You Are Here (2011)

Curiosità

You Are Here is a 2010 Canadian philosophical speculative fiction film written and directed by video artist Daniel Cockburn, which he also co-produced with Daniel Bekerman. Cockburn's first feature film is "hyper-inventive and categorically hard-to-describe", initially billed as a "Borgesian fantasy" or a "meta-detective story", and later as "part experimental gallery film and part philosophical sketch comedy." In You Are Here, Cockburn makes use of the techniques and concepts he had honed over the previous decade as an experimental video artist with "a narrative bent", and "works them into a complex and unique cinematic structure." The film mainly follows a woman searching for the meaning b…

Production

Cockburn received a Chalmers Arts Fellowship in 2006, which enabled him to leave his job for a year and work on the script. In 2008, he received additional funding from the Canada and Ontario Arts Councils, which made it possible to go into production, though it was several months before he found a producer: "through a daisy-chain of meetings and recommendations," he met Daniel Bekerman, and immediately knew that his combination of experience and…

The "micro-sized" budget (estimated to be $100,000) was a challenge, as Cockburn had not written a simple script for a few actors in a single location, but rather "an incredibly ambitious script production-wise, with many, many locations, a large cast, and heavy demands on production design and cinematography." The script as originally written was structured so that everything had multiple meanings.

The process of writing You Are Here from conception to final draft took two and a half years, the culmination of a "long conversation" he was having with himself over ten years; in a sense, it is a lot of his own life "boiled down into 78 minutes." Cockburn said he first conceived of You Are Here as "both a series of shorts and a feature-length movie," like a concept album or short story collection that "halfway through, you realize is actually a…

Cockburn was familiar with Tracy Wright's work in Me and You and Everyone We Know, as well as her short video work and her live performances, which he had seen in Texas in 2002. He thought she would be perfect for the role of the Archivist after seeing her in Monkey Warfare.

Cockburn said he originally tried to get David Cronenberg to play the Lecturer, but he was "unavailable", which, with hindsight, Cockburn was glad about: Cronenberg is quite recognizable, so the viewer would know what is on the screen is fictional, whereas R.D. Reid is not so well known (and, according to Cockburn, is also a much better actor than Cronenberg).

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