Gaze into the future: Victoria Warmerdam

“When I was 12, I had to write down what I wanted to become later for a school assignment. I wrote ‘film director’, but didn’t really know what that entailed at the time.” We watched art house films at home, but I wasn’t made to watch. Her undivided attention went to the Charlie Chaplin films her brother watched and this shaped her sense of humour. She bought her first camera aged 15, editing her initial films in Final Cut Pro. She has since made her graduation film Gelukkig ben ik gelukkig, the short films Korte kuitspier, Snorrie and the most recent Ik ben geen robot. Interlarded with humour, a dash of absurdism and plenty of intangibility.

“Life is tough enough as it is. The films I am working on at the moment are genre-bending, butt always have a tragicomic aspect. Look at what’s going on in the world. Comedy helps put all that in perspective, making it a bit lighter.” As a weapon, she uses Henry van Loon, who has become a fixture during her credits. “I love his timing and facial expressions, just like René van ’t Hof’s. He doesn’t have to do anything to be funny, exploits being clumsy, all the while having perfect control of his body. He is very good at acting, like life just happens to him.”

Ik ben geen robot is her attempt to mix various eras into an entity outside of time. Contemporary laptops in a 1970s office building, a human robot, and all shot on 35 mm. “We were looking for a visual style that avoided the cliched clean futurism you often see. I have quite a penchant for nostalgia and vintage. The brutalist building is in Brussels and is reminiscent of a 1960s spaceship. I tried to keep the era somewhat non-descript, yet still recognisable. Martijn van Broekhuizen, my director of photography, proposed shooting it in 35 mm. A common request from people in his position, ha ha. But we started examining whether this was feasible financially, and it was. I was pretty anxious about it all, because I had never used celluloid before. Endless re-shoots were not an option, but I never shoot a lot of takes anyway. So we should be alright I thought. Until I glanced at the monitor and saw that it looked like watching VHS. Apparently, there are only around three cameras in Europe that have the line-out to make the monitor image look good, the rest just make things look really bad.”

The finite nature of rolls of film – even though additional film was acquired – also had its effect on the rest of the crew. “It made the actors pretty nervous too, however, it did help concentration on set. Everyone gave 100% from the beginning. That was definitely an advantage. Ultimately 35 mm immediately creates this magical atmosphere. It’s much grainier, even the raw footage is so much more cinematic.”

Something that isn’t outside of time is Victoria’s struggle for equality. “A few years ago, there was even more inequality, particularly in the world of commercials. But I still experience it. If I attend a festival with my producer people often think he is the director. People are often also surprised to hear I shoot comedies. As if women aren’t funny. I’m no activist, but I do fight it by making funny videos. And by portraying strong women instead of ‘so-and-so’s wife’ or ‘someone’s mother’. I also do so by taking the age of the women I cast into account. It’s a fact that actresses over 40 get much fewer calls, which is fucking ridiculous, especially because this doesn’t happen to actors.” Whether her equality efforts have had results is hard for Victoria to discern. What she has noticed is that women have done well at film festivals recently. “The Nederlands Filmfonds is consciously selecting for that now. Nevertheless, I hope directors are picked for the quality of their output, not merely because of their gender.”

Victoria doesn’t take societal themes as the basis for her films. The latter are often based on minor events that she continues to fantasise about. What if completing a captcha keeps failing and this helps you discover you are a robot? Or what if you discover the whole world thinks you are a gnome, and you only find out thanks to a brief aside from your GP. Absurdism inspires. “However, Korte kuitspier is actually about being different, about being labelled and about discrimination. These themes osmotically enter my films.” Her mentor Van Lodewijk Crijns helped her to pick up the finer nuances of the trade, however Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman made her favourite film. “Being John Malkovich is one of my favourite films. I would have loved to have made that. Everything was so well done in it. The absurdity is taken deadly serious. It’s something entirely absurd, but as a viewer you never once think ‘right, I’m done, this is too far out’. It’s also just about human emotions.” It probably comes as no surprise to hear that Victoria also really likes Yorgos Lantimos.

This desire for absurdism has ensured that Victoria has felt like she wasn’t understood as a filmmaker. “I kept submitting plans that were rejected. Funds would ask me whether it was a comedy or a drama. The answer was somewhere in between. This left me frustrated for a while that my output was apparently so difficult to categorise. I and my producer have now made three short films and we are working on two long projects. He completely gets me. Because I have already made three films, it is now easier to explain what things are going to be like. However, it remains bizarre that you have to commit to paper what you are going to do on celluloid.”

What these long projects are will remain under wraps for the time being. “It’s akin to what I did before, but I always find it hard to talk about content. I am always afraid that I’ve jinxed things if it doesn’t go ahead. It’s another absurdist/black comedy/fantasy/thriller. It’s a mix of various genres. One film is in the treatment phase, the other in the scripting phase. It always really depresses me when I realise that it will take years before I am actually on set.” That doesn’t mean the preceding phase is a necessary evil. “Because I also write, alongside directing, this phase is also one I really enjoy. I don’t think one aspect is more fun than the other.” Nevertheless, Victoria can hear the set calling. She has recently decided to focus a little more on commercial work. “It’s financially beneficial, but I basically do it because my own film projects don’t get me on set that often. Making a film takes approximately four years. Two and a half years of preparation, six months of shooting and a year in post-production. Commercial work allows me to try out new things visually as well as trial-run collaborations with actors.” The list of actors she’d love to work with one day includes names like Dutch thespians René van ‘t Hof, Peter van den Begin, Bas Hoeflaak, Jade Olieberg and Michiel Romeyn.

Victoria is a huge fan of the Nederlands Filmfonds. “Amazing isn’t it, that in the Netherlands, you can get paid for working on a script?! In my experience they have also introduced some changes recently. For instance, they now have a workshop programme they aim to use to stimulate young talents to develop their first or second film. You still have to have attended film school or have won a prize at a festival, but the fact this exists is very good. We get paid for the art we make.” She is a little more critical about the range of films produced in the Netherlands. “On the one hand, there are the romcoms and, on the other, there are the intense, black arthouse dramas, which might attract 15,000 people – if you are lucky. People have the impression that the Filmfonds only funds that type of project, but I truly believe this is down to the proposals submitted. Perhaps it’s self-fulfilling prophecy with people making the same things they watch because they think ‘I might get funding for that’. I think people should be more honest about what it is they want to make. Naturally, you’ll be rejected from time to time, but then you have to fight for it more.”