WonderLoopToo young to direct
Trapezium, part 1. Where the idea came from.
As a kid I wanted to be an actor. There was one problem: I couldn't remember a single line.
So I went and stood on the other side of the camera. Directing turned out to be just as much fun. More fun, actually. You get to make everything up and you don't have to memorize a thing.
The Film Academy
I didn't get into the directing program at the Netherlands Film Academy in Amsterdam. Too young. So I became an editor.
After the academy I directed my first short film anyway, De Fiets (The Bicycle), with Freek de Jonge, Roef Ragas and a very young Marlies Rutten. To get it made, my good friend Reinier Selen and I started Rinkelfilm.
De Fiets got me into Columbia University in New York, for a master's in film directing. Too young to direct in Amsterdam, old enough in New York.
Suddenly everyone wanted the same thing
I went to New York to make big entertainment films. Romantic comedies, that's what I loved. My American classmates all wanted to make European arthouse. Fine, I thought, then I'll have the genre to myself.
Halfway through the program the wind turned. Suddenly everyone wanted to make romantic comedies.
That annoyed me so much that I sabotaged myself with a film nobody would want to see. Tomorrow Never Comes, about an undercover detective who poses as a corpse to catch a necrophile.
That did not go down well.
Dating Rosie
Another short film from that time did stick: Dating Rosie, written by my classmate Joe Castelo. In it, timelines run through each other. Characters step into each other's stories and comment on what they see.
I couldn't let go of that idea.
I've always loved that in films. Alaska by Mike van Diem, where three people live through the same story and you, the viewer, see something new every time. Vantage Point, which does the same thing as a big feature film.
I wanted to do it with a romantic comedy. The genre I once went to New York for, and walked away from when everyone wanted it.
So I wrote one myself. Trapezium.
I still couldn't remember a single line. Now I was writing them.