With Beckett now streaming on Netflix, I recently spoke to director Ferdinando Cito Filomarino about making the conspiracy thriller. If you haven’t seen the trailers, John David Washington plays an American tourist vacationing with his girlfriend (Alicia Vikander) in Greece who becomes the target of a manhunt after a tragic accident. Forced to run for his life, he attempts to travel to Athens to clear his name at the American embassy while being hunted by the authorities. Beckett also stars Boyd Holbrook, Vicky Krieps, and was written by Kevin A. Rice.

During the interview, Filomarino talks about how people from around the world came together to make the film, having seven languages spoken on set, what it was like filming on location in Greece and what the country added to the movie, how Alicia Vikander was only on set for two days so they had to get everything with her in that time, casting John David Washington around the time of BlacKkKlansman and he wanted to cast him, why they changed to title to Beckett, making the movie in thirty something days, and more.

Check out what he had to say below.

COLLIDER: I love asking directors, if you could get the financing for any project, what would you make and why?

FERDINANDO CITO FILOMARINO: I feel like I would spoil it if I say it, but I would like to make a big period epic set at sea into a mini-series.

So this is something you've been thinking about?

FILOMARINO: Yes.

Have you pitched this to certain streamers or people?

FILOMARINO: No. It’s for the future?

I love learning about the behind the scenes of the making of movies. What do you think might surprise people to learn about the making of Beckett?

FILOMARINO: Well, the film was an independent film that we kind of tailored it around very specific scene needs and summoned people from all over the world to collaborate with us. So it was a very strange group of filmmakers, we were from 15 or 17 different countries, the whole crew and cast. Putting this thing together, stuntmen from Bulgaria, Thai director of photography, an American production designer, Spanish Brazilian makeup artist, you name it. The atmosphere behind-the-scenes was this fun, mixed world of filmmakers that then all came here to make this very specific vision.

I just spoke to John David Washington and he told me that there were like seven languages being spoken on set. He said it was very interesting because everyone's working towards a goal, but everywhere you turn, there's a different language.

FILOMARINO: Yeah, and also everyone has a different set of problems to solve because the Greek part of the production had their own, the Italian part of production had their own. Then when they spoke to the others they had to speak in English, and so it was very messy in that sense, but I find that to be interesting and fun because we all share the same language at the end of the day, which was cinema. We all rooted for finding the best way to make things happen on that rectangle.

What do you wish you knew on the first day of filming that you now know?

FILOMARINO: Find a more aggressively efficient way to sleep at night.

I can't imagine what it's like as a director because you're stressed all day and then you come home and you're immediately stressed about what you need to get the next day.

FILOMARINO: Yeah. I have to say what was even more stressful and tiring was the prep because we had an unusually short prep for a movie of this type for a number of reasons. There, we literally started working at seven or eight am and then ended at eleven or midnight. Then you have to go to dinner, you have to eat something, so whereas when you're shooting, there's at least some rules to follow in terms of timing. So that really crushed me in terms of sleep and stress. It oddly got better as we shot the movie, but it remains a very secret, important element of filmmaking…finding sleep.

I've spoken to a lot of directors who tell me that like a day after they wrap principal photography, they get deathly ill.

FILOMARINO: It's very strange. I had a very interesting end of the film because we had left behind some what you would say, traditional second unit stuff to shoot, some road scenes and everything with just cars and stand-ins. But I shot those. So when we wrapped with the main crew and all of the cast and everything, I actually went on a road trip with a small crew and we shot those scenes and it was a nice sort of coda. I guess, as my sort of exit, very soft and more contained than, of course, the void.

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What I found shocking was I spoke to Alicia for The Green Knight, and she told me, and I could not believe this, that she did all of her scenes in two days.

FILOMARINO: That's right. She flew from Ireland on Friday night, woke up on Saturday, we shot, then went to sleep, then we shot on Sunday and then woke up on Monday, we shot some scenes Monday morning, and then she left to go back to Ireland to continue shooting Green Knight. That says a lot about her by the way.

She's fantastic in the footage, but if you had told me how many days was she on set, I would have been like a good week or two.

FILOMARINO: You want to know something else? She and John David had never met before.

It's crazy.

FILOMARINO: And yet they look like the perfect romance to me.

They're fantastic together. I have to ask you though, when you found out you had her, which is great because she's such a great actor, but were you wondering if you could get all you needed out of her in two days? That's not a lot of time.

FILOMARINO: Yes, but again, the privilege of having Alicia in the film, and the baggage that she can bring, and the instantaneous energy that she brings to the screen, and the potential I thought she could have with John David was so rich that you had to make it work one way or the other. We were shooting somewhere else in Greece entirely, and everyone traveled to Delphi, which is where we shot the scenes with her, and then we shot the scenes with her, and then we traveled back and finished what we were doing, basically losing almost two full days of shooting because when you travel, you pay the crew. So if you can get that magic on screen, it's all worth it.

Also if you don't have that setup, I mean, she is the setup of this movie; if that doesn't work, it's game over.

FILOMARINO: Absolutely. To me, this was so important because the context of the beginning of the film is more that of a drama. I wanted to make sure that we experienced this thriller through a dramatic character. I thought that for that to work, we should start in that genre and not in a thriller. And then the thriller kind of hijacks the movie. In that sense, also to establish who Beckett is and what is at stake for him, the difference between him and his girlfriend, April played by Alicia; they had all of that to deliver into first scenes. And like you said, that kind of sets up everything that has to do with who he is, and that is obviously central throughout the whole film so we had to nail it.

You met with John, I believe, right after he had filmed or right after BlacKkKlansman had come out. So before he had booked everything else. I guess you kind of won the lottery, casting him, because now he's such a bigger star than he was when you originally met with him.

FILOMARINO: I mean, to be fair, I think BlacKkKlansman was aside from already obviously being a film that will stay in history, definitely was a big revelation in terms of John David's potential. It was obvious that he was going to do something great. Yes, I did win the lottery because I was able to meet him and he responded to the material, we had a beautiful meeting. All I met was an amazing human being, an artist who has very specific taste, reacts to very specific things that have to do with character. And he reacted to the unusual things about the character, which of course I loved and the conversation was great. Then, while we were shooting, we discovered, oh, he's going to be in Nolan's next film, which happens to be this humongous project. I was like, okay, that's amazing, that's awesome, but there we were doing our little, sort of intimate, dramatic thriller. His range, both as a performer and I think as an actor in general, the way he thinks about cinema, he has all my admiration, and in the way that he can do both those things.

Yeah, he's what we call talented. You originally had a different title for this film. Can you sort of talk about where the change came from. Was it Netflix saying we want it to be called Beckett? How did the change happen?

FILOMARINO: Well, we had a conversation about what would be the most efficient title. Of course the character, like we said, is central to the experience of this movie, that's what we experience everything through. There's no omniscient gaze on the happenings of the movie. Everything is him, all the scenes are based on him. He also has this very specific name to him, so it just felt the most adequate, and represented the title for the film.

I'm fascinated about the editing process. I love talking about it because that's ultimately where the film comes together. Did you have originally a much longer cut? Was it pretty much what you shot? Can you sort of talk about editing the film?

FILOMARINO: It wasn't much longer. I worked with Walter Fasano, who I have worked with for both my first short film and my first feature film and other projects as well, documentaries and things. The amazing thing is that he is one of the most talented people I know, has an immense knowledge of cinema, and we had an amazing, perfect synchronicity and understanding, and we always find ourselves agreeing on, in terms of taste, of what needs to be done. On the basis of this, he retired to this house in Tuscany in the countryside, and just put it all together. It wasn't much longer at first. We actually cut, of the shooting script, only one scene was cut. Then some things were trimmed down, some scenes are shorter, as is natural, but only one scene is gone from the movie.

I want to talk to you about Greece, because there are so many shots in the movie where I'm just blown away by what's in the background, the locations you got to film at. Can you sort of talk about using the country, it adds so much because you're actually on location.

FILOMARINO: To me that was central, finding a very strong sense of place and realism. It would inform the tone in a very important way, in my opinion. So after the decision of setting the film in Greece, I traveled around all of mainland Greece. I was interested in seeing areas that are not known to international cinema so I avoided the islands, I avoided the idea of that golden summer and just went in the mainland and just opened up to discovering whatever felt right on the requirements of the story, but also what just felt interesting enough that we would change the story and adapted to what that place was. Because, to me, when you're running for your life and people are chasing you, it seems only fair that everything that's in your way becomes relevant to the outcome. So, of course, it was interesting to find, okay, we put a river here, a train there, and all those things were inspired by driving around literally and finding the best sort of sequences to put together.

How many shooting days did you pull this thing off in?

FILOMARINO: I want to say 40, however, a bunch of those are travel days.

That's not a lot of time and it definitely doesn't look like it was a 30 something day shoot.

FILOMARINO: You know what the problem is we never shot two days in the same place. Every day involved some kind of move in any way, you woke up and you were in a different place, different setup, everything different. So it's the fun part about a movie like this, because it's constantly moving, but also quite difficult about shooting it.

Beckett is now streaming on Netflix.