Kat Kourbeti chats with Daniel Ribeiro about The Way He Looks…
A fully developed version of award-winning short film I Don’t Want To Go Back Alone, The Way He Looks deals with blind teenager Leo and his growing affection for his best friend, Gabriel, amidst school projects, fights with his parents, and high school drama. Kat Kourbeti spoke with Daniel Ribeiro, writer and director of The Way He Looks, about the debut of his feature film at London Film Festival and across the globe…
What can you tell us about the inspiration for the film?
I wanted to talk about the idea of where our sexuality comes from, especially homosexuality, and I thought that a blind character would be an interesting way to portray that, because he’s a character who has never seen a guy or a girl and he still falls in love with another guy. I developed the story from that idea.
How about the journey from short to feature?
When I thought about this character, this blind character discovering he was gay, I knew I wanted my first feature to be that. I decided to do a ‘pilot’ before, so I wrote the short, to use that and try to get funding to make the film. Because it was going to be my first feature, I thought that was going to help me show what I wanted to do. So I wrote the short and concentrated on the three main characters. Around the same time when we were shooting the short, I already had a first draft of the feature, and it was really similar to the short—the ending was the same. But then the short got really popular on YouTube and went to a lot of festivals, so I realised that I could not do the same story. I had to change it. Of course the parents were there (in the feature), it was already more complex than the short, but the storyline of the three main characters was the same. So I decided to change all of that, and adapt to the feature, so the story could have more conflict. The actors grew up a bit as well, since it took three years from the short to the feature, so I was able to enhance the sexuality part of it, so we had the masturbation scene, we had the shower scene… It had to be different.
On that topic, the feature gave you a lot of room to expand on characterisation, and the conflicts between the three leads and the other characters that emerge. What can you tell us about the scriptwriting process?
It was actually all about adding more conflict to it, so the characters, especially Leo, became more complex. The other characters too—we know a little bit more about Gabriel, Giovanna is also a little bit more complex… In the short, everything simply works for the characters. There’s a little conflict with Giovanna, but it’s a really small thing. I knew that in the feature the characters had to fight and to stay apart for a while. Each character wanted something different, and we knew that, it was more apparent in the film, so I played with that.
What about Leo’s desire to leave, to do that exchange program he keeps going on about? That’s something that is completely new in the feature and brings out something new about Leo. What do you think it tells us about him?
In the short, things happened almost naturally to Leo. He’s simply okay with everything, and then something happens. In the feature, he wants to fight for his independence. He’s a teenager. I really wanted to talk about universal issues. Every teenager wants to do things by themselves, to do things hidden from their parents, to be independent and themselves. I wanted to create a universe where any teenager, or any person who’s ever been a teenager, can relate to. That’s where the idea of him fighting for independence came from.
The music also played a big part in defining certain characters. You introduced the idea that Leo only listens to classical music, and then Gabriel introduces him to Belle & Sebastian. What can you tell me about the soundtrack?
I wanted Gabriel to bring something new to Leo. Leo’s searching for independence, and doesn’t want to be treated as a child anymore, and while he’s doing that we have the character of Gabriel who actually shows him things he wasn’t expecting. One of the things was the music, and then he invites him to come see the eclipse… It’s all about this new world that Leo is discovering. I really love Belle & Sebastian, they’re one of my favourite bands, and I think that song (“There’s Too Much Love”) is catchy, you listen to it for the first time and you’ve already got it in your mind. It’s a great song. Then there’s the rest of the soundtrack of the film, which was sort of an accident. The editor used a lot of those songs as a reference for making an original score later, but the first time I saw the film with the music that he suggested, I really thought that the film would gain from using music that already existed. So some songs were the ones my editor suggested, others we couldn’t get the rights for so we had to change them, but at some point we decided that we weren’t going to have any original music. Belle & Sebastian came from the script, because they talk about it, so we knew we’d need to get the rights before the shoot, but all of the other songs were suggested by the editor and then we kept them.
What was it like working with the same actors you had in the short?
It was really good. They had chemistry between them and I really liked working with them, because they were very excited about it, and they were always contributing to the process. I really like to rehearse, so it’s good to have actors who understand their characters, so they know what their characters would do. They also made the dialogue and the story more adapted to them. Sometimes when something didn’t work very well, I would ask them and because they are teenagers, they could adapt to a more teenage dialogue.
As a last question, I’d like to ask about the bullying that takes place in the feature, which wasn’t really there in the short. Fabio and his friends bully Leo because of his blindness, but not so much about him being gay. What can you tell me about that?
I didn’t want to create a very mean bully. I wanted the film to be focused mostly on Leo’s world, not on a bully and how it’s a huge socially complex problem. I just needed to have that as a conflict in the narrative, so I tried to keep it light. I also think that bullying someone because of their blindness is a little bit foolish, but if it was about him being gay it would create a social context on the film. I didn’t want to add a new layer of conflict because of the homosexuality, so I kept it only on the blindness side of it. It’s very hard to talk about the bullying, because I tried to not make an issue of it, I tried to blend it as a regular kind of “kids being kids” sort of thing. It’s about how Leo feels, he just doesn’t feel comfortable in that environment. I could have used any other problem that he might have, to make him not fit in.
Read the review here.
The Way He Looks is out in cinemas in the UK on the 24th of October. Watch the trailer here.
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