Night Nurse, the feature directorial debut of writer-director Georgia Bernstein, premiered earlier this year in the NEXT section of the Sundance Film Festival, and it arrives in theaters July 10 as, in Bernstein’s own words, “an erotic thriller which takes place in a retirement community.”
Listen to our full conversation with writer-director Georgia Bernstein on all podcast platforms with an abridged transcription below.
In joining The Rolling Tape for a conversation on the film, Bernstein describes how the film originated from the experience of her own grandmother nearly being scammed over the phone. Her grandmother nearly wired the funds before a bank teller intervened. “I became really interested in this idea of the scammers, and this performance they were putting on,” Bernstein says. “I thought it was so theatrical.”
Around the same time, a billboard slogan advertising medical school that she kept passing in Chicago stating, “It’s amazing to be needed,” stuck with her. “It got at this idea that being needed can feel like purpose,” she explains, and nurses became the vessel that let her fold the scam concept and the caregiving concept together.
For tone, Bernstein points to a touchstone of erotic cinema, David Cronenberg‘s Crash (1996). “In Crash, they’re eroticizing something that’s not typically eroticized, car crashes. I wanted to apply that same concept to these phone scams,” she says. Her background as a producer on lower-budget films shaped how she approached her first feature as a director. “I became a really practical filmmaker,” she says. “Before I even wrote my script, I was thinking, I’m going to write something so makeable that there’s no question how I’ll put it together myself.”
That practicality extended to casting. Cemre Paksoy, who plays Eleni, is one of Bernstein’s closest friends, and the role was written specifically for her from the start. “The whole script was conceived around her. It was always going to be her,” Bernstein says. Douglas, the elderly care patient/con-man played by Bruce McKenzie, was the rare role not written with a specific actor in mind, though he came on through a friend’s recommendation and “brought so much specificity to the role.”
Much of the tension between Eleni and Douglas plays out in glances and proximity rather than dialogue, a choice Bernstein traces to her Director of Photography, Lidia Nikonova, who came up with the term “desire angles,” she says. “There’s something tactile about being so close. There’s a lot of emotion in being close on the back of the neck, or by someone’s ear. It feels very intimate…we really wanted it to feel claustrophobic. I wanted the movie to feel like you couldn’t get out of the pool, like you were circling and circling. I’ve heard people use the word nauseating to describe even the score, and when they do, I think, that’s perfect.”
Interview Courtesy of Danny Jarabek
Feature Image Courtesy of IFC