Playground

02/21/22 • 25 min

Belgian filmmaker Laura Wandel knew from the get-go that if she was going to tell a visceral story about school dynamics and the first childhood relationships made away from the family home, she would need to tell it from the child’s point of view. That visual perspective is partly why Playground, her feature-length debut, has earned widespread acclaim from critics and audiences alike ever since it debuted in Un Certain Regard at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.

We recorded today’s episode during London Film Festival, in a conference room at the Mayfair hotel, so while the audio quality might be a tad echoey, the answers Laura gives, with the help of a translator, are of the highest standard. So here, the filmmaker describes what went into corralling her inexperienced cast, including Maya Vanderbeque as seven-year-old lead Nora, and executing a stunning feat of filmmaking.

Playground is released in cinemas on April 22nd

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Playground is released in cinemas on April 22nd

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

Lilting

Award-winning casting director, Kharmel Cochrane has a reputation for championing new and diverse talent across film and television. As one of the few women of colour leading in the profession, her knack for finding the perfect cast has been utilised on the small screen in BAFTA-winning The End of the Fucking World, Sky One’s Intergalactic, and the Jodie Turner-Smith-led Anne Boleyn miniseries. In Film, she’s worked on John Wick: Chapter 4, Saint Maud and with Robert Eggers on all three of his feature films: The Witch, The Lighthouse and the upcoming The Northman.

Beginning in shorts and music videos, Kharmel’s first feature credit as Casting Director was on British-Cambodian director Hong Khaou’s debut feature Lilting. The 2014 film tells the story of a bereaved Cambodian-Chinese mother coming to terms with the untimely loss of her son as his English lover attempts to connect with her through their shared grief with the help of a translator. Starring Ben Whishaw, Cheng Pei Pei, Andrew Leung, Naomi Yang, Peter Bowles, and Morven Christie, Cochrane talks to Hanna Flint about bringing that cast together with the director...

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Next Episode

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Genevieve Gaunt is a talented British actress whose career has traversed stage and screen. From Michael Winterbottom’s The Face of an Angel and American soap opera The Royals to playing Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme in a production of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins at Edinburgh Theatre Festival and voicing Lady Penelope in a recent Thunderbirds audiobook series, Gaunt boasts an eclectic array of credits. But her film career first kicked off as a child actor cast by Alfonso Cuaron in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Widely regarded as the best instalment in the fantasy franchise, Gaunt’s debut feature role was as Slytherin student Pansy Parkinson. Although her part was small, it was an impactful experience that she sat down with Hanna Flint to talk about...

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