Interview: Directors Chris and Benjamin Blaine on NINA FOREVER

SHOCK’s Richelle Charkot caught up with brothers Chris and Benjamin Blaine, the  duo behind the hilarious and heartbreaking NINA FOREVER.

Think about the last partner you had trouble getting over. Wasn’t it a nightmare? Think about every time you watched a movie that they might like, or any time you scrolled over their name in your phone, or furthermore, the first time you forced yourself to delete their number. Think about the first time having sex with a new partner afterwards – did the ex linger? For main characters Holly and Rob in NINA FOREVER, an ex does just that.

This film follows Holly, a young woman who is training to be a paramedic and works part-time at a local grocery store. At work she meets the brooding and mysterious Rob, and learns through small-town gossip that he tried to kill himself after the death of his girlfriend Nina in a car accident. She is immediately attracted to his almost-Shakespearean declaration of love, and after a few gentle interactions Holly and Rob begin to date, and find comfort in the fact that they can expose their darknesses to each other. The first time that Holly stays over at his place for the night, they have sex, and the mangled revenant Nina emerges out of the mattress in a bloody heap. Nina continues to torment the two lovers with biting sarcasm each time they’re intimate or whenever she is remembered, insisting that Holly is “the other woman” in the ménage à trois.

The Blaine brothers masterfully weave a genre-crossing story that should resonate with any viewer watching it, because there is so much reality to its fantasy scenario. Utilizing powerful forces of wit, drama and sexuality seamlessly, horror fiends and romance lovers alike should let NINA FOREVER be the definitive “I laughed, I cried” watch this Valentine’s day. This “fucked up fairy tale” will be released theatrically in the US this coming February 12, 2016, and then it will be available on VOD, DVD and Blu-ray afterwards.

SHOCK: Tell me about the genesis of this film – how much real world experience is in this story? Because it does feel very personal.

BEN BLAINE: It is definitely very personal, but not a documentary, obviously. It takes a lot of truth and twists them around.

CHRIS BLAINE: Yeah, twisting themes around to make them visual, not just in romantic story telling, but taking visual symbols of the ways people feel and actually putting them on screen.

SHOCK: Who of the cast of characters would you liken yourselves closest to and why?

CHRIS BLAINE: I think um, well, at times I’ve been a Holly, I’ve also been a Rob, definitely. I’ve definitely been in love with a Nina, and Ben?

BEN BLAINE: I think I’m mainly Dan being a dad.

SHOCK: While watching NINA, I couldn’t help but think back to ex-lovers and the ones that were particularly hard to get over, to the point where it kind of stirred a lot of emotions to watch the movie – have you received any particularly memorable responses from fans or critics from watching your movie?

BEN BLAINE: Oh, yes, so many, one thing that’s happening right now is we’re seeing a lot of artwork, a real mix as well; some kind of really simple doodles, but there’s actually painters doing incredible things. To get that sort of response from an audience is brilliant, one of the things that we’ve enjoyed about the whole process is how much the audience brings to and changes the film; every time it screens it’s different. Every roomful of people find something different, differently weird, funny, painful, totally new.

CHRIS BLAINE: There’s a definite sense between us when we watch the film, I don’t even know how many times now, each time it does feel different, one screening sticking in my mind was MOTELx which happens in Portugal, the audience there – there was something in the air that night, that felt really emotional, special, something great about being in a roomful of people sharing the same emotion.

BEN BLAINE: A guy came up to me and took me by the hand and shook, but there was this feeling like he was trying to get away from me as fast as possible, and he just said, “I don’t know you know my life so well” and then walked off before I could be like “Sorry what?!”

SHOCK: Tell me about your earliest memories with expressing yourselves artistically, whether it be through film, writing, etc.

CHRIS BLAINE: When we were growing up Ben was every much the writer, I used to biff out of him that he was trying to Shakespeare.

BEN BLAINE: I could type before I could write, I remember typing on an old type writer, on a heavy old type writer you can get your fingers stuck between the keys, the physical process of printing words on the page, it is so satisfying.

CHRIS BLAINE: The first thing I can remember actually acting out and doing stories was probably with Lego, you could build your own world through Lego; names and characters from these little figures.

BEN BLAINE: Our first film would probably be when we decided to make another adaptation of the Bible. We shot that on one holiday; our school banned it because it was blasphemous. Black market was our most profitable way for filmmaking so far [laughs].

SHOCK: Tell me about why you as filmmakers enjoy playing with horror elements.

CHRIS BLAINE: I think a lot of the time horror filmmakers are drawn to the fascination with the human body, but for us it was – well, we can’t watch gory films, going to all these horror festivals covering our eyes, we’re really squeamish! We didn’t realize how bloody the film would get, it was very much a thing of just thinking about the way you feel emotionally, that’s how you feel inside when you’ve lost someone, feeling of pain weeping out, a huge mess.

BEN BLAINE: Being pretentious, we always build this is magic realist, a lot of horror is. We’re drawn to fantastic, magical details, stuff that really blurs the boundaries from solid reality and the reality you live in, for most people what dominates your thoughts is imagination and not real at all; it’s important.

SHOCK: While writing the script, were there any particular bands or artists that you listened to to draw inspiration?

CHRIS BLAINE: Amanda Palmer, she was the first artist we put down on the playlist, there were a lot of Joy Division, we had a Fiona Apple for a while, that drumming – for a while the division of use in music was getting the bounce in it, we needed songs with a slightly crazy energy, how you kind of feel when you’re going through grief, outwardly it’s a bit sad, but inside it’s running a million miles an hour, trying to capture that with the music was really important.

SHOCK: Holly, Rob and Nina are incredibly dynamic characters – can you comment on the collaborative writing process in creating them? For example, did one person have more influence on a certain character’s mannerisms, or was it a fairly even influence all together?

CHRIS BLAINE: We bounce backwards in forwards. We write in the same room together, and we both have a laptop that shares the same screen so we can see the words, it’s quite liquid, we always read it out and act out. Usually one of us is going to take on one role a little more, I was always Rob and you were always Holly [Ben], and we were both Nina in between.

BEN BLAINE: Equal, sometimes it’s more useful to bounce back and forth, you get the openness.

CHRIS BLAINE: A lot in the film has become more than the way that we’ve written them, we’d let the actors try stuff and see where it goes. Doing the auditions, Abigail surprised us, there was just no one else like her, you have the thing that you imagine one way and someone comes in and does a totally different thing, and it’s not bad, it’s like, ‘you did that different that’s really cool!’

SHOCK: Tell me about why Fiona O’Shaughnessy and Abigail Hardingham worked so well in their roles. Was there any specific advice you gave the actors to get into character?

CHRIS BLAINE: It was a very tense process working between the five of us, and particularly in rehearsals we worked with a choreographer, we knew with Nina’s performance we wanted to push towards something quite different and unique, how the character has to come to terms with a broken body, finding a new way to move a broken body, we did some sessions where she did the movement training, but also dancing.

BEN BLAINE: Finding each other’s rhythms.

CHRIS BLAINE: Cian’s kind of rhythm especially, so that he could move with the cast, and then getting the flow between everybody was really important, for that expressive physical side of the stuff that we all worked on. For Fiona in particular we had very long conversations not only about the specifics of characters, but a lot about death and what that means, big things, you can kind talk about things and feed it all in, and then see how it is all rendered through the actors.

BEN BLAINE: It was very important to be honest with everyone on set, hopefully it comes that way, we were very open with our emotions on set. Sharing deepest, most dark things, stuff that you don’t ever want to tell anyone, even still the best way of being able to explain it is not trying to hide anything.

SHOCK: I first saw this film at Toronto After Dark, and that night at the after party there were plenty of people chatting about how NINA FOREVER would undoubtedly stick with them for a few days due to a, b and c in their past – upon completing this film, did these characters or this story linger with your thoughts? Or was it a sort of exorcism?

CHRIS BLAINE: It’s still going! When we we said “Nina Forever”, we really apparently meant the forever part of it. We shot in 2013, it’s coming up on 3 years since we started shooting it, we pretty much worked on it exclusively, this last year has been all festivals, working on promotional side of stuff, very much still a part of us.

BEN BLAINE: The nice thing that is at least now, it’s something that we’re sharing with other people, the hardest bit was doing all the post production and stuff, was very intense, when you’re still living with the same people and no one else can really talk to you about it, now we can share it.

CHRIS BLAINE: There’s a really interesting thing that you get with an editor, in the suite, you get to know people, you know their mannerisms, the way they behave and the way they made their characters behave, little quirks, you sort of really fall in love in real life with everyone.

BEN BLAINE: A year after the shoot we started doing some ADR and it was the first night that we’d seen Fiona and Cian since the shoot, except for the fact that we’d seen them for 18 hours a day otherwise on screen, but this time they were wearing clothes and it’s just like, who are these weird people?

SHOCK: Alongside obviously being very poignant and at times sad, this film is really bitingly funny – can you tell me about some of your personal comedic influences?

CHRIS BLAINE: Growing up in Britain, your most important comedic influence were the people who were mean to you in school, but there was really great comedy on TV, like Monty Python, Father Ted, all that kind of stuff definitely, but it’s still the kind of people who were mean to us at school.

SHOCK: Can you comment on things kept in mind when shooting scenes with nudity? One thing that strikes me about this film is the fact that although the main characters are often naked – it feels respectful and sexy, rather than exploitative.

CHRIS BLAINE: Thank you. That was one thing that we wanted to come through, when you’re talking about the most intimate moments, it’s like, I’ve stripped you naked, but there’s more about the drama and the story, the fact that they’re naked is like, well you would be if you were in bed with someone, it’s not about seeing someone naked, the film has to feel emotionally honest, forget the fact that their naked, we’re just shooting a drama.

SHOCK: What advice would you give Holly, Rob and Nina, respectively?

CHRIS BLAINE: I don’t think you can give Nina advice.

BEN BLAINE: I would be terrified to give Nina advice, she’s the type of person who’d stare at you do the exact opposite, and then, I don’t know, set fire to your sofa or something.

CHRIS BLAINE: For Rob, I’d say just that you will get better at it, for him there’s always this sense that he’s a couple of steps behind, the entire time he was with Nina, and definitely with Holly. For ages in my life I always felt I was going to be like, blinking because I didn’t realize they needed something from me, and the person I was with would just be like walking out the door by the time I figured it out. Rob will eventually get there, same kind of with Holly as well.

BEN BLAINE: Yeah, I think that they’re on a path and they’re going to be okay, because stuff’s always going to be painful. Holly will find a point where she stops feeling like she has to prove who she is and can just be who she is.

SHOCK: What can we expect next from the Blaine brothers?

CHRIS BLAINE: Something that’s happened now in terms pitching stuff, because there’s a feature film to watch so they can see what we can do, is that they’re want to hear the weird pitches. In the past because people would just stare at us, but listen to the more ordinary ones, now they want us to get to the weirder ones. We’ve got a thriller which we’re writing at the moment as much a thriller as Nina is a horror film, a TV series which is truly bonkers and emotionally real and written by Irving Welsh, about women who knockoff a local casino.