Director Petra Volpe and Actress Leonie Benesch on Maintaining Tension in Their Night Nurse Drama ‘Late Shift’

Petra Volpe’s third feature film Late Shift – after The Divine Order and Dreamland – covers a crisis. There is a shortage of nurses across the globe and in the excellent hospital-set ticking-clock thriller Late Shift, Volpe displays the consequences of that shortage. The film follows a nurse named Floria (The Teacher’s Lounge’s Leonie Benesch) through her late shift (which runs from 14:00 to 22:00) on a Swiss cancer ward. Upon finding out she is only one of only two nurses on that shift, she sets about to do her job to the best of her ability but the work she performs slowly deteriorates under the strain of a relentless, unforgiving work environment. The wards various patients begin missing medication, tempers of family members flare as communication breaks down, and tragedy befalls the ward through bureaucracy and severe understaffing. 

Cinematographer Judith Kaufmann’s camera tracks Floria on her shift in long tracking shots throughout the hospital, lingering for extended periods of time on Floria preparing medication, slowly but surely showing the severity of the nursing crisis and its ramifications. With a score that fizzes with ticking pizzicato, Late Shift is a nail-biting exercise in tension. At Berlin Film Festival, where the film had its world premiere, writer-director Petra Volpe and lead actress Leonie Benesch sit down with AwardsWatch to discuss the research they undertook, how to maximise tension, and crafting a score around Floria’s emotions.

Connor Lightbody: What inspired your decision to make the film about a nurse on a late shift  rather than a night shift or a morning shift?

Petra Volpe: In the late shift, unlike the day shift, there aren’t doctors around. It was really important for me to focus on the nurses themselves. In the morning, it is very much about the rounds. The doctors come and go through the rooms and the nurses help them. I wanted doctors on the periphery of the story for once, because in all the medical television shows, it’s always about the doctors while the nurses are somewhere in the background putting in an IV, which is not really that big a part of their job actually. So the late shift is calmer in a way, but it’s still not calm as you see. I wanted to transition into the night visually because I think there’s no lonelier place than a hospital at night, for patients and also for the nurses. 

CL: Why did you choose to cover a nurse’s shift from start to finish, avoiding anything that could be seen as an inciting incident?

PV: I think this kind of focus is important. There’s a lack of nurses globally and you can tell that whole story, of what nurses face in the current world, in one shift. You can see what it really means when a ward says that it is understaffed, what nurses hear when they’re understaffed. I think you don’t need more than one shift to tell that story. You can tell the whole drama and dilemma of modern day nursing in one shift with one character. You don’t need an inciting incident as the drama is always there. These nurses won’t let anybody die if they can help it. But the drama is there because you can’t be in two places if you’re just one person. 

CL: In the film, the character throws a watch out of the window in frustration. Was this always in the script?

PV: Yes. Every nurse that I consulted with on the script told me they would never do that, but that they thought about doing such things. So this is the moment where we took creative agency and said that we have to give her this moment of release, where she’s really expressing her true feelings, like “fuck you.” So that was really important to the character. I really wanted it to be funny and releasing and really freeing in a way, I’m sure it was fun to act

CL: Leonie, how did you prepare for this? Did you have interviews with other nurses? 

Leonie Benesch: I did have access to Petra’s extensive amount of research and read through all the different interviews with lots of nurses. [to Petra] You ask them “why did they become nurses? What keeps them up at night?” and that information was invaluable. I also got to shadow in a hospital, so I could get an idea of how these people move, how they code switch when they’re talking to either patients or doctors or to the other nurses. That was really interesting for me because, basically, I had to get the choreography right of how they navigate those spaces and those relationships. And then we had an amazing medical advisor, Nadia Habich, on our film. She was there every day. She taught me how to mix medication and use syringes properly and all of that medical side that we needed to get right on screen.

CL: What other research did you do for the screenplay, Petra?

PV: I was also working in a hospital, where I shadowed three different wards. I just followed them around and observed everything. Then I read “Our Profession Is Not the Problem – It’s the Circumstances” by Madeline Calvelage, which was the inspiration to tell this really contained story. She describes, very simply, her normal shift and when I read this, it really felt like a thriller. And I thought this could be a movie. From there, I started to do the research, talk to more nurses, really trying to get a sense of “what is the atmosphere? What’s important for nurses today? What are their frustrations?” Because you read about it in the media, that there’s a lack of nurses, but what does this really mean for them when they work? Then I had a lot of doctors also consulting on all the different diagnoses the patients have. When I was writing the script, I had to start to think like a nurse because I was working the shift. When they work, they have to be really precise so I had to describe every action. I had to start to think, like, “how would I work this shift?” And for that, I needed people helping me to figure it out. And of course, the script is extremely precisely built to this escalation. There’s nothing random in it. Every movement has consequences, like a chain reaction. Her shift already starts to derail when she helps her colleague with the old lady who soiled herself. That’s where she becomes one minute behind, and that’s where her shift starts to spiral. Then the nurse colleague forgets to tell her that there is this other patient that she has to bring down, and he is dilly-dallying with his clothes. That delays her for another two minutes. So everything is consequential. And this is exactly the experience nurses have. Every little step has consequences. Like the young nurse forgets to do something. It has consequences for her. I really had to analyze and find out “What is their dilemma? How can I dramatize it?” And I realized it is their work that is already dramatic. 

CL: Your debut film, Dreamland, is 98 minutes, while your second film, The Divine Order, is 96 minutes. Late Shift is 92 minutes. Did you always envision this to be around about that 90 minute mark?

PV: Yes, I wanted it to be really razor sharp and crisp. And I think that with a lot of movies nowadays, there is a lot of vanity and lingering. And I really don’t like it – I like 90 minutes. I think it’s really great because you can engage for 90 minutes emotionally. It’s very immersive. But if you go longer than 100 minutes, you have to have a good story to tell and not just be vain about getting rid of some of your scenes. I also like theater plays that are 90 minutes, without the break. I love it. So I’m trying to always be disciplined and really think about the essence and tighten up what is already in the script. Of course, you always need a little more film for the editing, but I’m very strict with myself. My producer too, because he doesn’t want me to shoot anything that’s too much. It cost a lot!

CL: You and your camera follow Floria around the hospital for an eight hour shift. How do you refine that down to 92 minutes?

PV: That was really a big challenge because the things she does need to look authentic. So that’s where Nadia [Habich] was very important. How can we consolidate and shorten certain things Floria does as a nurse so that they still look authentic, but are not overlong? So there was a constant process of figuring out the timing of how to tell a story that feels like eight hours, but in 90 minutes. That’s just a lot of decisions about where to focus, where to shorten and where to go long, where to put the ellipses and where not to do that. For example, when she’s preparing medication. We really wanted to show how long it takes to go to the pharmacy and prepare a syringe. It’s not done quickly like in a television show, where there will be a cut and she comes back instantly. It’s really that she has to go in there and she has to find a certain medication, and prepare it.

CL: Some actors want a background story for their character to help them get into the character. Did you get anything like that here, and is background something you enjoy receiving?

LB: I love no background. Bill Nighy said it beautifully in an interview: “all I need to know about the characters in the script.” And I love that. I think that was definitely true here. I don’t need to know any more than the audience does in order to understand the acting challenge in front of me.

PV: We approached the character very physically. We saw her like an athlete, but she’s a nurse who wants to do a good job.  She’s not an idealist. She’s pragmatic, she doesn’t come to the world with an agenda. She doesn’t have psychological problems. She doesn’t do it because she has some power issues and likes to be powerful over her patients. No, she’s motivated because she loves her job. But you’re never good enough, because the system doesn’t allow you to do a good job. That’s how we approached the role. I found it really refreshing to work with Leonie because, in the beginning, I tried to give her background and she was like, I don’t need any. I was like, Thank God. So my direction was just “you do this and this and this, and you’ll figure it out”. And that was really great for us.

CL: You mentioned deciding when to go long or when to go short. What motivates your decision to choose which shots will be long takes and what were the logistic challenges of navigating the set in those moments?

PV: I aimed for maximum tension in this. I thought “How can I use the story to create maximum discomfort and stress?”. Because that’s what Floria feels. That was always the goal when writing, then directing, and then editing. That informed our decisions on how to really milk the drama of the story, which is really that you can’t be in two places at one time. As she’s losing control of her shift more and more, it’s really stressing her, and she only starts to be stressed because she can’t do the job anymore. And so they were chosen to really maximize that effect. That was a thing that was very important for the editor and I to figure out. As well as composer Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch [All of Us Strangers], who is amazing. Her music really adds a lot to this increasing stress

CL: Her score is really good. There’s a lot of ticking clock within it but what I found quite interesting is that there’s no end goal for that ticking clock. It’s just going to be the end of a shift and then it’ll keep on ticking. What were the conversations you had about constructing that score?

PV: It was an interesting process because Emilie works with the character. So with Floria, it was her physicality, her movements, the way she started her shift. These were what guided the music. It was also clear to us that there should be one motif. The patients don’t have their own music motif. It’s always about Floria’s emotion, and the sadness in a scene is not the sadness of the patients. It’s the sadness of the tenderness that she can’t really express because the time is ticking. So the music is completely tied to Floria, and so the more stressed she gets, the more she feels like she’s being ripped apart, the busier the music gets. We saw it almost like a bolero piece that gets more and more and more frantic.

CL: Much like The Teacher’s Lounge, Late Shift is a very stressful movie. Do you bring any of that stress home or are you able to separate from the work?

LB: On The Teachers Lounge and on Late Shift, we finished early almost every day. It was quite a relaxed, lovely atmosphere on set. I don’t usually bring a lot home with me. I think about it as a craft. I don’t look into too much of the psychology around it. But in this film in particular, I arrived very exhausted from the year before so I did underestimate how much some of the patient stories would get to me. I found myself quite exhausted from it but I don’t take that home.

CL: There’s such a variety of different backgrounds to the patients themselves, most noticeably a rich man who has a private room, while others share. How do you choose what kind of patient you want to represent, and how do you cast for those patients?

PV: So casting was one thing, but writing them was harder. I really wanted to have a ward with all ages. So it was young people, old people, very sick people, not very sick people. A wide variety, because it’s almost mirroring society. They are from all over and they’re all culturally different. It was very important to have that kind of mirror effect, that everybody could find themselves in somebody. So they’re based on research, but also my own personal experience, my personal fears and things like that. And it was very important that I cast people that are not really known in Switzerland or Germany. Very few of them are known within television, because I didn’t want people to watch the movie and think “I know this person from that show”.  I wanted people to forget that they are actors. I wanted audiences to see them like patients, that they could be somebody who sat next to them on the bus. So they had to be as normal as possible. And for that, we had to do a very big casting and really find the hidden talents. People who work in small theaters in Switzerland or haven’t done a lot yet. I love to discover new talent. That’s one of the fun things of it all. When casting, there’s always people I discover who nobody has ever cast, and then all of a sudden they’re given the perfect role, and they can shine. And I really like that.

CL: Leonie, how did you come on board this?

LB: I was sent the script, and then we had an audition. 

PV: I had Leonie in my mind for a really long time, but I tried to cast other people because I just wanted to look at a lot of people. And then I think you also didn’t have time so you were the last person we spoke to. I think we did an audition on Zoom. I remember that you stepped into the frame and you delivered the first sentences on Floria and did some gestures, and I thought I was seeing Floria. It was really magical for me, because you were so natural. I just believed you immediately. Then we were lucky that you had the time

LB: I was actually on a charter flight from New York to Telluride with Ilker Çatak, the director of The Teachers Lounge, and you called me on the Wi-Fi to tell me I was cast. 

CL: What’s next for you, Leonie?

LB: I’m shooting a TV show called Prisoner in Cardiff in a few weeks time, which I’m very excited for. 

Late Shift premiered at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival. It has yet to secure U.S. distribution.