Daan Bakker: 'I hadn't thought about it appealing to young people.'

What is that! In the first part of Quality Time we meet a certain Koen, who is very much looking forward to an upcoming family reunion. He is afraid of being the target of lame jokes like every year. So far, nothing special. Only: Koen is not an actor, but a round white dot on a red plane, where he is gradually joined by other dots. He talks in a distorted voice too. The amazing thing is that this ultra-minimalist design does not detract from the emotion the scene evokes.

It immediately made me wildly curious about the rest of this first feature-length film by Daan Bakker (direction and screenplay), perhaps Holland's most original new film talent. The next three stories are less extreme. Yet each time there is that tantalising contrast between the alienating form and the recognisable emotional experience. For instance, the lonely Kjell undertakes a psychotherapeutic time travel back to a knight's game from his childhood. Only the last part of this five-part work about what it is like to live life without a manual has a conventional form.

Dutch Tiger

Quality Time was the only Dutch entrant in the Tiger competition at this year's Rotterdam Film Festival. Poised between absurdism, satire and gripping drama, this tragicomedy won the prize of the youth jury. The trade magazine Screen International praised the film as refreshingly different. All this did not come completely out of the blue, by the way. Baker's short film Bukowski received the city of Utrecht's award for most promising new talent at the 2010 Netherlands Film Festival. His graduation film Jacco's Film (2009) has already won several awards. Jacco is a 10-year-old boy who builds his own fantasy world to escape his parents' quarrels. When I saw Bakker shortly before the cinema premiere of Quality Time On the phone, my first question is thus:

Are those insecure thirty-somethings in Quality Time also all a bit Jacco?

"Um, yeah, you could see it that way. I didn't think about it like that when I was working on it, but Jacco has a difficult relationship with reality. He puts his own spin on it to make it acceptable. The men in Quality Time in their own way, also have a difficult relationship with reality. But they no longer have that childlike imagination that can rescue them from it. They are more lost."

Eccentric and moving

Then that other burning issue. Where do you get off depicting participants in a family reunion as coloured dots?

"I had that shape in my head right away when I thought of it. So how I came up with it? I don't really have an answer to that."

"I like looking for abstraction. By taking away information, you ask the viewer to interpret it for themselves. In the Koen chapter, this is taken very far. You don't know what they look like, even the intonation of the voices is gone. I thought it was a tantalising idea to open the film with that."

The weird thing is that it still works very well. In those first few episodes, there is a crazy tension between the strange form that keeps you at bay and the strongly appealing, realistic world of feeling. I asked myself what idea was behind that. Showing things more clearly by presenting them in an unexpected way?

"That's right. I try to find a kind of backdoor with the viewer to make them look at it in a fresh way. With most films, you immediately start sympathising with the character. This film works more reflectively. The viewer has room to supplement it with their own ideas and memories. I find that an interesting way of storytelling. More of a collaboration between maker and viewer, supplementing it with their own material."

"I noticed that the person sitting next to you in the room can see something completely different from yourself. If it's going to work that way I really like it."

"Humour, for example, is experienced very differently. What one person finds funny is very tragic or moving for another. Like when, in the second chapter, Stefaan's dog is dug up in the garden. Some find this incredibly funny, others find it very poignant. This also has to do with the texts that replace the dialogues. Because the intonation is gone, everyone hears a different Stefaan in their heads."

In the fourth chapter, Charles is abducted by aliens, only to return to his parents as a kind of talking lump of clay.

"A part of the viewers have nothing to do with it, for others this is the greatest part. Subjectivity is very important, everyone puts their own spin on it."

Was it a bold experiment?

"I don't call it an experiment myself, but I do realise that it is seen that way. I trusted that it could be done, but of course it was exciting. Five parts that don't look alike and yet have to form one film."

"Divergent principles of form often don't work well for a feature-length film, but they do for short films. An omnibus film gave me the opportunity to be able to apply some more eccentric form ideas."

Insecure men

Which was earlier, the male theme or the shape experiment?

"I have had ideas for films made up of shorter films before, but I just happened to start this project as a traditional tragicomedy. This one was supposed to be about a man who moves back into his parents' garage to get his life back on track. There he discovers he has a little son, while he himself is actually still a child figure."

"But then I got stuck. I felt the screenplay was working towards the moment when he would go through a development or transformation, as usually happens in films."

"That change bothered me. Whenever I wrote a scene in which a development took place or in which he took steps, I had the feeling that I was cutting corners. I noticed that at the same time as such a development, a kind of moral crept in. The moral that you have to change. Maybe that's true, but I wasn't interested in that. I was interested in the absurdity of a human being's existence in the world, and that you just have to find your way there. I don't have to offer a solution."

"I was looking more for a state than a development, only I was not immediately aware of it. A lot of frustration preceded that. In that frustration, I started writing all kinds of impossible scenes out of a kind of wantonness. Only when I realised that I did not want classical development did I, in a kind of explosive tantrum, divide the character into five different figures. The man from the original idea no longer appears in it. His various traits do, though."

Where did you get the material for these five stories?

"I have not done any special research on the lives of thirty-somethings. Of course, I myself am a man at the same age stage as my main characters. So I can't deny that it also stems from my own experiences and my view of the world, and that of my friends. The feeling of uncertainty about what your place is in the world. From that feeling, I started writing."

"In retrospect, I discovered that it was a very intuitive process. Only when the film was finished and I started talking about it again, also with journalists among others, did the search for interpretation begin. The thirty-something dilemma, for instance, and what masculinity is in this day and age. Those themes ended up in it because I myself am someone who lives in these times. But I find the word autobiographical a bit tricky, because it is not. It was made from a personal experience, though."

Intuitive

You talk about intuitive filmmaking. Wasn't that difficult at the Film Fund? I recently attended a discussion evening on Dutch film. There, the opinion passed that there is too little original talent in the Netherlands, and that this originality is also given too little space when assessed by funds.

"I know those stories, about interference by dramatists and so on. I hear a lot of annoyance about that, but my experience with this film is different. Maybe because Quality Time was made as part of the Oversteek, the collaboration project between Film Fund and broadcasters. The Oversteek project really wants to give auteur film by first-time makers a chance."

"I personally experienced a lot of freedom, even though it was a whimsical process where the idea for the film kept changing. It was exciting, though, because the Crossing is a rubbish race. It starts with a lot of candidates and eventually two films are made. But people remained curious the whole time. I got a lot of confidence, not only from the Fund, but also from VPRO and the producer."

Never tempted to increase your chances by making it a little more conventional?

"No, I always believed in trying to make what I wanted as pure as possible."

Youth Prize

How did you feel about being awarded the very prize of the youth jury, the MovieZone Award, in Rotterdam?

"I really liked that, I didn't expect that. They choose from 14 films from all parts of the festival, there are big names among them. That they had chosen mine I thought was very special. It really got to them."

"I hadn't thought much about the fact that it might appeal to young people. But maybe it makes sense. In the film, you actually see a kind of second-round adolescent wondering, 'What am I here to do?' Something that will be a very recognisable predicament for the average adolescent."

"Maybe being in their thirties just makes it a bit easier for young people to get into it. That's my little theory. Sometimes it's nice if it's a bit further away from your own experience. That can make it easier to identify with."

Is it refreshing, for a youth jury to fall for something so far removed from the average teen movie?

"Yes, it does, but the film also asks quite a lot of the viewer. They get a lot of different impressions. Young people today are trained to absorb very varied and rapidly succeeding visual information. Think of computer games, to which the film also makes some reference. I believe that older people in particular have more problems with that extremity in its form and sometimes speed. Younger people have no trouble with that."