by Chiara Spagnoli Gabardi

Drake Doremus had moved audiences in 2011 with the beautifully touching ‘Like Crazy,’ capturing all the truthful shades of love: the initial happy folly, the moment when perfection seems to be achieved in that special love bubble and how time alters the magic, drawing soul mates apart. The sensitive-at-heart director is back with his favourite British lead actress, Felicity Jones, who in ‘Breathe In’ interprets a foreign exchange student, that arrives in a small upstate New York town and challenges the dynamics of her host family’s relationships, altering their lives forever.

The film opens March 28th in NYC and April 4th in LA.
Drake explains in this Exclusive Interview the making of ‘Breathe In’:

How did you craft this film around Felicity Jones?

The project started as a continuation of our collaboration that began with ‘Like Crazy.’ ‘Breathe In’  was all about Felicity and wanting to work with her again and it would certainly have been different without her. So the intent was to custom-tailor something for her and Dustin’s music inspired a lot of the mood, the tone of the story.

Dustin O’Halloran’s music in the film seems like a leading character…

We had a lot of music before the film was even shot, and a lot of the scenes were moulded to fit the music. For me it was a very exciting opportunity to almost make a musical, and let the music be the emotion, and drive the performance.

It does have an operatic cadence to it, are you a fan of the opera?

Very much, I remember when I was in Milan (where I had just made a short during Fashion Week with Luca Guadagnino for Sergio Rossi) I went to La Scala in a box and it was incredible to see the opera there. But I listen to all kinds of music. Two years ago when we started working on ‘Breathe In’ I was obsessed with classical music.

How much are Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce playing their instruments?

A good amount. Guy already played the guitar, so he knew the fingering when he spent weeks learning the cello. Felicity had time with a coach. We did have doubles for the details, but they did most of the work.

Do you play any instruments?

No but I wish I did. My grandfather did, he was an incredible jazz bassist, so I reversed in this film my aspiration to that.

‘Like Crazy’ was inspired by a long distance relationship you had, how was ‘Breathe In’ conceived?

It just came about organically, by virtue of wanting to take a simple story, with very little plot and do something emotional and tonal, something that felt complex within the mood and the texture and the feeling that evoked. The inspiration of making a dangerous suspenseful movie came from ‘A Place In The Sun,’ a 1950s film by George Stevens with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, and how within that tone something genuine and romantic is presented. That dichotomy and juxtaposition was fascinating to me and I really wanted to explore that.

Is there more improvisation in ‘Breathe In,’ than in ‘Like Crazy’?

Actually there was less. It got more structured as we refined the process. We shot for four weeks, then edited for seven months, and then went back and shot a little bit more. So the process kept evolving and we were finding the movie in the editing room, it was almost like a documentary. It’s very well balanced: some scenes are all written and a few are entirely improvised. The title as well came really late.

The cinematography contributes to the darker tone…

John Guleserian, is a very talented cinematographer that I work with, and to prepare for ‘Breathe In’ we watched several films together, with different textures and lights. We were obsessed by this upstate New York summer rain world, with the way the leaves were coming. We wanted to capture all of that, for what it looked like, and felt like, for the human eye.

The location also adds to the lugubrious atmosphere, where was the film shot?

Long Island, Bay See Cliff. We looked at so many different houses before finding our key location. But in trying to use a simple story, it was crucial to find the proper setting that could be a character in the film. It’s alluring with its colours and textures and really gives a sensory experience.

Will you continue to make films focusing on the evolution of romance?

Absolutely. I’m still asking myself questions related to this topic. I’m very excited by the idea of having someone falling in love, maintaining it, understanding it. I’m still asking questions and am as far away as when I started this journey. Every movie is somehow a diary and a question, a mood, a feeling of how hopeful I am or where I’m at.

Do you have anything in the works?

Yes I’m going to do a scripted film later this year, totally different than anything done in the past. It’s called ‘Equals’, written by Nathan Parker, who had scripted ‘Moon.’

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