Director's Statement

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The Significance Of Others is an exploration of two characters whose lives are in a slow-motion spiral into disarray. After all, life can be messy, lonely and surprising. This film is an exploration of these three things, in both the lives of the May and Steven, and in the lives of the ones they are connected to. More than anything, at its core, this is a film about connection.

I was interested in the way that smartphones and social networking has changed the way we connect. Or if indeed it has? On one hand it has made it easier to connect, and, on the other hand, we’re constantly distracted and distanced from each other by them.

How we connect with each other, how we connect with ourselves and our pursuit of the things that we want in our life, hasn’t changed though. And the price of pursuing what we want, especially when it involves taking from the ones we care about, is definitely just as real. And devastating.

This all sounds very dark and serious, and the story of May and Steven is, at its core, tragic. But it’s also lots of fun. They’re complicated, and charming, and awful. Aren’t we all?

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I started the year with a very different idea of the graduate film that I was going to make in my final year of film school. The film that I started writing was called Seed about a fame-hungry florist and the relationship that she strikes up with her violent stalker. After I spending a good two and half months writing, toiling away for hours in the dark huddled over a laptop, I found I was spiralling into a dark place of isolation and depression that I had no idea how to escape.

Hours before we were going up on stage to pitch our films to a crowd that had been assembled of independent film crew from the Melbourne filmmaking community, I made a bold (and somewhat insane) choice. I followed my gut and decided to completely jettison the film that I had written and instead strike out on a path much less travelled: the path of developing a film through character-based improvisation.
 

Departing from the traditional methods of developing films that I had been taught during my time at the Victorian College Of The Arts, I chose instead to follow a path similar to ones that have been mapped out by British filmmaker Mike Leigh in the very unique way that he creates his films. I chose to interpret in my own personal style, and often deviated from, the methods and processes that are attributed to Leigh. Sometimes this was to suit my own instincts and curiosities (and the instincts of my actors) and sometimes this was necessary due to limited time, resources and circumstances.

Over the 6-8 weeks of improvisational sessions and rehearsals, my lead actors Jeni and Gavin first developed their characters separately, then their relationship together, during which the world, and ultimately the story, emerged from our sessions. In the final few weeks I brought several others characters in, taking on one myself as well - ultimately out of desperate necessity as the shoot drew alarmingly close!

We shot the scenes with most of the dialogue and some action improvised. However, in contrast to the loose and explorative early sessions, these scenes had been distilled and refined through our rehearsals following breakdowns for structure, as well as key lines, moments and plot points that would be covered every time the scene was ran.

This resulted in intensely immediate and authentic performances from the cast. It was hard work on our sound recordists David Ross and Brendan Muller who were kept on their toes as no take was the same. And on the bodies of our camera operators  (DP Clement Soo and Neal Engelbrecht) who shot most of the film with two cameras simultaneously and shot most of the film handheld in takes that would sometimes last up to 7 minutes at a time.

The edit was a very challenging process as our editor Marco Treglia and I rewrote the film in a microscopic way, combing through the 6.5 hours of footage to finally arrive at the 18 minute cut we have today.

I am incredibly proud of The Significance Of Others. Many talented people have poured a tremendous amount of work, and energy, and love, into it. I hope you enjoy May and Steven’s journey watching this film as we have had discovering it.

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- Sebastian Bertoli, Director/Writer, November 2017