The Incident

Carlos

Juan

Roberto (Age 10)

Groom

Raft instructor

Roberto

Camila

Marco

Sandra

Oliver

Bride

It was specifically after Isaac Ezban finished reading David Mitchel's "Cloud Atlas" on the summer of 2012 when he decided he wanted to do a film with fragmented narratives. He loved the idea of going back and forth between certain unfinished stories. He later recalled one constant experience he had as a child and teenager: every time his family had Shabbat dinner at his Grandma's house on Friday night, Isaac's father always wanted to take the stairs up until the ninth floor "to make some exercise", and Isaac remembered feeling very tired going up all those stairs and thinking: what would happen if suddenly after the ninth floor, the first floor would start again? That fear of staying on an infinite staircase all of a sudden sounded like such a cool idea for a movie... but something else was missing. A few weeks after rolling that idea on his head, Isaac had dinner with his screenwriter friend Maic Castro, who gave him a present: a book called "The Mysteries of Mister Burdick". The book consisted in a series of strange pictures with only a sentence attached (supposedly Mister Burdick left those pictures to an editor one day, saying he would come back on the next day with the stories for each picture and never came back, but the editor was so fascinated by the pictures he published the book like that). Maic told Isaac how a long time ago he had to do an assignment in school that consisted in looking at this book page by page and then creating a story for each picture. Isaac then decided to see this book every night before going to bed, looking for inspiration for his next film, and it was then when he discovered one of the pictures that showed a couple of boys in front of a long road and thought: what if I made a movie about people who spent their entire lives walking down one road? Then, suddenly it all clicked. He mixed that idea with his previous idea of the infinite staircase, his fanatism for films in which a big period of time takes place, his inspiration from "The Twilight Zone" and "Lost" episodes, as well as other psychological science fiction stories like "Inception" or "Cloud Atlas", and his obsession with the subject of time, and he thought "hell, this could be a movie". The first draft of the screenplay was ready two months after that night.

For the short segment of the bride and the groom in the hotel that appears in the beginning and end of the film, Ezban was extremely stubborn with the idea of shooting it at the Geneve Hotel in Mexico City, because he loved everything about it (the hallway, the lobby, the colors) and he said it all looked "like something out of a Kubrick movie". However, being this a very fancy hotel, the independent budget of the film could not afford the shooting permit. Later, Ezban and Askenazi got the idea of lying to the hotel and saying they were students shooting a short film for their class, got fake student IDs and a fake student letter, and that's how they managed to actually shoot inside the Geneve Hotel, although they were only allowed to shoot there for 4 hours and only with a 10-people crew, so it was a really rough day. They managed to shoot there with only 10 people, while the other 25 of the crew (including production assistants, hair dressers and make up department) waited on the restaurant in front of the street, hiding there, just in case they were needed.

Production designer Adelle Achar and Director of Photography Rodrigo Sandoval Vega Gil are actually a couple in real live, and they're practically the best couple one can find out there, not only because both of them are amazing human beings and very in love with each other, forming a wonderful relationship, but also because cinematography and production design are always supposed to get along well. However, their relationship has not been constant, and the history of their continuous break-ups and reunions has always been related to the film industry and films produced at Yellow Films. They first met at the set of "Ocean Blues" (Yellow Films's first feature film, directed by Salomon Askenazi and produced by Isaac Ezban) on 2010 and immediately fell in love. After being together for almost two years, they broke up on 2012, and were somehow re-united (although not as a couple anymore) on 2013 by "The Incident"'s exhaustive pre-production. In the first weeks of filming, while shooting the segment of the stairs, Adelle Achar constantly had to fill the walls of the set with quotes (for the set of the stairs after many years), and, still being in love with Rodrigo, she hid, in very small font, some quotes dedicated specially for him. A few days later, when Rodrigo read this on the wall and only he understood it, he acted as if he was just interested on the set design and wrote a quote for Adelle. After that, a few days of clandestine communication between Adelle and Rodrigo took place on that wall, even if both if them were currently in relationships with other couples, which, as a matter of fact, were visiting the set a lot. After a few months, they both managed to get single again and got back together, and now they're still together. They were seen together at the world premiere of the film at Fantastic Fest. That tinny sparkle that caused the passionate fire of their love to burn again started in the wall of the stairs, at the set of "The Incident". And it will remain in the film in the scenes that feature those walls... forever.