shots Unsigned: Werner Vivier

Werner Vivier is a South African-Swiss writer and director based in London.

In 2021, he made his debut short film Winter Coat. The film went on to play at various Oscar and BAFTA qualifying festivals. His second short film Walls Like Windows went on to win two Golds at the Kinsale Shark Awards and was nominated for ‘Best Short’ at the Cannes Young Director Award.

Fine Dining, Vivier's latest short is focussed on a one take, back and forth conversation with a young couple engaged in a debate around the Eurocentric nature of food culture, particularly regarding the concept fine dining...

Can you tell us a little about your background and your route into directing?

I didn’t grow up with my dad’s Super 8 shooting films with my friends in the backyard or anything like that. It’s quite a boring answer, but I just watched a ton of films and TV as a kid. Like way too much. When I was about 7, I’m pretty sure I watched Hercules (the Disney one) every day for a year straight… Wasn’t the most popular person in the house, but I had a knack for procrastinating by way of watching too much stuff. 

Eventually, I got curious. I wanted to know how to make  the films I was watching on TV. So, in class, I volunteered to make my essays and presentations into short video clips that I’d edit together with ripped music from the internet. These poor kids in class would have to sit through a four-minute video of why mountain gorillas in the Congo are endangered, along with a Moby soundtrack (I’m still repenting for that)… That was my first memory of filmmaking really. 

After university, I ended up working as a runner at a London production company.  I kept trying to assist the treatment designer in between odd jobs, and eventually (after loads of YouTube tutorials and some terrible treatment samples) I decided to go freelance. As a researcher and treatment designer, I got to work with some really amazing directors, from whom I learned so so much. Some names include Ruben Östlund, Julian Fellowes, FKA Twigs, Natalie Rae (and many more).

I took a leap of faith in myself and jumped into the deep end to make my own work. That led to my first short Winter Coat. It was such an incredible experience. We put that film together on a shoestring budget, running around London, asking people if we could film in their stores for free. It was essentially just me and some friends figuring things out as we went. After that, though, I was obsessed. 

I took a leap of faith in myself and jumped into the deep end to make my own work. 

ABOVE: A poster for the film Fine Dining.

Would you say you have a directing style? How did you arrive at it?

That’s a really tricky question! I guess it all just depends on taste to be honest… I think it all just comes down to one’s sensibility (for me at least). I like films that make me believe the characters and their emotions. I don’t often like it when I can see the seams of a film. Every so often maybe, but usually I prefer when a film makes me forget about whatever is around me and sucks me in. So perhaps that’s the kind of films I try to make. Ones where the performances and characters feels grounded and true to what a person would do or feel. So performances and working with actors are king. Or at least thats the intention. 

Often times, when I’ve assisted other directors earlier in my career, I’d find them talking to the DoP constantly and never speaking to the actors. Which was odd to me because the director is one of the only people whose job it is to speak and work with them. That always gave me a good laugh. The DoP’s would sometimes come over and joke to me that the director seemed like he wanted to be a DoP more than a director. With that being said, I obsess about films, music videos, commercials and art that expresses a creativity in its use of the medium or the technicality of each practice. So for me it’s a mixture of believe what you’re seeing, but being intuitive about the way you approach that goal through your use of the medium and its constraints. 

Did you study filmmaking? How did you learn your craft?

I was extremely lucky and fortunate enough to be able to study film at Ithaca College in New York. It was a very transformative experience for me, and one that I’m endlessly grateful for. However, I would definitely say that going to film school is 100% not a necessity to be able to get on in this industry. Some of my friends and peers who never went to film school, are the most successful and experienced people that I know. 

I would definitely say that going to film school is 100% not a necessity to be able to get on in this industry.

What was the inspiration for your short film Fine Dining?

The idea for the film came about when my girlfriend and I went for lunch at a small market near where I live in London. It’s a gem of a place, filled with independently owned restaurants offering food just as diverse as the local communities they serve. As we sat down, looking around the market at all the restaurants, it struck me just how instant and vast the landscape of food culture has become. Foods such as Kimchi, Okonomiyaki, Jollof Rice, Lahmacun, and Rendang, to name just a few, used to mainly be eaten by people with direct relations to the countries and cultures that invented them. But these days, the palate for them has extended so far beyond those borders.

In so many ways, I thought this was such a beautiful side effect of globalism. But then, for some reason, my mind shifted from that optimistic thought and considered the flip side… So many non-European cuisines are just as infinitely complex, if not more so, than that of their European counterparts, yet they receive little to no recognition in the echelons of fine dining. Why is this? I wanted to examine these themes of Eurocentrism and racism inherent in food culture but in a way that wasn’t didactic or felt like an overwhelming exercise in virtue signalling.

In terms of why we shot the film the way we did…in all honesty, my main point of inspiration was Fonejacker! I loved this idea of shooting the film almost like a prank video but with a slightly more heightened sensibility. I wanted to strip the film to its core, letting the world and performances span a single unbroken take, inviting the audience to witness these two individuals’ mutual interests evolve as the scene unfolds. Through a wandering and voyeuristic lens, the idea was to observe them from a distance, encouraging the audience to understand and empathise with both Fatima and Luke from an objective perspective, whilst interrogating their racial prejudices and preconceived notions regarding fine dining. In the end, Fatima and Luke are forced to juggle this sensitive power-play, whilst the subtle chemistry they share and the fading prospect of a growing relationship hangs in the balance. The goal was to illustrate how Western society often attempts to homogenise non-Western cultures to our own benefit. Bit of a mouthful, but that was the intention. Whether or not we were successful in doing that is up to the audiences, hahah!

The goal was to illustrate how Western society often attempts to homogenise non-Western cultures to our own benefit. 

ABOVE: Some behind the scenes photos of the shoot.

What other directors' work do you admire?

The names chop and change all the time, but some that are constants for me are Oliver Hermanus (a fellow South African and incredible filmmaker), Aoife McArdle, Hirokazu Koreeda, Sam Brown, Wong Kar-wai, Denis Villeneuve, Hiro Murai, and Pantera.

Where do you find the inspiration for your projects?

When I’m trying to sleep, the tube, speaking to friends, watching other films, it’s endless. It’s like an intrusive thought. You kind of have to just go with it and write it down before it disappears.  

What were the biggest challenges you faced in pulling this project together?

Like any short film, it’s a massive hill to climb. Whether it be raising funds to be able to pay for the production, working around schedules, finding locations, it took everything. But it was mostly due to the fact that Alex Ayodele-Otele (the producer) did his usual thing of putting out fires and making problems seem like opportunities. 

On top of that, the film wouldn’t have been made possible were it not for the support of Dom Thomas and Morgan Clement over at Object & Animal. They backed us and for that I’m super grateful!

How long was the shoot and what was the most challenging aspect of the project?

With it being a one-take, things from a production standpoint were pretty straightforward. Once we found our location and did all our prep work we were good to go. The actual shoot was just about seven hours long, which was the shortest shoot I’ve ever had. The crew were on point and absolutely fantastic. 

The only snag was that about two takes into the day, the DOP Stefan Yap came over to tell me that the mechanism for the zoom lens had broken, which meant that the only option was for him to free-hand things. This was an issue as our original idea was to have the film start wide, then very slowly zoom to a CU of the two leads, and then back to a full wide.

Realising there was no other option, Yap asked if we could tweak things so that he could just zoom in and move around organically to the flow of the scene. Thinking his idea was far better than my original plan, I told him to do his thing until… we found out that his headphones stopped working as well, so he wasn’t going to be able to hear any of the dialogue from the actors. We didn’t have much of a choice, so we just leaned into it. In the end, I think the fact that Yap couldn’t hear the dialogue, meant that his eyes had to guide him, which I feel really added to the film’s sense of voyeurism. We gave it a go and five takes later, we had our film!

What have you learned during the process of making the film?

With it having been such an amazing experience, especially given how outstanding the cast and crew were, it just reiterated to me that working with kind people has no substitute. On top of that, prepare, prepare, prepare. Work your ass off, be nice (we’re not saving lives, no matter how much we like to tell ourselves we are), and be nice to runners - they’re working as hard if not harder than everyone else. 

Work your ass off, be nice, and be nice to runners - they’re working as hard if not harder than everyone else.