The film begins with the dream as an unannounced flash forward. What made you decide to show that at the beginning rather than when it actually happens?
It might be a flash forward. I do like movies where you see something and don’t know what it means straightaway and then later it makes sense. But it could be that she’s having a recurring dream and she doesn’t remember until the night she wakes up halfway through. As if the dream had done its job previously. I also like that the movie starts under the surface.
Do you dream much?
Not really. Not as much as I used to.
The sound design is something that stands out. And it took you almost a year to produce?
Yes. I spent a lot of time experimenting with different things. Except for the dialogue every sound was added in post. The sound of the pen took a long time before it felt right and a long time to record. Every pen stroke had to be matched, of course. Also, I didn’t want to use library sounds. I think I paid for less than ten sounds in the end, everything else was recorded for the movie, including all the ambience. I think we get used to the way movies sound because they all go through the same process but for better or worse I wanted Electra to sound like its own thing.
There’s a strong feeling of isolation in Electra, wouldn’t you say?
Yes, but not always an unhappy isolation. It can be cosy. She has everything she needs and she’s engaged creatively in what she’s doing. There’s a reason she wakes up early without needing an alarm.
You were saying to me before we watched it that you see some similarities between Electra and Eraserhead.
(Long pause) Well, I watched Eraserhead again recently so it’s probably just on my mind. I need to be careful because it can sound terribly arrogant, comparing your own work to that of a Lynch or Tati or Bresson (all of whom I love) so obviously I’m not saying my movie is on the same level as theirs. Having said that, I watched Electra recently at the cinema with an audience and I am very pleased with it.
In what way do you think they are similar?
Obviously, Eraserhead is abstract and weird while Electra feels like the normal world. Eraserhead is the inner world, whereas Electra is the outer world. But I also wanted it to have an uncanny sense of the abstract at the same time. A feeling of something else going on under the surface. Just to add to the self aggrandising comparisons, one reason I called it Electra is because of James Joyce’s Ulysses where everyday events have the threads of mythology running through them.
Can you give an example from the film?
One example is the scene where she returns home and the camera tracks forward. If you’re paying attention you realise she’s bought these, let’s call them lady products [tampons]. It dissolves from the chemist bag unfurling to the sound of children after we’ve just seen a text from her boyfriend. It’s just the mix of those elements that I find interesting. It’s like a still life. The fact of her body doing its thing, the boyfriend, the romantic hearts and then the sound of children outside. They’re all quotidian but connected psychologically.
You see that she’s crossed out the note to buy the tampons with much more vigour than anything else.
That’s true, which ties into the ending, where she sort-of rebels against what another part of her wants/needs. There’s also the book cover with the lions on it, which is another connection to mythology. I was thinking of the Goddess Rhea, who’s associated with motherhood and birth. I designed all the book covers, which was a lot of fun. I don’t expect anyone to pick up on those things as direct references, I just hope it creates an internal logic that you can feel. Something in the background.
You’re really leaning into the mythology aspect there. Is that throughout the film?
It's dotted around the movie. She’s meant to look like an actor in a Greek play at the end. If you look closely, the names you see written down change from Germanic or Eastern European sounding to Greek as the movie progresses.
What did doing that give to the film?
There's something interesting in the idea that someone's life has another rhythm beating underneath it. It's this feeling of other forces at work and that they're hidden in plain view. It's hard to put into words. I'm sure we all do things that we don't even question, that seem perfectly ordinary but that there's this deep seated reason we are never aware of that's driving it. It also creates this feeling that if the story is following a myth that there's some kind of inevitability about it. But more than anything else, it's a movie that should be felt rather than puzzled over.
But you do have to pay attention to follow the story. For instance, you don’t see her put those “lady products” away. You hear it and have to gather that’s what’s happened because of the sound and what you’ve heard before. The film asks you to pay attention.
There are gaps that you have to fill in, which I often find fun when movies do that. Gaps in what she’s doing when we don’t see her too. Like she was supposed to meet up with two friends for a drink but you later see it’s been postponed. But I hope that’s just stuff you pick up on naturally. It’s not as if you need to be concentrating hard and making notes.
The sound of her knee cracking every time she kneels is like something out of a Jacques Tati film. You can imagine it in Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday.
Definitely. His use of sound to suggest routine and repetition. He was such a genius. I just adore his films.
The creak of the cupboard door every time she opens it.
Yes. Although, that’s not actually the sound of a door creak that you’re hearing on the cupboard, it’s the sound of a dog whining.
That's surprising. You would never guess.
It’s literally the same dog whine you hear at the beginning. No processing or anything. There are actually a lot of dog sounds throughout the movie. Some you would never recognise. Like the sound of the water pipes shuddering has a slowed-down dog growl mixed in there.
That’s very creative.
It might be but I’m not sure of the overall effect it has. Doing such things is not much more than an in-joke, really. The sound is designed to just pull you into the main character’s world. I wanted to capture this beautiful feeling of being lost in your work. One person said that watching it felt like doing meditation. He was into the whole mindfulness thing (which I’m not) but I get where he’s coming from. It’s about switching off that part of your brain that’s talking to you and just taking things in as they are.
As a kind of hypnosis.
Perhaps.
Have you seen, Europa? That literally starts with a narrator hypnotising the audience.
I have and I actually thought about doing something like that. Just to put the audience in the right frame of mind or even doing something ridiculous like putting some text at the start like in Pickpocket but hopefully you just settle down. It might sound a bit grand but I’ve come to think of the movie as being like one of those magic eye pictures. To properly get it, all you need to do is listen closely to the sounds. Don’t even try to think of anything else. Hopefully, then you just get lost in the world of the movie and it slows down your metabolism and you just pick up on those details we were talking about and you kind-of sense something else taking shape. This is where the slow pace is essential.
And what is that, "something else" taking shape?
Well, now we’re getting into it. Obviously, I have my ideas on that.
Would you like to talk about some of it?
One of the things I found interesting was something I read about a generation of people who are highly educated and who define themselves as coming from that student activism in the 60’s and 70’s. They might be too young to have taken part in it themselves but they still feel strongly connected to it. But now they have children of their own who are young adults and some of these kids become more conservative than their parents. It’s an interesting inversion of how you normally think about things. This movie just touches on it but there's a really great film to be made about that.
It certainly feels like there’s a distance between the mother and daughter.
Yes. Although, it’s all very polite. Everything that's important in that conversation is unspoken. That was the Harold Pinter/Joseph Losey influence. The basic idea was that during the monologue the main character is open and honest about how she’s feeling. It’s an outpouring of emotion. She’s feeling vulnerable and upset and at those times we can open up. But during the conversation with her mum she keeps those things to herself … which is not to say that that’s inherently bad.
You don’t think that she’s working against her own interests at the end?
Not by keeping some of her concerns to herself. It can be nice to not share your feelings, can’t it? To keep a secret with yourself. But, of course, that’s not all that happens in the conversation at the end.
It does feel like she’s hurting herself by not going home. It almost feels like a form of self harm.
It does. It’s like she’s hurting one part of herself by doing something that another part of her wants to do. And there can also be a thrill in hurting yourself like that, don’t you think? Like sometimes you have a cut in your mouth and you can’t leave it alone because the pain is weirdly pleasurable. I do feel that the ending also has something political about it but this is where words fail me so maybe I’ll just leave it there. It feels like there’s an intersection of the personal and the political in the ending and you can’t really disentangle one from the other.
There are points in that conversation where you feel she’s reacting against her mother. Certain things that her mother says seems to make her bristle but the mother doesn’t seem to see it.
Yes. Or else, her mother’s pretending not to notice it.
So, in line with what you were saying about some children being more conservative than their parents, is that what’s happening here when you say its political? Is she rejecting her mother’s liberalism?
(Long pause) It might be that. Or it might be that that’s what she thinks she’s doing. We have all these layers to our motives and it isn’t really clear even to ourselves why we do the things we do. What’s clear is that doing what she does makes her feel isolated but also exhilarated. I do feel the ending is ambiguous and probably unresolvable. You could almost see it as heroic because she has a moral code that she sticks to even if it conflicts with her needs but I think you can also see her as being petty and immature.
Did you think about these issues when you were writing the scene?
Very little in these terms. I’d rather just follow where my imagination takes me, one line to the next. Trying to hear it rather than dictate it. That way you can be carried along by it. Otherwise, I think you may as well write an essay.
So, there’s no one single explanation for her decision at the end?
Yeah. I see it as a combination of different things. Something else Ani and I spoke about is that [the nameless main character] feels like life has slapped her in the face by requiring her to do certain things for her own psychological wellbeing. And here she’s rejecting that. She’s slapping it back. But, you know … At the end of the day, whatever her reasons, she’s a young daughter thumbing her nose at her mother.
It is called, Electra, after all. We know what she was famous for.
Yes, although I think the title is ironic, for the most part. Electra in mythology arranges for her mother to be murdered. The character in the movie just doesn’t go home for Christmas and doesn’t laugh at some of her mum’s jokes. I don’t know. We can talk about these themes but the movie is as much about the sound of a pen when you’re writing a note at six thirty in the morning and a car drives by in the distance. I like that these themes are present but they only really mean anything to me if they’re there alongside the sound. The sound of a porcelain mug when your hand closes over it. Those two things are equally important and you can't have one without the other.
What is it exactly that you like about that combination?
I think it just feels evocative of something.
Those tactile sounds seem to become less pronounced as the film goes on. By the time it reaches the end they seem to have gone.
That’s true. Originally, I had the sound of rain on the window and more ambience outside during the ending but it felt better to just leave it empty. Not silence exactly but room tone. You really feel it in a cinema. She feels surrounded by a quietness. I think I probably didn’t go far enough but from the conversation on I wanted it to feel like that part in Kiss Me Deadly where he goes to the boxing gym or those scenes in Boudu Saved From Drowning or something where you become conscious of the location sound. It seemed to chime with the main character’s state of mind. More hiss is needed. Maybe on the special edition.