Still: Bite - Guido Coppis

In Guido Coppis’ feature debut Bite*, produced by The Rogues, Mark’s life is characterised by destructive and violent behaviour. He works within a dirty animal sanctuary that is run by a boss who resembles more a slave owner. He supplies heroin to an addict with whom he has sex, which may or may not be consensual, and regularly beats him up afterwards. His terminally ill grandad, is in hospital, where Mark meets Lisa, a nurse with no qualms about exploring and acting upon her own base and violent instincts.

The film is shot with an orange filter, the colour of insanity as Vincent van Gogh wrote, and Coppis quite brilliantly allows the story to flow towards its psychologically challenging and violent conclusion.

“I think I'm quite an optimistic or positive person. I don't really look that negatively at the world,” the filmmaker responds to my question as to what drew him towards such a macabre tale. “Maybe a little bit, but not as extreme as the film might suggest that I do. But I find it a difficult question because when I write these things down, a lot of times I get a bit scared what I'm writing down. I never hold back. But I also don't try to research what makes my psyche go the way that it does, because apparently there's something in me that makes me want to tell these kind of stories.”

“I do know that a lot of the inspiration comes from this feeling of fear of the things that I write,” Coppis adds, agreeing that, as a writer/director, he is also attracted to things that he would otherwise be totally repelled by.

The cast and crew rehearsed for several weeks before the shoot which, while not unheard of, is nevertheless unusual within The Netherlands.

“It was a very interesting process. Actors Frieda [Barnhard] and Reinhout [Scholten van Aschat] are amazing actors, and what I really wanted to do was to basically rehearse the entirety of the film from beginning to end in pre-production. We really did that because I feel that when you're on set, there's always the pressure of time and stuff like that, and everybody wants something of you, the actors and me. And I feel that always prevents you from really talking to an actor and to really understand what they want to bring to the role and what you want them to bring to the role.”

“One of the interesting things that I really enjoyed with Frieda is her character doesn't have any clear reason why she's so fucked up,” Coppis adds. “She just does these things. So we talked to one another and our start of the process was not to find the motivation internally why she is like this. The start of a process is she just does this and we don't care why.”

Coppis concedes that his film has a touch of Bonnie and Clyde about it, and that Barnhard fulfils ably the role of classic femme fatale, if a somewhat psychotic one. There are also obvious parallels to the films of Dutch master Alex van Warmerdam in terms of its embrace of absurdity and choreography of casual violence.

A more specific reference is Mike Leigh’s black comedy drama Naked (1993), the filmmaker underlines. “I thought that was an incredible film, and has this sort of feeling of dread and a continuous flow of dreariness. And I really felt how in that world, actors like Frieda and Reinhout could really fit in. So Naked is a big inspiration in that sense,” Coppis signs off.

IFFR takes place on January 25 - February 4, find the Dutch line-up here. Or discover IFFR on https://iffr.com/en.

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*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund