INTERVIEW WITH PAUL POURVEUR

What is the starting point of ‘The Cutting’?
Peter wanted to make a movie in a cutting, by night, a sort of thriller. I was already interested in
quantummechanics, had already made a play about it and the perception of reality. In quantummechanics, there is the principle that as long as you haven’t decided, you are able to be in two different, opposite conditions, like a cat that is and living and dead at the same time.
This I elaborated: suppose two people did something wrong and flee in two opposite directions. As long as the third, the pursuer, hasn’t decided which way to go, he finds himself in the two places. That is this cutting, where the three of them find themselves in the mindscape of the pursuer.

Three characters and three ways of thinking?
Yes, in a way they represent the three different lines a person can follow: emotion, ratio or the third who puts everything into perspective and chases the others to see what way of thinking will win.

The talk they use seems to come out of the mouth of people in their fourties...
I wrote the Cutting for older men, but Peter prefers to play with young people. Young people don’t have much to look back, as fourties have. That creates the contemplative aspect in the movie.
This gap between the age of the characters I thought of, and the age of the actors, intensify the absurd character, the abstract situation.

The structure of the scenario luckily causes unity...
The screenplay I wrote, was used as it is in the film, what doesn’t happen that often... There is a double structure in the film, on the one hand the story of the pursuer who chases the other two, and the fragmantated sructure. There is a continuingly crossing between the trinity chaser - victim - carer and secondly the argumentations and scientific quotes.

And the way back to the quantummechanic and the quotes of Einstein?
The quotes of Einstein work as a relativating of reality. If you take away all emotion, alle mythology, all that is human, only pure objects are left, everything is reduced to moving between pure objects. So everything is braught back to its pure essence, what doesn’t mean it gets easier. The world has become more complex than f.e. thousand years ago, and ‘The Cutting’ tries to reproduce this complexity.

[Paul Pourveur is screenwriter and playwright.

He realised e.g. the screeplays for the following series and movies: ‘Adraen Brouwer’ (5 parts), dir. Peter Simons (BRT), ‘Congo’ (BRT, 7 parts with Bert Van Hoecke), ‘Windkracht 10’ (Bible - with Erwin Provoost), a Multimedia/BRTN production, ‘Onheilsbode’ (Robbe De hert), ‘Medea’ (René Huybrechtse) and Euro-Obsession’ (European Scipt Fund).

He also wrote amongst others following plays: ‘Congo’, dir. L. Vandervorst, ‘Parade’, dir. Guy Cassiers based on Cocteau, Satie, Picasso, ‘White out’, dir; W. Keessen, ‘Contusione è minima’, dir. W. Keessen, ‘Noorderlicht’, dir. L. Vandervorst.]