At the opening of our programme Missing Pictures – around the virtual reality experience of the same name – director of the VR Clément Deneux and filmmaker Naomi Kawase were guests in Eye, and later that week Catherine Hardwicke joined us for an introduction. We asked them about their experiences with the new medium.
By Anna Abrahams23 December 2022
You may know Catherine Hardwicke from her dark coming-of-age films Thirteen or Twilight, but did you also know that the film of her dreams is an adaptation of the eco-activist book The Monkey Wrench Gang? No studio dared to take on the project, so she made a short virtual reality experience about it in the Missing Pictures series. She was in Eye to experience her own VR, and talks about how it relates to her film work.
You can almost call her a regular at the Cannes Film Festival: Naomi Kawase. She even won the Grand Prix with her film The Mourning Forest. Eye shows five of her films, parallel to her contribution to the virtual reality series Missing Pictures. We asked her how she sees this new medium. Does it look like film, or is it something completely different? If she were to continue with VR, what direction would she take?
Eye hosted Clément Deneux, the director of Missing Pictures. He had previously made a documentary series in which he asked directors to tell about a film they would have liked to make but which never got beyond a script. Then he realised that there was no image to illustrate the dreamed films. That is why he opted for virtual reality with Missing Pictures, a medium in which everything you can imagine is possible.
