To be honest, I'm a bit of a hack. Since my last film, I knew I wanted to shoot my next one handheld. I knew this, before I'd even written the story. I knew it, even before I knew what the story was.

About five years ago, I fell in love with Susanne Bier. A fairly unknown filmmaker at the time, she emerged from the Danish Dogma movement. Rob, my DP, was horrified, I'm sure, when I first uttered the word "Dogma". Which DP wouldn't be? What I was interested in though, was less the guerilla-bare-bones approach in the filmmaking and more the intimacy that came through in Bier's films. Using her very much unknown Open Hearts and Brothers as references, I wanted to make a film as honest as hers.

To emphasise Marissa's interior journey, we started with a very basic strategy: a steadier feel to the camera, gradually moving into longer lenses, tighter, virtually claustrophobic framing, and shakier camera movements. The word "documentary" was introduced very early on in Rob's and my collaboration. I wanted everything to feel organic, which meant that, like a documentary, things could drift in and out of focus in some of our more intense scenes. I was interested in capturing human details in very dramatic moments. What were the actors doing with their hands in the heat of a scene? What were they touching? To me, there's something very human and ultimately poetic in these details. In an attempt to move away from the Dogma aspect but still incorporate the documentary feel we were after, we looked to Half Nelson directed by Ryan Fleck, Babel directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, and The Constant Gardener directed by Fernando Meirelles. I wanted to give the actors as much freedom as possible in their movements, so scenes wouldn't feel "blocked". In the name of spontaneity, Rob would operate as on a documentary film: very often, he would simply capture what was happening. The actors' performances, movements, and actions would differ from take to take and so therefore would the images, on which Rob was focusing.