Olivier Boonjing on following Ghost Trail
Ghost Trail follows Hamid, as he joins a secret group tracking Syrian regime fugitives. His mission ultimately takes him to France, where he pursues his former torturer. Captured by Olivier Boonjing SBC, Ghost Trail competed for the Caméra d’Or at the 77th Cannes Film Festival.
In 2019 Boonjing shot the short film Je serai parmi les amandiers (Among the Almond Trees) for the same production company (Films Grand Huit). “The film was director Marie Le Floc’h’s third short film and we both got along very well with the production company,” he begins. “A few years later when they were looking for DOPs for Jonathan Millet’s movie, they decided to have a casting process to meet different DOPs. Producer Pauline Seigland invited me to meet with Jonathan. We got along well, very quickly because we have a similar background and neither of us went to film school. He started by shooting images for different NGOs and stock shots for different companies and documentaries, as well as a few commercials. Ghost Trail was his debut feature. He’d previously shot feature documentaries and short fiction, but this was his first feature film.”
Ghost Trail is based on various true stories all stitched together. The project initially began in documentary form, until Millet ran into difficulties piecing it together. “He noticed how difficult it was because many people didn’t want to appear on camerabecause they were afraid that their families back in Syria will have more issues,” explains Boonjing. “He also noticed that it’s difficult because most of those people haven’t seen anything, only heard, smelt and felt things. They didn’t actually see their torturer and all those people. So, it was a very difficult subject to imagine and to create in a documentary. He decided that fiction was a better option to make this more visceral in a way and less informative. He wanted to do something that reaches the audience a bit differently.”
Boonjing describes the style of film as a cross between something that is very realistic and a thriller. “As it is based on true stories,” he says, “it was very important to make something believable. The stories are quite incredible and I hadn’t really read about them in the news. This is happening right now across European cities. That’s why the style of the movie was a thin line between making things somehow a little bit exciting and with a bitter mood, but at the same time having something that felt very honest and sometimes even modest, with maybe a little documentary feel to it.”
Translating these numerous stories into images was a challenging task for Boonjing as he was dealing with real people. “We didn’t want to just use this context as some kind of backdrop. Hamid (played by Adam Bessa) is a teacher and in real life many of these people have normal jobs. There are not only teachers but also taxi drivers for example. There are many thrillers about espionage that’s really out of this world, such as the Bond or Bourne films. For us, it was about being truthful to the background of these people and the story and we wanted to be really honest with them.”
Boonjing spent lots of time going through the script with Millet. “Jonathan is someone who is very precise,” he adds. “He knew that the script was a really good script, but he knew that the script wouldn’t be everything in terms of making a movie. He knew that we needed to translate a lot of things, especially because he also wanted to have a movie that wouldn’t just speak to your brain but would also speak to your senses in a way. Many of those characters didn’t see their torture and so we wanted to show how they use their smell and senses to portray their experiences. At the same time, we wanted it to be quite simple, but you had to get certain moments in the film where you feel the impression that you are inside Hamid’s head and to feel things like he feels them.”
“We spent nearly a month just breaking up the whole script into shots,” Boonjing continues. “The movie is very close to what we had in mind in terms of visual rhythm. What I really love about Jonathan, is that he’s a hard-working director and you could really feel that he’d done years of research and spoke to lots of people. Usually when I receive a script, I read it many times, but I’m sometimes more interested in the notion of subtext than the notion of text. The text is there for all of us to read, but I would like to know what’s behind it and what’s the second or third layer that he wants to tell. Jonathan produced a 50-page document, scene by scene, telling everything. He joked that if he died, we could take this document and still be able to shoot the film. That document was really useful because it had a very precise description of the subtext and all the other layers that he wanted to tell in each sequence. This really was our main working document.”
Boonjing and Millet watched lots of films in preparation. “We didn’t have one particularreference, but we talked about some espionage films that we loved, like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. We also both love the German film, The Lives of Othersbecause those films are quite different from modern thrillers. They have a certain rhythm and they’re really character driven and you actually care about the characters, probably more than their actions. It’s more about their state of mind and how he or she goes through all these different moments. We talked about things very far away from the thriller genre. We thought about how there’s a very sensual visual notion in the movies of Wong Kar Wai, for example. We didn’t want people to have a feeling that they already saw everything that we’re going to do, we wanted to slightly blur the lines between all those different sub genres.”
The video game sequences depicted in Ghost Trail were based on real life events. “There are many groups and they have to be undercover and approach subjects linked to war, so they might need to use words such as weapons or bombing, for example. They meet in video games because that’s one of the only platforms online where you can use those sorts of words without making anything too obvious. Jonathan always told us that he wished he could have had this idea himself, but it was just based on real life. We had a post-production company in France build up our own game, so we could be a little bit more precise. In the movie, there’s no flashback sequence of the war, so this video game was a bit of an absurd way of giving a little bit of context, even if it’s those are not the real locations. They are there to remind you that it’s an actual war going on. It’s not just abstract context.”
Production had to shoot the film in France, due to financing reasons, though many of the real-life stories were happening throughout Germany. “Jonathan decided to place the film in Strasbourg because you have this link with Germany in Strasbourg,” says Boonjing. “There’s also a big Syrian population there and so it made sense. We had the help of la région grand est, the big eastern region of France in making this movie. They gave us access to lots of cool locations, such as the university. It had a very interesting Brutalist architecture from the 60s and 70s and it gave it a less welcoming, almost threatening feel. The movie was really well produced.”
There were 40 shooting days overall, with 35 days in Strasbourg, as well as a day in Paris and a few hours of shooting in Berlin. There were also five days in Jordan. “In Jordan, we cheated Syria and Lebanon,” says Boonjing. “We couldn’t shoot in Syria, of course, but we were only 10 kilometres away from the border, so we had the landscapes. Some of crew was also from the area and it was interesting not having to entirely cheat those sequences in Europe. It was as close as possible to the real locations, so we were very lucky. Everyone worked really hard on the movie and you could feel that it was important to everyone. You could also feel that it came from years and years of research, which made it easier on my part.”
The café sequence is one of the pivotal moments in the film and was shot in a 13-minute take. “Adam, who plays Hamid is a Franco-Tunisian actor, so he speaks Arabic, but not Syrian Arabic. He had a dialect coach as he only understands around 30% of Syrian Arabic, as it’s quite different from his native Tunisian Arabic. When he speaks in the film, he doesn’t completely understand everything he says. Also, Tawfeek Barhom, who plays Harfaz didn’t speak French. He learnt it for the movie and now speaks it very well, but when we shot this scene, he didn’t speak it that fluently. Julia, who plays Nina doesn’t speak French either as she’s Austrian. Jonathan felt that technically you should be able to just watch the sequence and be able to just feel everything. We knew that the characters would talk, but they are both lying and judging each other, so at the same time it isn’t so much about what is being said, but about how they react to what is being said.”
From a camera perspective, it was always going to be a very simple set up for Boonjing. “We knew it was just a matter of having two faces and not too much over the shoulder,” he details. “That’s the first moment in the film where we see Harfaz in close-up and hear him talking. We knew we didn’t have to overdo it in terms of lighting either. It shouldn’t be dark. They’re not alone, they’re in a restaurant and it’s crowded and sunny. It’s only a cold feeling from what is being said. Our main decision was about finding the right focal length to isolate them a little bit. I still remember how intense it was to operate, even if they didn’t move much and there’s still a little bit of adjustment. The scene is also very long and we only did it five times. It was a very interesting shooting rhythmand you can feel that it’s a bit different. You can feel it’s quite intense, but that shouldn’t come from the camera or the lighting, it was about capturing their performances.”
Boonjing opted to shoot the film with the Sony Venice 1 in 6k OCN-LT. “I like this camera a lot because I think it gives a great image and also we knew we had certain sequences in low light and it’s a great camera in low light,” he says. “The full frame sensor was interesting for this film, because we play a lot with different depth of field. Sometimes we actually close down quite a bit because we used a lot of long lenses and we didn’t want to blur out the backgrounds completely. It was important to have a camera thatcould work at high ISO just to be able to really nail the depth of field that we wanted for each shot. It’s a very practical camera.”
Boonjing selected TLS Mamiya 645 lenses (25-32-37-50-57-77-107). “I really love those lenses because they are quite special, because of the speed booster and because they are vintage lenses. They are quite imperfect, in a way that the edges are slightly imperfect, but they have a really nice way of rendering faces. When you close them down, they don’t get over sharp because many old lenses, once you close them down, they become very modern in a way. They are still quite a bit lower contrast, a little bit softer and so I think it was a nice combination. Our main lens was a 50mm on full frame. It was quite straightforward, but you play a lot with longer lenses because of the espionage feel, so we had 107mm and a Angenieux 25-250HR long lens that we used in Super 35 just to get those very long lens POV shots.”
In terms of lighting, Boonjing wanted to make sure that the film didn’t look too much like it was lit. It was vital to have a realistic feel throughout. “We played more with colour, but we didn’t want to make a movie where it’s always dark because that would have been too stylised. In real life it’s sunny sometimes and you can still feel worried, sad and anxious and it’s not dark. We wanted to play with that contrast. Hamad is living in our world and many people are living their lives. He’s there at the same moment, in the same space. I have to make it right considering the space the character is in and from there we can still adjust a little bit considering the mood. It’s more about colours because the film starts warm and then it gets really cold as it becomes winter and then it’s spring again, so we wanted to push that more.”
Boonjing enjoyed working on a film that had to be very precise, as he often works on very freestyle movies. “One I’m shooting now is very freestyle, as was Zero Fucks Given. For Ghost Trail, we spent a lot of time at the table, just thinking and discussing things. I also really enjoyed the fact that it’s a fairly unknown story. When we shot the film, Bashar al-Assad was still in power and nobody had seen any images of Sednaya Prison. Jonathan also became a close friend of mine and he’s the type of director I really love because he’s very precise and has a different approach because of his background in documentary. This was a perfect mix between many things I’ve done before and a completely fresh genre.”
“When people reviewed this movie, they never talk about the image of this film and I’m very happy because it’s not a film about images. Jonathan tells in many interviews that sometimes the images had to be very simple because sound would create this second layer of feeling and of narrative elements. Images aren’t the centre of everything and are just one element of a puzzle and for this film, we thought about the whole puzzle at the same time,” concludes Boonjing.
By Oliver Webb
Crew:
1st AC : Aurélien Dehin
2nd AC : Lisa Billuart-Monet
Gaffer : Arnaud Hock
Key Grip : Lionel Kuhn
Steadicam : Nicolas Savary et John Morisson
Colourist : Loup Brenta