Interview with the Filmmakers Behind Oscar-Nominated Short, "Two People Exchanging Saliva"

  It's that time of year again: awards season! Every day we grow closer and closer to the 98th Academy Awards, a ceremony with some of the toughest competition audiences have seen in years. This week we had the privilege and pleasure to sit down with Alexandre Singh and Natalie Musteata, the filmmakers behind Two People Exchanging Saliva; one of the Oscar-nominated short films in the live action category this year. After premiering at Telluride and AFI Fest back in 2024, the film captured the attention of critics and audiences alike. So join us as we catch a glimpse into the minds of the two brilliant filmmakers who helped bring Two People Exchanging Saliva to life!

Eric: "Thank you so much to both of you for taking the time to sit down and talk with me today. Congratulations on the film, it is absolutely wonderful. I would like to start by asking about where the inception for this story came from. I know you’ve mentioned in The New Yorker, the absurdities of our current world being a major influence in your guys’ writing of the script. I'm curious, what more specifically you could speak on that inspired you to come up with this script initially?"

Musteata: "Yeah, well thank you so much for having us. We’re always so happy to chat about the film. This idea came to us sort of all at once and very quickly. It was really inspired by a lot of the news stories we were reading at that time which included, like, police brutality, and Ron DeSantis reintroducing the 'Don’t Say Gay Bill' in Florida, and all of these women that were being shot at in Iran for taking off their hijabs; for asking for their rights to civil liberties that should be common sense. So it was kind of all of that just thrown together that made us feel like we’re living in a world where violence is normalized. Where we see if you open Instagram, civil unrest in one post, juxtaposed by a luxury handbag in another."

Singh: "And not just a handbag, but an influencer on a private jet. The way money and capitalism has kind of distorted all of our behaviors and our aspirations. It’s invisible in a way. We have a four year old child, and she, like any four-year-old is like 'buy me this, buy me that.; And when we say that things cost money she says 'I know how money works you just go like this (tap) with the card.' In a sense, she’s not wrong, you just wave this little plastic card and magic happens. Value is transferred from one person’s hands to another, and that sounds very innocent, but actually people’s lives are completely distorted by their needs to provide for themselves and their family. And meanwhile, our society aspires to cryptocurrency and get rich quick schemes. We spend our time staring at Jeff Bezos on a yacht. So we’re living in a very strange, distorted place. But human beings have a great capacity to adapt to the circumstances that they’re in."

Musteata: "-And to stop seeing the absurdity of it all. I think it’s a mode of survival. We become acclimatized to unusual things, and we stop seeing them as unusual. So we wanted this film to very simply…you know it’s not a sci-fi film, it’s more a parable. It is a mirror and a reflection on our own society.

Singh:  "And it comes out of this surrealist tradition. Obviously Luis Buñuel’s films, going back to the 20s and 30s, and even back in the medieval days when you’d have a fool who becomes a king. We’ve always done these things in our society. We’ve had these art forms where we’ve shaken up the big snow globe, and we see what it would be like if everything was upside down for one day. And I think that’s a very important thing to do with our art."

Eric: "Lovely. I’m glad you brought up the card, and how money looks in a four year old’s eyes, because I was wondering how materialism and consumeristic culture has influenced some of the themes you’re talking about here. It seems like the characters are really focused on the shiny things, and dresses they can buy, and how much color they can have in their dresses. Even though the film is in black and white you can see that there’s a lot of dynamic colors to the production and costume design. So I was wondering how you guys approached characters being so attached to their things since they can’t be intimate with each other?"

Musteata: "Yeah, I don’t think it’s a novel take on things. The story is of these three women from three different generations and how they respond to the repression in this world in very different ways. That’s where all of the drama of the story is. But if we were to choose one main character, let’s go with Angine, the character in the middle. She’s the one that’s the most torn, she doesn’t belong to either side, and she knows something’s wrong, but she doesn’t know what it is. There’s a big difference between her want and her need, she wants to be accepted by society, she wants to be able to have all of these luxury products."

Singh:  "And she wants to be made numb by buying stuff. It’s a dopamine hit."

Musteata: "We've all experienced that: this desire to have something, and then the second that you have it, it becomes sort of empty. Her need is this human connection, so she’s constantly battling between what she thinks that she wants and what she actually needs. I think that’s a pretty classic goal."

Singh:  "Yeah, and the film kind of subverts it. Because as a woman who shops; who gets her happiness from shopping, suddenly she gets her happiness from shopping by being slapped by this young woman. You know? There’s this small scene where you see her on the balcony and she’s putting ice against her bruised cheek. And there’s all these unopened shopping bags all over her apartment. She hasn’t opened them, and she doesn’t need to open them because that’s not what it’s about. She’s just buying stuff so that she can have this physical, sensual, and almost erotic connection."

Musteata: "Alex is a little too obsessed with Letterboxd. I don’t read the reviews, but Alex does. There was one he sent me the other day that was really touching and sad. And it was basically like 'this woman seeks out being slapped by this salesgirl because she knows that that’s the only way that she’ll be touched by her.' So it was just a sort of weird subversion of the rules that they act out."

Eric: "Well, I’m with you on the Letterboxd obsession. My friends always tell me that if I don’t like their reviews within 5 minutes of them posting them they’re worried for my safety. So I feel you on that one. I would love to talk about the brutalism influence in your guys’ production design. I was really struck by that, especially when juxtaposed with some of the things we talked about with consumerism, and how it strips away a lot of the soul of the environments these people are in. Even though that style of architecture has a real beauty to it as well. So I was wondering what your process was in terms of designing the sets and the environments, how the execution method is just a cardboard box in the film, and the minimalism that goes along with that."

Musteata: "Yeah. It’s funny, I think the film looks very expensive because we had access to this insane, incredible location which is this luxury department store in Paris. But at the end of the day, there really wasn’t that much production design in our budget, and the team was quite small, so we were always thinking creatively. One thing that we thought a lot about was where do we point the camera so that we’re creating the most striking image? And the same thing is true with the cardboard boxes, like the cardboard boxes are representing essentially, a mass grave. We don’t have the budget to create real coffins."

Singh: "Nor do we have hundreds of people in a mass grave. That’s an example of one of the constraints of the filmmaking working its way into one of the conceptual ideas. In a lot of authoritarian societies, we’re seeing this in Iran right now: how a system that murders its own people treats the dead bodies is kind of a way to denigrate them once more, and so as for the coffin box: it’s carried in a white van, there’s banality there which is what’s so chilling about it. In terms of the architecture of the store: one of the reasons we shot in black and white was that the black and white showcases the underlying architecture of the building from the 1930s. We were very influenced by Bertolucci’s The Conformist, which has these very beautiful, not black and white, but beautiful shots of imposing fascist architecture in 1930s Italy. The way we photograph those shots gives it a sort of symmetrical cold, austere formalism. 

Musteata: "Yeah, it kind of reveals what’s already there. So if we’re looking at a character’s face, it really focuses in on the face rather than having color being a distraction. Alex and I joke because people always ask us 'why is the film in black and white?' and we want to ask 'why are most films in color!?' Like, black and white is better! It’s sad because there are certain countries that won’t distribute a black and white film. One of our friends shot a black and white film, and then the distributor released a color version without really consulting anyone. Which is crazy! But, you know, I guess it is a question of getting eyes on the work, so, it is what it is, you know?"

Eric: "That’s interesting. I never knew certain countries had rules about that stuff. I was curious about your casting process because your performers are from such a wide variety of subgenres and different stylistic approaches. Obviously you have Vicky Krieps as your narrator, so I was curious where you guys pulled your talent from, first of all, but also what your process was like rehearsing with these actors. So I was curious what your prep was like, as it’s a really unorthodox way of performing."

Musteata: "We really fell in love with Zar when we saw [The] Holy Spider, and we were really inspired by what was happening in Iran with the Woman, Life, Freedom movement at the time. It’s inspired by many things, but we thought it would be really special to have that connection. And more so we were really love her as an actress, and when we approached her it was like 'let’s see if there's even an inkling of a possibility', and she came back so enthusiastically. She has a real love for surrealist cinema. It was really like a domino effect that snowballed one after the other relatively quickly. That part was just such a pleasure."

Singh: "And the same with Luàna, who is most known for being in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. She has been acting since she was like, 11."

Musteata: "Yeah, our DP who is young, had already shot with Luàna like twice before. Once when she was 11, and once she was 15, and when we shot this she was 22. So she’s just a wonder, so professional and such a lovely person to work with."

Singh: "And Auélie Boquian who plays Petulante, the antagonist, she’s done film and television but her background is mostly in theater. She was in a production that won the Molière Award for Best Comedy last year. So we have actresses coming from slightly different tones and registers with their previous work, but it's not that different."

Musteata: "It was sort of calibrating so that everyone was in the same register, which was a little bit heightened sometimes. But mostly, we just wanted it to feel real. Because our world is absurd, and it was important for the character to believe in this world so that we d do too. So in that sense we really just kept encouraging them to live in the moment and really believe in the situation. We mostly just had some really long conversations. We love the idea of rehearsal, but it’s not for every actor, and some people really like discovering it on set, and not getting so much into a rhythm. You know, having the performance feel authentic. And we got that sense from a few people, and so we really found it in the takes."

Singh: "Also, the actor just has to spend a lot of time getting to know who the character is from their own perspective. Fill out what they need to in the background in terms of their relationships, who they are to this person, or what they’re thinking in this moment, and then incarnate it."

Musteata: "That was definitely true for Zar."

Eric: "Great. Well, I have one more question for you because I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but I would love to talk about the role that humor actually plays in the film. Because the film is still quite funny at a lot of points despite how dark and depressing it winds up becoming for these women. So I would like to talk about how you guys found the humor in situations in these sequences, and how that kind of plays a role in our own society as the intimacy that you guys talk about is being kind of fizzled away."

Musteata: "I do think we’re living in a moment where the ridiculous and the horrific have never been closer. Like the idea of the President of the United States wanting to buy Greenland. It’s a really absurd proposition."

Singh: "And the threat of actually going to war, and people could die. And this has always been the case. I think we see our view on the world being darkly humorous."

Musteata: "It does kind of come naturally to us. In fact, so naturally that we kind of forgot that it was actually funny. So like when people would laugh we’d be like 'come on guys, this is serious!'”

Singh: "You know, there’s this shot of Angine eating her onion, her single, little onion with her fork, and it makes that nasty noise when you put metal against a plate. It’s a very humorous juxtaposition made more so that it’s shot like it’s some sort of, beautiful, important arthouse moment. And so I think we’re playing with that."

Musteata: "It was definitely a fine line. We were kind of careful to toe it because what was most important to us was to tell a story sincerely, and to have these three characters really go through something together. We were ultimately searching for the catharsis at the end. We can think of a million crazy ideas on any given day, but what we’re always trying to drive towards is that emotional catharsis. So yeah, it was a fine line."

Eric: "Wonderful. Well, thank you guys so much for your time. And if people want to see the film, I believe it’s free on YouTube, right? With The New Yorker?"

Musteata: "It is, yeah! It’s free on The New Yorker site and on their YouTube channel. So yeah, please go watch it!"

We here at Cinemasters would once again like to thank Mr. Singh and Dr. Musteata for speaking with us about their incredible work this week. Two People Exchanging Salvia can be watched in its entirety here, make sure to watch it before the Oscars on Sunday, March 15th. Thank you for tuning into Cinemasters.net and remember to never stop watching!