In a blue-walled bedroom, a seven-year-old girl watches her goldfish, plays with her dolls, draws pictures with her crayons. Her mother brushes her hair, buttons her school uniform, zips up her skirt. Her father leaves for work, kissing her mother good-bye. These are the familiar rhythms of family life, but something is wrong; the girl feels it, sees it. She remembers how things were when she was a little girl of three, and it is rarely like that anymore. But the child does not have the words to express her emotions, and suspects that words themselves may be the problem. So she stops talking.
In The Quiet Room, writer/director Rolf de Heer takes the viewer inside this child's head as she interprets the world around her. It is a world over which she has very little control, for her parents' marriage is disintegrating. Through her silence, the child attempts to influence her parents' behavior, to force them to communicate properly with each other and with her. In her mind, she observes, reasons, cajoles, hopes and fears. With the marriage speeding towards total collapse, the child finds ways to make her actions speak even louder and finds the means to reconcile herself with her world.
A unique film whose nearest reference points might be My Life As A Dog and Careful He Might Hear You, The Quiet Room vividly and respectfully explores the inner life of a child. "I'm really interested in the way children think, and I have quite strong memories of childhood and how I thought." explains Rolf de Heer. "I do remember quite strongly feeling that adults underestimate the way children think and that I must never forget that, so that when I became an adult I wouldn't make the same mistake."
Fine Line Features is proud to present The Quiet Room, starring Celine O'Leary, Paul Blackwell, Chloe Ferguson and Phoebe Ferguson. Directed, written and produced by Rolf de Heer; produced by Domenico Procacci for Vertigo/Fandango Productions. The Quiet Room had its world premiere in competition at the 1996 Cannes International Film Festival.
Much of Rolf de Heer's work, from his very first feature, 1980's Tail of A Tiger, has been concerned with childhood. His acclaimed 1993 film, Bad Boy Bubby, was about a man whose childhood continues 35 years while his grotesque mother keeps him locked away from the world. Startling and innovative, Bad Boy Bubby won the Grand Special Jury Prize and the International Film Critics Award at the 1993 Venice Film Festival. De Heer's next film, Epsilon is about a space alien, a different kind of innocent creature.
In The Quiet Room, writer/director de Heer makes his most direct exploration of childhood to date, creating an intimate, impressionistic portrait of a seven-year-old girl (Chloe Ferguson), and of the three-year-old she used to be (Phoebe Ferguson). The girl has stopped talking, seizing upon silence as a way to protest her parents' (Celine O'Leary and Paul Blackwell) ongoing marital discord.
The girl's willed silence gave de Heer the mechanism necessary to probe her inner life. "Here was an opportunity to penetrate that world and make a film that could quite uncompromisingly go into that area." The film came together essentially in one day, after a period of "inspired lunacy" that began at 9AM. "By lunch time, we knew we were making a film." De Heer wrote the script for The Quiet Room in less than eight weeks.
The Quiet Room gives voice to the child's thoughts, revealing an interior life full of questioning, observing and reasoning, colored by a palette of emotions. "Thought processes in kids are much more sophisticated and complex than what we often give them credit for," de Heer believes. "I wanted to give kids credit for who they are, really."
He notes that while the child is perceptive, she is not always accurate in her interpretations. "For me, it was important to work at that balance of when she's perceptively correct and when she makes completely the wrong conclusions," he pauses. "It's interesting observing my own kids, quite often they have a concept but they can't really express it in the way that adults would, because they just don't have the vocabulary and the conceptual thinking. That doesn't stop them from feeling things."
The deteriorating relationship between her parents serves to intensify the child's feelings. De Heer deliberately kept information about the marriage itself minimal, "because the film's not about the marriage. And I wanted to be completely even-handed about it as well. It's all very particularly scripted to try and not make an issue of content and not make an issue of who was right and who was wrong."
De Heer resisted making the ending of The Quiet Room too bleak. "It's more bittersweet because she's lost the thing that she tried to hold together, but she's got some of what she wants and life goes on Ñ and so does she. Kids are very strong, and can suffer a whole lot worse than she does in the film and get through."
He is thrilled with seven-year-old Chloe Ferguson's performance. "Every day, I was amazed and surprised and thought her wondrous." He is also pleased that the experience hasn't left her stage-struck. "At the end of it, she said, Ôyeah, okay, that's all right, but I don't think I want to be an actor. It was fun doing it, but too much of it is too boring.'"
De Heer was also delighted with the adult actors, Celine O'Leary and Paul Blackwell. "They were fantastic. Chloe would not have been half as good as she was without what was, in a sense, a really selfless effort by the two adult actors off-set as well as on-set." O'Leary and Blackwell made friends with Chloe, playing with her and devising various games and prizes to keep her happy over the five-week shoot in Adelaide, Australia.
The Quiet Room is visually as well as emotionally intense. The colors are vivid, deep and recurring. The camera lingers on certain images that are like memories yet to crystallize Ñ the child's mother brushing her hair, a Barbie doll wedding party that is a mute witness to a parental argument.
Writing and directing the focused, four-character film gave de Heer the opportunity to probe a universe he knows well. "I just immersed myself in that world of childhood. It's a world I like a lot, and I don't think I've ever been very far from it," says the writer/director. "I talk to you now as an adult, but really, I don't feel any different than I remember feeling when I was a kid."