'Dream Scenario' Kristoffer Borgli on the challenges of writing and filming dream sequences
As a filmmaker, what do you do when you have the entirety of humanity's subconscious as your playground?
That was the challenge that writer-director Kristoffer Borgli faced with his new film, Dream Scenario. The movie stars Nicolas Cage as everyman Paul Matthews, whose waking life changes drastically after he suddenly begins to pop up in strangers' dreams. He doesn't do much in these dreams, only wanders through and greets the dreamer — even as they fend off nightmarish earthquakes or dogged assailants.
Dreams have infinite potential, as they are places in which quite literally anything is possible. That creative freedom can be exciting, but the limitlessness can also be daunting. "As a writer, it's a difficult place to start from, with no framework," Borgli told Mashable in an interview.
As guidance, Borgli decided to focus on capturing the feeling a dream evokes when you're in it. "In retrospect, a dream can feel very ridiculous when you tell someone about it, because you're using your waking brain's logic. But when you're dreaming, that logic doesn't make sense. There's no skepticism," Borgli explained.
He continued: "I needed to find dreams that mostly felt like they had the seriousness and stakes of the real world. If they were too ridiculous, you would just brush them off as silly dreams. It was a balancing act of something that can easily get your mind drawn into the drama, but still play with the lack of limits and creative freedom of a dream."
Some of the dream sequences Borgli landed on included a spontaneous bout of flight, an encounter with strange mushrooms, and even a sexual fantasy about Paul. Borgli did reveal one dream that ended up being cut from the movie entirely. In it, a woman is taped very high up on a wall, along with several French baguettes.
"That dream was supposed to represent Paris," Borgli said. Paris becomes an important part of Paul's journey, as the French are obsessed with his dream persona, even when it morphs into something more menacing. But the scene was ultimately too bizarre for even Dream Scenario.
"It was kind of ridiculous, and it felt like a moment in the movie where we needed to be more serious," explained Borgli of omitting the scene.
It's strange to think that the baguette dream was out of place in a movie about dreamscapes, but then again, most of Dream Scenario's dreams and nightmares begin by being rooted in reality. Only when we experience a fantastic disruption like flight do we realize we're not in the waking world.
"I wanted to shoot the dreams in a way that didn't distinguish them or announce them as dreams," said Borgli. "So, there was a limit to how strange and different these dreams can be. And a lot of my dreams are just mundane, like I'm in my actual apartment or an office that I'm usually in but something's kind of off."
To achieve this effect of something being "off" in each dream, Borgli and his team came up with a series of rules for production design. "Let's see how few props and how little set dressing we can away with and have it still feel like the same apartment or room that we saw earlier," Borgli explained. In that way, the film can mirror the limited information your brain is generating while you're asleep, while still giving you just enough to make you buy into the world of the dream.
For example, we see Molly's (Dylan Gelula) apartment twice in Dream Scenario, once in her dream about Paul and once in real life. For the dream version of her apartment, Borgli said, the crew ended up removing about 90 percent of the props and set dressing from the real life scene. You can also only see one tree out of her window instead of the full street. Since those scenes were shot on location, the Dream Scenario crew had to put up black curtains all around the street in order to isolate the image of the tree.
Aside from the film's set dressing subtly signaling when we're in a dream, Borgli also wanted to mimic strange behavioral patterns that occur in dreams. Towards the end of the movie, when Paul fights off a group of "dreamfluencers" who have invaded his subconscious, we see his punches are almost entirely ineffectual.
"That's a thing that happens in my dreams. Often, I get in some sort fight, and someone's trying to murder me or something. I fight them off, but my punches are so weak and slow and have zero impact — and that's exactly what it looks like in the movie," Borgli said. "In the end, a lot of the source material for these dream sequences were just my own dreams."
Dream Scenario is now playing in select theaters. It will open nationwide Nov. 17.