Crossing Boundaries

How and when did you decide to become a filmmaker?

 

That's nothing I decided but rather something I remembered. When I was very little I used to tell my mother fictional stories with pictures all the time. Sometimes the front of houses would seem like faces to me and scare me. I used to cast other kids in roles and directed plays with them. But later on I forgot about that and actually studied law, although I spent more time in the cinemas than in the seminars. One day I saw MODERN TIMES by Charlie Chaplin, and it captivated me so much that I suddenly remembered where I wanted to go. I was 21 then.

 

Were there any special conditions or requirements for DOWNTOWN STORY as a student film?

 

It was my project for the third semester, but there were no concrete conditions. I had to work with one of the scriptwriting students, but since we couldn't find common ground I ended up writing the story myself. That didn't go down too well with the school, and they had a difficult time understanding my work process. I always had to justify myself and couldn't understand their concerns.

 

What was your original idea for the film and how did it maybe change over time?

 

The original idea was the image of a giant barcode with a girl being imprisoned behind it. I wanted to show an abstract city as the dark side of capitalism. Abstractions have a certain mathematics to them, and every symbol should follow logically from the one before. So I started searching for an order for the elements, that felt organic. The bar code turned into a zebra crossing, on which the girl has the “accident“. I started with the last image, arranging all the previous symbols so that they would lead up to it. I think we achieved that goal more or less.

 

The film has a unique style, somewhere between Michel Gondry and DOGVILLE. Did you have stylistic role models?

 

I had a very clear vision of the images and the sets. The film is constructed very carefully. I worked on my ideas and images over a length of time in order to give them meaning. I don't really decide, it's more of a search of how to best transport an idea. The film's style is a result of this search for images, forms, materials etc. and a certain combination of these elements. I was often misunderstood, people thought I changed things out of a whim. It's important to understand your own process and be able to communicate it in order to prevent conflicts and false expectations.

 

The sets are especially interesting in your film, as is the score. Can you tell us who was responsible for these aspects and when they came to this project?

 

The sets were designed and constructed by two students from the University of Applied Sciences in Dortmund, Samina Mohn and Babs Tarabczynski. Everything that is seen in the film has been projected by them first and then constructed. They came to us shortly after the completion of the screenplay. They understood my vision perfectly and contributed a lot of really creative ideas. From my instructions they did sketches and thought up systems to build, for example, the telephone booth and the ticket machine in a functional way. Ten days before the shoot they started sleeping in the studio and working intensively with their three or four helpers. As for the score: All the music used in the film is in the public domain. It has been mostly composed for animation films, the titles and composers can be seen in the closing credits. 

 

Where and how long did you shoot?

 

We shot for three days in the studio. Lighting has been done with my DoP Tilo Hauke. There were two scenes in front of the green-screen. But since our three-day schedule was rather ambitious we didn't get everything exactly the way we had originally planned it and had to re-think some of it. It was quite a tense experience, but I think in the end we all had the feeling that we had crossed some boundaries and had created something real.

 

Where did you go after DOWNTOWN STORY and what are your plans for future films?

 

For some time after that film I didn't have a good time at all. Not a lot of people believed in the project and it cost me an unbelievable amount of strength to push it through. I also learned that there were no impossible or even wrong projects, but rather people who didn't fit to those projects. I also found out that stories have their own destiny, and good directors don't try to influence it but rather recognise it. I can't work in fear, so I learned to chose the right people for my projects. Right now I'm doing a postgraduate study in film animation at the KHM in Cologne. I had to try that out. I never make big plans for the future, I rather enjoy the present day.

 

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