2: Rick de Leeuw wakes up three times in Granada

We aren't going to run through the whole film shot by shot.

We're not? (A frown appears across the table)

No, but maybe we could discuss a scene at random. The first scene is very exciting to start with. What were you trying to say with that scene? Because it seems to be separate from the rest of the film.

That's right. The viewer is repeatedly wrong footed all the way through the film. It looks as if we are in Granada, Spain. A real drama feature. And Rick de Leeuw is asleep. At least, that's what we want to believe. But of course we also KNOW at the same time that he is really pretending to be asleep. Or isn't he? (Is the baby later in the film also pretending to be asleep?)

Rick is woken roughly by a film-crew. There is a quarrel (that looked so real that the set builders who decided to drop in surreptitiously and take a look on the set fled again because of the 'difficult mood' on the set!).

The sound of the traffic in the street turns out not to be real: it gets switched off. It isn't Granada at all, but a film set. Then suddenly 40,000 litres of water floods in through the three windows.

What are we really looking at?

Oh, thank goodness, Rick wakes up. And so do we! He has dreamt all about himself, the director, his crew and the water. So he dreamt he was asleep and was woken up. But then, while his answering machine calls him and he walks to the phone, he shrinks visibly, to a quarter of his height.

Yet the title: Granada, 12 june 1973 makes you think the film really starts here. But are the street sounds real then? In spite of ourselves we start believing in it all again.

Then Rick wakes up for the third time. With one leg in plaster. So he dreamt that he woke up twice. But is he now really awake? Is this where the film really starts? Apparently it does, because the opening credits and the title of the film appear: the sea that thinks. Then a hand on a remote control switches channels, away from this feature film, and it turns out that, from the very start, we have been watching a TV set on which the sea that thinks is being screened. But which film ARE we watching now?

I hope that, by this stage, you are slowly losing touch. I use this confusion and repeatedly taking a step back, throughout the whole film, to make the viewer aware that he repeatedly assumes something, keeps believing in things. If you take enough steps backwards, you finally reach yourself, the viewer. And I hope that you will start posing questions to yourself such as: what do I actually believe in? I think that, as a viewer, you gradually become aware of your own expectations: that's what it's all about. You are going to think after this opening sequence that Rick de Leeuw, a Dutch celebrity, is still going to play a significant role in the film. Well, he doesn't.

You try to convince the viewer that much of what he always assumes to be true may not in fact be so?

Yes. I think we are all too willing to believe all kinds of things about ourselves and reality, while it is all very much stranger and more surprising than it seems! I want to shake the viewer awake, so he might be amazed again about things and about himself.

So what is true?

Did the English car crash really happen? Is the 6 o'clock news real?

Is it real?

No. The news is staged in the real 6 o'clock news set. Are the street interviews real? Some are, some are not. Which ones are? What criteria do we use in that respect? Is this interview real? Surely not. I'm writing on my own.

And if I can make it apparent that many things we think we see are not true, then maybe I have found a way through to the other side; maybe many things we think we are, are also not correct. Does it depend on our point of view? What am I? What do I think I am?

Part 3: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0261277/board/nest/191269726