Unfortunately, roulotte renting isn’t a very lucrative business, so I had to find means to make my film. My last film ‘Forecast’ we produced ourselves at our own studio Lokman Productions. Since this is a much bigger project and I’m living in France and not very acquainted with the French subsidiaries, we decided to look for a producer in France and a co-producer in the Netherlands. Nicolas Schmerkin of “Autour de Minuit”, who also distributed Forecast, was immediately enthusiastic of the project, as was Richard Valk our dutch co-producer.
To obtain subsidies, you have to fill out an application in which you specify the project and the budgetary needs. The problem with my films is that they’re almost abstract. There is no apparant storyline in the sense of going from a to b, no apparant characters and so on. In other words, how do I synchronize the images I see in my head with the images in the heads of the subsidiairies?
What we normally do is that Liesbeth interviews me and turns my pictures into words and writes that part of the application. But Chase was more complicated because I haven’t so far made a film with a clear storyline. Even I wasn’t sure I could transform a n exciting liveaction scene into an exciting abstract scene. So we first applied for a subsidy to make a test.
The dutch film fund wasn’t easily convinced and wanted only to give a part of the money to make a test and they demanded a more elaborate script. In retrospect I was very glad with their last demand because while developing the script I had to sharpen my ideas in order to develop logical storyline but also in a technical sense. Liesbeth, the french scriptwriter Sebastian Ors and I managed to write the script and together with the test I made and the budgetary explanation of the producers, we convinced not only the Dutch Film Fund but also the Filmfund of the Auvergne (where I live) and Arte that the film was worth making.
