Henry Golding and 'White Lotus' Star Beatrice Grannò Are Dreamy In 'Daniela Forever'

[Music] it's a movie that takes place in Two Worlds one is supposed to be the real life and the other one is his dreams so the movies going back and forth between uh his dreams induced by a pill that allows you to have like Ultra Crystal Clear lucid dreams he can dream whatever he wants and because he's grieving uh his girlfriend that uh that died recently in a horrible accident he's taking the pills in order to dream of her again which sounds like a like a really tempting but bad idea at the end of the day everything horrible that happens uh uh to the character in the first half of the film all the horrible stuff I mean h grief uh depression addiction that that's I'm sad that that's the real inspiration for this film like all the horrible uh state of mind that he's uh going through this is a I know this is a a big depressing answer but the movie is less depressing that this answer we find Nicholas at the at the top of the movie um really in the depths of Despair uh it's been about 6 months since his his girlfriend and the love of his life passed away and like all of us we find different ways of um recovering or or or managing these these kind of emotions and and Nick just can't find the way and um and a friend offers up an escape which is uh through this experimental treatment um for lucid dreaming and and for me it was the idea of of delving into a character that starts at his lowest we often find our characters sort of high on life everything's going well then they come across some sort of obstacle they have to overcome it and they come out the hero at the end this is pretty much the exact reverse uh he's low he finds a way out and then we we we discover that with that way out comes a lot of complications and brings out uh a lot of depression ing characteristics uh of Nick and very selfish ones and I think when we come across these choices of bringing somebody we love so much back to life we tend to choose those selfish choices and that's what he does it was very challenging character for me and I I really enjoyed playing this woman who was not fully a woman at the beginning she's just a memory she's a projection of Henry's character feelings and so for me to play that was great because you know she goes through different stages and in the begininning she's just a doll and then she slowly grows in the film and sometimes also that I I know it it's it's something that it's out of the blue but sometimes also like you know being a woman kind of learning who you are and then like growing and starting to question yourself and why you're there why what's happening to you and there's some sort of control that his Harry character Nick is doing on her and and I think sometimes when you lose something when you lose someone it can feel that way it can feel that you don't want that person to go you don't want that person to leave to a point that you want to keep her to yourself and you're not letting you know that person be whoever she wants to be it was great for me to play that it was also cuz when you play someone who's just a memory is not fully a person you always have to find ways to portray that energy and to also to to make sure that when you're not there something's missing because that's you know what I was trying to do this is something that I fully realized yesterday watching the the film in front of the audience for the for the first time I suddenly realized that um her transformation the curve of the character is more detail I'm more defin that what it came from the script the curve is softer like it's more pronounced it's way more sophisticated there was a lot of um little nuances that I wasn't able to to see until until yesterday which means that maybe I'm a bad filmmaker because I should be aware or of anything that happens in front of camera but yesterday I was like look at that look at that oh my God it was great also like natural gave us so much freedom on set to just play and do whatever we felt like doing and he always had a Clear Vision which is something that I loved like you can tell that he knew what he was doing even if he pretended that you weren't but he knew he had a vision and it was that vision and he would tell us to do specific things and sometimes I wouldn't understand it because his his way of like thinking is so creative and so unique it's my English also and no a problem here it's not that it's like sometimes it's like a no no no it wasn't the English it was like yeah you you want to be a shark with a gun like why why is this happening and then and then and then he would tell me to do specific things but I think that when you trust someone that you're working with you just go with it so that's that's how I felt I felt Nao said this so I have to trust him and once you begin to trust who you're working with say with Henry you just feel this freedom and that's how I felt that's the core of making films like the little accidents and the little um occurrences that are born at the moment as the movie um like spirals into chaos I just wanted the the audience to be to be um sure about which side of the world we were uh looking at I I wanted that thing to be like Crystal Clear like okay we are either here or there we are either awake or sleeping because later when once we start to turn the rules upside down we I still need the audience to know where we are and so we wanted to make a really radical difference between the the the the formal aspects of those two worlds and initially when I wrote the script I was a bit of a it was kind of boring because I played okay black and white versus color which is like the uh the only clear way so we were like one month into shooting and and we said uh they were like this is a no no no no no no black and white you have to find something else and we um we had this panic attack and we came up with something that is way more radical than black and white which is using the real old beta tapes that we were using in 1995 to shoot horrible short films the same camera the same tapes and I realized last night when I was watching it that when you when you see an image that you can tell that is from an older camera all of a sudden for some reason you just feel something that it's reminds you of I mean for me what when I was younger and it there's something that it's a very strange feelings like watching this film that had those images don't you don't you feel like you can you can somehow perceive the camera like you're like it's a documentary yeah like finding an old tape of your parents wedding it's like a it's like a time travel in a way like okay this is this is myself looking something that that if I made 25 years ago it will look the same I think you might be the first person to put CGI on to oh yeah yeah that is tricky that is really tricky yeah you try to make this kind of simple intimate small story between two characters and then you your brain finds way to make things more convoluted and complicated and so that's uh that happens all the time [Music]