From writer and director Florence Bouvy, “Where We Stay” is a beautiful and touching examination of human connection and unspoken truths. The film was partially inspired by Florence’s own story of loss, when her father was diagnosed with terminal cancer and the period of pain, grief, and love that followed. She noticed how in those final moments, our masks come off and our humanity in all its imperfections is put on display. Instead of showing the idealized “perfect goodbye,” she wanted to capture the often-taboo reality: messy, human, and deeply beautiful. The short premiered at the 2024 Palm Springs International Shortfest, was shortlisted for the Iris Prize 2024, and will screen at the upcoming, Oscar-qualifying, Cleveland International Film Festival.
This film is so visually stunning, and the acting is sublime. It’s remarkable. Let me start by asking, how did you get involved with the project? How did it evolve?
So I actually made a graduation film that ended up getting this prize from the Dutch Film Fund, where they give you what’s called a wild card. So they give you funding to do whatever you want. It’s a wild card, free, you can make whatever you want to make. Which is terrifying. Because then you go, OK, so then what do I do? In film school, my dad actually passed away. He got diagnosed with terminal cancer. And so that was this experience that brought me really close to a deathbed and to everything that goes on between us as humans and that. And so it just always stuck with me as a place where I really wanted to tell a story and kind of get into that nitty gritty that happens between us as humans. So that’s where this movie was really born.
I know that you studied philosophy and then film, and I’m wondering if if you could speak to how each of those fields influences your work, and if you ever feel some kind of friction or if it everything flows together.
Well, it’s interesting. When I was 13, 14, I started acting, kind of. I think that’s usually when we’re in high school, the first kind of thing that gets us in the creative field. You know, we can play in something or be in the school play. So my fascination for human behavior I think I started with this love for acting, then started to create more stories and then as I did that for a while, I just, I could feel I’m always going create something and I’m always gonna be in the creative industry, but I also loved studying and I love books and I love reading. And so I was like, OK, let me for a bit focus — in Holland we have an amazing school system, so I knew I could dive into that for a while. And that’s when I got into philosophy.
The thing is, for me, it was all about the way that we relate as humans, and I found that the most interesting part of philosophy. After one year, I stopped that and went to film school. But what I really took away from my studying of philosophy and it all adds to this: How are we processing being here and all that it entails, you know? So I don’t have a very intelligent answer for you, but I think it all connects to my feeling of the struggle that we all have with like, what is this thing that we’re doing here on this planet? And, how do we do it to the best of our ability, you know?
When they’re dancing, and obviously they’re inside, but you take cuts of them being outside together, dancing, and the camera lens is clouded by a bush. I took it as they’re being hidden; their honesty and their truth and their feelings for each other are hidden, kind of clouded by this, or that maybe death was encroaching and the sun is setting.
That’s so interesting. I love that. Yeah, a lot of the way that we shot this was extremely intuitive. We shot the whole film doing these extremely long takes of sometimes an hour and a half from where I would start them out. We had a script and we had this arc that we wanted to work with. But then the way that I love directing actors — and this is where a little bit of my fascination of humans comes in and my own experience with acting — is I like to kind of start a take and then keep rolling and then bring it back or bring back a part of another part of the script that I can feel is going to touch on something. I really look at where the actors are going and what buttons I can push to bring them to this place.
There is so much that you create on set that kind of happens so intuitively when you get into this almost trance-like moment, I like to call it, because it’s sometimes better than we can think of with our brain. I think sometimes when we’re reacting so almost physically to it — you know the story, you know what the feelings are — and then we all start moving as we would maybe as humans in day-to-day life on an instinct.
So I remember that scene, actually. We had a little bit of extra time and the sun was setting and we suddenly saw this and we started playing around with it. And I knew these scenes, I knew these moments, and I put them there; and we all started kind of intuitively working, and the camera pan started feeling like we kind of both moved into this space where, you know, we’re so intimate and so close to them. The entire film. But here, it’s almost like they’re given that privacy and that it is so much their intimacy now that we get to, in a very private way, kind of look at. So it was a very intuitive thing. It wasn’t an, ‘Oh, the bush has a certain meaning.’ But I do think when you’re working with something so from the guts, it starts to create these meanings that you can later relate to it, you know? And so it just it felt right in the moment. It’s all I can say.
Oh, I love that. And you’re right, that we’re at first looking at them in the room, at their faces, and then it’s to their back, dancing, and that’s beautiful.
And I think in the end, it started to take on this meaning — I wanted to really work with kind of a liquid narrative — harmony, Sen calls it that. He uses it, for instance, very well in “The Beach Bum,” where we’ll be having a conversation and all of a sudden, our conversation continues, but we’re at the beach, you know? And I love that because for me that really plays into the feeling that we can have watching film, where everything is kind of organic and flowing, but the emotional arc is very clear. I really wanted to incorporate them for this film. However, we obviously have one character that’s stuck in a bed. So I was really trying to get that in there. And I feel like this moment and this world was the closest we could get to something — that place with that liquidity — because that’s also something that we experience as we start to pass, as we start to move to a different world, we do often start to kind of move along dimensions; even before we pass away, there’s often people describing having certain visions or sensitivities or feelings, you know, that are a little bit the in between, right?
So for me that place where they’re at is also a little bit the in-between, where they connect in a way that you can feel it the way you want to feel it. And it can mean to you, as a viewer, whatever you want it to mean.
That’s all part of the human experience, right? How you perceive and analyze and interpret. That’s gorgeous. And I think, too, to what you were just saying, that conversation continues when Daniel does go outside and the elements are so harsh and it’s snowing and it’s windy, but he’s just very calm, and then he’s back.
That was a crazy moment, because it’s like my favorite moment of the film where . . . actually that was the thing I put in because when my dad passed away, it was snowing. And so I always felt like there’s these little things that start to take on a bigger meaning when we’re in these spaces, right? We get this sensitivity for, you know, it can be a little sound, like a wind chime that suddenly holds something bigger or, you know, connects us to something bigger. And the snow felt that way for me and we really wanted to shoot it, but it was like, it was this whole thing with us trying to get fake snow and then there was gonna be this rainstorm and it wasn’t looking good. And so I thought we were gonna have to skip the whole scene. And because when we were shooting it was really warm and so there was no way. It was very sunny and bright. And then at the last moment — it was our last scene that we had planned for the whole shoot, and it was like one o’clock in the morning — we had just finished the improvisation, and I was ready to go, and I said I guess we have to skip the snow scene because it’s raining. And I remember looking outside and there was a full snowstorm happening. It was crazy.
And that snow that you’re seeing — it was so thick. I said they’re huge flakes, like crazy, and the whole country, like the whole of Amsterdam when we drove back that night, was covered in the night and then the next day I woke up at 10 in the morning and it was gone. So it was that connection that you see; it was about this feeling of the snow hitting your skin, let it come in, and they just had this cathartic moment and the snow also kind of resembles that the elements can sometimes have this, like, it’s almost a release, right? So that connection — it literally happened kind of in the real way that it is in the scene.
I don’t like the phrase ‘You can’t make this stuff up,’ but I mean — you can’t! How does that happen?
This was so personal for so many people, so everybody in the crew was so involved and it is such a communal experience that we have. We’ve all loved people that we lost. We all have people that we think about not just when we’re watching the film, but even when we were shooting it, you know, everybody had different moments where they were moved by it. And so, I don’t like to think that it’s just my dad that sent that snow. I do feel like somehow we all felt like it was our loved ones that were standing in there. It felt like a very communal experience of something special.
That’s beautiful. Thank you. Let’s talk about the timeline and how long it took to shoot.
So actually it was quite a luxury because we had six days to shoot, and the reason we also did six days is the producer, Purple, they were super amazing in the sense that they allowed me to shoot it this way with these long takes, but that also meant that we wanted to make sure to create enough moments of breaks. It was such an intense way of filming and so emotional for people that we wanted to have moments where we could go outside, like taking the sun, like having a breather so that it was sustainable, you know, so we did three days and then one day off and then another three days.
You touch on this a little bit, but I know that you love long and improvisations on set. How do you go about directing that?
Yeah, so, it’s really interesting. I think I kind of developed this from working with children, actually, and actors, because you learn how to again; coming a little bit from acting background, I like to help people get to a place. Now, when you do this with actors, you can go to a whole different dimension, right? Because you can really collaborate on it. So the way that I like to go about this is it’s very instinctive, but like I touched on before a little bit, and we start with a scene. Everything is written, they know what they’re about to say, but maybe they do it and I tell them, OK, pick it up again, but do it in a different position. So I give them a different starting position. Then maybe I say, OK, say the monologue that Carry had about how he passes away, that was something that I figured out early, that really did something to Emmanuel and to Daniel’s character.
So sometimes I would just suddenly go, ‘do your monologue,’ and it would help them so when you kind of take different parts of the script in that way, they start to kind of flow with it. And though they know the words, they know the lines, it kind of takes them out of their control, and they have to start to instinctively reacting. So sometimes, you know, Carry doing that monologue would bring Daniel to this place, Emmanuel to this place, and then we would pick the scene back up from the beginning. And so this way, you kind of play around with it and you kind of see which buttons you can touch and similarly, I would be right behind the DP and I I could tell him sometimes, like let him free flow; and sometimes be like, OK, move in closer or let’s back off a little bit. It’s all this kind of playing around and then sometimes letting things happen.
There’s this beautiful moment where they actually just had their fight, but I left the camera rolling, and we see this wide shot of Carry falling asleep and suddenly waking up, going: ‘What were you saying?’ Yeah. It was full improv. Like that was just letting the camera roll and letting something exist and you could tell; and if this was actually a really long take where Carry was starting to breathe really slow and you couldn’t it was really beautiful because I could feel the actor Emmanuel freaking out because he thought, ‘Oh my God, is he about to?’ You know, because we were so free playing around that Michael could have made that decision in that moment. And suddenly he woke up and he said, ‘What were you saying?’ And the reaction that it gave Emmanuel was a real moment. And the beauty is that after that, when Michael and Emmanuel saw the film, they were like, ‘I don’t remember shooting any of this.’ Like, they were so in it. You kind of lose yourself in it, so I couldn’t even remember when we did that, but it all flows together.
Something that I picked up the first time I watched it was the spider crawling on the steps, and the way that its legs are shaped; and then Carry dancing, and the way that his hands are shaped and even his hair. We have those two images that are reflective of each other, right after Carry had said ‘They’re not ready to put me down yet.’ It just hit me, like, wow — how quickly are some people to end that spider’s life? It brought up a whole lot of feelings about how humans value life and which life forms they think deserve to live.
That’s so beautiful, yeah, I love that. That was again one of those very intuitive things. I was actually talking about this yesterday with someone; it’s been a while. So I don’t remember if we planned shooting the spider or if it was there. I do remember our AC capturing it and trying to like, you know, get the spider because we did the take multiple tries, trying to get him to walk perfectly. Where that was born from was, again, bringing the space to life that this all is happening in and I think that there’s so much again, like the way that you’re describing it is so beautifully. And that is really what I hope for when people watch the movie — they bring their own experience to it and what that means. To me, some people experience almost as a horror element, you know, like very scary thrillery, you know, we’re hearing that faucet dripping, there’s a coldness, but at the same time, there’s this like very fragile life that we’re seeing.
But yes, I was really trying to find little things in the world around them and in this room, in a frozen moment in time, which is often. The last time we’re with someone, that space becomes this sacred, still world; and after someone passes away and you open the door — I remember leaving the hospital — and it’s like the world is, like, coming by and rushing and everybody’s just living and doing things and you’re like, how? How are we still, how is the world still spinning? And in this film, we’re staying in that very quiet space where something like a little spider crawling by, it’s all part of that, that ecosphere that we’re in, you know?
Yes, yes, that’s beautiful. Thank you. You’ve said that it’s all about what it means to each individual, how we interpret things, but if you could say what you hope people will take from this — what they’ll carry with them after seeing this — what would that be?
Well, it’s twofold, so what I hope it is in a deeper sense is something that I often think about: There’s a beautiful book that talks about how back in the Greek times, they saw art as something that can actually heal you. So if you were sick, they would literally prescribe going to the theater, and you walk away with this healing. We all have this sometimes, right? Where if we see something beautiful it gives that feeling of, you know, like almost a like a healing experience. It can make you feel better, let me say it like that. And at the same time, I think sometimes things can also really make you feel sicker after watching them, and like confined or constricted. I really want to give something to people that, though it might be on heavy subjects, they walk away feeling, if anything, lighter or more hopeful. And I think in this film, we do look at things. I’m looking at things I don’t want to look at. It’s like my worst fear, looking at these things, but at the same time, what I hope is that people walk away with at least the feeling of being a little bit lighter because sometimes feeling your feelings is a good thing.
That was really important for me. I don’t want people walking away with a feeling of like, a constrictedness, the opposite. So I’m hoping people walk away with a feeling of hope and with a message of the value of loving each other, no matter what; it doesn’t matter that maybe we don’t get to spend a lot of time or we don’t get the benefits of this and this and this. It’s really about the pure reason of being here as humans — it’s the most beautiful and the most brave thing we do. That’s what I hope, in a way, people take away. I’ve had a couple of people that came up to me that had just lost someone themselves, and there was a woman who said she had gone to the bathroom after and she had a really deep cry after watching the film because it brought up a lot of her recent experience; and she walked out and she told me I needed that cry, you know? And I think if I could have done that for her, then this movie has done its job. And that’s the most beautiful thing.
Well, I will share that I did have that experience, so thank you. It’s just so real. You feel that. It’s beautiful. The ending: Is that up for interpretation? I took it as Daniel knows. He’s just lying there, listening to his own breath, and he knows.
We had a whole scene after where he likes says goodbye to the body, and we had this beautiful moment where we see him looking at the body and we see Carry behind him, actually looking at him, and it was a gut wrenching moment, but the film was done. So we ended up cutting it. They’ve both already had their moments. And that’s where you really don’t want to overstay your welcome. But it was definitely one of those kill your darlings; but it was important for me to have that feeling of ‘he knows,’ and the pain — the little painful twinge at the end is obviously he’s had this whole [experience] and now he has to continue life, right? And he has to now carry this. I think that is something I wanted to leave the audience with because that’s the duality, right? It’s the beauty and the pain at the same time. And I didn’t want to make something that was only like ‘everything is good and fine.’ No, it’s gonna be really hard for him now, but he did have a beautiful experience that he will have with him for the rest of his life.
Right. And, you know, I feel you obviously learn these things as you evolve as a human and your experiences become more important, but when you’re younger, it’s moments or just moments, but when you get older, moments are everything. And yes, they’ve both hidden their feelings for each other, but they had it. That one moment.
What is next for you, for more projects and for this film?
I’m I’m in LA right now, and I’m kind of trying out all different kinds of things. For me, making a short film like this, it takes me a long time to simmer on it and to look at, like, what do I want to touch? So I’m really trying to incorporate new ways of storytelling. For instance, right now I’m doing music videos. There’s a completely different vibe. And I do hope to incorporate more and more of a combination of having these like experimental things, but at the same time making things exciting and really taking you by the hand. And I want them to be both. So I’m still on my journey of learning about those different ways of storytelling.
Then for the film, well, right now it just screened at Cleveland. It’s coming to Poppy Jasper, so if you’re in California, it’ll be there and I’ll hopefully be joining too. And then I’m not sure. It premiered last summer, so obviously I hope maybe there’s a couple more festivals, and if not, I really hope that we can find a way to put it online and to really have as many people watch it as possible; because there’s one thing I took away from this experience, which is it’s such a connection. We all go through this, no matter where we’re from, and if it speaks to you, it speaks to you. And then it’s the biggest blessing to be able to connect to people and and have that connection. So I hope to have more of that.
I hope so, too, because this needs to be seen.
Thank you. I really appreciate the way that you’ve connected to the film and to me and about this. It’s extremely meaningful to me. It makes me feel like, oh, yeah, this is why we’re doing this.
