Jump-Cut-Meta-Mash-World-Ending-Midnight-Movie
Adrian Țofei returns with his second feature film, entitled We Put the World to Sleep (2025). The story revolves around, or better said, spirals haphazardly around two filmmakers (played by the director and his wife and artistic partner, Duru Yücel, who also co-wrote the movie) who attempt to make a film about bringing forth the end of days, while simultaneously blurring the lines between fiction and reality. The two main actors voluntarily plunge themself into their characters, characters which coincidentally are also actors who get swept away in their roles. What results is a Möbius strip-like film punctuated by elements of horror, fantasy, and black comedy.
CD: Hello, Adrian. I know your schedule is extremely full while promoting and screening your new feature in the international festival circuit. We Put The World To Sleep is a very hard film to summarise. My first question is also a request: How would you best describe your film?
AȚ: Hi, Cristian, well, the truth is I don’t like describing it beyond the plotline we wrote for it publicly: “Adrian and Duru get lost in the characters they play in an apocalyptic film and embark on a secret mission to end the world for real. What follows goes beyond their wildest imagination.”
We know what it is on a deeper level, but we prefer that audiences discover all that while and after watching the movie. It may require a second watch, though, because of the tight editing which gathers a ton of fast-flowing info in just 83 minutes. We’ve read the reviews (from both audiences on Letterboxd/IMDb and critics) and listened to the feedback, including from other fellow filmmakers, and everything put together paints a great picture of what the film is.
CD: In one of the films within the film, the main concern is eschatological in nature. Two filmmakers are researching ways of ending the world. What made you want to explore such an idea?
AȚ: Well, as the characters say, to save the world from present and future suffering, haha. One of my first inspirations came in 2015 when I watched a documentary about serial killer Anatoly Onoprienko. While on a killing spree, Onoprienko also killed a baby after killing the parents. When asked by authorities why he did it, he said he didn’t want the child to grow up without parents, suffering and being abused in orphanages, as he did. This explanation inspired the movie’s concept: ending the world not to cause pain, but, in the characters’ twisted minds, to save humans and animals from future suffering.
Another ambitious goal was to combine the metaphysics of 2001: A Space Odyssey with the realism of The Blair Witch Project, two of the movies that impressed and influenced him the most as a filmmaker. And when you deal with the meaning of life, you must also deal with either the end of it or with the eternity of it or both. I’m not sure there’s another way. Eschatology may be unavoidable and necessary when asking the big existential questions.
CD: Your debut feature, Be My Cat: A Film for Anne (2015), was a found footage horror with a certain metacinematic quality to it. This direction is exacerbated in your new film. How do you view the relationship between meta and horror?
AȚ: I’m not sure there’s an intrinsic relationship between meta and horror. It was just the way it was meant to happen in my first movie.
On one hand, I wanted Be My Cat to be an inspiration and a teaching tool for indie filmmakers and actors, and that’s best done when the creative process becomes transparent, and when the movie itself is about a form of creative process, even though a twisted and horrific one, haha. I’m very happy when film professionals all over the world get inspired by both Be My Cat itself and by the way I did it to make their own movies and work on their roles. And not just indie, Hollywood as well - just recently, the star of the new Faces of Death horror feature, Dacre Montgomery (Elvis, Stranger Things), said that he based his character in Faces of Death on my character in Be My Cat, and that Be My Cat is the scariest movie he’s ever seen.
I did my best to detail the creative process on IMDb Trivia (my real process, not the one of the psycho I play in the movie, haha), and I’m glad that people are reading it and learning the basics of indie filmmaking from it, such as how to work with actors, to support them to live in character and to create an alternative self-sustained reality for your movie where you don’t even need to direct because the directing already happened months or years before in the preparation phase. That’s something that film schools often and sadly don’t teach; they focus on the camera work and lights, but those cameras have nothing authentic to record if all you have is a dead film set, instead of a living and breathing self-sustained alternative reality where the actors are the characters living in their environment. Ideally, the director should feel like an intruder invading that reality with his/her camera - a reality which the director has created months/years in advance, but now it’s alive, goes on by itself, and only needs to be recorded, with little to no direct intervention needed.
On the other hand, one of the reasons why I chose to make my debut with a horror movie was my theory from back then that horror films put a mirror in front of the audience, a mirror in which they see reflected their darkest and most violent subconscious impulses, and so they become aware of them and get to control them in real life, thus becoming better people.
I meant the movie to be a character study about the paradoxical human nature, a meta-study about filmmaking and acting and a lesson in cinematic realism.
CD: How do you and Duru Yücel approach creating the story and characters? What is your process? How does the Cojar Method harmonise with the Night Stalker?
AȚ: Haha, I guess I already talked a bit about the process above, not knowing that this question would come.
Our filmmaking method usually consists of working for months (years in this case) on an alternative psychological reality for the actors, including ourselves, partially living in character, so that when we start improvising, we mainly need to record the unfolding events and to make sure the improvisation goes in the right direction. The script mostly consisted of plot points which evolved and changed over the 10 years of production. While creating and maintaining this alternative psychological reality for our characters, we shot about 150 hours of footage improvising guerrilla style, then put together the details of the story in post-production while editing, more like a documentary filmmaker would, even though the movie and our roles are totally fictional. It gives the illusion that it blends reality and fiction, but in fact, it’s just fiction.
But I wouldn’t recommend anyone to do this for such a long time. A couple of months of partial living in characters is necessary for realism, but doing it for years becomes very dangerous, especially for dark characters. It took me more than a year to recover from the darkness of my role’s psychology. But don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t a danger to society, just to myself. That darkness brought me down so much, and thank God for the full recovery.
About Cojar’s Method: This was just an inspiration and a starting point for creating my own method. Ion Cojar and my acting teacher, Mircea Gheorghiu, both aspired for this kind of realism, but working within the constraints of theatre, they were limited as to how far they could push it. With our method of work, I can allow the actors to live and interact in characters naturally, because I have the editing tool at my disposal: I cut all the boring parts in life when nothing happens, and I keep only the interesting moments. But with theatre, you can’t do that, you can’t keep audiences watching a 4-hour-long improvised theatre show that only has 30 interesting minutes. That would be boring for most audiences. And hence you’re forced to direct the traditional way (to tell the actors to go there, do that, etc.), to use scripts (written plays), and a part of the authenticity dies in the process. We’re very blessed to have the editing component when making a film, because we can allow the actors to flow with that authenticity uninterrupted for hours, and then we get rid of the boring moments and keep only the most interesting moments in the movie, without intervening in the lives of their characters, which often kills the liveliness.
CD: We Put The World To Sleep experiments with classic cinematic tropes (from thrillers and even sci-fi), but also seems to be informed by the aesthetic of vlogging and YouTube videos. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a feature film utilise so many jump cuts before. What made you go in this direction?
AȚ: Well… we had a ton of footage, and all of it was made of first takes, no doubles, the story constantly evolving and even splitting into multiple directions. How does one compress all that, years of recorded footage, all moving forward with new information added every time, in a movie just under 1h 30m, to keep it commercial for most audiences? The numerous cuts were necessary; I don’t think we could’ve told that story efficiently in any other way. We did consider at one point releasing the two chapters separately, as two separate feature films, each with a slower pace and fewer cuts, but that would’ve reduced the impact. I don’t think it would’ve been a good idea.
And yes, nice catch, ultimately I did think of the fast cuts in social media videos - people are so much used to watching those nowadays, so why not use the style in a feature? It was a deliberate departure from Be My Cat’s slower pace, but was done out of necessity, not really out of love for social media’s editing style (I guess I’m neutral about that one).
And did you know that we recorded 2 or 3 more levels of film-within-film? But we did not include those in the final cut, it would have been way too confusing for most people, as already the number of meta levels may be a bit too high, haha.
CD: What’s next for you? How deep can the meta-rabbit hole go?
AȚ: The glorious end to the spiritual trilogy is called Pure. This one’s completely different, and most certainly won’t be meta. It is the most scripted and structured movie of all three, with less impro, a bigger team and budget, more polished cinematic visuals, a wider mainstream appeal, and a unique point of view which is a first in the history of cinema! And of course this won't take 10 years to make, haha, quite the contrary, by the time We Put the World to Sleep is commercially released, Pure may be already completed.
Duru Yücel is starring, I’m directing, we’ve just started pre-production, scouting shooting locations across Romania, and we’re also accepting a limited number of investments (including from anyone reading this interview, not just people in the film industry).
The trilogy is a journey from the lower instinctual self (Be My Cat) to the middle rational self (We Put the Word to Sleep) to the higher spiritual self - mysteries beyond reason (Pure).