Interview with Marion Burger & Ilan Cohen

“Emperor”: poetry of aphasia

The idea of a Land of Aphasia is rather anecdotic. When my father tries to explain something to me, he is pointing his finger, saying “it’s closer” or “not far”, or “right there”. It’s like a kind of GPS trying to point me in the right direction. So I really feel I have to follow him through a landscape as if navigating a map that keeps changing.

After experiencing “Emperor”, my father’s speech therapist told me that she was shocked because it was really what she felt when she was trying to enter her patients’ worlds. Each person is different and each person has a personal relationship with the language. Every landscape is different.

Izabella Adamczewska-Baranowska: “Emperor” was the beginning of your love story.

Marion Burger: – We met on the set of a feature film. I was a production designer, Ilan was first assistant director. We fell in love and decided to work together because we had so much in common.

Ilan Cohen: – Before we were a couple, she told me she had a project about her father. It was fascinating because she was approaching it from a place of intuition and emotion first, but it didn’t necessarily have a shape. We were exploring many ideas and at some point I brought up virtual reality because I’d had an experience writing a VR project that never came to be, but I had it in mind. It seemed to make perfect sense. Marion’s compulsion to tell the story felt pure. There was never a question about the content. We would be trying different things, and Marion would see if they fit her sensibility or not. It was just an iterative process.

Marion, Emperor is rooted in your personal experience because of the story of your father, his stroke and his aphasia. When it happened, how old were you?

Marion Cohen: – I was 21. It was summertime, we were on holiday with my parents in Provence. It was very traumatic in a way, because in one day my father lost the ability to speak. And so I lost a part of my father. I never had an adult relationship with him.

I realized that some years after the incident. What I missed was not really meeting my father as an adult. He was there and, at the same time, he wasn’t there. It felt very unfair to not be able to share things with him. I started to think that I needed to do something to understand him – maybe not through language, but in my own way, learning to see little things as signals, as clues of his story. So I began – like a journalist – just trying to understand: scientifically, medically. I attended some sessions to observe my father’s speech therapist because I wanted to know what aphasia really is. I noticed that there are some poetic images in the way he 

. Sometimes you have moments of fun just because the situation is completely absurd and he’s telling things that sound completely crazy and sometimes you laugh just because the situation is so absurd. But sometimes you notice there is a method to his madness – the words he chooses, even when they’re not the right ones, have some emotional meaning. As though he was attempting to communicate through personal emotional memory.

Did making “Emperor” help you to understand your relation with your father?

Marion Burger: – Yes, it was therapeutic for me. We did a lot of work in shaping the relationship over time between “the father” and “the daughter”, by progressively making it more personal.

We haven’t been close in a while. When you are 21 year old, you’re not much connected with your parents. That’s why there was something very heartbreaking about the timing of the stroke, I think. But even so, it was important to us to hold back on the emotion throughout the experience as much as possible.

“Emperor” is a very intimate daughter-father project. Ilan, what was your role in it?

Ilan Cohen: – I was the therapist [laughter]. I pushed for digging deeper into the personal nature of Marion’s story, arguing it would make it more universal. But we also had to sometimes step away from the reality, in order to best communicate the story and the emotions to the viewer. In the end, it was a balancing act to make the experience both personal, and universally relatable.

We start the experience from the daughter’s perspective, and then shift to her own interpretation of her father’s experience. We were co-writing and co-directing the whole time. I could say which parts of her story felt the most relatable, and point to the ones which felt unnecessary. In the end, it’s a combination of deep personal truths, with some imagination – we were always looking to find the right balance to create an efficient narrative and emotional journey for the audience.

Marion Burger: – I was very shy of sharing something too emotional or too personal. At times, I felt that some things were too much to share. In such cases Ilan was telling me: “No, I’m very interested in this and I want to hear that”. It was very helpful to have someone who offered a sense of objectivity.

Ilan Cohen: – Very early on we shared a clear idea of what it was going to look like. And we kept saying that with this unfinished, black and white aesthetic, we could get away with a lot of suggestion because the user is going to fill it in with his own projections. We were always very dependent on the aesthetic to help balance certain questions.

Marion Burger: – For example, the face of the daughter is not there, it’s blurred. I didn’t want to show something that seemed too real or too personal. And partly because there is a kind of weirdness in the characters in VR, like an Uncanny Valley.

During our festival we are also presenting “Turbulence. J’amais vu”, an XR experience about vestibular migraine. The narrator is Ben Joseph Andrews who suffers from this condition. Marion, you don’t guide the users with your voice. But instead, you decided to hire professional actors. Why?

Marion Burger: – I needed some distance just to be able to direct someone. Besides, it’s very hard to listen to your own voice. I’m not an actress.

Ilan Cohen: – “Emperor” is not a documentary. We knew that there was something powerful about the medium. We kept using the phrase “immersive empathy” to define it, because instead of seeing through someone else’s eyes, you embody their point of view physically. Nevertheless, it only works if you carefully curate every aspect of the experience, and we realized we had to direct very carefully. That’s where professional actors come in.

There is a scene in Emperor when a daughter is sitting in front of the father and she wants him to write something down. It was very frustrating for me to play the role of the father facing the demanding daughter. Maybe you, Marion, didn’t want to take this anger upon yourself?

Marion Burger: – No, I could have handled this just because it’s really what happens. I can be very soft and nice, but it’s still my father… 

Ilan Cohen: – The reason I was drawn to the story is because it felt very universal. I could imagine myself later on in life with my parents, even more tired and confused. I think that the reversal of roles that takes place is something that we can easily project into. Think about your parents having difficulties with the Internet or with a computer that you have to handle over the phone: they make you insane and it’s the same for everyone. The easiest way to play the immersive empathy was to put you in the position of someone who’s frustrated and someone who’s chastising you and the impatience is growing.

Marion Burger: – Dealing with aphasiac people is difficult. You have to be patient, really patient. And it’s not easy. I’m always imagining the frustration of my father – sometimes he’s angry about himself. That causes changes in his personality, because he’s always fighting against something that doesn’t work for him. When you’re in his place, you feel you’re doing the right thing, even though you are not. It was very hard to explain, so we used it in the exercise to help people understand that the hardest part for people with aphasia is that they think that are using the right word , but they still cannot be understood.

We should explain to the readers that maybe they don’t know what aphasia is, how people with aphasia feel and how they react.

Ilan Cohen: – There are several types of aphasia, but generally what it means is that your language filter is jumbled, and so you can generally decode properly, but you can’t encode properly, or you might encode incorrectly. So as you formulate your thought into a word, you use the wrong word, you misjudge many things based on language, and it becomes very complicated because you think you’re using the right word, but you’re not. And from there you progressively lose the ability to communicate with people, because unless you work really hard, it doesn’t come back – and it gets worse.

What I like in “Emperor” the most is that you present the problems with language as something artistic. When he is confusing words, the father discovers the poetic function of language. He is making metaphors. One, for example, is the duck. Marion, you sat in during your father’s speech therapy. He had a card with a picture of a duck. Instead of saying “the duck”, he pointed at you. That confused the therapist. What was the link between you and the duck?

Marion Burger: – In French, un “canard” is a duck. But it’s also the act of dunking sugar into a coffee and eating the coffee-soaked sugar. When I was a child, we lived near the sea. My father would always order coffee by the sea, and I would always ask to dunk my sugar in his coffee. One day, years later, I attended my father’s speech therapy sessions to see how they worked. She asked him to do an exercise: he had to make her guess a word only he knew. The word was “duck”. But instead of saying things like “bird”, or “animal”, he pointed to me and spoke of the beach. And coffee… The speech therapist was confused. But I understood him, because of the shared memory! It was like he was making an emotional connection with me…

“Emperor” is translated into English and German. It must have been difficult to keep the effect in translation.

Marion Burger: – Thankfully Ilan is completely bilingual. So he was able to translate it as close as possible.

Ilan Cohen: – For many years I was a translator for film and grew up with both languages. We prefer the term “adapt” to “translate.” Sometimes, you have to step away in order to get closer. Sometimes it just works better to do something else that evokes sort of the same vibration of understanding an experience from a linguistic concept, even if it’s not the same sentence or the same image being used.

With the “duck” example, we got quite lucky because the word “duck” and the verb “to dunk” sound so similar – so we had the little girl say “Daddy, can I dunk my sugar?”, and it fit right in…

How about this bottle of wine and the fish?

Marion Burger: – In French, “vingt-huit” (“28”) can sound a lot like “wine-trout” if you just add an “r” between the two words. It’s just because my father did this once with his speech therapist. We wanted to use it because it was a nice example of the absurd poetry of aphasia. It was like a number that becomes a fish-bottle. This mixing of objects was really what I had in mind when I was with him at his speech therapy classes.

These word-mixtures are visualized in “Emperor”. You explained it in one interview like this: “We use objects like words. We make objects like my father would make words, like there’s one of this and one of that, and it doesn’t mix together. To him it seems correct, but it’s not.”

Of course, it’s partly because you chose VR, but maybe also because, as a set designer, you tend to think in images.

Marion Burger: – I think it’s because we wanted to take a step away from reality – this enabled us to recreate, to retranslate the problem somewhere else. But you’re right, I really do sync with images so when I was writing the project, I took some pictures and put them together. It is similar with metaphors – all this poetry conjured up images that we wanted to explore.

Ilan Cohen: – The next step is also very important: we had to find a way to deal with language through eyesight and gesture, because those were the tools at our disposal. We had sound, visuals, and this added dimension of gestures from VR. It became a tool for creating an approximation of the sensation of the handicap. It starts with the writing and ends with using one’s hand to attempt to say things.

But in a way, it’s very accurate from what Marion’s father goes through. He’s so frustrated with his inability to say the right thing that he spends a lot of time gesturing and not really attempting to talk anymore. So what happens? You show pictures, you make gestures. Just trying to communicate without words.

Like a visual dictionary.

Ilan Cohen: – It’s just like everything around you can be useful.

Yes, I asked this question because I saw a photograph when you started to work on “Emperor”. There were many things on the desk, but it all looked like unique sensory art installation designed to engage the viewer and create an experience rather than just an object to view.

Marion Burger: – I need to make an identity of a story, because I’m used to reading a script and then making the worlds around the words. But sometimes I find one object – a truly conceptual object – that becomes the main idea, a symbolic object.

And in “Emperor”, what was this object?

Marion Burger: – A hand – pointing, showing the way. We end the project like that. It’s a link between people.

The warmest and strongest connection I have with my father is when I touch his hand. He’s not very tactile and emotional, but when he does that, the moment becomes incredibly intense, just because he can’t say anything.

I like the way you put instructions for the person who experiences “Emperor” into the story. The user learns how to do it during the experience. It’s very nice.

You also gradually unveil interactive features. The more a user goes into the father’s memories, the more he’s able to use his body again.

Ilan Cohen: – Yes, this was a very conscious choice: to slowly build up the interactive features. So you start in the present, physically handicapped and unable to act the way you’d like to, and bit by bit, you unlock more personal memories, each bringing you a new toolset: riding a sled, standing up and pulling buried objects from the ground, teleporting… We wanted the experience to reward you with new features as you progressed through its runtime.

Why you chose the journey and why aphasia is shown as a land in your work? Is it because I read various memoirs written by people with aphasia, and very often the experience of regaining the ability to communicate is described as a trope of a journey where one has to a way through uncharted territory.

Marion Burges: I haven’t read that anywhere. The idea of a Land of Aphasia is rather anecdotic. When my father tries to explain something to me, he is pointing his finger, saying “it’s closer” or “not far”, or “right there”. It’s like a kind of GPS trying to point me in the right direction. So I really feel I have to follow him through a landscape as if navigating a map that keeps changing.

After experiencing “Emperor”, my father’s speech therapist told me that she was shocked because it was really what she felt when she was trying to enter her patients’ worlds. Each person is different and each person has a personal relationship with the language. Every landscape is different.

She told me that sometimes she worked with an autistic child that hid under the table. So she joined him under the table and waited. She entered his world, trying to get him outside.

She said that sometimes, people are far away, as though lost in a forest. And her job is to try to bring them closer to the clearing. I realized that this is exactly what happens with my father. He is pretty lost. Now, as a very old man, he doesn’t want to leave his place and talk anymore. He’s lost in the woods.

So from your perspective, it’s a journey to some foreign country of aphasia. But from his perspective, I think it is maybe a journey during which he has to find himself in all new circumstances. I’ve read some medical studies on how aphasiac people use metaphors to describe their lives and journey and battle are the most frequent metaphors. Did you chose “Emperor” as the name for your VR project because of a battle?

Marion Burger: – We explain it at the end of our project. One time, several months after his stroke, We were wondering, my mother and I, what he wanted to say. We couldn’t understand. And he was screaming still. I thought he went crazy, and I was scared. But then I took it as something fun and light. It was the first moment of levity since the accident. And also afterwards, when I think of this moment, I was feeling like it’s really him trying to control his world just because my father would be quite authoritarian before. He still doesn’t want to lose control. He still wants to be a part of the world and just to be able to choose what he wants, say what he wants. So he still has the power, pointing his finger...

I was thinking about “Emperor” in the context of filial narratives. I mean memoirs about fathers and daughters, about fathers from the perspectives of daughters. And the motif of the king is very frequent, for example, in Susan Faludi’s “In the Darkroom”. Or in Joanna Wilengowska’s “King of Warmia and Saturn”.

Marion Burger: – When you are a child, you feel that your parent is like a huge statue: someone solid, who seems unbreakable. My father was also an authority figure, and this word “Emperor” suited him very well in a way.

We had a title before we started the project. It was the first thing. We like to have a clear concept, because it gives us a direction. So with this metaphor, you also have an environment: like the ruins, which can be connected to an emperor. But then again, there’s some reality in that because my father was fascinated with archaeology. He did a lot of travels with my mother to see ruins in all these sites in Greece and Italy. So everything was linked. We tried to build as much as possible from who he really was because it gave more emotional investment and it was easier to find a universal truth within something so personal.

When we started working on “Emperor”, we were trying to invent things completely, but it always felt a little off. Something being lost. And when we went into a bit of truth and translated it from a documentary into a poetic interpretation, it felt truthful again.

For example, my father was also a military. That links to the idea of power. He was a parachutist. That’s why we have a falling-down-scene in “Emperor”. At the end of the experience you have a photo of him, in a parachute. And there are all the other photos that connect to the details unique to the experience, drawn from his real life, that can justify all these links.

While we were working out what the project was about, we realized what the main topic is: what’s left of a man’s life when he has no ability to share his life with others anymore. What’s left is his memories and – in this case – the interpretation of those memories by someone who’s curious about them.

That was the reality of what we were doing and what we were trying to convey: the links that remain, beyond language. The links that still exist between me and my father, in our memories. This is why in this experience we come back to his childhood, and then we discover him as a young adult, and then, a father.

Could you tell me more about your relation with your father? Did making “Emperor” and thinking about it, make you closer to yourself? 

Marion Burger: – As many teenagers I was conflicted with him during the time when he had his stroke. It was not a crisis, but I was feeling at odds with his behavior. I was much closer to my mother. So, when the stroke happened, I felt that I had lost the opportunity to be closer to him.

He was not talking at all about his feelings and his life. He was not sharing a lot. When I started to work on “Emperor”, I came to him to ask if he was okay with this. I did it because it was about him, but much more about my vision of him, my relationship with what happened.

He understood, but when I wanted to read the script to him, he didn’t want to listen at all. I think he didn’t want to be in the middle of attention. He was showing us that he was happy that his project was going well, but he never wanted to know so much about it. And he didn’t see the project, but I think he wouldn’t be able to really interact with it.

I won’t have the adult relationship with my father, but now I’m accepting the really little things that we have together and I’m OK with that.

In “Emperor” we have three perspectives: the perspective of the father, the daughter and the user. Why did you choose this kind of storytelling?

Ilan Cohen: – For us it’s much more then two perspectives, but of course there is the third one in between. We were trying to get into the mind of Marion’s father – from her perspective.

Marion Burger: – Yes, it was of course something from my point of view as a daughter. I will never know what he feels, what he sees exactly. So it is just guessing. This is why we wanted to begin with the daughter’s point of view, just to be realistic. We are going through the journey in his shoes. When we get into his mind, we see his hands and then we arrive in a surrealistic place. But at the end we wanted to go back into the daughter’s shoes, just to finish with the idea that everything that is presented in “Emperor” is much more about the daughter. We can never really know how he feels.

Ilan Cohen: – For the third POV, that you were talking about, I think there is an element of missing a fourth wall, but unlike theatre, they are actors in the play themselves. From a mise en scène perspective, this is an interesting tool to play with. I think our approach to this toolset is connected to how we see art in general, which doubles as how we see value in interactivity. Not just physical interactivity, but also metaphorically: in our opinion, leaving space for the audience to fill in the gaps is inherently very interactive. We like it when the audience has to work to complete the picture. It makes them relate more deeply, and more personally to the experience. The relationship that you create with an imperfect representation of reality strengthens your relationship to what’s being said in the work of art. It was very important for us to not have things that were too specific, too self-evident, too well-defined – that you had to look around, that you had to make connections on your own. And I think that’s how we thought about the third POV. Of course we don’t control it, but we could control how the user interacts with it. Being very sketchy and minimalistic was a way to preserve not only the intimacy of Marion’s story, but to help make the experience more personal to each viewer.

Cello music is very intense.

Ilan Cohen: – “Emperor” has a heavy topic. We chose to really try to be very careful how much emotion we would let through. And it helps having unfinished images, suggesting the father’s mind is a work in progress. The experience feels like it’s unfinished, and I think that creates a bit of distance.

Not having color also creates a form of distance. We also experienced using the wrong sound design for certain actions or objects, and emphasized having a lot of silence, a lot of white space. It helps create a distance and then we can control a little more carefully what you’re paying attention to and also it helps us shape the tone, by being highly selective with what is being conveyed. In this case, a certain dryness was desired. It’s easier to control humor because you’re always waiting for something to happen, and if it’s something funny, you don’t see it coming. And so I think it was just using a palette of tools that would help us control tone and to be careful not to divulge too much emotion too easily.

I think we didn’t want to fall into the trap of doing something too sentimental. But to get back to the music, we also had two very talented musicians, Jamie Freeman Turner and Gaspar Claus. Gaspar is a cellist – and the cello is a very intense instrument, like you said. Although the cello is very present as a discrete presence throughout the experience, it’s more for sound design than music – until the end, when we save the real emotion for the finale.

Who did the drawings?

Marion Burger: – Artistic director Daniel Balage. We came to him with a very precise mood boards and references. At the time nobody was doing this kind of design. When we arrived with our mood boards of charcoal, everybody was looking at us like “maybe you will have to change your mind”. But we couldn’t imagine it any other way. It was very exciting to try to make it possible, because there was a lot of pushback initially – everybody was saying that it’s too white.

Ilan Cohen: – It’s really white. Everything in VR at that point was very dark. But we had solutions – our base white is actually only 60% white. It still feels very bright. Your eye will think by measure of contrast that that white is pure white. And so we actually had a very low level of white to start with. So it’s not blinding you. It’s not aggressive on the eyes, but it feels like you’re in whiteness – but you’re actually in gray.

The fun with this medium is that you can challenge every rule. It’s still a new medium!

Marion Burger: – But also first when we were talking about black and white, we were talking about drawing things with lines. That was not working at all in 3D in the Quest, and it didn’t feel very organic. It was very hard also because there is no transparency in the Quest, and we wanted misty, foggy environments, like smoke, fog, and so on. There were lots of technical challenges.

I remember a drawing class I had where my teacher told me: the shadow makes the line, the line makes the shadow. I told Dan, the artistic director, that maybe we should just use shadows to make things. So there is no more line and we just draw the shadow, make textures for the shadow and the shadow makes the volume and then the thing exists because of the shadow. And that’s the way we arrived to this aesthetic, it’s just thinking of textures only, but textures are not complete and it’s possible in 3D because you have volumes and so you can project artificial light so you know where the shadow is going to be and then you draw onto the texture, remove the artificial light, and the volume appears.

We decided to take a step away, having something always a little bit removed to not show everything. This was a nice inversion. Instead of seeing the details, you see the shadows and you imagine the details.

This concept of shadow is also very good because it’s symbolic. Shadow is something in between. It’s liminal. There are more symbols in “Emperor”. For example – the desert.

The desert for us represents the loss and the loneliness in which my father is trapped. We use the desert as a landscape of different textures… sand, snow, water, depending of the memory we are going through: white textures transforming, shifting and flowing to reflect the memories we are experiencing.

You were talking about white – that it shouldn’t be aggressive. I think that in “Emperor” white should be aggressive because this is a kind of experience that should cause some difficulties. Just as white-out causes disorientation.

Ilan Cohen: – I think that white is neutral and the content of certain scenes are going to take you to the places that offer where it becomes peaceful at times and aggressive at others.

As soon as we add music to a scene, it becomes threatening or intense. But just as easily it can become peaceful. It’s like entering into a disappearance, everything is very gentle and you find yourself in a memory. It also works well for evoking the snow. Or, in black and white, sand! So we played with that obviously, the way that blurs. That was fun to play with.

Marion Burger: – Our idea was not to frighten, but to reveal an anxious feeling. But one of my uncles, when he saw Emperor, was very uncomfortable. He didn’t like to be there. But he has a very specific psychological connection to my father. The surrealistic vision, the disappearing background – it scared him.

Ilan Cohen: – We were looking at other projects in VR at this time. They were overwhelming by details or by lots of things everywhere…

Yes, and this is distracting. You cannot concentrate on the story when you have too much around you.

Ilan Cohen: – Exactly. It’s a challenge to direct attention in VR.

I’ve read an interview in which you told that many people stop listening. They just cannot concentrate on the narration because we live in a visual culture.

Ilan Cohen: – In VR your brain immediately wants to play. And we realize that the experiences that didn’t let you do anything for a long time are very frustrating. We knew that we had a long story to tell. So we were very nervous about starting with so much story and no interaction. And that’s I think why we came up with the idea of having the menus and even the credit sequence being interactive, so that you start by doing fun little interactive things, and it’s sort of a promise that we’ll get into this stuff later. And then the mind can focus on the beginning of the story. I think that was helpful because there’s always temptation to move around, to try things, to knock things over. And if someone’s telling you something very emotional in this moment when you’re just playing with things, it doesn’t work.

Did you read about how memory works? I’m asking about it because I’m thinking about the structure of “Emperor”. There is a session, and then there are the memories from school childhood, college, adulthood. Is there any hidden sense in this seemingly chaotic structure?

Marion Burger : We did research in neuroscience, I spent even more time observing my father. And I often realized that he used words connected to shared memories to tell me about something specific.

I became aware just how much our choice of words is shaped by our personal experiences and the connotations we give them.

In Emperor, we’re trying to understand who is the man behind the father. Who he was before he had a stroke. And with the daughter, we gradually retrace his memories… from his childhood in Vosges on a sled, through his Baccalaureate exam tackling a philosophy question, his first parachute jump as a young soldier, the birth of his daughter, her growing up… fast, too fast, their distance and their bond that withers away, through answering machine messages and missed calls… until that day in August when he had a stroke. The earthquake that shook everything.

The structure of Emperor has three parts. In the 3rd part we retrace the father’s memory and his point of view – in a symbolic and surrealistic way.

Tell me about feedback. What people told you after experiencing “Emperor”?

Ilan Cohen: – There are different kinds of feedbacks. Lot of them are emotional. We knew that it was an emotional project, but didn’t expect so much. We realized that this story connected with many, many people who had gone through the same kind of stuff with their parents. Not really aphasia, but all kinds of medical problems, alzheimers, aging... It was very emotional for them, but also the medium is very strong, much stronger than classic cinema. People use their body and they are just exhausted by emotion at the end. It’s all about the immersive empathy. That’s why I came on board: I truly believed this was a story that was important to experience in VR.

You want “Emperor” to be experienced by caregivers, for example, people who work in medical centers.

Ilan Cohen: – “Emperor” reminds the user of the complex life inside someone seemingly lifeless, and that was what we discovered as we were making it.

When we were initially looking for financing, including insurance places, and we talked to some doctors, they were very excited about the concept. They were the ones saying it’s terrible, but sometimes you are so caught up in your job that you lose sight of the human being behind the patient.

Marion Burger: – I’m thinking a lot about it right now. My mother is still taking care of my father, but it’s harder and harder because of the age. Maybe we will have to put him in the nursing home. Someone with a personality, with a story, won’t be able to connect with anybody in that place and he will be very alone. So that’s why we try not to do this. The problem with this kind of disability is the lack of connection with people. My father would like to still be himself and not just a body…

What was the most challenging in making “Emperor”?

Ilan Cohen: – So many things. VR is so complicated and very frustrating. We didn’t know so much about this medium when we started.

VR is, let’s say, avant-garde of 21st century. Ilan, you told in one interview that – comparing to film – it’s like a Wild West for pioneers.

Ilan Cohen: – There’s still things to challenge and to see for the first time. Maybe an impossible problem is no longer impossible a few weeks later. We love to experiment.

The biggest obstacle we had probably came from the fact that when we made Emperor, the general perspective from professionals in the market was that everything had to be made for the Oculus Quest. And this was a big limitation compared to using a more powerful system. We had to make all of our ideas work inside a limited system at a time where a lot of things had not been made readily accessible. And so there was a lot of problem solving and optimizing and compromising to get close to what we wanted.

Marion Burger: – Also interaction with the hands was hard at the beginning because everything was so new, and the type of hand gestures we wanted were very fine and sensitive .

Do you work now on new VR piece?

Marion Burger: – After finishing “Emperor”, I felt an emptiness. It took five years. It was strong and so personal… I had to digest all of this and then see if I was able to do new things. But now I have maybe a seed of an idea that I would like to develop, I don’t know the form yet, it must have to fit the subject.

Ilan Cohen: – I have other projects, not necessarily in VR. There was one VR idea, but it proved complicated to get financing for it. We both really believe that a project arises out of an artistic necessity. If you feel something is important and true, you find the right medium for it.

We chose VR because of the project, not because of VR. My newest idea was more of a video game. It really is about distilling an idea into an experience for the user to live through your ideas. And so you’re just setting things up, hoping that they’re going to see this and feel this and hear this, and it’s going to create this in their head. And I think it’s the same way when you write a script, when you direct a movie, when you make a play. You engineer the architecture for an experience. I think all these things are pretty much the same instinct, so we could end up doing any of those.