Conversations with Other Women is a 2005 romantic drama film directed by Hans Canosa, written by Gabrielle Zevin, starring Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter.
At a wedding reception in New York, a man in his late thirties (Eckhart) approaches a bridesmaid (Bonham Carter) of about the same age, and offers her a glass of champagne.
Witty small talk about such topics as the wedding party and their own past relationships gradually reveals to the viewing film audience that they are not strangers, but in fact were previously husband and wife.
The emotional fulfillment the two experienced in their youth has the appearance of causing them to reflect on their current lives in comparison to the choices and options they had while much younger.
Released by distributor MK2 Diffusion under the title Conversations avec une Femme, the film played theatrically for five months to both box office success and critical acclaim.
The original split-screen Region 1 DVD version was released in the United States on January 9, 2007 by Arts Alliance America.
The site's critical consensus reads, "Its occasional use of split screen may feel gimmicky at times, but Conversations With Other Women is a bold, inventive drama carried by its two charismatic leads.
For the sex scene, the director asked the actors to stay in the bed while the crew quickly changed camera positions to get all of the coverage.
Other films shot at that location include Barton Fink, Chaplin, Nixon, The Fisher King, Wild at Heart and Bugsy.
Shots captured included views of the actors' dirty feet as they got into and out of a clean bed, which would be unlikely in a carpeted hotel room, an error that was not caught by the script supervisor on set.
In order to address the problem, the visual effects supervisor rotoscoped the bottom of the actors' feet to delineate the parts of the frame that needed to be replaced.
The song "J'en connais" accompanies the opening title cards and the juxtaposed narrative images, and then recurs in the final scene through the end credits.
The sex scene is played to the song "Ripchord" from the 2004 album More Adventurous by the Los Angeles-based rock band Rilo Kiley.
The visionary French director Abel Gance used the term "Polyvision" to describe his three-camera, three-projector technique for both widening and dividing the screen in his 1927 silent epic, Napoléon.
More recent uses of split screen include Mike Figgis' 2000 film Timecode and the Fox TV series 24.
The classic, and simplest, example of this is showing two sides of a phone conversation, as in the 1959 film Pillow Talk starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson.
Another common use of the technique is to show two separate but converging spaces (such as contrasting shots of predator and prey) to create tension or suspense.
The resulting film presents the actors' work in the way musicians play in a duet[citation needed], with action, dialogue and reaction running on both sides of the frame in real time.