Gold

In the summer of 1898, a small group of German immigrants set out on a journey to Dawson City to find their fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush. The mostly inept travellers include a snobbish, mercenary news reporter, Gustav Müller (Uwe Bohm), who intends to report on the trip for a New York-based German paper, an older couple who take care of the catering, and a poor carpenter (Lars Rudolph) looking to make a better life for the large family he left behind in the city. Joining them at the last minute is Emily Meyer (Nina Hoss), a stern, self-reliant and hands-on divorcée, who soon turns out to be the most driven member of the group, willing to push ahead at all costs as they trudge deeper and deeper into a menacing wilderness, forging through dense woods and across raging rivers. Though determined and sensible, Emily’s focus seems to shift slightly as she starts talking to Carl Boehmer (Marko Mandić), the charismatic (and only competent male) packer and horse guard, who eventually confesses to her that he is on the run after killing someone.

The man who claims to be able to lead them along the rough and steep way is shady businessman Wilhelm Laser (Peter Kurth), who holds their money as well as their hope in the form of some gold nuggets he insists were found at their aimed-for destination. But not only is the group badly equipped to handle the gruelling terrain, the tension between them soon gets the upper hand, and the accidents, injuries and mental exertions of their dangerous adventure gradually minimise their number as they move on.

Carefully constructed, weirdly chaste and slow in pace, Thomas Arslan’s Gold is essentially a German-language Western with a fierce sense of authenticity at the expense of action and drama. It’s beautifully shot and benefits in no small part from Arslan’s meticulous eye for characters continuously in motion, here carried by yet another remarkably restrained performance from Nina Hoss in the lead role. As precarious as their trip across uncharted territory may be, Emily’s certain of one thing – there is no going back to her old life, no matter where their journey comes to an end.

Pamela Jahn talked to Nina Hoss at this year’s 63rd edition of the Berlin International Film Festival in February, where Gold premiered in competition.

Pamela Jahn: Although the film is labelled a Western, it feels more like an adventurous road-movie at times. Did you approach it that way?
Nina Hoss: Yes, I think so. It’s much more about the path, the journey, than big shoot-outs, or whatever else you consider to be in a classic Western. Of course revenge is a motive, and there are other elements in the film that you find in a typical Western, but the plot is more like an adventure, or a road-movie with horses, maybe.

Have you ever shot a rifle before? What was it like to brandish one?
I learned how to shoot recently for a vampire movie I did, so it wasn’t all new to me. But it was exciting, because you don’t really get to shoot much in German movies unless you’re playing a detective or a cop. And what helped me with my role here is that Emily comes from the city, and she is going on this trip and experiences something she’s never done before – like she doesn’t know how to handle a gun, she doesn’t even know how to ride a horse. So she is learning all this throughout their journey, and I could learn with her, which took some pressure off me and made me feel more comfortable with the situation.

The film also tells a part of German history that probably no one really knew much about…
That’s right. I think this was actually part of Thomas’s personal approach for telling the story. I mean, we all knew that, at that time, there were lots of Germans emigrating to the United States and Canada, as they did from many other countries. But it’s interesting to see this group of Germans trying to make a new life for themselves, whereas now Germany is considered a place where people go to in the hope of making a better living.

But looking at it from today’s perspective, we all have to go on that path again in a way, because no one knows really how this financial crisis is going to end. So it was interesting for me to tell a story that shows that there is always hope. Even if you forget about why you’re on this path, and you don’t know whether you’ll ever see real gold in your life, the only thing that counts is that you keep on going. And maybe throughout that journey you change, which is what happens to Emily. She becomes more and more free and confident and self-fulfilled, and that is already a success.

What was the most challenging part for you during that journey?
It was a tough project, because it was a low budget movie, so as actors, we really had to deal with the horses all day long in between shooting. We did have two wranglers, but they couldn’t look after ten horses all at the same time. So whenever we took a break from shooting, we had to stand around with the horses. I wasn’t used to taking care of them at all. Horses get very tired after ten hours, just like us, and then it becomes dangerous because they do things you can’t predict – we had several dangerous moments. So for me, working with the wranglers was like a therapy of some sort, because I learned how to always stay calm for the horse. As soon as I got somehow excited or angry or tired, the horse would react immediately. So you always had to be in this ‘om’ zone, which was an amazing experience for me. I never thought I’d say this, but what impressed me most was the work with the animals. I really had to work hard to make it through the shoot. At the end of the day, we weren’t professional riders. I learned to ride a horse especially for this film, I had never done it before. But I wasn’t afraid… just very respectful.

There comes a moment in the film when Emily has to make a decision whether she wants to go on or not. Was there ever a moment in the process of the production where you, or Thomas Arslan, thought, ‘Stop. That’s it. I am not going any further.’
There was one moment when we were really worried that we had to stop. We were shooting in the Fraser River Valley, and there was only one gravel road out of the valley. Otherwise, you had to use a ferry to get on the other side of the river, but this was also miles away from where we were. One day we heard helicopters flying around and we couldn’t shoot because of the noise they made. And then suddenly we heard our producer through the walkie-talkie saying, ‘You have to stop immediately and leave…now!’ And if a producer says that, you know that something really bad is going to happen, because it costs them a fortune to break a shoot. So we tried to stay calm and started packing, and all that with these horses. So we had to guide them up this tortuous road to where the trucks were parked. And as soon as we got to top of the hill we realised what was happening, because we saw smoke, and then the fire. So we had to rush out of this valley through the fire, literally. Like there were trees falling down around us and what not. So we thought: ‘Oh god, will we ever make it out of here!’ But also, the question was really whether we would ever be able to go back to the set. We lost a couple of days because of this fire, but luckily we were able to return and finish the shooting.

Do you actually have a favourite Western movie?
I love the John Ford movies, which I first saw when I was still a kid. But I watched one recently that I hadn’t seen before, which is Monte Hellman’s The Shooting, which is really an incredible Western because it’s so simple in terms of the story and even the way it is shot, but extremely effective – I loved it!

Was it difficult for you to swap directors and work with Thomas Arslan instead of Christian Petzold? Is there an open conversation between those directors, who constitute this particular ‘Berlin School’ of filmmaking?
It was an exciting project for me, but not because I ‘left’ Christian Petzold for this film, as I have worked with other directors before. But what was interesting, first of all, was the fact that Thomas Arslan, as a German filmmaker, takes on Canada to make a Western. As a German actress, I never dreamed that I could ever be part of a Western. So this was very tempting. And of course it was also interesting for me to experience a different kind of working relationship with someone who comes from the same background as Christian. Christian knew before I did that Thomas was going to cast me for this role, because they are friends, so Thomas wanted to make sure that wasn’t a problem – which I think is a bit odd, because of course we can all work together. Christian thought it was great, because he had this idea very early on that there would be a big ensemble around these Berlin School directors, like a pool of people who work and develop things together. But he’d realised that wouldn’t quite work out because all of these directors have big egos. So I was quite excited that it was sort of happening, but I am also already working on my next film with Christian again, which I am looking forward to.

How do you and Christian Petzold work together as a team? What is your working relationship like?
I am always as prepared for my next role as one can possibly be. I already know all about it because I am part of the process, not necessarily of the writing, but of constructing the story. So I get the first 20 pages of the script and then the next 20 pages… I am very much involved and so I can go on that path with him. I can do my research and read the books related to the subject, which means I don’t have to hurry up to prepare right before we start shooting. So I am really in an ideal position with him.

Interview by Pamela Jahn

Watch a clip from Gold:

Peter Kubelka (New York, 1967)

It was meant to be the highlight of the London Film Festival’s Experimenta Weekend last October, but a broken projector prevented Austrian avant-gardist and experimental filmmaker Peter Kubelka from presenting his ambitious Monument Film project – a double projection of his works Antiphon (2012) and Arnulf Rainer (1960), back to back, side by side, as well as superimposed. Both works explore the four cinematographic elements – light and darkness, sound and silence – effectively stripping cinema down to its bare essentials as well as offering ‘a countermeasure to the dominating emotional motion picture’ (Jonas Mekas). What’s more, Antiphon literally presents the answer to Arnulf Rainer: what was white before is now black; where there was sound there is now silence. Monument Film is a response to what Kubelka describes as the ‘hostile takeover’ of analogue cinema technology by digital media, and hence might be best understood as a ‘last call to dogged resistance’. This month, Kubelka will be back in London to accomplish his endeavour, which he himself considers to be a culmination, the grand finale to his cinematic labors.

Pamela Jahn talked to Peter Kubelka about the essence of cinema, stealing films and losing friends when making them.

Pamela Jahn: You once said that you’ve lost most of your friends because of your film Arnulf Rainer. Why did you decide to produce another film, which is the polar-opposite version of it, as you’ve done now with Antiphon?

Peter Kubelka: To be honest, I love it when people enjoy my work, but I don’t really care if they leave the cinema. My intention when making films is not a wish to entertain, but rather that of a scientist who does his research. I use my medium – though use is also a too-cool word in this sense – I love my medium, and I use it as a ship to go on a journey to places that I haven’t been to, or nobody has ever seen before, and whatever will be found there is fine. I made my film Arnulf Rainer without having a precise idea of what it would look like on the screen, because I couldn’t project it or look at it on an editing table, because I had no means. I was very poor back then. And as with almost everything, when you are poor, you are more courageous because you have nothing to lose.

But to answer your question, I am overjoyed when people share my satisfaction. But if they don’t, I won’t change my mind because of this. And if some people leave now when they see my work, whether it is Arnulf Rainer or Antiphon or Monument Film, that really gives me pleasure, because it proves that they can evoke a reaction from the audience even after more than 50 years, when so-called ‘art’ has turned into something that is closer to social entertainment, where people accept anything, and it has practically become impossible to get people to admit that they are shocked, because they really don’t feel it anymore, or worse: they don’t care. People are not really interested in what it is they are experiencing any more, they just participate in the social epiphany. But again, I never really had a relationship with the public. I work for myself. And I strongly believe that if I do the best I can for myself, according to my standards, then other people will understand my work, and stay.

But particularly the people you worked for in the beginning didn’t share that opinion. Your first films Adebar and Schwechater were originally commercial films that your clients – a Viennese bar and a brewery – refused to approve.

I consider my position towards the commercial side of cinema, and by that I mean commercially produced films and the industry around it, as that of a parasite. I had to fight a lot in order to squeeze out some pieces of hardware and material for my work. Again, in a way, it’s a very similar position to that of a scientist or explorer, in that you have a wish, or a strong ambition, and in order to get where you want to be, you need to have some sort of a relationship with those who pay for the medium. And the only way I thought I could do this was to become a criminal – I stole all my films. I accepted commissions, but then didn’t really execute them in the way that those who paid for them had anticipated. But what gave me the moral assurance that I was right was to believe that I gave them something that was much better than what they really wanted. So when I worked in the 50s, I had that same attitude.

Were you sued by the brewery, Schwechater?

Yes, I was sued and I had to leave the country. I went to Sweden and worked as a dish washer and god knows what else. It was the only way for me to survive. Schwechater was very influential, so I couldn’t stay and work in Vienna. Even the film lab would no longer do prints for me, because Schwechater was their client and they would tell me: ‘They pay us a lot of money every month and you are nothing. You just create problems because your films are so difficult to print with a thousand cuts in one minute, so go away.’ All in all I paid very dearly for my films, because I lost all my friends, I lost my social and my work environment many times. I lived about 14 years of my life without a clue how to survive until I came to America and started teaching.

Which partly explains why your entire body of work comprises barely 90 minutes of actual film, but you have become a very well-respected lecturer around the world. What do you teach your film students, or your audience, about filmmaking based on your own experience?

Well, I am very strict in declaring that what I do in my films has nothing to do with what I say in terms of my authority. When I talk about my films, I do it in a way as if I wasn’t the maker of these films. And when the films are fresh, as my new work is, I actually talk very little about them, because the verbalisation is of course a completely different medium, and it takes some time to digest what you have done in a medium that, as film does, excludes the medium of speaking and excludes literature, for example. On the other hand, the whole spectrum of what the human being is experiencing in its conscious life is bigger than what one single medium can show. It’s a fact that music is a very important medium that is extremely rich in content, but this content remains within the medium. No one is able to fully explain a piece of music to people who haven’t heard it. It’s like the phenomenon of ‘deaf-mute’. If you are deaf, you are mute because you don’t know what speaking sounds like. So, it’s practically impossible to translate the content of films like mine into another medium like language. So what I do in my lectures is to try to help people to find a non-verbal entry into my work by leading them into my thinking. For me, speaking is just another medium I exercise. It’s not like the filmmaker translates what he has to say. In fact, for me the phrase ‘what do you have to say’ already expresses the dictatorship of language over all the other media which now exist. So, in essence, my lectures are ‘talk’ work, which I have pleasure in exercising.

What was your main intention when making Arnulf Rainer and, subsequently, Antiphon?

Arnulf Rainer is the logical consequence of my previous film travels, so to speak. It’s like when Schönberg started 12-tone music: he didn’t invent it as people always say, rather it was a logical consequence of musical history up to that moment that opened the door to 12-tone music. In the same way, Arnulf Rainer uses the most simple and essential elements that constitute the medium of cinema, namely light and the absence of light, sound and the absence of sound. These four elements are the bare essence of cinema, you cannot go beyond that.

Do you differentiate between the absence of light and darkness, for example?

No, but I prefer the absence of light in this context, to take the thoughts of a person who hears the word ‘darkness’ away from its other connotations, for example, fear or even a romantic kind of darkness. It’s a more neutral way of saying ’darkness’. I don’t want to work the spectator’s brain in that way. Again, it goes back to an essential situation of the human being. We have our senses and with their help we react to changes in the situation we are in. In fact, every sound is the message of a movement, of a change in situation. And that sound is a warning that wakes us. We start to analyse the situation in order to decide what we will do, how we will react, and if it is actually necessary to react. But the important thing to understand is that the change in situation is what makes us feel that we are alive in the here and now. And since the earliest days of mankind, there is a desire to artificially create such moments, to create a ‘now’ experience, like clapping hands, for instance. And then comes, let’s say the artist, who extracts the element, who uses those ‘now’ moments, and by this intensity and rhythmic condensation, ecstasy is given to the audience. So when I made Arnulf Rainer my intention was to use these most simple elements of cinema to create this ecstasy for the movie goer, for the people who cannot dance, and drink or take drugs or party for days, but quite the opposite, they sit very well educated in their cinema seats. In a way you could say with Arnulf Rainer the pole of the cinematic universe has been reached, the point of its most simple form of existence. But it might not be as clear when you look at the film alone. Its counterpart, Antiphon, which I have now made, completes the work in that way. It’s comparable to the philosophy of yin and yang in that both films complement each other to create a whole. This is what I was trying to achieve with Monument Film.

Did you need to go through a process in order to come to that conclusion, or did you always intend to make Monument Film after Arnulf Rainer?

The idea was already there in the very beginning, and it was first of all an economic question at the time. But then, all my metric films are only prototypes, where I realise only one phase that defines that kind of cinema. For example, in Adebar, I had already had the thought that light and darkness should be equal, and I achieved this by showing all the elements in positive and negative for the same amount of time, so by the end of the film, the screen has received the same amount of light in all its parts. So this was my first metric film, an idea that I then followed up with Monument Film. And another point is important here, which is that with Monument Film, I wanted to create a memorial to cinema that explains the materiality of film.

How would you describe your idea of a cinema?

For me, the idea of a cinema is a machine, not a place of entertainment. It’s a machine that has the aim to bring the work of the author to the public in the least disturbed way. And my model of a cinema is the interior of a classic camera, namely complete blackness, where in the place of the lens there is the screen and in the place of the negative in the back of the machine is the brain of the author, represented by the projector and the film strip, and in between is darkness. So the ideal cinema for me would be a black space in which you don’t even feel that there is a space. You should only feel that it’s black and the only element of reference would be the screen and what happens on the screen. As for my films, I call my cinema normal cinema, I make normal films and the industry makes commercial films. The real filmmakers are those who work for a result without compromising.

Interview by Pamela Jahn

Citadel

I always wondered if I would be able to offer safety and protection to those I love if confronted with the need to choose physical violence. Being an ex-cop/ex-athlete’s son, I received plenty of dirty pugilistic tactics in those halcyon days when folks didn’t bat an eye over playground scuffles. I eventually put Dad’s counsel to use on a particularly vile bully. It worked so well that my opponent’s face was exquisitely rearranged and from that point on, nobody, I mean NOBODY ever bothered me again. I knew I was able to employ similar techniques if it ever happened again and went through life with no worries. But that’s ME. What could/would happen if I needed to protect someone else? Could/would I be able to do it again? Would it be different? Worse yet, what if I was not able to deliver the goods? That’s very scary. That, I can assure you and this, I believe, is a key element permeating Ciaran Foy’s stunning feature film Citadel.

The greatest fear, they say, is fear itself and now, my fear boils down to this: What if I failed to protect? What would the consequences be? Not to me, per se – I don’t give a shit about ME, I care only about protecting those I love. How would this fear transform itself in the aftermath of FAILURE to deliver protection? These are very real things we all, to varying degrees, must deal with. They also happen to be the very things that drive Citadel, one of the best films of the year.

I’ve been blessed to see the movie a few times now and after my first helping, I’m equally blessed to have had a chance, via Skype, to interview its talented writer-director, Ciaran Foy.

Klymkiw: I was so lucky to see Citadel on a big screen at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. For me, it’s definitely a Big Screen experience and even though so many independent genre films get relatively modest big screen exposure at festivals and in limited theatrical runs for an eventually larger life on the small screen via DVD, VOD, etc., I can’t help but assume you crafted the picture with Big Screen at the forefront.

Foy: That’s very true. I think especially so in terms of the soundscape. Sound was an important big screen element when you’re going into a 5.1 sound mix.

Yes, the aural landscape, if you will, is alternately subtle and jarring, but it seems to me that your visual design always felt bigger than life and yet, in so doing, captured life and reality so much more powerfully than many similar genre films.

Yes, we had a fairly extended series of preparatory discussions about the aspect ratio and at first I was thinking in terms of the aesthetic and practical pros and cons between a 2:35 landscape or something closer to 1:85. Trying to capture Tommy’s agoraphobia was a big part of this and my initial feeling was to go wider. At the same time, I really wanted to build in much longer, more extended takes to capture Tommy’s condition. However, working within modest means you begin to realize that cinemascope-styled frames need more lights, more art direction, and that extended shots take longer to plan and shoot, especially with actors getting their marks and so on. We eventually settled on the 16:9 aspect ratio.

And of course, planning within exigencies of production doesn’t have to mean compromise, but actually allows you to use your palette in ways that are far more effective in terms of capturing what you wanted in the first place.

Yes, and though to capture agoraphobia the feeling was to go wider, I eventually agreed with my cinematographer that it was best to choose wide angle lenses and often shoot close up, using a claustrophobic approach to capture Tommy’s terror and heighten it for the audience.

Yes, even the wider exteriors felt like Tommy was boxed in amongst all those endless towers in the housing project he wanders through.

I also loved punching in close on Tommy and using the camera to allow us to be staring directly at the fear in his eyes.

The film affected me on so many different personal levels and as such, almost by extension, I couldn’t help but feel that the film was deeply personal. Did it come from something very close to you?

I tend to describe Citadel as 50% psychological horror and 50% autobiography. When I was a teen I was the victim of a vicious unprovoked attack by some young thugs in Dublin after seeing a movie. I was beaten repeatedly on the head with a hammer and threatened with a dirty syringe. The attack left me with this condition of being agoraphobic. My battles with it, my recovery and my love for genre films are all things that eventually led to Citadel. I should say that the project had a somewhat more straightforward genre incarnation, but as I discussed it with people we’d invariably get around to where it was coming from and they’d say, ‘Oh, why don’t you tell that story.’

The horror in your picture, especially the stuff with Tommy dealing with his fear, kept forcing me forward to literally move to the edge of my seat, lean forward and thrust my point of view ever closer into the image.

I always wanted to present an extreme version of a subjective experience and as I wanted to put the audience in the mind of an agoraphobic, I think I was forced – to do anything like this, really, you are forced – to do so within the realms of genre. To put an audience into the very state of being an agoraphobic, I think that fantastical genre films work best because agoraphobia itself puts you in a state that’s just so irrational. It’s an irrational fear because you’re seeing things in the shadows that aren’t there and hearing things that aren’t there, so what I wanted to do was make sure that everything was witnessed from Tommy’s point of view. In fact, I never cut to an angle that Tommy couldn’t see.

Yeah, when I first wrote about the film, I’d only seen it once and was sure of that, but for some reason, not 100% sure.

Well I broke that rule once because I figured that if I didn’t show what happens to a particular character, everyone would think he was going to come back at the end.

I’m totally crazy about Aneurin’s performance as Tommy. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it, really – you captured so many great shots of him inhabiting the role so totally that I even remember his body language in those seemingly endless shots of Tommy pushing the baby carriage through the projects.

Yes, I’ll always remember young fathers pushing baby carriages in the working class neighbourhood I grew up in. This is why it was so important to cast someone very young – someone in his late teens or very early twenties. The problem with that, though, is so many actors in that age range are so extroverted, confident and good-looking that many of them have a hard time carrying themselves the way they need to since they themselves haven’t had times in their lives to experience failure.

So how did you guys work together? How did he prepare?

Well, as it turns out, Aneurin had similar experiences as a teen with constantly being bullied, so he understood Tommy very well in addition to attending group sessions specifically with agoraphobics. It was great, really. Aneurin and I had developed a short hand about things like what would be going through your mind if you were anxious or paranoid.

I recently talked to William Friedkin about the intensity of the performances in Killer Joe (2011). He went into a lot of detail about using sense memory with his actors, and I’m like, ‘Whoa!’. Sense memory is, to my way of thinking, potentially a dangerous place to go – even for professional actors. Then again, ‘Danger’ is Friedkin’s middle name. You and Aneurin, on the other hand, had some mega-sense-memory going on – so much so that it’s in body language where it really pays off.

When I was in film school I was lucky to have access to a counsellor. One thing I’ll always remember is when she talked about body language. She said that when you’re scared, your body says you’re scared, but if you walk through the worst area imaginable and look like you know where you’re going, the thugs, the street predators don’t see you. What they see is fear. I remembered that and thought, so what if there was a creature that was blind, but could see fear? That was the original predator I sketched out in the early versions of the story. That’s what really began that weird fusion of escapist films I love, the iconography and the experience I grew up with.

Well, it takes a lot – and I mean a lot to scare me when I’m watching horror movies. The constant tension inherent in both the mise en scène and the performances contributed to a movie that frankly scared the living shit out of me.

I do think that the entire shoot contributed to that also. The shooting was chaotic. Locations would be lost at the last minute and new ones found that I’d not even seen before going on set – everyone was anxious. There was not a lot of time to do many takes and we had to do everything possible to keep up the pace of shooting five pages a day. In the mornings, we’d all be in the zone – a totally paranoid state because none of us ever had time to get down from it. The tension was there morning, noon and night. It really affected everything. The thing that was scaring me to death was continuity. Shooting in Glasgow, snow fell when we least expected it. We’d shot a good chunk with no snow, but luckily we were at a point where it was relatively easy to come up with the notion that it snows overnight while Tommy is sleeping. Oh, and with all the snow – Glasgow is a hilly city and often the ice made it useless to get the trucks to some of the locations.

I can understand the positive effect this would have in terms of capturing what you needed to, but how do you practically get through all this?

Your crutch is your storyboard and it’s always your storyboard that gives you this sense of confidence that if you shoot what’s on the page it will make sense in the edit. When certain locations became inaccessible and we had to change them, I’d often have to throw storyboards out of the window and that was scary. When I started to see the rushes, it was a great boost to my self-confidence.

I’ve had the good fortune to work with many filmmakers who do use storyboards and just the process of creating them and knowing all the shots needed to piece the film together effectively was always helpful when they invariably needed to be tossed. Storyboards are springboards you can use to launch yourself into uncharted territory.

Absolutely, even throwing them away, they still had a use. I remember thinking about Citadel as being a dark, twisted version of Dumbo (1941) with Tommy as our baby elephant who meets a mentor character who gives him a feather, a placebo, and it’s a crutch. Furthermore, even for myself as a director, I’d use the character of Tommy as that feather and the storyboards have a similar placebo effect. I held them so close to my chest and they were my placebos to shoot the film. If I’d gone in without them it would have been a disaster. I actually learned to enjoy going on set not knowing what the location was, winging it, but sticking to the rules of the story and the approach to visuals that the storyboards helped me design.

What’s your first truly indelible movie experience? Were there any movie epiphanies?

Without question it would be the first movie I was taken to, Return of the Jedi when I was five years old in 1985. It was a mind-expanding moment, I loved the idea of being transported to a place I could never see. I was raised on Spielberg, Lucas, Zemeckis, Verhoeven and genre in general – being transported to worlds that didn’t exist. I was 13, though, when I realized it wasn’t enough to just visit other worlds you couldn’t visit. I got this sense of wonder from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) where I started to ask, ‘Why do I feel like watching this movie?’ It was then that I decided I really wanted to make films. It was feeling empathy with the character. Whether awe, horror, terror, wonder, humour, sadness, catharsis – every emotion I had watching that and other great movies expanded through character. The more real it feels, the more empathy I had for the character. It heightens everything. Being a geek at heart, I of course wanted to make horror, science fiction and fantasy movies.

The dystopian vision of Citadel brought me back to the 70s. I’ve got a couple of decades on you, so my childhood and teen epiphanies occurred in the late 60s and throughout the 70s. Even though your film has a contemporary and only ever-so-slightly futuristic reality, there was something about the squalor of the setting and the terrible beauty of Citadel’s exquisite rawness that kept bringing me back to a bizarre reverse image of this chilling terror I experienced when I first saw George Lucas’s THX-1138 (1971).

Every single one of those 60s and 70s films had an effect on me. Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979) and The Omen (1976). When contemporary filmmakers remake films from that period, the new versions have a slick sense of production value that is rooted in the here and now, which makes them less scary. It’s the raw qualities of the 60s and 70s that made everything more real and hence scarier. I think I also always knew my first film would be low-budget – and the low budget was actually going to be essential to capturing those raw, realistic qualities that make genre films so scary.

It’s somehow a time when movies mattered. It’s nice to see movies like Citadel to keep reminding us that they still matter.

If anything, I’d have to say that the 70s are my favourite decade for horror movies.

Amen!

Interview by Greg Klymkiw

The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich

In 2009, Antonin Svoboda made a TV documentary about the Austrian-American psychiatrist and experimental scientist Wilhelm Reich. He has now returned to the subject with a feature biopic that focuses in particular on the second half of Reich’s life and work in American exile. Drawing on the depth of knowledge that Svoboda has acquired working on the project over many years, the film stars Klaus Maria Brandauer as Reich, who lends a compelling presence and dignity to his character.

Reich, who devoted himself to searching for the fundamentals of life, arrived in America in 1939, after fleeing Nazi Germany. His story is related with the help of flashbacks to his earlier career and the research that led him to a theory postulating the existence of a bioelectric life-force energy called ‘orgone’, which, according to Reich, flows through all living beings. Blocking up this force with social taboos and ideological nonsense could only lead to harm – for the individual and for society. However, his radical dream of liberating human individuality made Reich an increasingly dangerous opponent to the American system and, in 1956, Reich found himself on trial, charged with fraud and sentenced to two years in prison, while six tons of his publications were burned by order of the court. Intriguingly shot, yet not free of dramatic flaws, the film manages to be both understated and epic, leading up to Reich’s death in jail, reportedly of heart failure, only days before he was due to apply for parole.

Pamela Jahn talked to Klaus Maria Brandauer at the 50th Viennale in October 2012, where the film had its world premiere. It opens for a theatrical run in Austria this month.

Pamela Jahn: What attracted you to the character of Wilhelm Reich?

Klaus Maria Brandauer: I read the script and thought the theme was very fascinating. As an actor, you don’t necessarily play a part simply because of the character, but because of the story and the environment associated with this character. And in the case of Wilhelm Reich, I found that environment very intriguing. The story offers so much scope to express yourself because it describes not only a moment in time, but the 20 years Reich spent as an immigrant in America after leaving Germany in the late 1930s to escape the Nazis. And sometimes this relates back even to his earlier life – which you gradually learn from selected flashbacks – and the difficulties he’d experienced when he was young. Both his parents died very early, the mother committed suicide after having an affair with his tutor, soon after the father died of tuberculosis; then the Russians invaded and Reich and his brothers flew to Austria where he joined the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War. After the war, he went to Vienna where he studied medicine and became a student of Sigmund Freud, because he was also very interested in psychology and the social environment of human beings and their relationships with each other. But then he became somewhat disillusioned with Freud’s psychoanalytic method, and unlike most analysts, Reich was not content to keep silent, so he took his own path. But I think what is crucial to understand in his case is that he was not only a doctor or psychoanalyst, but a sociologist who did a lot of research on the situation of women in the 1920s in Austria, for example, because he was convinced that everything is related to everything else in this world and beyond. To some extent he was also a visionary, because he was convinced that one day somebody would prove that everything that we think, see and feel, as well as what we dream and what we imagine, that all this is ‘true’ and part of our human identity.

But instead of the freedom he hoped to find in the US, he was crushed by the American legal system.

Yes, because he was a very strong opponent of the war, of any kind of conflicts really, but most importantly of nuclear power. Although he had some conversations with Einstein about his discovery of ‘orgone’, he didn’t support the invention of special nuclear material or atomic energy, simply because it was first and foremost invented to kill people. And that’s where our film starts, in the moment that he believes himself living in a free country – an exemplary democracy, as it where – and all of a sudden he’s no longer allowed to carry out any research because he’s against nuclear weapons and also against any methods of manipulating the human psyche. So the Americans chase him, he is maligned and later even put into jail based on faked witness statements, and there he dies.

But to get back to your earlier question, Reich is only one example of many, and still there is something special about him as a man and as a scientist in the way he fought against the oppression of others, and of their thoughts. And in terms of his own work, he just wanted to carry out his research, independently and without getting on anyone’s back. That’s what fascinated me about Reich.

Talking about your work, you’ve had a remarkable career both on stage and on screen, but you always seem to remain truly faithful to theatre.

Because for me film is not more exciting than theatre, that’s nonsense. Today, as an actor, you work in television and if you have the time, you play in theatre. But when I first started, it was the other way around. When someone offered me a part in a film, back then I said, ’No thanks, I do theatre!’ But in a way it doesn’t really matter. There are people who work more in film and television, and then there are others who do more theatre – everyone has their own priorities. And of course it’s easy to think that film work is better paid, which it is, and that’s why people go for it. But if you’re a true actor, you just love doing theatre, so I don’t really have a preference.

Would you like to direct again as well?

Of course, but the two films I have done so far [Georg Elser – Einer aus Deutschland (Seven Minutes, 1989) and Mario und der Zauberer (Mario and the Magician, 1994)], I was really dying to do, and even when I watch them today, I think, ‘Thank God that you’ve done this!’ But to direct another film, I would first of all need a lot of time, like Antonin, who spent more than eight years developing The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich. Or, take Sidney Pollack’s Out of Africa (1985), it took years and many drafts to get the screenplay right and still no one wanted to finance it. And before Pollack, it was John Frankenheimer who tried to make that film. It was only because they were friends, and Pollack had worked as an assistant for him in the past, that Frankenheimer said, ‘Look, why don’t you give it a try? You’ve just had a major success with Tootsie, maybe you can do it’. And Pollack did. All I’m trying to say is that there is always an awful lot to do before, eventually, you can see a film on the big screen, especially in Europe, and in smaller countries like ours, it’s a nightmare to even just get it financed in the first instance.

Did you see parallels between Antonin Svoboda’s work on The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich and your first film, which was also shot in the English language, about Georg Elser, the man who attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1939?

It’s difficult for me to say, because Antonin is a professional filmmaker who went to film school and, originally, I was only meant to play Georg Elser in the film and John Frankenheimer was supposed to direct it. But when John came to Europe the dollar hit rock bottom, which was terrible for the production because the entire budget deflated within seconds, and then John said, ‘It’s not going to work like that, let’s just leave it’. One or two years later the producer of the film, John Daly, called me up and asked, ‘Klaus, do you still want to do that film about Elser?’ I said, ‘Of course, it’s a great project, but who’s going to direct it? Is John back onboard?’ And he said, ‘No, not John, you!’ Two weeks later I was sitting in LA trying to plan how I could make this work. So I called my friend Lajos Koltai, the Hungarian cinematographer, and said, ‘Listen, we always wanted to make a film where there is hardly any dialogue’. Because what has always annoyed me, even when I was younger, was that there is too much talking in film, as if it was literature. Film is a visual medium and is meant to express with images in the first instance, not with words. And Koltai said yes, and we made the film together in the end. But again, I am not a filmmaker, I didn’t show up on the set and said, ‘OK, focus at 45 please’. I learned all that from Koltai. I really wanted to make this film because of the story and Georg Elser as a character, which fascinated me in a similar way that Wilhelm Reich does now, partly because they were both outsiders. The difference is that one of them knew he was going to die and the other one didn’t stand a chance.

What do you feel an actor has to have these days?

I have been doing this job for 50 years now and I still don’t really know. I just found a way to do it, like others did before me, more or less, with different premises. I am artistically minded, I need literature, I need music and so on and so forth, and I can try to express other people’s words and stories in many different ways and different formats: in an audio play, a TV production, on stage or on the big screen, it doesn’t matter. The most important thing is that you’re not trying to act, but to explore something, to delve into the character. Nobody likes actors who act, not in theatre and even less in film. Anyone can recite a text or a dialogue, but it’s my responsibility to bring this person to life – that’s my duty. But in order to succeed, it has to be the deepest passion of your mind and heart to be human. And I mean you as a person! In other words: you have to know for yourself whether you call the tune on a Stradivarius or you’re just scraping a fiddle. Of course you can develop through practice, but if you don’t care about it at all, sooner or later others will. Most importantly though, and this is the real problem: art makes no sense at all. But that’s why it is so fascinating.

Are you driven by self-doubt or disapproval, either as an artist or personally?

A devout human being, who believes in God, but who doesn’t sometimes doubt, will never find that God and is a complete idiot.

Interview by Pamela Jahn

American Mary

Sexy and horrific, shocking and thoughtful, gorgeous and freakish, humorous and disturbing, American Mary sent a blast of fresh air through FrigthtFest back in August where it wowed the horror crowd. It opens in selected UK cinemas today, with the DVD and Blu-Ray release following shortly on 21 January.

Katharine Isabelle (Ginger in John Fawcett and Karen Walton’s 2000 Ginger Snaps) plays Mary Mason, a medical student whose moral signposts are pushed further and further out by financial necessity as she is drawn into the underground world of illegal surgeries and extreme body modification. The second feature by Vancouver twins Jen and Sylvia Soska, following Dead Hooker in a Trunk (2009), it is a boldly original conflagration of rape-and-revenge story, psychotic doctor/sadistic nurse characters and fetishist world with a feminist twist. Mary may indeed appear in sexualised fetish outfits, but she is no typical victim or mere eye candy. Disenchanted and angry against those she used to look up to, she uses her fine skills with a scalpel to stand up to the authority figures who have abused their power.

American Mary is a film with tremendous heart as well as terrific cinematic qualities. Complex and morally ambiguous, Mary is capable of repulsive acts, but never loses our sympathy. The body mod characters are handled sensitively, with the Betty Boop-like Beatress Johnson and Barbie-wannabe Ruby Realgirl equally grotesque, fascinating and moving. Ruby Realgirl in particular is a tragic character, provoking only violent disgust when she finally achieves the mass-market doll’s asexual sexiness she had longed for so much. In that as well as its main character’s story, American Mary brilliantly deals with the contradictions and pressures, but also the possibilities and variations, of modern female identity.

Virginie Sélavy talked to Jen and Sylvia Soska and Katharine Isabelle about the monsters of the filmmaking industry, the importance of Ginger Snaps and making a feminist horror film.

Virginie Sélavy: American Mary seems like a big leap from Dead Hooker in a Trunk (2009). What changed?

Jen: We had a little bit of money (laughs). A tiny bit more. But we knew we had no money when we made Dead Hooker in a Trunk so we picked grindhouse filmmaking, so hey, if there’s a few flaws that’s OK, that’s the style. With this one we wanted to show people that that’s not all we’re capable of. It’s more of a love letter to European and Asian cinema, especially as we’re such big fans of horror. Horror movies can be beautiful and operatic, I was really proud to be able to do that with the second film.

Sylvia: Dead Hooker in a Trunk was really to say, ‘here we are’, and American Mary was to say, ‘here is what we can do’. The main thing that changed was us in every way. When we made Dead Hooker in a Trunk we were super young, we were very ambitious, our hearts were on our sleeves, you can really see that. And then in American Mary, we’ve seen a lot of monsters, we’ve battled a lot of demons…

Jen: …and now we’ve become psychotic surgeons

Sylvia: … and we’re little bit pissed off about it! (laughs)

Yes, I read in an interview that what happens to Mary is a parallel for what’s happened to you in the world of filmmaking.

Sylvia: Very much so. It just became a little more honest than I originally intended because we wrote it in two weeks, and I was thinking, I just need to put something in there that I can relate to, and I put a lot of personal stuff in there. And when you put a lot of personal stuff in a film, it’s more than just you who sees it. It was nice to have that kind of dialogue because I know a lot of working women come into contact with a few monsters, even working men, and it was nice to hang those monsters up in a storage locker.

American Mary can be described as a rape-and-revenge story to some extent. Did you want to bring a fresh spin on that sub-genre?

Jen: I think the way we shot it was definitely something we wanted to put a spin on. And to say that it’s rape-revenge, I think that Mary went through a lot of things in the film that kind of tear away at her, and no one event is more than the other: having to compromise her morals with the surgery at the beginning and then the surgery with Ruby, and then finally those two sacrifices that she makes to continue with her medical profession, and then she finds out that the people she’s idolising are not exactly what she was hoping for.

But most rape scenes are shot to be completely gratifying to men, and we even had some notes, ‘you’ve got to make sure that Katie’s tits come out at some point’, and we said ‘absolutely not’ because then, not that I have something against nudity, but the main thing that everybody would be talking about would be, ‘oh here’s Katharine’s breasts, oh my god, how fantastic’.

Sylvia: And considering how rape is one of those things that is rampant in our society, and almost shameful to even mention, if you show it in the horrific light that it is and people are like, ‘it is a very long and upsetting scene’, I’m like, ‘yeah, because if you are in that situation you don’t get to cut away’. A lot of it is on her expression and on his expression. I love watching how difficult it is for people to watch because it is realistic, it is real horror, and it is what a horror film should have.

It was a huge and welcome contrast to rape scenes in some of the films that showed at FrightFest last August. Do you feel you’ve made a feminist horror film?

Jen: Very much so. When we have films like Twilight, that go under the guise of ‘this is a female’s film’, my god, I hope that’s not a female’s film, because I think back in the dark ages a woman defined herself by who she’s with, and men defined themselves by what they do professionally, and to go back to pining over two guys, what about your own life? The writer of Twilight said that she was a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which just blew my mind because this is a very self-assertive woman who is in charge of her own destiny with some guys in the background. We also took the crap of why doesn’t Mary leave with the guy at the end, or why does she not get the guys to fight her battles for her. I think there is such a lack of women fighting their own battles that are portrayed in films.

Sylvia: Yeah, it’s an agenda of making women seem weaker and subservient and I just couldn’t stand that, especially after the horrific event that happens between her and her mentor, people are like, ‘why doesn’t she cry?’ And I’m like, ‘how many movies have you seen where something horrific happens and the female character is crying and then calling someone else to help her?’ No, I don’t want to see that anymore.

Katharine, do you feel you play a feminist heroine in the film?

Katharine: I absolutely do. I’ve done a few horror movies and it’s absolutely refreshing. The character of Mary on paper has no redeemable qualities. She’s not that pleasant, she’s not that kind, she has no friends, she has no family. She’s very narcissistic and self-absorbed, and that was refreshing in itself. I tried my best to make the character likeable without sweetening anything, without dumping any radical rigid feminist plotlines and themes! (laughs) I think it was the most true-to-life character that I’ve ever had the opportunity to portray because all the time in film women are, like Sylvia said earlier, those sort of easy bake kind of cookie images, like the slut, the tease, the good girl next door. And to have a character that was so multi-dimensional, that didn’t have any particular redeeming qualities, but was still likeable, was still strong, was still interesting and stood up for herself and gave not one fuck about anyone else, or what anyone else thought, or what anyone else expected of her, is something that I think we need to see more of in film and in society in general.

You played another very important horror female character in Ginger Snaps. She was also something refreshingly new.

Katharine: Yeah, I’m really blessed to have been given those two girls, Ginger and Mary. In Ginger Snaps, I was 17, I didn’t know what the hell was going on. But that’s what she says in that movie, a girl can only be a bitch, a slut or the girl next door, or something like that. And it kind of came full circle for me with American Mary, it’s like maybe that’s what would happen to Ginger if she didn’t end up being a werewolf – she’d be a weird psychotic surgeon! (laughs)

Sylvia: That’s really interesting because when I was a teenage girl Jen and I were called the Fitzgerald sisters because we were so similar and dark, and that movie got me through a lot of things, being teased a lot, mocked, and I got a lot of strength from those girls. And now you’re playing this next decade of a same kind of power female – now I’m going to have to write a forty-year-old! (laughs)

Jen: We actually have a forty-year-old housewife role…

Sylvia: It’s fun to see that, because you were not only a big part of my growing up as a teenager but a lot of girls growing up as teenagers, and to get you to do this next step is really interesting.

You deal with body modification in a complex and sensitive way. What led you to set the film in that world?

Sylvia: We wanted to have people from the real-life community: they don’t take off their horns, they don’t put their tongue back, they don’t change, it’s their life choice. And more often than not people are going to judge them because of this choice of how they feel more comfortable in their own skin. This is probably the first movie that just focuses on the body mod culture and I wanted to have a good first introduction. I wanted to have respect for the people who looked over the script, the people who came from the society to actually play themselves and be authentic, and it was my goal to do these people a proper representation. And some people will always be ignorant but I hope it educates and shows that these are just people, just like if I got a Mohawk it’d still be me, it just doesn’t change anything.

Jen: You’d look cute with a Mohawk.

Sylvia: I’m going for it.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Watch the trailer:

11.25: The Day He Chose HIs Own Fate

‘If we value so highly the dignity of life, how can we not also value the dignity of death. No death may be called futile.’ – Yukio Mishima

In 11.25. The Day He Chose His Own Fate, one of his last completed films, the late Kôji Wakamatsu turned his attention to the final years of Japanese writer, critic and nationalist Yukio Mishima, who espoused traditional values based on the Bushido code. On 25 November 1970, Mishima, along with four members of his own private army – the Tatenokai – went to the Self Defence Forces headquarters in Tokyo, tied up the commander and took to the balcony to call upon the assembled military outside to overthrow their society and restore the powers of the Emperor. When he was jeered, he returned inside to commit suicide, leaving behind a set of controversial writings, including short stories, plays and novels, and a mystery that echoes to this day.

Pamela Jahn took part in a group interview with Kôôji Wakamatsu after the premiere of his film on Mishima at the 65th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in May, where the film premiered in the Un Certain Regard section, to find out more about Wakamatsu’s take on Mishima and the reasons behind his actions.

Question: What was your motivation for making the film?

Answer: I first thought about it when I was shooting United Red Army. There is one scene where the Red Army marches during a very strong blizzard and it was actually a real blizzard that we were facing at that time when making the film. The Red Army was a formation of left-wing extremists. But I knew that there were also right-wing activists, young people who wanted to change the society just as much, even at the cost of their own lives, like Mishima, who formed his private militia – the Tatenokai, or ‘Shield Society’. I felt that portraying only one side of the whole spectrum wouldn’t be sufficient and that I should depict both extremes and I decided to make a separate film about the Tatenokai. First it was just an innocent joke. I’d tell my actors on the set of United Red Army that my next project would be on the extreme right for a change. But I knew that making these films in a row would be rather hard on me, so in the middle, as a sort of easy play, I shot Caterpillar . Both films turned out to get a very good audience and attendance that provided enough money for 11:25, and also two other films, Petrel Hotel Blue and The Millennial Rapture.

Your last visit to Cannes was just over 40 years ago when Sex Jack was shown at the festival in 1971. How does it feel to be back here after so many years with yet another film that is highly politically charged?

It doesn’t have any special meaning or significance. The only special thing back then was that on the way back I went to Palestine to film a documentary [together with Masao Adachi], and because of that, I was labelled as terrorist and declared a persona non grata in the United States, Russia and other countries. And the Japanese government also questioned me quite severely 15 or 16 times. It that sense, it was quite a memorable visit.

Arata Iura, who plays Mishima in the film, is very well known in Japan. You don’t usually cast stars like him.

He also had a part in United Red Army and I thought he was very good in it. I got to know him as an extremely hard worker and somebody who’s able to deliver great performances with consistency. I’m the type of person who feels strong gratitude and obligation towards those who give me something. Arata was very well known already, but he agreed to do the job on my terms and follow my method. I asked him to come alone, without any manager or personal assistant. On my set I use no make-up artists, script girls or secretaries – he had to accept that. I had several people in mind for Mishima’s part, but I finally gave it to Arata. Looking at the film only reassures me that I made the right choice. I never cast stars to attract a bigger audience. To me it doesn’t matter if it’s someone as famous as Arata or an amateur. As long as you have a heart, you can act. If cinema was only about attracting audiences with star power, I wouldn’t be making films anymore.

Both films, 11:25 and United Red Army, show a deep sense of comradeship that is essential to the development of any revolutionary movement but also more generally speaking in Japanese culture.

To put it very simply, the Japanese culture is not individualistic. The focus is not on the individual but on the community. Whatever we do, we always consider our neighbours, family and friends. For example, if you’re making dinner and it turns out really delicious, it is natural to offer it to your neighbours, to share. These cultural differences between Japan and Europe or the United States may be rooted in religious concepts of Christianity and Buddhism and, therefore, some behaviours or rituals might be harder to comprehend for a viewer from outside of our culture.

The only female figure in this otherwise male-dominated film is Mishima’s wife. She’s spoken of rarely, appears in one scene and barely has one line. How do you see her character in the film?

I believe that the very consciousness of her existence was necessary for the film. During the research stage, when reading through all the materials and documents available, I found many proofs of her role and influence in the Tatenokai, even though she acted behind the scene. But for example, every time they went to a training camp, she would come along and give pep talks to the trainees. Also in the household, her presence was natural. In Japan, the wife’s position is behind her man, in the background. It would have been difficult to bring Mishima’s wife into the spotlight because she would never have stepped out. She’d support him silently, like she did. Again, that’s a cultural thing that be might more difficult to understand for Westerners.

Your name is inevitably associated with the pink film genre (pinku eiga) that first appeared in Japan in the early 1960s, but actually soon after it became popular you stopped making that kind of films.

I was the first director of pink cinema, and everybody else followed me and copied what I came up with. But their imitations were focused only on showing naked women, sex scenes and so forth. Soon after, pink cinema went down the drain and became the mainstream. There were so many pink films around that I didn’t feel it was interesting for me to continue that path. If you compare pink cinema from the time when I was active in that genre and contemporary pinku eiga, they are entirely different. All the directors who made pink films back then have disappeared with the exception of Mr Takita, who became very successful. His film Departures is known around the world. To others, pinku eiga was just an easy way to make money. They’re too scared to be anti-establishment. For me, making a film means to throw a stone at the establishment, and what happened to pink cinema is that it became conformist entertainment.

You are not only an influence on, but a mentor to, young Japanese filmmakers like Banmei Takahashi, for example. Is helping the new generation of filmmakers important to you?

It is true that many young filmmakers started their professional career on my set or thanks to my recommendation. But it was they who came to work for me in the first instance. Of course, I can help them, I can give some assistance or mental support. But the truth is, they are my competitors, or in other words, they are my enemies. But by creating my own enemies I become more enthusiastic. If one of them makes a really good film, that only makes me more passionate about it and drives my own motivation to be better. I think that the young directors in Japan today whom I mentored are my best, most inspiring competitors. In the mainstream I don’t see anyone I’d consider as such.

You are a very precise author, whose art is so particular, that sometimes it might come across as hermetic.

I think in Japan, and anywhere else in the world, there are many mysterious things. My work might sometimes seem difficult, but I am just doing what I do and I am just turning these mysteries in society, which are sometimes hard to understand, into images, into films. Each person is different, in terms of their looks but especially in terms of their thinking – there are no identical human beings. Take this bottle of water on the table in front of you, for example. It might seem just ordinary clear water to you, but there may be someone else who doesn’t perceive it in the same way, who might think it’s red. It’s not us longing to be each other’s clones, it’s the authorities, who try to make everyone as identical as possible.

You are an internationally acclaimed director but your position in Japan is still difficult, especially in terms of financing your projects.

The government does not recognise my films because in a way they rebuild the part of Japanese history they’d like to hide. My work is most problematic especially for the Cultural Agency. They hold the budget to subsidise filmmaking in Japan but they wouldn’t give any of it to me, even though I requested it many times. They’d rather fund films with far less value instead of mine, mainly because I am very straightforward and open with bureaucrats and I tell them what I think about them. But in any case, you couldn’t make a film about the United Red Army or Mishima with money from the government. They wouldn’t give a single yen for a film like that.

How do you feel about Mishima’s suicide?

People in Japan have been wondering about Mishima’s suicide for long after his death. The reactions in the public have been quite ambiguous. People talk about it according to their own imagination and equally I made the film based on my understanding and interpretation of the events. I think that Mishima had chosen the venue and time of his own death quite carefully – he died at 45. The date, the 25th of November, was also the date when one of his close friends from the University of Tokyo committed suicide. That friend was involved in a financial fraud; he couldn’t get out of it and felt so cornered and hopeless that he decided to take his own life by hanging himself.

Could you relate to his decision?

At that time, when it happened, I thought it was just stupid. I also had my reservations about his idea of creating an army of ‘toy soldiers’. I thought that Mishima, who was an accomplished writer and well-established citizen, eventually went insane. But as time passed and I went through many documents, including his writings about planning that event, my opinion started to change. I also sometimes drink sake with one of the surviving members of the Tatenokai and slowly my view changed: I came to think that actually he is a phenomenon in his own right. There are other films about him and about the Red Army, but the names have been changed. I refuse to do that, in my films I use their real names. People around me warned me that I’d be assassinated by the right-wing if I did that and I said, ‘Well, if they want to do that, that’s fine.’ But I met some of the people and I read a lot of material and I believe that I am showing both sides, the right and the left extremes of the spectrum, and that it’s a fair view on both sides. I am telling them both that they were trying to do something good, that they meant good for society, and that they shouldn’t be ashamed or live in hiding. And after I made those films, they actually thanked me for what I did. They came to see the films, they even helped selling tickets, and I think it’s because my intention is genuine.

Interview by Pamela Jahn

Sightseers

Sightseers, Ben Wheatley’s highly anticipated follow-up to Kill List, is a comedic character study starring Steve Oram and Alice Lowe as a freshly in love couple who are setting out on a road trip across the north of England, which turns into something unexpectedly darker and fatally dangerous for anyone who dares to spoil their twisted idyll.

Pamela Jahn met up with the director at the 65th Cannes Film Festival in May to talk about exploring the British countryside, romance and how women are sometimes the better killers.

Pamela Jahn: Sightseers is very extreme, like Down Terrace and Kill List, but feels more open and lighter.

Ben Wheatley: Yeah, one of the major attractions to the story for me was to get out and explore some of the broader space of England, but also in terms of cinematic space… Sightseers is much more about figures and landscapes rather than just faces in frames.

And there is more humour.

Basically, I wanted to make a comedy after Kill List, because on the one hand, if I had made another horror film, everyone would have said I am a horror filmmaker forever and that would have been bad. The door would have just been shut and locked. We also felt depressed after Kill List, because it was just so horrible and it was such a hard film to make and to edit and to be involved in. And then you get this thing when you watch a film back, and you think, oh, well, I could have made anything, and I made this. Why did I do this? [laughs] So we thought, let’s just make something that feels lighter and happier, and more fun. And the other reason why we wanted to make this film is because we wanted to do something that is much more playful and loose. We knew that the movies coming up after this are going to be much more technical and difficult, so we wanted to be able to play a little more here.

The violence is still pretty shocking in places.

Yeah, but it’s not that shocking. Like Kill List wasn’t that violent, I mean not really. It’s just that you feel it because of the emotional kick, but physically and in terms of body count, it’s not that bad.

The script was co-written by the stars of the film, Steve Oram and Alice Lowe. Does it still feel very close to you though?

Amy Jump, who is credited with additional material, is my wife, and she co-wrote Kill List and edited on Sightseers as well. We restructured it a bit from their script and took things on board that we had learned from doing the two previous movies. So this way, we brought it into the family of the previous films. We also did the editing, and there is so much improvisation in it. There is actually a level of authorship that goes on top of the script, which comes purely from us.

There’s a line that seems to run through your films, that somehow refers to the extreme, or the animalistic in human nature. What is it that fascinates you so much about that?

Talking about England – but it’s the same in all of Europe, actually – it feels to me that there’ve always been layers of reality. Beneath the pavement is the earth, and there have been all sorts of things happening here for over thousands and thousands of years, and it’s all in us. And this is what we’re trying to show in these movies, that it is only a step to the left or the right and you find this stuff… Things aren’t as modern as we think.

What is it that attracted you in particular to this couple and their story?

When I first read the script and got to know the characters, what struck me was that they’re crossing over the boundaries of society, they’re not held back by modern manners. In a way, I could have been in the film, except I wouldn’t murder anyone, but I’d probably go back to the caravan, crunching my teeth, thinking ‘gggrrrrr’. And I think there is something about watching people who actually go through to the very end and break social rules and do it.

But it’s also that kind of strange story about a couple who are throwing at each other what they like and what they don’t like. First, he shows her his darkest side, and then she can do it much better than he can, and that’s really depressing for him. So he’s crushed. I like that… For me that’s quite romantic.

Are women the better killers?

In this one, yeah, absolutely! But I don’t think she speaks for all women [laughs].

You don’t seem to be worried that people might take your films the wrong way and actually be inspired by them.

It doesn’t end well for them, so I don’t know… And I made Kill List. Jesus, if I was worried about that, I would have stopped there.

Did the success of Kill List come as a big surprise to you?

Yes, it did. But I don’t know how you’re supposed to react when that happens. You can’t really think about it, because it just chains you from doing anything else. And you can’t take any of it seriously, because if you did, you’d take yourself too seriously and that’s a disaster – it totally inhibits how you work. So I just say ‘thank you very much’ and move on. And although you can pretend that you’ve got a plan, you just end up making the films you make. This is the only way I know how to do things. In retrospect, you could look at the movies and probably slot them in and go, ‘oh it’s a bit like this and a bit like that’. But they’re never conceived like that.

Do you feel there is something particularly British about your characters or your films?

In Britain, it’s like everywhere, there are people who are very meek and there are people who are just really, really violent. You wouldn’t want to stagger around drunk on a Saturday night in a seaside town in Britain without your wits about you. And I guess there are still people shooting pheasants with shotguns somewhere, things like that.

What’s your favourite killing scene in Sightseers?

I really like Ian’s death, mainly because I like the parallel editing, you see lots of things happening at the same time, and cut to the music – I really enjoy those sequences. And we’re trying to make each of them different, but then use certain elements again for her murders and his murders.

Is there something you think you consciously have to do, or not do, if you want to be a good director?

I don’t know…But when I became an editor that ruined everything. So once you know how to edit, you’re fucked.

Have you ever been on a caravan trip yourself?

I have been camping a lot, but not in a caravan, no. And I don’t know if I will now, after sitting with a camera in the toilet of that caravan with a monitor on my lap. The caravan thing might be over for me.

Interview by Pamela Jahn

Watch the trailer:

Amour

Compared to Haneke’s earlier works, Amour stands out for its astounding sensitivity and subtle tenderness, but ultimately, the story, which centres around 80-year-old retired music teachers George (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), is no less hard-hitting. As the couple are faced with Anne’s physical and mental deterioration after two successive strokes, the film scrutinises, in a profoundly intelligent and unsettling way, the consequences of life and death, and the role that long-standing love plays when one half of an ageing couple is facing the end. As one would expect from a filmmaker as precise and skilful as Haneke, Amour is finely scripted, superbly composed, and often hauntingly beautiful and desperately sad. The quiet grandeur of the film, however, would be lost without its two main actors, whose astonishing, disarmingly honest performances breathe life into Haneke’s formal perfection in capturing the realities of terminal illness in meticulous detail. Crafted with passionate conviction and a mastery of film language, Amour is that rare work of genius: an acute philosophical inquiry that’s highly emotionally charged, but also dramatically gripping, incredibly discreet and utterly credible in its depiction of human behaviour.

Pamela Jahn talked to Michael Haneke after the premiere of Amour at the 65th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in May to find out more about one of the most exciting films this year, and what makes a great director.

Pamela Jahn: Amour is essentially a chamber play, and the apartment where the film is set feels very much like its own character. What role did the premises play for you in the story?

Michael Haneke: The apartment in the film is based on my parents’ apartment in Vienna, which I had rebuilt in a French studio. We gave it a French atmosphere but the layout is the same. When you’re writing a film it’s easier to use a geography that you know so intimately.

The film describes in a very sensible but precise way how an elderly couple deals with the ravages of old age and looming death. What made you explore that subject matter?

Like I think all of us do, at some point in our lives, I knew someone in my family who I felt very close to and who I loved very deeply. But this person had to suffer for a long time and went through a lot of pain while I had to look on helplessly. This was a very difficult and disturbing experience for me and so it motivated me to write the script. But please don’t think that because it is the apartment of my parents this is also the story of my parents. It’s not.

Was it difficult to get Jean-Louis Trintignant involved in the project? Amour is the first film he has made in years.

Yes, that’s true, but it was not difficult to get him involved. I wrote the part for him, in fact, I wrote the script for him. And he had seen my previous film, The White Ribbon, which he liked, so it was actually quite easy for me to get him for this film.

It seems like you wanted to work with him for a long time?

Yes, I always admired his work. But the problem is always in finding the right part for an actor. I know many actors I’d like to work with, but I haven’t had the occasion to offer them what I think is the right part for them. In Jean-Louis’s case, because of the theme and the fact that you are dealing with elderly characters, he was the only person I wanted to work with in this film. In fact, if he hadn’t been available, I wouldn’t have made it. Hidden, for example, was a very similar situation for me. I wrote the film for Daniel Auteuil because I wanted to work with him.

Why did you choose to make George and Anne music teachers, who have a very particular place in society?

I wanted to avoid the danger of the film coming across as a social drama. I wanted to set aside any financial constraints, because if the film had been set in the working-class environment, people would probably have thought: oh, if they only had enough money, things wouldn’t be all that bad. But that’s not true, it doesn’t matter how much money you have, the situation, the tragedy is the same. Another reason why I wrote the film for a musical couple is because my stepfather was a conductor and composer, so again, it’s a milieu that I am familiar with and it is easier for me to describe the setting with the most precision and detail.

You are widely recognised as a master of film language and the different aspects of filmmaking. What do you find most difficult as a director?

Good question… The hardest part is probably not to feel nervous in the morning when you wake up.

What do you do to avoid that?

Nothing, unfortunately. The difficult thing is getting ready before the shoot. It’s similar to being an actor just before a theatre performance. Usually, the actor is terribly nervous while waiting in the wings but, as soon as the curtain goes up, he’s totally concentrated. It’s that constant stress that you feel on a daily basis and the fear that you are not going to be able to succeed and achieve what you are looking for. But unlike in theatre, where, if you’re rehearsing and something doesn’t work out one day, you can come back to it the next day and try again, you don’t have that luxury in film. You just shoot a scene on one day and if it doesn’t turn out the way you wanted it, then it’s lost, because you have to move on to the next scene. That’s one of the disadvantages of making films compared to theatre and opera.

There is also this great story about Ingmar Bergman, that whenever he was shooting a film there had to be a bathroom nearby because he was so nervous that he needed to go to the bathroom frequently. I don’t know whether the story is really true or not but I can certainly empathise with this.

You said elsewhere that you work better with your ears than with your eyes. How do you explain this?

It’s because your ears are more sensitive than your eyes, or at least that’s the case for me. Sometimes when I look at a scene, I get too easily distracted by thousands of details. But when I don’t look, I hear immediately if there is something wrong with the sound or if somebody said something that is not quite right. There is also a simple example: if you need to loop a scene, which means if you are asking an actor to come back to the sound studio and re=record a sentence, that for some reason didn’t work out the first time around, people always think that synchronising the lip movement is the hardest part. But actually that’s the easiest part, because, as long as the lip movements match, it is credible for the audience. It’s the scenes that are off-camera, like voice-overs, that are the tricky ones because you immediately hear if the tone is wrong. In the many years I have been directing for theatre, I have often gazed to the ground while my actors were rehearsing on stage, not for the entire time of the rehearsal, but for parts of it, because I thought I could better comment on their performances that way.

You mentioned Bergman before. How much of an influence was he on you, in particular in this film?

I am influenced by Bergman in the same way that I am influenced by a number of different directors. In fact, I think it’s very important for a filmmaker to try not to be influenced by other people and rather find your own language. As an artist, your artistic equation is ultimately the result of all the other films you have seen, all the books that you have read, all the personal experiences in your life, everything really. And you should just try and do what you feel you have to do instead of asking yourself all the time what Mr X or Mrs Y would have done in that situation. But nonetheless, I think it is true that what my films have in common with Bergman’s is that they all focus on the actors, because that’s what interests me most.

When was the moment you decided to become a director?

Well, let’s say when I was 15 I was hoping to become an actor like my mother, when I was 14 I wanted to be a pianist and when I was 13 I wanted to be a priest. But as an actor, I wasn’t accepted at the academy, so I studied philosophy instead and did a lot of writing, short stories and a bit of film criticism. I was a terrible student though because I was in the cinema three times a day. Then, I went to television and became a story editor. I also worked in theatre for 20-odd years and at the same time directed films for television. And then, at the age of 46, I decided to make my first feature film. With hindsight, I think it is almost always very easy to draw some sort of red line through your biography, but I believe that in your life most things are determined by luck and coincidence, and the goals you set for yourself develop, just as you do along the way.

Why do you refuse so vehemently to offer an interpretation to your films?

If I were to explain things myself and offer an interpretation then this would automatically reduce the spectator’s ability to find their own answers. My films are offerings, I invite the audience to deal with them, think about them and reflect upon them and, ultimately, to find their own answers. I also think that an author doesn’t always necessarily know what he intends and what the meaning is behind his work. For example, I am always amazed by the many theses and books I read about myself, all of which reveal what I supposedly wanted to express in my films or was supposed to have dealt with. I strongly believe it would be very counterproductive for the audience if I were to answer the questions I am raising in my films, because then no one would have to think about them.

Have you ever been disappointed by the reception of a film you made?

Yes, Funny Games U.S. was pretty much a flop.

Would you generally consider yourself a pessimist or an optimist?

I don’t think I am a pessimist or that I have ever been a pessimistic person. If this was the case, I would only make entertainment films because I wouldn’t think that people actually care, and are intelligent enough, to want to deal with the questions I raise in my films. In that sense, I believe every so-called artist can only be an optimist, because otherwise they wouldn’t be motivated to try and ask questions and to communicate with their audience. A pessimist would simply say: it’s pointless, so I am not doing anything.

Has your motivation to make films changed over the years?

No, but that may be because I can’t really say why I am making films in the first place. Probably it’s because that’s all I know how to do.

Interview by Pamela Jahn

Alps

Yorgos Lanthimos first came to international attention with Dogtooth (Kynodontas), a comedy of obsidian darkness portraying the Chernobyl of nuclear families. Reality is twisted by the parents into a series of bizarre rituals and lurking menaces to keep the children – now adults – under their control. Reality is likewise pliable in his new film Alps (Alpis), co-written by his collaborator, Efthymis Filippou: a small group of misfits – the Alps of the title – offer their services to bereaved families. For a fee, they will replace the deceased and act out scenes with them as a way of alleviating their grief. As ever there is a sense of play but the stakes are perhaps even higher than they were in his previous film as the bending of reality leaks out of the tight claustrophobic family compound and into wider society.

John Bleasdale met Yorgos Lanthimos at the Venice Film Festival in August 2011 to talk about Alps and the elusiveness of reality, dysfunctional families and the Greek crisis.

John Bleasdale: In both Dogtooth and Alps reality is up for grabs, manipulated by your characters.

Yorgos Lanthimos: I don’t think there is reality anywhere. Films are fiction and I’d even consider documentary fiction. When you start filming something it becomes something different.

How did the project start?

We had the idea of people writing letters as if they were dead people writing to people they have left behind to keep contact. I liked the idea but it didn’t seem very cinematic so we came up with the story of someone offering the service of pretending to be someone else. This nurse (Aggeliki Papoulia, who also played the eldest daughter in Dogtooth) works in the hospital so it’s easy for her to find people who have just lost someone. We started writing scenes and dialogue. We also rehearse and improvise on set. When we’ve finished the scenes for the day, we shoot another scene that just comes to mind on the spot or we write something very fast and shoot it, and if it works, it might end up in the film. Also we might cut out some scenes that we’ve written and shot in the editing so it’s always evolving in rehearsals and in shooting.

The Alps take their name from the idea that the mountains are irreplaceable, so they are replacing the irreplaceable. Did you consider using the Himalayas as a title?

(Laughs) ‘Well, the whole thing isn’t very plausible, is it? The name makes sense but you can see holes in it. Just in the same way you can see the holes in what they are trying to achieve and so it was funny and made enough sense, but you ask one question and it’ll fall apart. You asked about improvisation. The scene of the naming of the group we shot for hours with the group asking the leader questions about why and how, and you could see that this could not hold for a long time and it was funny.

You began your career as a theatre director before making your first film. What did you gain from theatre?

What I gained from theatre is how to work with actors. I don’t have the same philosophy for making a film and working in the theatre. They’re two very different things, but theatre gave me time to work with actors.

Your camera is often claustrophobically close to the main character.

It’s really important to be focused on the most important thing in a scene. When you give time to the viewer and you stay with and follow one person it is more profound than when you show whatever is going on around them. It works for me. So, for instance, in this film I felt the need to tell the story through the nurse. So that’s why most of the time we focus on her and we see everyone else around her. If I focused on the other people, then it would become that story and we would have to deal with all of them equally, and it wouldn’t feel right.

How difficult was it to make the movie with the crisis in Greece?

It was extremely difficult even before the crisis. I’ve made all my films with an extremely low budget. My first film didn’t have any support. There is no private funding because there is a huge problem with the laws and there are no incentives for private investment. Films in Greece are funded by the Greek Film Centre, which is government money, and for many years it was extremely corrupt. Very specific directors got the money, no younger filmmakers. That means you do it on your own: you gather money from friends, you put in your own money, have lots of people working for free, ask for favours – that’s how it was for younger filmmakers and that’s how it still is. The crisis hasn’t changed much. I managed to make my second film, Kinetta (2005) with the support of the Greek Film Centre but that’s 250,000 euros, and you have to do it the same way and hope you can pay them back two years later. And then, because of the crisis things became even worse. So there weren’t even the contributions from the Greek Film Centre for Alps. We had to do it on our own with friends and many co-producers who put in 10,000-20,000 euros. People worked for free, we found what we could for free. Now, the Greek Film Centre is supporting the film, but after it is made and without the risk. It was already in Venice and Toronto.

You have symbols of authority and rebellion in both Dogtooth and Alps.

I try to do what is right by the specific story and hope people can link the things that they are watching with their own experiences and make their own conclusions. But I believe that if I tried to do that before putting the story together and thought this should be about this person’s rebellion as it connects to the sociological situation right now, the film would be a mess. It allows people to think this but not by imposing it as an allegory or something.

Your central characters tend to be women and the dominating characters tend to be men.

I do like women characters. I think they’re more complex and intelligent in general. I think there is a clichéd behaviour which tends to be male. I find it more natural to have a woman as a heroine against the stupidity of males, but next time I might do something different. I’m not obsessed.

Do you plan to make movies outside of Greece?

I have the possibility to go somewhere else and I’ll do that. It’s something I’d like to do anyway, not just because of the situation in Greece, but because I like different cultures, and places around the world have a lot to add to the films. I could make the films I make in different countries. It would change the films but that is not a bad thing. I try to incorporate into the film the whole of the energy, the feel of the place where it is happening. I try to accept it. I don’t try and make it more beautiful or shy away from it. I decided not to go against the difficulties we had. We couldn’t choose locations for houses and so we filmed in locations that a friend could give us for free. So whatever it is, I’m going to make it work and make it part of the film. With that in mind, I think it is very interesting to make films with different landscapes and languages. And, of course, with the situation in Greece and since I’ve already made three films in the hardest way possible I’d like to do something with a bit more support.

What about family situations? Families are destroyed in both Dogtooth and Alps.

But these people are very different. If you’re asking why they are troubled in this way, then the greater percentage of families are dysfunctional. It doesn’t have to be so extreme. We put them under these extreme conditions to test them. There would be no point for me to show a happy family being happy. I didn’t want to make an entertaining film – not just an entertaining film. I think the film is quite entertaining, but it’s not just that. And that’s why I choose to look at troubled families and troubled people. Not just families, but every aspect of the film is troubled: that’s what I’m interested in exploring.

Can I ask about the tone? Sometimes it seemed like you were testing how black the comedy could get before the comedy collapsed.

It’s natural for us to do it this way. Both I and my writing partner (Efthymis Filippou) have this sense of humour. And I don’t think we could ever approach it in just a dramatic and tragic way. You experience both feelings deeper if you have the contradiction in the film. Just being tragic is fake, and just being funny is entertaining but it doesn’t go anywhere. So if you succeed in making people laugh but feel awkward that’s deep. They laugh but when they revisit the film they might feel bad about themselves. People feel more engaged when there’s this more complex tone and way of watching the film. That’s also why the film is made this way: it demands that you are more engaged and you make up for what you don’t see.

Interview by John Bleasdale

Institute Benjamenta

Colonial Report on Cinema from the Dominion of Canada
Zeitgeist Films Brings Robert Walser via the Brothers Quay to North America
Greg Klymkiw Chats with the Twins

PREAMBLE

There was a time in the Dominion of Canada, on the hallowed shores of Lake Winnipeg, when a group of virile young men, the Drones, assembled at Loni Beach in the village of Gimli to pay homage to the Holy Fjallkona of Islendingadagurrin. After many days of serving the needs of their respective mothers, they looked longingly at the ‘Woman of the Mountains’, who for one of their kind, the mightily domed Magma Head, represented the dream of Icelandic nationhood. For the others, being Mieuxberry, The Love Doctor, The Claw, Squid and Little Julie, the Fjallkona was the Mother of All.

And their lives, such as they were, would be changed forever.

In 1995, the Quay Brothers unleashed their stunning feature-length adaptation of Robert Walser’s novel Jakob von Gunten and I experienced an identical sense of eye-opening to my first helping of their film as I did when I first heard, or rather, read the novel for the first time. Granted, the book and the film are two works that exist separately from each other in completely different mediums and as such, are of lasting value insofar as I believe it is possible for anybody to experience one without the other.

Ah, but what joy to know Walser when diving headlong into the Quays’ magnificent motion picture. Then again, what joy it is to know the Quays’ movie, then dive with the same headlong abandon into Walser.

The tale, in both book and film, is much the same. One Jakob von Gunten (Mark Rylance) enters into the study of servitude at the Benjamenta Institute, a school devoted to turning out the very best butlers and servants to ply their trade throughout Europe.

Alas, the Institute has seen better days – at least it surely must have – for when Jakob flings himself into its womb of servile academe, he is perplexed by its dank decrepitude, slightly surprised over the money-grubbiness of its principal (Gottfried John) and completely, utterly and wholeheartedly enamoured with the chief lecturer Lisa Benjamenta (Alice Krige).

Endless days and weeks are spent in rigorous exercises devoted to subservience. Jakob occasionally attempts to subvert this, just to mix things up a bit, but as he is drawn deeper into the spell of Lisa, her brother, the Principal, draws himself ever closer to Jakob.

Death, it seems, is just around the corner, for the Institute and its spirit – personified in one who clings to rendering all to a supine position of grovelling. Life in the Institute, such as it is, is not unlike a dream.

Like all dreams, however, it must fade.

Some will fade with it.

Others will move on.

I first saw Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life at the Locarno Film Festival in the summer of 1995. The experience was one I shall never forget. So emotional was my response to the film that I finally gave way to a physical need to respond to the beauty and brilliance of what the Twins had wrought from Walser. At a certain point, my elation caused me to emit tears of joy over their supreme artistry, which astonishingly converged with tears wrought from the profoundly moving sequence towards the film’s end when the character of Lisa Benjamenta, surrounded by the mournful humming of her pupils, fights to stave off the inevitable whilst betraying the deep knowledge that resistance is indeed futile.

This is something that has seldom happened to me while watching a movie – an almost spiritual experience of being deeply moved by the filmmaking and its sheer genius just at that salient point when the film’s narrative and themes are equally moving. It was at that point I was quite convinced I was watching a film destined for masterpiece status.

Add to this the fact that visually, Institute Benjamenta is a feast of epic proportions, with both production design and cinematography that have seldom been rivalled (in the years following its release) in terms of originality and dazzlingly sumptuous beauty. Add yet another element of perfection: a screenplay that captures the spirit and key building stones of Walser’s book with grace, humour and emotion. Add to this a perfect cast, a spirit of cinematic invention and last, but not least, a musical score of such power that it haunts the world of the film as equally as it haunts the viewer.

It has been 17 years since I first saw the film. In that time, I have seen it more times than I have counted. My most recent helping was a new re-mastering of the film by the British Film Institute and imported into an exquisite new DVD from the now-legendary Zeitgeist Films of New York for consumption here in the colonies.

The film is just as great and gets richer with every viewing. If that’s not a masterpiece, I don’t know what it.

I had not laid eyes upon the Twins since 1995. My last memory of them was sitting in some reception hall within the British Film Institute during the London International Film Festival and trying to determine on a map where my Ukrainian ancestry originated to see where it lay in relation to that of Bruno Schulz. At the time, my knowledge of my roots was murkier than it is now and I’m pleased to say that Schulz did indeed come from an Oblast next to mine and that he did indeed reside in the same Oblast for a good portion of his life and career.

Seventeen years, however, is a long time to not converse with artists whose work has infused me with such joy, so in honour of the North American release of Institute Benjamenta via the Zeitgeist Films label as well as two major programmes at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) – one being a film retrospective entitled Lip-Reading Puppets: The Curators’ Prescription for Deciphering the Quay Brothers and the other being a historic exhibit entitled Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets – please find below my conversation with the Quay Brothers on Institute Benjamenta.

Greg Klymkiw: I’m thrilled Institute Benjamenta is now available for home consumption via Zeitgeist Films in North America. I trust you were involved intimately in the process?

Brothers Quay: It was made from a 35mm fine grain and a low-contrast 35mm print both held by Channel Four and cinematographer Nic Knowland, and the two of us supervised the transfer.

I usually avoid watching such extra home entertainment items as ‘On the Set’ segments, as I find they can have the potential to remove any future magic I will derive from the film itself. That said, I trust you both approved its inclusion.

To be honest, the ‘On the Set’ segment is very small, is actually quite all right, and will help considerably in its own modest and informative way as to the location we found and how we worked with it.

Upon watching the segment, I found it moving to witness such commitment, joy and good humour from all the participants in your production, which is so important when one is creating magic. Though this phrase has sadly become a clichéd line from too many who create anything but magic, I still steadfastly hold to the belief that movies ARE magic. I think, though, for that magic to live and breathe on screen it must work its way through every crevice of the picture’s soul, ever forging new waterways and swirling kaleidoscopic tributaries. This is what I see on your set. On a strictly personal level, the ‘On the Set’ segment brought me back so vividly to the production of Archangel where my dearest Mr Maddin and I never once felt the set was anything BUT a secret playground. Am I wrong in assuming you, like Disney’s dwarves, are ‘whistling while you work?’ Is it important to have fun? Are there aspects of moviemaking that bring you back to the joys of childhood? The make-believe? The play? Even to the extent that ‘work’ IS play?

I think we were much too nervous to whistle – literally – but we did have the confidence and the utter loyalty of our hand-picked team. We finished on schedule and under budget and I think we surprisingly proved that our strain of American Protestantism was augmented by Shakerism and Amishism. In the end, yes, everyone was at full ‘play’.

Prior to writing Jakob von Gunten, Walser studied to be a servant and did indeed briefly hold such a position. When not writing, he held several jobs that one might consider to be representative of complete and total servitude. In your film, one of the most indelible sequences for me is when Jakob begs/demands for a decent place to ‘rest his head’. At least initially, this is something that clearly sets him apart from his fellow students in the servant academy (as I suspect Walser himself must have felt like when he himself toiled in similar inconsequential positions of employ).

No one wrote more beautifully about the notion of ‘freedom’, and the un-freedoms within freedom, than Walser. In real life he was a great interloper, a loner, extremely restless, a permanent wanderer and he knew hard and difficult penury but these odd jobs that he so frequently took up were there to protect and keep his writing independent. In Jakob von Gunten, he is both proud and a little defiant, but in order to explore those ‘grey nether regions’ of zero-dom he simply needed a decent place to rest his head and no doubt a table to write on. There was also an enormous element of play-acting, mischievousness, in his role as the servant, but there were lessons he learned and admired and submitted to at the Institute Benjamenta: the renunciations, the strictures.

YES!!! I do so love that notion of ‘play-acting’ in both life and movies. At times, the actors playing the Benjamenta students are infused with a quality of gentle pantomime, certainly not unlike the magical qualities of silent cinema, where performance was rendered stylistically and with a theatrical sense of projection. Granted, so much in those early days of movies came from such theatrical sources as vaudeville, melodrama, and yes, traditional British pantomime. It brought an added magical quality to the medium that, to a certain extent, is lacking in the post-silent era. (There was and is magic, of course, just rendered differently.) However, I am very interested in how so much of Benjamenta is relayed visually – I can even imagine a movie that includes music and soundscape, but where the ‘text’ is conveyed via intertitles. I find your film is so delicately, exquisitely balanced in this regard that while every element of the storytelling is infused with ‘style’ it does not draw attention to itself – you set the ‘parameters’ of Walser’s world in cinematic terms and we go with the flow. To what extent are you consciously invoking elements of ‘archaic’ storytelling and making it your own in order to serve Walser’s vision?

We promised ourselves that everything that we learned in animation wouldn’t be jettisoned just because we moved into our first live-action feature and that the dialogues were NOT going to over-dominate; that Walser’s voice would be heard but only when necessary; and that like in our animation films image/music/sound would dominate first and foremost.

The very exigencies of your production ‘parameters’ (as witnessed in the ‘On the Set’ featurette) seem to allow an even greater penetration into the realm of magic (as cinema and vice-versa). Did making the film in this fashion provide greater freedoms?

No, our first intuitions were correct when we wrote the script. We always told Alain, our co-scriptwriter, that we first had to imagine the setting first, the décor, the light, the music and sound, and only then could we safely permit one single line of dialogue to transpire. AND a lot of them were voice-overs, which allowed even more independence for the image. As you know perfectly well, to do animation is long and patient work, so you think twice and ten times when you have to do a retake. It was so joyous to ask an actor to redo a take and to see how much you could reshape a performance or have them propose something more daring. In that sense we might provoke something and then be there to ‘capture’ that moment. So we were very happy ‘trappers’. We always said that we treated our actors with as much respect as our puppets – which is clearly NOT the same thing as treating your actors as if they were only puppets.

In terms of the flow of both the film and its narrative, there is a clear emphasis on this sequence. To what extent was it of import to establish Jakob’s ‘difference’ at this juncture in the proceedings?

Yes, it was very important that early on there be this sudden unexpected moment of Jakob’s revolt. It’s the moment where he’s trying to swallow the gruel for dinner that he begins to gag and violently shoves the plate away, and then there’s a hard cut to him falling onto the floor and grabbing Lisa’s ankles and begging her desperately for his own room. But after that it all takes care of itself and we don’t make a feast of it.

In terms of crafting a final shooting script, did the process of creating this sequence affect the content that precedes and follows this sequence?

No, it was always there in the script, as it was in the novella, but it allowed for his singular subjective voice-overs to really begin to flow and to comment on the hermetic cosmos of the moribund Institute Benjamenta, the mysterious brother and sister, his fellow students, particularly Kraus, who was all important for Jakob – and for us – in terms of creating the ‘Benjamentian’ perfect zero.

Do you recall the nature of your conversations with Mark Rylance, Alice Krige and Gottfried John regarding this sequence?

No, we don’t, but for sure Lisa has already divined in Jakob the ‘Prince-ling’ who will hopefully come to awaken her from her deep human sleep with a kiss, so she’s already highly pre-disposed towards him as this mysterious interloper who’s just arrived at the Institute. It’s as though at the beginning of the film when she’s bathed in sweat and dream, she’s invoked his arrival. And of course she’s Sleeping Beauty. So there was the whole fairy tale element, which was so important in Walser’s writing, which we overlaid in the film: that Gottfried was the Ogre, the students were the seven dwarfs, etc etc. To this we added the entire fairy tale animal kingdom of deer, and that it was all set in a former perfume factory – musk coming from the deer – that the Institute Benjamenta had moved into and that it had inherited the defunct Deer Museum on the top floor.

As human beings, as artists, was there (or were there) a moment (or moments) when you found yourselves demanding or requesting or proclaiming that you needed something that would allow you to serve either your muse, the art of cinema, or for that matter, anything/anyone else?

No, not in Walser’s demonstrative fashion. But we’re all prepared to!

The Institute’s motto declares: ‘Rules have already thought of everything.’ To what extent, either historically or in contemporary terms, is there truth to this in how the world of man conducts itself?

It’s one of many placards seen on the walls of the Institute but this one so powerfully evokes an implacable dead-end-ness and that it is useless to revolt. So submit!

While I’m sure there are virtues to be found in dominance, it rather seems like an awful lot of work. Submission involves pure innocence (some might say ‘ignorance’) and the exertions of following, of OBEYING, allowing one to drain the exertions of thought and to concentrate on the matter at hand. In this sense, perhaps there’s more potential for a few ‘followers’ (like Jakob) to reverse the power positions as reaction to orders can hypnotize, but just as easily open one’s mind, or at least, open the powers of instinct.

Submission for us – and for a Jakob especially – would not be tolerable if there wasn’t space to breathe with a sense of subversion even if it tests one’s limits, and then the exertion might be so demanding as to make one break down from the negation.

What are the dangers or virtues in this as you see it?

But of course the Institute Benjamenta could easily serve as a wider metaphor, not ONLY as an anti-authoritarian tract but also as a kind of potential spiritual terrain that shapes Jakob’s interior life, and that in all the Institute’s strictures and submissions an immense inner freedom could be located.

Are Jakob’s submissive qualities those that allow him to move more gracefully from reactive to active?

Walser and Jakob pre-exist in that open state already. They merely have to test the boundaries.

German sociologist Max Weber describes a bureaucrat as someone who faithfully, almost blindly, exercises delegated duties in strict accordance with rules that are completely impersonal. This, of course, seems to describe the servants-to-be in the Institute and their ultimate ‘fate’ upon graduation. So, that said, I feel that the universality of Walser’s work and your film is a key element in their place in the world as art – as a reflection and perhaps even a commentary upon mankind.

Only indirectly in so much as we were fascinated, as was Walser, by how one might navigate such a closed and seemingly hopeless and negated realm; that the suppression of freedom makes it possible to experience freedom. We felt we knew and understood that realm quite intuitively.

Beyond Walser’s indelible style, are the aforementioned thematic elements things that have drawn you to him? Were they key elements that infused you with desire to make the film? And if so, to what extent did they drive the film’s story and style?

We chose this novella by Walser because it was like an intimate chamber work and as it was our very first venture into feature films and working with live actors, we wanted to be cautious and not take on something too grand and beyond our scope. We read our first article on Walser written by his translator Christopher Middleton and it was called ’The Picture of Nobody’. Naturally, that appealed instantly to us and we slowly started to devour all his writings – what was available at the time. But whilst first reading Jakob von Gunten we realised at once at just how cinematic it could be. And we also felt very close to the ‘diary’ form so we embarked on writing the script without really knowing if it would ever get financed. We wrote the script with Alain Passes, a writer friend, but we also wrote it visually with great detail, always including the quality of light and the décor.

When writing with such attention to visual detail, to what extent do you think you consciously (or even unconsciously) tie these details into the ‘actions’ of the characters?

We must have had some intuitions how an actor might handle that scene but that was for us the only ‘unknown’ quantum in the equation we were trying to create, but whatever the actor created, it was all bonus because everything else we could pretty much control.

The use of black and white, aside from its inherent aesthetic beauty, seems to enhance a sense of a world where blind servitude is the most logical pre-requisite to unquestioningly follow impersonal rules. At the same time, the medium itself (as I believe, life itself) is replete with ‘colour’ in so far as there are literal shades of white, black AND grey. Why did you see the movie in black and white? Did any of the above have an influence and/or were there other reasons? (Perhaps even practical ones?)

From the very beginning we intuitively knew that the film had to be in black and white, that all the inner rhymes would be found in the classroom blackboard and chalk, in the ethereal dimension that only black and white can give and we asked our cinematographer, Nic Knowland, to exploit the full range of the most intense whites, to the richest of blacks and the most beautiful and mysterious of greys, to shoot with wide open f-stops, and that light was one of the main protagonists and that Lisa knew precisely the hours where and when the sun would journey through the Institute and her rooms.

The idea of light as a protagonist is such an inspiring one. Would you say that the importance of light to the medium of all visual arts – particularly cinema, where the images, the story, the world of the film must be conveyed THROUGH light (whether it be a movie projector or HD monitor) – is something you as filmmakers are keenly, if not always, aware of? It’s been said great filmmakers (and specifically cinematographers) often paint WITH light. How in this context does it inform your work, and specifically, the world of Institute Benjamenta?

Well, since with animation you have to learn ALL the metiers: to build the décors, the puppets, to give them their ‘climates’ and ‘stimmung’ through light, to know the camera and what lenses could give you, to animate the puppets, to learn how to edit, how to do sound – and we’ve always ALWAYS had music first before the film even began. So when we asked Nic Knowland to come on board to be our cinematographer we had a lot of experience about how to light – although very amateurish by comparison. And the element of ‘choreography’ in its widest sense appealed to us not only in terms of literal movement, but because the ballet doesn’t use dialogue but for the most part music only and it tells its stories via gesture and music and décor.

I cannot imagine anyone other than Alice Krige as Lisa Benjamenta. What was the process behind casting her?

Initially we had Charlotte Rampling on board – she was a name and we thought it was a coup to have gotten her for the production. But at the last minute Channel Four refused to insure her because she’d walked off a previous film set. Our lovely casting agent had been pushing Alice all along and suddenly we had to pitch the project to her and she wasn’t initially terribly convinced by the script, saying she didn’t know what she could bring to it. So in a panic, we sent her a snowdrift of faxes explaining what we were after and she said yes and jumped on a plane and arrived on the weekend. The filming started on a Monday for six weeks in an old country house near Hampton Ct on the edge of Richmond Park where deer grazed next to the house.

I am in serious love with her performance. It’s impossible to take one’s eyes off her. In that sense, was this notion of her magnetic qualities ever a consideration in shots that involved her? Did her natural qualities ever force you to block and/or shoot anything to maintain the perspective(s) necessary to the individual dramatic/thematic/artistic beats of the work?

It was the great unknown blessing to have gotten Alice to play Lisa and she was a dream to work and collaborate with, as were of course Mark and the wonderful Gottfried John. She would keep asking for further takes and you could see she was searching and taking her character deeper and deeper. She kept a flow chart in her hotel room and as we shot the film out of sequence she would always consult us to where emotionally she had to be on such and such a scene.

What was Ms Krige’s understanding and appreciation of Walser, the work itself and her character?

It wasn’t necessary for her to have read beyond the script as we talked to her about Walser and Lisa, his real sister, and all that might help her but she also really responded to the décors and the space we created for her, the climates, the quality of light. And she loved working in black and white. Even after the official shooting ended she came freely to our studio to shoot some extra close-ups that we had devised.

In recent days, I’ve imagined some Ruskin-like Ethics of the Dust transcript involving Ms Krige presiding over a ‘tutorial’ involving yourselves and the other cast members.

No, alas nothing like this.

Well, one can only dream, then.

Of course, Alice was never more beautiful than when she was dead.

From the first time I saw Institute Benjamenta and through almost every time I have seen it, I’m reminded of how beautiful death can be on film. The actor, of course, is infused with the quality of life and no matter how great they can be as actors, this natural quality is especially useful in making characters in death look ‘never more beautiful’. The shots of Ms Krige in death are right up there in my personal pantheon of gorgeous screen corpses, ESPECIALLY in Carl Dreyer’s Ordet. In fact, Dreyer is an artist whom I’m pleasantly reminded of when I see Institute Benjamenta. (In fact, I sometimes imagine a Dreyer adaptation of Benjamenta appearing in his canon – probably between Gertrud and his never-made Jesus.) Is he someone you yourselves admire? Might there even be a conscious or unconscious Dreyer influence on your work?

When we were in Copenhagen to do work on the décors for a ballet with Kim Brandstrup, our choreographer on Benjamenta, we visited Carl Dreyer’s grave. He has been one of the most important influences on our work and we have watched and re-watched his films.

One thing I suspect I will never forget, and indeed, think of often, is the young saplings sequence where the men rock back and forth humming, almost chanting, and you favour Lisa in those exquisite shots where Ms Krige evokes both desperation and heartache.

Before the scene was filmed she told us she’d wing it, that she wasn’t sure what would happen but to stay with her. But it was this slow swaying of the students, their backs to her, along with their mounting humming, that of course started to slowly and implacably swamp her appeals, but it is all so dreamlike and strange and troubling, with Jakob helplessly standing off to the side holding pinecones, watching Lisa become undone. But it’s true that by the end of the scene, when Lisa sees Kraus writing the giant zero, you can see that her gaze has seen beyond this life into another one.

From the first time I saw your film in that huge indoor sporting complex (or whatever the hell it was) in Locarno so many years ago, and upon each subsequent viewing, this sequence has moved me to a combination of tears, trembling and physical sensations of tingling and gooseflesh.

Yes, initially this scene was placed much earlier in the script but because of its emotional strength we moved it further back in the film.

The young saplings sequence inspires me with many levels of meaning and emotion, but I will keep them to myself and ask what this sequence means to you, what you wished to achieve with it and how you prepared for it, shot it and rendered it in final form?

The sequence was a premonition of Lisa’s emotionally becoming undone, that she could no longer reach her students, not even her preferred one, Inigo, and that a darker and more disturbing and bleaker finality loomed before her.

Ever the optimist, I suspect we all have a ‘darker and more disturbing and bleaker finality’ looming before us. And speaking of finality, I have one final question for you. Are there things in Benjamenta you’re not completely sold on these many years later or, if given a chance, things you’d do differently (and if so, what they might be)?

No, you couldn’t have really thrown any more money at the production and we didn’t need famous actors. A six-week shoot seemed perfect although how could we have known. We had a very experienced first assistant, Mary Soan. We stayed small and it was beautifully in control and it was a unique and moving experience for us. We actually lived in the top floor of this old abandoned country house during the entire shoot. But there was one scene where I wished we’d been a lot braver, and we’ve talked about it much later with Alice, and that was the scene where she goes upside down and guides Jakob to her. She should have been boldly naked beneath her gown and as Jakob was blindfolded he would have been so disoriented by this unknown region of flesh and pudenda, but we as an audience would have gasped at her erotic boldness.

From the northern most point of the Bruce Peninsula in the Dominion of Canada, I bid you: Bon Cinema!

Greg Klymkiw