Spurning Tricks - Interview

CM: Did Katrin have any concerns about the audience being able to connect with a character you've painted in a sometimes unsympathetic way?

LK: Katrin and I were both very much in agreement. One of the reasons I cast her is that we saw the character in similar terms. I had wanted to attack the whole notion of the sexy prostitute playing out some male fantasy and to concentrate on how the character had to compartmentalize her life in order to exist. The clients aren't really having sex with Claire; they're having sex with an image of her. So it's purely narcissistic on their part.

I think the film is very emotional. You see Claire going through a real emotional journey and at least attempting to live the life that she wants, which I think takes a tremendous amount of courage. Most people, when they're faced with any degree of significant change in their lives, tend to do anything to avoid it. I didn't want the audience to be seduced. The sex scenes--there are a fair number of them--I think all of them are very different. But certainly the ones that deal purely with her work are more distant and antiseptic: It's merely a transaction.

CM: There's an ambiguous aspect to Cain's relationship with Claire, to the point where it almost seems as if he has her best interests at heart, yet obviously he's her pimp and doesn't. He's manipulative and cruel. How did their relationship come about?

LK: Brevity and efficiency are things to strive for. When I was thinking about the whole idea of prostitution, I realized it's such a standard story. So I refused to really explain everybody's backgrounds. There's also a certain banality to the reductionism of explaining psychologically everything that happens. "Why did Claire become a prostitute?" In all honesty, I think people make decisions based on years of living and that it's incredibly complicated why people behave in certain ways when faced with a conflict and choose certain paths and not others.

Why Claire became a prostitute is not the point of the film. Cain was a friend of the family's who helped Claire's mother gain hospital treatment and then forced Claire, at the moment when she was most vulnerable--when her mother was very ill in the hospital--to pay back the debt by engaging in prostitution with client friends of his. The most manipulative thing he could possibly do was to invade her private space in that arena of emotions, given that the one loving relationship Claire has at the beginning of the film is with her mother.

At film school they taught me this maxim--and I believe it to this day, whether it's accurate or not--that people are what they do, not what they say. Cain is obviously abusive of Claire. He doesn't care about Claire. Clearly, he's not a reliable narrator. Anything he says, an audience should immediately question. So when he says, "I've known her since she was twelve--she was a whore then, she'll always be a whore," as far as I'm concerned, he's totally unreliable. It may be true, it may not be. But it's more about how the audience takes it and what that says about their own feelings or prejudices.