The Intended is available on release as region 2 DVD (Europe) in Italy, and is called Quando verrà la pioggia. The Italian DVD has English language with Italian subtitles, or Italian dubbed options.  

My copy arrived from dvd.it very quickly. The DVD has a 10 minute "behind the scenes" extra but no interview with JJ (as in the region 1 version). It also contains a couple of "deleted" scenes, that had been heavily edited for the region 1 version.

I have made screencaps and clips of the scenes and added them to the galleries. Seeing the unedited scenes, for me, actually gives the story more clarity.   read more »

Introduction
"You don't make a film," says Kristian Levring. "You find a film. You find it as you do it." And indeed, The Intended, his third feature as a director, is the perfect example of a film that came to its creator through a long, sometimes arduous and often inspirational process of discovery. Perhaps the most refined and personal of his films to date, it takes place far from today's society, in a small trading outpost in the Far Eastern jungle, back in the 1920s. The Empire is fast losing its vicelike grip on the world, but the dwindling British community there continues blindly, as if nothing has changed.

The head of this crumbling enclave is the domineering Mrs Jones (Brenda Fricker), an ivory trader whose clumsy, feckless son William (Tony Maudsley) has always been a disappointment to her. Mrs Jones has an uneasy relationship with the natives; so to increase productivity she hires a young British surveyor, Hamish (JJ Field), to carve a road to nearby Batang. Hamish duly arrives with his intended, Sarah (Janet McTeer), who is an older woman than Mrs Jones is expecting. It transpires that Sarah has left her husband, and past life, behind her in England, and that the couple are using the opportunity to start afresh. The trading post promises a quiet haven, away from judging eyes, and the money Hamish makes, they think, will pay for a new and better future together. But events begin to conspire against them. Mrs Jones proves a formidable, demanding boss, and when she quashes William's dreams of returning to England, he takes his revenge with a vicious, premeditated murder. In his mother's stead, William takes his place at the head of the trading post, but proves a duplicitous and petulant successor. Slowly, Sarah sees her dream of freedom becoming a nightmare. Trapped by William's greed, she finds herself increasingly at his mercy, and her despair reaches a head when Hamish is struck down by a potentially fatal illness.

The Inspiration
To understand how Levring arrived at this story, it's best to start at the beginning. Or rather, a new beginning. A frequent traveler who has worked successfully across Europe, the 45-yearold Dane had carved out a lucrative career for himself as a commercials director when he received a call from maverick director Lars Von Trier. Levring had known Von Trier since film school and was both flattered and surprised when his peer made a suggestion. "Lars said, 'I'd like to see a film by you,'" Levring recalls. "'But you can't use any of that stuff you do in commercials.'"

Further conversations revealed that Von Trier wanted Levring to join himself and Thomas Vinterberg in the controversial Dogme 95 group, a loose collective of filmmakers committed to challenging the blandness of modern cinema. Dogme films were designed to be spare, strictly regulated projects that had to conform to a tight set of regulations. There was to be no artificial light, no sets, no specially brought-in props, no non-source music and, most importantly of all, the camera had to be hand-held. "I was very challenged, and he was right. It was good for me to try to do something so very, very different."

The result was The King Is Alive, the acclaimed fourth Dogme film that premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2000 Cannes Film Festival. Shot on Digital Video and with an ensemble cast that included The Intended star Janet McTeer, the film told the story of a busload of travelers who break down in a Namibian desert and find themselves battling both for their sanity and survival. To pass the time, they stage a play – an all-too appropriate version of Shakespeare's King Lear.

"I had a good career in commercials," says Levring, "and I got offered all the movies that a commercials director gets offered – thrillers, action movies, whatever. Before The King Is Alive, I thought I would betray myself if I accepted them. I was a cinema lover – Fellini, Bergman, Herzog – and I used to love westerns too, but I felt that if I went into filmmaking it should be to do something personal. But what? To be honest, I think I didn't really have the courage to express myself. And when you don't have the courage you just carry on with what you're doing. That's why I'm very grateful to Lars and Thomas for pushing me. They said, 'You have to do this.' And I kind of accepted it."

During filming, Levring was exhilarated by the originality of the Dogme process and it excited his own creativity. After many conversations with McTeer they decided they wanted to create a project together. "We came up with various ideas," says McTeer, " but I thought his ideas were better…and so did he! The Intended was his and I really liked it."

The Script
"I wrote a very, very primitive little synopsis and Janet was intrigued by it," says Levring. "I asked if she would write it with me, because we'd had a very good creative relationship on The King Is Alive.' The story came from me, but Janet had a fantastic influence on the dialogue and the characters. There came a point when we actually couldn't remember who'd come up with what."

The original draft of the script was simply a character study, but over the next four or five months it began to take shape. "It came from the germ of a story," Levring explains. "A love story, a triangle involving three people. It wasn't a period film at that time. Then it became obvious that a period piece would be good, and also that a jungle setting would be suitable. I'm a big fan of Conrad, and although this is not at all a Conrad kind of story – he didn't write that many love stories – I was fascinated in trying to convey some of his spirit, as I see it. I don't really believe in making books into films, but there is a certain spirit in Conrad that I was interested in giving my own take on."

"It's about two people," he continues, "a 40-year-old woman and a 25-year-old man who run away from England. The man gets a job in a very remote trading post as a surveyor. They go out there with a lot of expectations and high hopes, but they soon realize that this place is not at all what they expected and they're locked in there for quite a while. And before long, the psychological influence of the other inhabitants starts eating their souls." Adds McTeer, "both Kristian and I are grown ups, we've had lives, and we wanted to write something about the effect of a characters past on their present, how it can harm and become destructive. Both of our two main protagonists, William and Sarah, have been damaged by their lives and in turn they inadvertently damage Hamish, the innocent one of the trio. The emotional implications of intimacy has become such a minimized currency in our modern world, and that's something we wanted to explore."

"It's really a study of different kinds of innocence," says Levring, "and for this story, the most important thing is how easily you can get really, really lost. I mean, modern people know the world but I like the fact that these characters come from the north of England, they've never been outside it, and it's so exotic, so shocking for them to arrive in the jungle."

Digital Video
Though it has its roots in Dogme, The Intended is by no means a Dogme film. "I didn't want to do another," Levring says simply. "One has to go on. I learnt an incredible amount from that, but it's not interesting to do the same thing once more, so I decided to do something else. I wanted to do something quite visual." Interestingly, however, Levring decided to stay with Digital Video, but use it in a different, more stylised way. "I wanted to make a film in the way I prefer, where you work closely with the actors – you can shoot and shoot, rehearse and improvise – but at the same time still make a very visual film. Which is sometimes very complicated, but for that I felt DV was absolutely right. To work in the same way, film would have been much more expensive."

The film's producer, Malene Blenkov, who has worked with Levring for a decade now, puts this into perspective. "Kristian comes from a film background," she says, "and he's always been against using video. But on The King Is Alive he realized that maybe he could use it to do something he hadn't done before. He could shoot with lots of cameras and get much more material, have the freedom to work with actors for a lot longer, and explore more possibilities. And I think he gained so much from working that way that he wanted to continue with it. And as a result, I think, the performances are quite outstanding." Like Levring, executive producer Sally Hibbin would like to stress that his use of the medium is different to the current wave of DV projects. "I think Kristian is using DV completely differently to anyone else I've spoken to or heard about," she says. "He's using it as an art form – he's painting pictures with DV – while other people are using the hand-held roughness of DV to tell a story. It's a very original approach."

Levring was quick to see that this would have a profound impact when making a period film. "The thing about period films is that there seems to be a specific way of doing them," he says, "which probably comes from Visconti, who I'm a great admirer of. But you can't do any better than he did. That's it, really. And that style has been imitated so much, it's really, really hard as a director to get that out of your head. To do it differently. So in a way I felt DV was a really good thing."

Blenkov takes this point further. "Kristian didn't want to make a period film, in the traditional, glamorous sense," she says, "and he was very strict about that from the beginning. The costumes are not pretty, and when you see the make-up, their hands are very, very dirty. So it was important to use DV for that purpose, so it wouldn't look too clean and neat."

To get the right images, Levring spent a lot of time preparing and experimenting with DV technology. "One of the lessons from Lars Von Trier is to push yourself," he says, "and sometimes you have to do things like Dogme to push yourself away from what's normal or the way you would normally think, because of the number of movies you've seen. So DV was a way of pushing myself, and I also feel that it's where the breakthroughs are being made in the movies right now, and by that I don't just mean post-production. With digital we're just at the beginning. On this film we did a lot of tests – we modified the cameras, lenses, did colour tests – and it was fun, like being in the 1930s when they invented the wide angle. I'm not putting myself at the same level but I really feel that that kind of experimenting has lost itself in the traditional way of filming and it's hard to get any further. People from the industry always want to do things the way they do normally. And that's understandable, but it's the director's job to push away from that."

However, Levring admits that, though admirable, such principles do not make for smooth filmmaking. "It was a tough process to get the money," he concedes. "In a way," adds Hibbin, "this is a film you should never try to film on DV – it's a period film and it's set in the jungle – but that was really part of the attraction, to try something you really shouldn't do."

Location
Indeed, the film was fraught with many setbacks, all of which were taken firmly in hand by Levring and his cast and crew. The first challenge was to find a location for the film, which was originally intended to take place in South Africa. "We always knew that the setting would be a jungle," says Hibbin, "and we always knew it would involve an English colony, natives and elephants. So Kristian and Janet went on a recce to South Africa and, lo and behold, there wasn't much jungle there – at least, none that was safe. So it became a choice between Costa Rica and Malaysia, and although the film isn't actually set in Malaysia – it's sort of a no man's territory – we felt it really worked in the Far East. Although, strangely, we found it rather difficult to find any of the huge trees that they wanted. Until one day Kristian went for a pee in the woods, found himself looking up at one and thought, 'That'll do.' Which is how we found our location."

Casting
Casting, in the meantime, was proving unexpectedly problematic. To join McTeer, who was nominated for an Oscar for her role in Tumbleweeds (2000), Levring approached previous Oscar winners Olympia Dukakis and Brenda Fricker, to play Erina and Mrs Jones, the two matriarchs of the outpost. Says Dukakis, "I think Kristian had seen a movie I did called A Life For A Life: The Stefan Kiszko Story, in which I played the lead character's mother. Looking back, I realize that there were some similarities with Erina, a kind of 'withheld' quality that's true of both of those women." Like Fricker, Dukakis was also intrigued enough by the script to arrange a meeting with Levring, and both actresses were bowled over by his enthusiasm. "Kristian's just wonderful," says Fricker. "I immediately wanted to go on this journey with him. He's full of energy, he doesn't miss a thing and he's proactive too. He isn't just technical, and of course because he's co-written it, it's all there in his head for you to dip into." The sheer quality of these appointments, however, proved troublesome when Levring came to find his male leads. Says Blenkov, "We thought the two men would be hard to find, and not simply because it was difficult to find a match for Sarah's character." Impressed by A Life For A Life, Levring invited Dukakis' co-star Tony Maudsley, who played her son, to play William. "He was an incredible find," says Blenkov. "Everyone got very excited about him, especially Kristian, and you could see he felt the character was coming alive. And the same goes for JJ Feild: he was actually quite an unknown risk, but his profile has risen wonderfully since Last Orders."

Feild, for his part, admits that he was quite nervous about joining such an auspicious cast, and has nothing but praise for his co-star McTeer. "Janet's a brilliant actress and very generous," he says, "and because she co-wrote this story she was remarkably easy to work with. She knows exactly what's going on."

World Events
But even with these elements in place the film was dealt another blow on the eve of principal photography, which was due to start on September 15, with the cast and crew already on location. "I think we must say something about the horrific events of September 11, because we were so hard on the heels of that," says Hibbin. "It was extraordinary for us to be in Malaysia for the six or seven weeks afterwards. It was very safe but it was strange to be so out of the loop with what was happening. There was never a moment in the production office when we didn't have CNN on."

As Dukakis recalls, "The worst moment for me was sitting my room, surfing the TV, and seeing – live – what happened to the World Trade Centre. At first I thought it was a movie, but then I realised it was really happening, and all I could think of was that my son worked six blocks away and has an apartment three blocks away." The actress was touched by Levring and McTeer's concern, which proved a pillar of strength while she tried to contact her son.

Fortunately, he was one of the lucky ones. Says Blenkov: "Olympia responded so courageously. She was totally professional. She went back for her son's wedding on the 22nd and flew back again – which not many Americans would have done at that stage." The events of that day started the shoot with mixed emotions: the cast and crew were dumbstruck but it was too late to stop. Says Hibbin, "We had to close the contracts on September 11. We were in the middle of putting the final contracts to bed when all this happened. I think it's worth saying that we owe something to the Royal Bank Of Scotland, among others, who waived all sorts of precedents that you would normally have to make the film happen. For example, the title search didn't come through and people said, 'We'll go without it.' We couldn't get the completion bond signed because it was in New York – there were a whole range of things. Because the tunnels were closed, our lawyer at IFC actually walked to the office on September 12 to get the contract signed. These people did us proud."

The Set
Distressed by world events and under pressure to wrap by November, due to the imminence of the rainy season, the team put the finishing touches to the trading post, which took eight weeks to build. Despite the constraints of time, Levring was compelled to seek authenticity in his set design. "We were fantastically lucky to find a Sri Lankan art director," says Hibbin, "who really cracked it for us. He really embraced our way of working and gave us a way in. He really understood that we wanted to use local materials and styles, so we were spared some of the excesses of Hollywood by being able to use local carpenters and local painters who were working in traditional styles. There were one or two people from Kuala Lumpur but on the whole we were using local labor. If you look at the detail, it's fantastic." Adds Blenkov, "Everything was constructed on location, which meant a lot to the actors. A 360-degree set gives them a lot of freedom, but it also made it more authentic, which obviously helps the performance."

Filming in Malaysia
Levring, of course, was no stranger to exotic locations after The King Is Alive, but he was still taken aback by the logistical problems. "The funny thing about that is that The King Is Alive was actually quite pleasant," he says. "It looked tougher than it was, and filming in the Dogme style made it easier. But on The Intended, the weather conditions were much tougher. It's much harder to be in a jungle than a desert. It was just a very tough shoot. Creepy crawlies, snakes, the heat…! People got sick, people fainted and we built a jetty that got washed away no less than three times. It's such a different environment from what we're used to as Europeans."

"That river was extraordinary," says Hibbin. "We found the location, we built the jetty and the river was at a particular level for most of the time we were there. During the recce we asked, 'Is this how it always is?' and they'd say, 'Yes – in the dry season it dries out and in the rainy season it gets higher, but in between this is pretty much as it is.' So we were totally unprepared for this river, which could rise and fall by feet. Drastically – the jetty could be covered within 24 hours, then almost dry another 24 hours later. And it seemed to have nothing to do with the rainfall. We could never figure it out."

Filming on location was definitely a challenge for the cast, as Olympia Dukakis confirms. "Working in the rain forest, I think, changed me," she says. "There's nothing there. Things grow, they rot, they fall to the ground… There are no warring philosophies; there are no political parties in the rain forest, just this circular inevitability of life, death, rebirth. Usually I read a great deal on sets but I would just sit there. I think to call it meditation might be a little bit much but I guess you'd say there was a kind of 'zoning' that would happen. The air is weighted with water, the space is canopied by trees and there's no wind, except for an hour or so in the late afternoon. It was difficult. Very hot, very muggy, very muddy and very physically uncomfortable."

There was also a strange and potential deadly threat from a surprising source. "Let me tell you about the dorian fruit," says producer Patricia Kruijer. "This is a fruit that no one in England is really familiar with. It grows over the course of two or three weeks from a tennis ball size to the size of a melon and has enormously tough spikes. They grow on the top of tall tropical trees, they smell disgusting and they taste even worse. But it's a delicacy in Malaysia and China, which means it's a very expensive fruit. So whenever they fell – and when they fall, they send tremors through the jungle – at least ten of our Malaysian crew would run off to find it, either to eat it, because they're very nutritious, or sell it. At first we thought it was funny, but after a couple of days we started to realize the real implications of this: we were continually under threat from these killer fruit."

"I think it's from the coconut family," explains Dukakis, "and if one hits you, that's it. The crew got very concerned about it eventually, and marked out where these trees were so we all got to know what they looked like. Then they gave us hard huts and we'd run past them, but one day one of them fell right in the middle of the sets, so they set up nets. Now, one of the locals showed me this fruit, and it had a terrible odor but they kept insisting that it was delicious. So I tasted it and it wasn't bad. But the following day, of course, once they realized I liked it, they brought me another offering. But this one was really ripe – and it was delicious! Well, about an hour later I was in a slightly altered state. And that's why it's considered a sacred fruit."

The practicalities of dealing with problems such as this brought an added realism to the enterprise. Says Blenkov, "One of the actors said something that I found really interesting – he said that, had he shot the interiors on a soundstage, he would have constantly been dabbing his brow with a handkerchief. Whereas in reality, he found he would just get tired – he wouldn't make all those mannered gestures." Then there was also the freedom afforded by shooting on DV. "I think there is a way in which DV changes film grammar," says Hibbin, "because you have the ability to shoot 360 degrees and you have the ability to cross the line in a way that you don't with film. I think that gives the film a very modern, refreshing feel."

Shooting in Sequence
Using three cameras to catch every possible nuance, Levring also had the luxury of shooting the film in sequence, enabling his cast to follow their characters' individual journeys as closely as possible. "I realized how acting could be so different for me than it had been in other movies," says Dukakis. "For instance, there was no script girl, and usually there's such a big thing about continuity. Plus we did so many takes – which, in the past, has always kind of demoralized me or exhausted me, but I didn't feel that at all. I felt as though every take was like taking another look at the scene and not because something was wrong. There was hardly any waiting around either, which gave us more time to do the actual work. "I've worked in sequence at other times," she adds, "but not for such a long period of time as this. But what I really enjoyed about the acting was Kristian's insistence that there be no acting, as such – that everything should be very personal and not manifested but lived. Again, I've worked with other directors who've wanted that but Kristian was a watchdog. If there was one moment that went off, he caught it. He would catch every little thing."

The Music
Experimental electronic musician Matthew Herbert was brought in to create the original score. Kristian and Matthew had a very clear idea about how they wanted the film to sound. They didn't want anything to create false emotional reactions, but rather to underscore the emotion already in the film. Matthew created over 200 separate piece of music for the film that were then slotted in, almost 'jigsaw-like', to the visuals and then chopped and changed around until they were happy with the end result. Matthew employs a strict manifesto somewhat equivalent to the rules of Dogma. When he creates his music, he allows only original sounds created by himself to be utilized, i.e. he will not sample other people's music.

The Characters
After working so long in the commercials industry, where post-production is becoming an increasingly important part of the process, Levring found that his experience with Dogme forced him to focus on his storytelling and the impact of each individual performance. With its flexibility and portability, DV allowed him to spend more time with his cast, which translated into openness that everyone found both challenging and liberating. "As an actor," says McTeer, "it's wonderful working with Digital Video. The King Is Alive was the first time I'd worked with that, and it was fantastic, but it was a very different process to this. Kristian is very open to actors' input and I think he has a very big respect for actors, which shows in the work. Because if you write a character, it doesn't really mean anything unless it lives. You can read it and intellectualize it but it has to live, and that can only happen when it's really taken on board by an actor."

Indeed, the cast appreciated the many months of work that went into developing the script, and everyone concerned is very much aware that the film is a group effort. "Kristian makes working so much easier because his main priority is to tell the story," says JJ Feild. "So you don't have any extraneous nonsense to worry about, you don't have to worry about all the little technicalities. When I read the script, I felt that it was so rare to read a part that has such a great journey, that's so complex and has so many dimensions to it. For example, this guy I'm playing is quite a shy guy, because, although he has confidence and self-belief, he's also mannered and quite withheld."

Being so far from home enabled the actors to really throw themselves into their roles. Says Tony Maudsley, "My character, William Jones has spent most of his life in the trading station in Borneo. He's grown up there, apart from a couple of years' education that he had in England, and I guess he's what you'd call a social misfit. His personality has been shaped by the women in his life – his father hasn't been around since he was a small boy, so he hasn't had a lot of male influence."

The ruling power in his life, then, is his mother, Mrs Jones – "a tough woman," says Fricker, "who runs a tight ship." However, like everyone else in this drama, Mrs Jones is more than she seems. "She's quite cruel to William in a lot of ways," says Maudsley. "She's never allowed him to make the mistakes in life that most people learn from, so he's really very naïve. His nanny, Erina, has been more of a parent to him than his mother and father ever were. She's probably the only person who's ever brought him any joy in his life. And they also have quite a strange sexual relationship…"

Dukakis concurs that Erina has hidden depths. "She's a very interesting woman," she says. "Seemingly simple but very complex and very interesting to play, made even more so by the world that she inhabits – the world of the rain forest, with this closed family. She can be very kind but at the same time have a very Machiavellian turn of mind. She has a relationship with the younger man whom she's been the nanny for, and although it's a sexual relationship, it's also a deeply emotional, connected, complicated relationship. And she, of all of them, has totally accepted where she lives and she has permitted it to affect and change her. She's been there for 20 years and never wanted to return."

The Outcome
Ultimately, these subtleties are what drive The Intended toward its powerful climax, in which the whole network of secret allegiances and betrayals short-circuits itself with tragic results. "I was always attracted to the undertones," says Hibbin, "which had to do with exploitation, money and greed. It's the story of a woman who's become trapped into various choices. And although that was there in the script, it's become what the film is about – that's the through line."

Along the way, Levring's film examines the slender threads that bind and control our destinies. "Why does life seldom turn out the way we had dreamed?" the director asks. "Why do we often search for happiness everywhere but in our own souls? What does it take to make a life? I do not claim to know the answers to these questions, but they are themes that I would like to delve into. Most of all I would like to tell a story about some people trapped in the life that fate has given them, some people who each in their own way are searching for a way out."

Genre

Period drama / thriller

Synopsis

In 1924, Sarah and Hamish travel from England deep in to the jungle to earn their fortune surveying an ivory trading post. Instead of an exotic retreat, the couple encounters an oppressively small community. Despite their best intentions, their presence in the jungle unleashes a downward spiral that ends in greed, murder and madness.

Directed by Kristian Levring and filmed on location in Malaysia.

JJ Feild role

Hamish Winslow

Release dates

Theatrical: 2 Sept 2002 (Canada); 25 June 2004 (USA)

DVD: 28 December 2004

Trailer

Links

IMDb

IFC site

Trailer

Production notes

Box Office Mojo

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Variety.com