Péter Engelmann focuses on the effects of a unique experiment which has far-reaching consequences for a trio of seemingly unrelated strangers in TRIANGLE.
Film And TV Now spoke with the film-maker about the work.
FILM AND TV NOW: What’s interesting is that the experiment is about interaction of strangers, but it could also be about how life and the world brings certain people together in life. What were your own reflections on the original experiment when you first heard about it?
PÉTER ENGELMANN: When I first heard about Arthur Aron’s experiment was in 2015, when a journalist carried out the experiment with her university friend and they fell in love which then led to an article saying, “36 questions that lead to love”, and then it obviously went viral. That time it was just a fun thing to read, I probably thought that ‘yeah I should carry those cards with me and try them out with girls I’m interested in’ – which of course I never did.
But in 2020 when this experiment popped into my mind again during writing of Triangle and I dived in deeper to the 1997 studies along with a bunch of recent videos about people carrying it out I realised it is more than just having some fancy questions that may or may not lead to love and two things were heavily caught my attention. In one hand, very different people happened to come together and shared things to each other that they would normally never do, and they left as two people who care about each other. It even worked with people who had attitude differences, which greatly shows us that we can disagree on several things on the surface, we can be different, but we can still connect in a deeper level.
On the other hand, I also realised that due to this it could also serve as a part of a solution for the issue that the film is about.
FTVN: Did you ever try out the experiment with yourself and your friends and did you get through all thirty-six questions?
PE: I haven’t tried out the experiment with myself yet, I was planning it when I was writing the script, but it was in lockdown with zero chance to meet anyone, so it is up to the future. I saw so many videos of people carrying it out (and I saw them multiple times) so I started to feel like I have already done it.
FTVN: Tell us about your cast.
PE: Lili Vetlényi (Vic) was introduced to me by our line producer, and she made a huge impact on me on the very first casting, there weren’t too many questions left in my head after she left, while she was really invested in the character which for me was also a great and necessary sign.
I was really surprised when it turned out that she never learned acting in a higher education environment, only in some short courses. Oh, and the dancing she is doing with her daughter and husband in the film – it is really their family thing!
I saw József S. Kovács (Perp) for the first time in 2016 in a movie called The Grey War (for which he won the Hungarian Film Award for Best Leading Actor – in a Television Movie) and I decided that I don’t know when and in what movie, but I need to work with him, and eventually, through the casting period for Triangle he came to my mind so I wrote him just via Facebook, I was like ‘let’s see what happens’, and what happened is he was really friendly, he liked the script so we invited him to a casting where I also had this gut feeling just like with Lili that I think this is it.
I met Dániel Gaál (ByStan) in a one-day film masterclass a few years ago and as I was searching for potential faces through my social network he popped up and although at the end there wasn’t any casting for him due to scheduling issues, through the videos I saw from his previous performs and the easy-going personality he has I believed he would be a great fit for ByStan and he proved me so right in the first rehearsal later on and even surprised me on set more than once.
I really need to mention Lilla Kovács (Young Vic), who was 9 at the time of shooting, it was a debut appearance for her with no previous experience in acting and I chose her after a video casting for that she and her mother prepared a lot which were also a great sign for me. I think she did a wonderful job, I’m glad we found her.
FTVN: Tell us about your production team.
PE: As a Bournemouth Film School graduation film, it was originally meant to be shot in Bournemouth with the cast & crew from the UK. However, due to the pandemic it turned out that we cannot shoot in the UK until this summer, 2021 so I needed to choose, and I chose the obvious option to go back to my country and shoot there and the Uni also supported me to do so.
For that matter, although it is considered as a British film, the cast and crew became fully Hungarian with only one British crew member, the composer Sam Dinley. It is crazy to think about that without these extreme and unpredicted circumstances I wouldn’t shoot in Hungary, and it would be a totally different movie. I’m glad that I ended up shooting there with these wonderful people.
The first person I wrote when I came back from the UK was the producer Janka Gyapai, who also coproduced my previous debut short film #HELP after we met at the Budapest Film Academy in 2014 who we had a great relationship. Janka brought in line producer Zhang Ge and 1st AD Milán Kovács and together they helped me recruit the team along with the head of departments, director of photography Csaba Bántó and production designer Janka Szécsényi.
FTVN: How long did it take to write the script and how many drafts did you write?
PE: I had this idea since 2018, or better to say ‘goal’ that I would like to work with this issue and that I would love to make a positive impact in real life situations related to it, but it was only in the MA Film Practice course where I finally found the form and story for the idea.
From that – around February – it took me 4 months and then when I finished it in English it turned out I need to shoot it in Hungarian then it took a bit more to translate it (as the two languages are so different it is not just a translation, it is a bit of a rewrite too). If I remember right, I had like 4-5 drafts in English and then came the Hungarian version.
FTVN: You use some subtle visual effects in the film. Tell us about these.
PE: Oh, thank you very much, I really appreciate the kind words.
Through my previous music video and other works, I did make some VFX, but I came to this project with a strong goal of not doing everything by myself again and I will only do the editing in post – but then I also ended up doing the VFX and the grading.
We have never had a VFX artist attached to the project so I planned out the VFX with keeping in mind that there is a chance that I will end up doing it so I acted like a VFX supervisor on set without really explaining to anyone how I will do those, so they just had to believe that it’s going to work – so as I (a huge thank you to them that they did so). I had a plan, that worked eventually, but that was the first time that I did such a thing.
FTVN: How long did it take to shoot and where did you film?
PE: As I mentioned earlier, due to the pandemic I needed to shoot it in Hungary, so we shot most of it in the Sidelight Photo Studio and the surrounding areas in Budapest. The budget let us shoot only two days, which was not much, but everyone was on top, so we managed it.
FTVN: What issues and themes are you keen to explore in your future work?
PE: The project that I’m invested in the most recently is a collection of extremely short stories or fractions of stories from the Holocaust about ordinary people, ordinary neighbours going towards different paths of becoming perpetrators, bystanders and victims that captured my mind and made me strongly feel they need to be told in film, particularly in short or a series of shorts, and I’m keen to explore deeper the psychology behind.
FTVN: How did you raise finance for the short?
PE: Well, in the early stages I was thinking about crowdfunding, but due to the financial disaster that came with the pandemic it was not the right time to asking for money, so at the end, besides the fund from the Uni, I had to put in everything I had and covered the rest of it.
Obviously, I made it harder for myself as I came up with the idea of recording the experiment real-time which then required us to work with 3 cameras…
FTVN: The film was produced via Bournemouth Film School. Tell us about this facility and what are the key strengths when it comes to developing new talent for their entry into the world of creative visual production?
PE: Bournemouth Film School – which is part of the Arts University Bournemouth – was my first choice when I decided to apply for film schools in the UK and it became one of the best decisions in my life.
For me there were two main ways in that I was benefited the most: one is that from week 2 they picked me to be one of the three main cinematographers of the course – even though I was mainly doing directing and editing – that was a one-of-a-kind possibility to broaden my knowledge, to switch from a director’s point of view to a cinematographer’s for a while and to make me have more options when I step into the world of visual productions.
The other way, which is connected straight to my journey towards Triangle is my actual transformation, development as a film-maker. I came to the Uni with a very strong interest in genre films, sci-fi as the most, with a tendency of developing very complicated ideas. But then here, through the course itself, the things we learned, and the tutors were all encouraging us to experiment, to step out from our comfort zone, to focus on the essentials and the core of an idea, to start with something simple.
All of these worked on me through the months until I realised that I did start to think differently, catch the essence of an idea and start from a simple core idea and then develop it, rather than start with a huge, complicated idea and then try to find the essence of it. And that was the point when I started to think differently on this idea I had since 2018 and through my development I could finally find a form by allowing myself to experiment with documentary and fiction, and I was also able to develop my story eventually.
I’m really grateful to my course leader Andrew Vallance, and tutors Jonathan Lewis, Witold Stok, Clare Cahill, Ronald Gow and all of the other people who contributed to it towards the year.
FTVN: Would you like to expand the themes in this short into a feature idea?
PE: Well, I was thinking about this – and I’m also curious how the people who will see it would think about it – but at least how I feel it now is that this film is complete as it is, I had some backstory for one of the characters for example, but I cut out those in the stages of writing as it wasn’t necessary. However, I’m still highly interested in the theme of the film and cannot rule out that I will come back to it later in some point.
FTVN: The film has a valid statement to make about the effects of emotional stress years before. What was your own childhood like?
PE: Oh yeah, great question! I’m sure several people from the audience after watching the film would wonder how much is this about the director, is he had the same issue as the characters? Well, after I finished the script and read it through, I was also started to think about that if there is anything hiding in my unconscious that I just can’t remember, did I repress something?
The thing is I had an interest in the issue a long time ago, but my own childhood was great, one of the best parts of my life (which people tend to doubt after they see my films…). However, without giving out any spoilers, I did realize that I was an eyewitness of similar things that come along in the movie.
FTVN: Who are your key cinematic influences?
PE: My all-time favourite writer-director and cinematic influence is Christopher Nolan, but also the works of Dennis Villeneuve and David Fincher, with additional individual projects I also need to mention like The Truman Show (Peter Weir) and the Black Mirror series (Charlie Brooker). However, with Triangle I was rowing onto slightly different waters with recent influences of Punishment Park (Peter Watkins), Le Jetée (Chris Marker) or Tales From The Loop (Nathaniel Halpern).
FTVN: Are there plans to show the film to schools and universities as a point of reference?
PE: Thanks a lot for mentioning this, I do have a plan that I may call a dream or a secret goal, but yes, I would love to see it being shown in universities and schools.
One of my main goals was to try to make a film that could possibly help people in real life situations (already existed or possible ones) and could lead to a positive impact. If it only helps one person, it is already worth it. I’m still trying to figure out the age range that the film could be presented for, my original plan was to be able to show it from around the age of 9, or above but as young as possible, but it may not hold the attention of the little ones, I’m still looking for feedbacks about it.
I also submitted it to some festivals that focuses on children and young people like the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival as if it fits in then it would be a great platform to reach the younger generations.
FTVN: How has the global situation affected your development and evolution as a film-maker?
PE: We were in the middle of our master’s degree when the pandemic came in, so it turned it upside down.
It also turned out to be scrapping the grad shootings – however I decided not to leave it that way and went back to my country in July, translated and rewrite the script a bit into Hungarian and shot it in Budapest in August, but we were so lucky as we could catch a small window where the situation was good enough with low cases, there weren’t any restrictions, the risk in getting together for a shoot was very low (although we provided masks and disinfection gels and sprays of course) while literally the next week after the shooting the infection rates went high and the pandemic stomped in again – but by that time I was back in the UK with the film files ready for post-production.
FTVN: Finally, what are you most proud of about this short film?
PE: I’m really proud of my team, the whole cast and crew to be able to make this film and everyone was on top, we were all in the same page, those moments when I was standing in the set and seeing the scenes, the characters, the film being born and in a way that I hoped for is priceless.
If only I could hear from one person who is affected by the issue that the film had a positive impact on him/her/their I would be very proud of that too, just as if the film could be getting into schools as a point of reference.
