This interview contains mild spoilers.
Everybody is in search of love. But more importantly, we need to be certain that you’ve found… the right one! And we need accept any help to get it, even it’s from a computer to tell us if a partnership is worth pursuing. One film that explores this concept is Christos Nikou’s Fingernails (Apples, Km). It’s simple – you and your partner each remove a nail from your hand and get tested for compatibility. There are only three possible results – zero, fifty, and one hundred percent. We can all figure out what zero and a hundred percent compatibility means. But fifty? It means that only one partner is fully committed to the relationship. The gray area, if you will. Filmmaker Nikou spoke with Creative Screenwriting Magazine about over-relying on technology to find your perfect match without the heartache of wasting time!
“I wrote Fingernails because I was trying to understand what love is. I’m still trying to understand what love is. I think that love is the most elusive thing. It’s not something that we can put in our hands, and we cannot analyze it. But at the same time, we need it so much and we all need to feel it,” opines Nikou.
“And it also fascinates me, why we’re letting an algorithm decide, and present to us some partner options, when I think that we just need to follow our heart and our instinct,” he continues.
The Inspiration
Christos Nikou watched at the arthouse films of Robert Bresson, Leos Carax and Aki Kaurismäki to shape the difficult to define tone and feel of Fingernails (co-written by Stavros Raptis and Sam Steiner). Some of the filmmaker’s less oblique influences include The Truman Show, The Tenants, and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. He reinforces that these references inspire his love of cinema rather than directly dictate his storytelling.
Christos Nikou
Fingernails traverses the intersection of humanity and technology. It’s a science fiction film at its core. “I believe that the technology has become a little bit of our lives. We are living in a time of fast food emotions because everything is one click away.” He likens the experience to the time of buying a vinyl album when he was growing up in Athens, Greece. He’d put on a record and listen the to it in its entirety. He’d take the time and follow the musical journey. “I was very excited about the music that I was listening to and I was trying to give enough time to all of these pieces and appreciate it.” Now, in the age of digitized music, you can skip songs, listen to a few bars, or go back and listen to a song again with ease while cutting a whole musical experience short. That’s how love has become – a more efficient experience in fast-forward to save time and avoid mistakes.
Certainty Of Love
Aside from the fast-track nature of love, Fingernails examines our need for certainty in relationships rather than simply allowing a connection to unfold. Do we actually need to know if a relationship is going to last? Nikou responds with a resounding, “No.”
“As humans, we sometimes need to have replies for many things that don’t actually have replies. We don’t need to have a reply for everything. We just need to appreciate life and not accept everything that our society is giving us as a certainty.”
We need to remove our doubts and trust our instincts. If a relationship works out or not, so be it. It’s all part of a life experience. The element of not knowing where things will lead, is part of the joy of falling in love.
Fingernails also forces us to question why we jettison such important personal decisions to machines. Why do we feel that they know us better than we know ourselves?
Melancholic Mind
There’s a lot of space, silence, and contemplation in Fingernails. Christos Nikou calls the tone The Melancholic Mind. “I think that that’s how our life is.” There is science-fiction, romance and even comedy in the film. The filmmaker prefers not to reduce Fingernails to a single genre since not every type of love can be put in a single category. “I don’t like movies that are doing only one thing and I don’t like the movies that take themselves too seriously because life is not like that. Life is everything and movies should also be everything,” he muses.
Duncan (Luke Wilson) Photo courtesy of Apple TV+
Life is a mixture of comedic, melancholic, and sad moments, so the film reflects all these aspects. “I believe that even if there are these absurd moments where some people believe are shallow, there are so many layers below them that are hidden.”
“The movie talks about many things about relationships and love. But the film also doesn’t say a lot of things about love.”
Are Anna And Ryan A Perfect Match?
The film’s main characters are Ryan (Jeremy Allen White) and Anna (Jessie Buckley) who are purportedly a perfect match because they passed the fingernail test. But Anna’s not so sure.
“They are a couple that are locked into a routine in a way of life. The low certification that they are taking, is a little bit like marriage. The test is similar to a wedding where a wedding ring is a way of proving one’s love for one day. But love is something you need to work on every day.”
That’s the problem with relying too much on technology, especially with established relationships. “Anna feels she is missing something and Ryan has settled into a routine that he has accepted and he’s not really working on their relationship.”
Anna is the active part of the relationship and puts in the effort. She senses something’s off, but can’t place her finger on it. “She is trying throughout the whole movie to feel something more about Ryan, to feel like she did in the past, and to make him feel the same.” Anna wants to motivate Ryan to break their routine, but he isn’t motivated. Furthermore, he doesn’t feel the need to do so because their fingernail test proved they are a good fit. “He doesn’t want to risk taking the test again. And that puts their love at risk.” It’s not even clear that he’s still happy any more.
But Anna persists and they eventually take the test again. “She’s trying to find something real, but maybe there isn’t anything real left for them anymore.” Ryan has become complacent.
Rather than accepting an offer of teaching at a local school, Anna accepts a job at the Love Institute headed by Duncan (Luke Wilson) in an attempt to better understand the nature of love and her relationship. She’s trying to do so by observing connections in other people. She’s trying to find out more about herself and what love means. She undertakes various bonding tasks with Ryan in a desperate attempt to stimulate her relationship with him. Anna is proactive in understanding her relationship via the process of elimination – finding out what doesn’t work.
What’s Up With Anna And Amir?
The fingernail test has shown that Anna and Ryan are a perfect match. Until the retest when they score fifty percent. Anna hooks up with Amir (Riz Ahmed) her co-worker at the Love Institute. Christos Nikou dissects their relationship in defiance of the testing machine. “Amir is hiding a lot of things behind his humor. He’s trying to hide a lot of things about himself, about his own experiences, and his own secrets.” Anna is trying to form a romantic liaison with Amir as a way to examine her feelings about Ryan. But she doesn’t really know Amir outside a work environment. “Anna is very curious about Amir and this shifts to something deeper. She starts to have deeper feelings for him. They are both there because they are trying to find answers about love and why it is so difficult for both of them to feel it. They’re not quite lost souls, but they’re searching for something.”
Anna (Jessie Buckley) and Amir (Riz Ahmed) Photo courtesy of Apple TV+
“Amir’s trying to find his way in this world, even if he doesn’t understand it completely. He understands the problem, but he doesn’t know how to solve it. He’s vulnerable, active, but he doesn’t feel sorry for himself,” Nikou continuous.
Working With Cate Blanchett
Christos and Cate (who co-produced Fingernails with her husband Andrew Upton) first discussed the film several years ago when Apples was released. “When we met, we felt both of us were aligned with cinema. We love the same movies and we love the same things in them. We have exactly the same passion about films.”
“It’s the first time that she’s seen a movie [Apples] that is a conceptual story with a weird tone, but at the same time, is so humanistic. She really felt the humanistic side. Fingernails is a little bit quirky and a lot of things are a little bit off. But at the same time, there is a lot of warmth there.“
