Paula van der Oest is a multi-award-winning and Oscar-nominated filmmaker, celebrated in her native Netherlands and around the world. She has been nominated for nine major awards, including a foreign-language Oscar nomination for her first feature Zus & Zo, and has had three films chosen as the Dutch submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Feature, including Tonio (2016) and Accused (2014). She has directed over 22 features and TV shows during a prolific career, including the award-winning English-language feature Black Butterflies, starring Carice van Houten in a career-defining performance, as well as the latest season of the BBC's acclaimed drama The Split. Paula specializes in character-driven dramas and thrillers with a strong visual aesthetic, which made her the ideal director for The Bay of Silence.
When I read the screenplay of THE BAY OF SILENCE I saw a very compelling story, both thriller and drama, about contemporary people with deeply interesting themes. It's about stepping over boundaries, it's about family and it's about art. The husband, Will (Claes Bang), discovers he actually doesn't know his wife (Olga Kurylenko). When you start a relationship do you really want to know everything about the other person? Doesn't a little mystery help romance? But that is also where Will goes very wrong.
Every scene has an underlying subtext. I have directed two films with similar themes — Black Butterflies, about South African poet Ingrid Jonker, who was bipolar, and Tonio (Dutch Oscar entry 2016), about a couple who lose their son, though neither possessed the mystery-thriller element. My DOP, Guido van Gennep, and I decided this film should be atmospheric and stylized, referencing the classic cinema of Nic Roeg's Don't Look Now, Bad Timing, Hitchcock and Polanski.
At a certain moment, the plot narrows and the cinematography works with that. This is not a handheld movie — there is a lot of movement and travelling, dollying and tracking. I like to be very prepared with the shot list and then, on the day, concentrate more on performance. It's important that the characters are real, multi-layered, and that the audience identifies with them.
We had challenges: three separate countries — Italy, Scotland and England — and a short shoot schedule, with remote locations including beaches and cliffs, racing time and weather to get beautiful images. Isolated locations contrast with the busy urban environment of London and the beauty of La Baia del Silenzio, to create a dramatic and atmospheric visual palette that complements this complex, often disturbing, story.