this way. I believe that content and form must interact with each other and mirror each other. And this script, in particular, gave me the opportunity to explore the content to find the appropriate form, which I hope, translated into the visual style.

Interview with Pippa Hinchley, Writer

Where did the idea of Breaking Out come from?

The initial seed of the idea came from a real life experience of a break-in and was, to begin with a study of fear - a close look at what it really feels like to know that your life may be irreparably changed, or over, in the next few minutes and the powerlessness of those moments.
As a new writer I was learning a lot very quickly at the time the short was first being written and I soon discovered that this was an 'anecdote' - a snapshot of real life, rather than a 'story' with a change and resolution for my protagonist. And, that faithful as this description of fear may be, it wasn't a drama unless something was invested in the outcome, unless we cared what happened.
So then the challenge was to come up with a character who learns something or whose life changes as a result of this fear, this unwanted intrusion.

How has the original idea evolved over time?

In developing the piece further it became necessary, and a challenge, to engage and empathise with Jessie - a character who is lifeless and monosyllabic at the beginning. This was achieved, hopefully, by creative use of her surroundings and her upbeat answer machine message, which tell us that she is when not suffering from depression, a vibrant person, with a keen sense of humour. The character of her sister, Sara, also sheds further light and shows the difficulties of communicating with someone who has disengaged from the world and even from those closest to them.

How would you describe your collaboration with Marianela, a writer/director herself?

In a word, wonderful!
Marianela has an awesome visual style which lent itself particularly well to this script especially as it's impact comes largely from the minutiae of detail: the flicker of an eye; the fractured images of the imagined scenarios that Jessie sees in her mind's eye.
She made many insightful additions to the mis-en-scene, the whole look of the piece and of course the careful, detailed nuances necessary in the performances.
As a writer herself she was enormously in tune with the script and with the process of re-writing and adjusting it to get it as perfect as possible before shooting began. She painstakingly prepared every shot and was mindful of every detail, down to the colours present in Jessie's flat and clothing, which would work best working on DV. Respect!


Interview with Natasha Braier, Director of Photography

What attracted you to work on a project like ‘Breaking Out’?

The most attractive thing about the project was the fact that it wasn't so much about telling a story, but about portraying an emotional state of mind. It was a real challenge to do it in a way that wasn't flirting with the thriller aesthetics or even horror movie. Even if Jessie's imaginations were quite horrific, we had to find a language that belonged to her subjectivity and be very careful not to fall into the thriller/horror stereotypes.

Can you describe how you and Marianela first approached the script to define
a visual language?

After I read the script for the first time there was one image stuck in my head, Jessie's eye behind the sheets, "seeing without watching", just by the sound of the off-screen activity of the intruder. In my first conversation with Marianela it was very clear that she was seeing the film exactly in the same way. We tried to approach the language of the film as a "lucid dream", that blurry territory between being asleep and awake, when you don't know what is dream and what is reality, when you are also not in control, you are stuck in your bed without being able to move. The repetitions, the circularity, the loops, are also part of that world, and that's why the editing was also a key element to construct this language.