‘Sound of Falling’ Director Mascha Schilinski Interview

A slot in the Cannes Competition is so coveted that even some of the most famous names in film get turned down. With just her second film, Sound of Falling, German director Mascha Schilinski is one of the lucky ones, and will be setting foot on the Croisette for the first time ever.

The story is fictional, she says, but has its roots in reality. “My co-writer Louise Peter and I spent a summer in the Altmark, near the Elbe River,” she explains. “We happened upon a farm, and it seemed like time had stood still there. The house had been empty for 50 years, and by chance, we found a snapshot from 1920 in which three women, kind of unusually for the time, were looking straight at the camera. We were standing right where the camera would have stood, and we saw these women looking at us. So, we asked ourselves, ‘What happened here?’ ‘What were their stories?’”

That, she says, “got us thinking about the idea of synchronicity of time,” resulting in an ambitious project that took five years to make. “In essence, it’s about four girls over the course of the century on a farm in Northern Germany and throughout the process of the film, their lives begin to mirror one another.”

Schilinski’s film was snapped up early by the festival and created a lot of buzz under its original title: The Doctor Says I’ll Be Alright, But I’m Feelin’ Blue. “We really loved our working title, I have to say. We really, really would’ve liked to have kept it going under that title. And frankly, when Thierry Frémaux announced the title at the press conference and asked, ‘Mascha, why did you change that beautiful title?’ I felt a little stitch in my heart. It was emotional. But at the same time, it was also clear that the title was just too complex and too long, and when we tried that out with friends, no one could ever remember it.” Hence the change to Sound of Falling. “It expresses something very important about the film,” she smiles, “but perhaps in a more concise way.”

DEADLINE: Was Sound of Falling a difficult story to write?

MASCHA SCHILINSKI: Yes, but also no. In a way it was very liberating, because the story itself was quite obstinate — when we tried to impose too much [structure] on it, it sort of fought back and so we had to go with the flow. And the way we did that was that we used images that swelled up within ourselves when we were thinking about the story. And we wrote these down and then it became almost more of an editing process than a writing process. It was a very associative process that led to this… Well, an almost impossible sort of collective memory, a document of a collective memory, a document of a strangely joined body experience over time. Or the body experiences, I should say, of the various protagonists.

DEADLINE: Could you talk a little about the cast that you put together, and how you worked with them?

SCHILINSKI: Well, yes, the casting process was very long, obviously. The film has a huge cast and there are many children, because there’s no real single protagonist. Of course, there are the four girls, but it really is everybody who lived in that place in each of the periods we described, and there are very many. They all have their own part and they’re all important in their own ways. We actually did the casting ourselves and we looked at around 1,400 girls, and that took about a year. What I was looking for mostly were faces. I searched for faces that could have been from the time that they were representing in the film. So, after about a year we thought we really nailed it down: “This is exactly who should be there.” In the end, it became a mix of people who had never been in front of a camera before and experienced actors that we cast to make the whole thing coherent.

DEADLINE: What is your process as a director? Do you embrace chaos? Or do you like things to be ordered?

SCHILINSKI: Well, it’s my firm conviction that chaos will order itself. If you put many, many people in the room, at some point they will impose their own order and that is something that I believe in and that I try to work with. Regarding my process as a director, I would say I haven’t really been able to work as I would like to. Obviously, there are restrictions in terms of time and budget. This is a film that was done with very modest means, meaning, for example that we didn’t have money or time to do extensive rehearsals, which for a film like this is obviously challenging. The difficulty was compounded by the fact that we had so many minors, and, of course, there are many regulations as to how much they can work. And then we had 34 days to shoot a film of two and a half hours which is a challenge in its own right.

All of that was a little overwhelming I have to say, but in a way, the way I usually work is that I think very visually. I think more in terms of images and of atmosphere, and that’s what I wrote down in the script, very precisely. There’s very little dialogue in everything I do, and I tend to work more intuitively. I have to say that this would not have been possible without my DOP and husband Fabian Gamper, who’s been part of this project from the very beginning, just because it is so image-driven. Fabian was essential in putting my vision across here, especially because there was no rehearsal time or very little time to test things out.

DEADLINE: How does it relate to your previous film, Dark Blue Girl?

SCHILINSKI: Well, my last film was a far smaller project and, actually, a very different project. In many ways I almost did that as a stealth production, because it was my third-year project in film academy, and we were not actually supposed to do a feature film. So, what I really did was I used the academy more as a production office of sorts. Fabian was also part of that. I and some other people, we just went to Greece to a place I knew from my childhood, a place where I’d stayed with my parents and friends, and we went there for three weeks. It’s very different in terms of its style; [we shot it] almost documentary-style. It was not really a fully-fledged film production. Sound of Falling is a very different beast in that regard.

But perhaps there’s a connecting thread, in the way that I’m interested in children’s perspectives on the world. Children, in my mind, have an almost hallucinatory gift of finding voids, of finding empty spaces with unexplained things in the world and sort of putting their finger on that, and I find that very fascinating. So that is certainly something that connects those films.

DEADLINE: When did you find out you were in the competition in Cannes, and what was your reaction?

SCHILINSKI: Well, that was amazing. It was actually a few days before Christmas, and this email arrives from the Cannes Film Festival. I open it, and simultaneously my telephone rings, and my producer shouts down the line… We were like, “What’s going on?!” When I first read it, I said to Fabian, “Look, it says, ‘Official Selection: Competition.’ Is it really that, or is it a section that I might not have heard about?’” I really couldn’t believe it. It was very, very emotional, obviously. The weeks after that were a little bizarre, because we couldn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t tell my actors, I couldn’t tell the team, and it felt like a very isolated time — for a long, long time — because I could only share it with my husband, obviously, and with the producer. We had to stay mum. But of course, we are extremely happy and really overjoyed to be in Cannes with this film.

DEADLINE: Why did you become a filmmaker?

SCHILINSKI: Well, my way into directing was a bit unusual, I’d have to say. It’s not like someone gave me a camera, and I always knew I wanted to be a director, and then it just went from there. In my teenage years, I was something of a troublemaker and I didn’t integrate terribly well, so I didn’t finish high school. I just broke off, couldn’t take it, and traveled for a few years. I was a little lost perhaps in those years, I had to find myself. I started writing short stories. Afterwards, I worked in an agency and that was perhaps my first connection to the film world. I worked in an agency, casting young actors, representing young actors, child actors, young actors, and I had a lot of interactions there that I loved. And as part of that, I read a lot of scripts and something that struck me at the time was, “Well, why do they always think they need to say everything?”

So, my interest was tweaked. I thought I might be able to do something with that, but not having a school degree in Germany, I could not go to university. I might’ve actually studied philosophy or psychology had I had the chance, but formally that wasn’t possible at the time. And luckily the film academy in Hamburg had a program that I could participate in, which brought me into scriptwriting. I wrote scripts for TV soap operas — not exactly the type of thing I wanted to do, but it was useful in the sense that it required a lot of plotting. It was a good school. I learned a lot doing that. And then fairly late — I was 28 already — I decided to finally study. There was a special program at the film academy that would admit me, and it started from there. So, my directing career really started fairly late.

DEADLINE: Do you think German cinema is having a moment right now?

SCHILINSKI: Perhaps, it’s hard to tell, I certainly hope so, and it does feel like that to some extent. And of course, I welcome the possibility for German talent to have more of a chance to be seen abroad, to become more of an international phenomenon. And what I would really hope is that it gives German film as an art form, if you wish, more of a chance to be seen and to develop further, because there’s more of an audience.

DEADLINE: By the way, did you ever find out who the women were in the photograph that you found at the farm?

SCHILINSKI: Well, that’s a really crazy story. We never actually found out who those three women in the photograph actually were. We do know they were servants, or agricultural workers on that farm. And that’s part of the movie, their status. We were very much interested in the social status in the lives of the females. Especially, agricultural workers, who lived under pretty harsh conditions at the time. But we never really found out who these particular women were, even though their stories, I feel, are part of the film.

But a few weeks after the shoot, I went back to tidy up a little, put some things in order, and in one of the outbuildings of the farm I found a diary from 1910 — which is a period we cover in the film — by someone called Bertha. This is a complete coincidence, but we actually have a Bertha in the film. She’s one of our characters. So, it didn’t have any bearing on the film, as such, and the diary itself is written in the cursive that they used in Germany at the time, which is kind of hard to read, so I need to go through that with an expert to get to the bottom of it. I’ve only been able to read excerpts up to this point, but I’m really looking forward to doing that and see what might be there.

DEADLINE: Do you believe in destiny?

SCHILINSKI: Whoa. That’s a question that, incidentally, my co-author and I constantly asked ourselves when we were writing this. What is the connection between coincidence and fate? Is there anything that’s preordained? And we discussed it every possible way. In the end, I think the best way to put it is, perhaps there are coincidences that can become fate, but not in a predetermined manner.