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From the "People" Archives: 
by Bryan Wendorf [EDITOR'S NOTE: Bryan Wendorf interviewed "Tuvulu" director Veit Helmer during the 2000 Slamdance Film Festival, the film is now playing in New York and Los Angeles.] "Tuvulu," the debut feature from German director Veit Helmer, is a poetic fable about an agoraphobic who dreams of leaving his father's dilapidated public swimming pool, and journeying to a tropical island paradise. Winner of the Slamdance Jury Prize for best cinematography (and garnering additional awards at international fests from Flanders to Hof), the film is told almost entirely through visuals. Veit Helmer has been directing since he was 14, and his short films including "The Window Washer" and "Surprise!" have earned him more than fifty international awards. "Tuvulu" stars French Next Wave actor Denis Lavant (from Claire Denis' "Beau Travail" and Leos Carax's "Lovers on the Bridge") and old-guard thespian Philippe Clay (Jean Renoir's "French Cancan") and is currently screening at the Rotterdam Film Festival. Next week, it will go onto the Berlin Film Festival's Forum section. While in Park City, Bryan Wendorf caught up with the new German auteur and spoke with him about cross-continental searches for swimming pools and actors, Bulgarian cinematographers, and the inherent challenges of making a black and white feature without a traditional script. indieWIRE: "Tuvulu" is set almost entirely in a dilapidated swimming pool. How did you find the proper location and did the script change at all once the pool was found? Veit Helmer: Finding the pool was one of the hardest things, because we really didn't have a special swimming pool in mind, we created it on paper. Afterwards, it was so defined and well-described that we had such a hard time finding it. At first I was looking in Germany, at some old, closed public bath houses and we couldn't put water in many of those; that was big problem, so I had to travel beyond. I went to Poland, the Czech Republic, Russia and I still couldn't find what I was looking for. So I sent letters to friends all over the world asking them for help. Finally, one day when I was feeling very sad and desperate, I got an envelope with pictures from Sofia, Bulgaria. The same day I went there, which was not so simple, and I saw the pool and I had tears in my eyes. It was exactly what we had described, maybe even more beautiful than what I had written. There were rooms that we hadn't even thought of, so the actual Central Bath in Sofia changed the screenplay. The other nice thing about Sofia was that a lot of the other locations were around there as well. We found the Shipyard, the boat, the harbor, weird landscapes that we were looking for. So Bulgaria was very well suited for the film. iW: Did you have to do any additional work to prepare the pool to fit your vision? Helmer: Oh yes, a lot of work. We had to build the cashiers box, we had to create the ceiling with holes. The swimming pool, even though it's now empty and no one is renovating it, is municipal property of Sofia and one day they want to put it back to its original condition. Everything had to be art directed. For example, the machine room didn't exist at all; it was completely fantasy. The trick we used to create this hyper-reality was combining several locations for one set. So, for instance, in the case of the boat there was one boat outside, but there was no room inside, so we built something inside. Many times, we used a completely different location for different shots. If you're looking toward the pool, we used the real one, but looking from the swimming pool away we were shooting on an empty field. It was very complicated continuity because we shot the reverse shots two weeks later, so it became very difficult for the actors. Actually we had to shoot a lot of scenes twice in different locations, shot reverse shot, sometimes with a discrepancy of three or four weeks. So we couldn't alter the scene even if the actors had a new idea. iW: I heard you also spent as much time searching for your actors as you did your location. Helmer: I became addicted when I realized that a script without dialogue could be done with any actor from any country. I went to Russia, the United States, France, Turkey and I saw like 1,100 actors that I videotaped. I asked them to improvise a scene that I explained to them. Some actors refused to audition without pages, but there were actors waiting for me, I could feel it. There were actors so happy to express themselves without words that I actually feel that I didn't choose the final actors, they chose me. They were so willing emotionally to do this thing. iW: Where did you find Denis Lavant? Helmer: In my screenplay, the role of Anton is described as a man in his twenties, so actually I had never thought about Lavant, even though I admired him as an actor. It was my Paris casting agent who offered him to me as the older brother and it was like it clicked when he came into the room. I thought, "Why am I auditioning this man for Gregor" He's Anton. There was no doubt about it. He changed the other casting, the father became older, and the brother became older. I think it's great, because he's in his thirties and so the whole film I think becomes much more tragic and deeper. Because if somebody has never been outside in thirty-five years, it is much more absurd or grotesque. If it is someone at the beginning of his twenties, you can imagine that they could still go out one day but with Denis you somehow can really believe that he'll be a prisoner all his life. iW: At what point did you realize that you could tell this story without traditional dialogue? Helmer: I think maybe I had the dream from the beginning, but I didn't dare say it right away to my writer. iW: Did you have versions of the script with dialog? Helmer: No, we started with a treatment and I think the writer always wanted to start writing dialogue. I said at the beginning, let's try it with really reduced dialogue and some scenes in the treatment could be staged without dialogue. So I then looked at the other scenes where she was ready to write dialogue and said we can use this image to explain this idea and we began to try it and it worked for every scene. It was amazing. However, I still didn't know if it would really work on the screen. It was the actors that gave me the confidence that it would not be cold. iW: Were there any silent film directors that provided inspiration for what you wanted to achieve? Helmer: I was not looking for slapstick; that was not interesting to me. I tried to work with clowns or mimes and it was never emotional so I auditioned for actors. I think maybe more modern silent films were interesting to me like Jacques Tati. I think also the absurd use of language. My sound editor would like to kill everyone who calls it a silent film, because he worked for six months creating the sound design. The law we created for this film was that the film would be able to travel without dubbing or subtitles. The words should not be something that must be understood or they are such basic English or basic French or basic Russian. There are so many words, we discovered, that exist in many languages like "Technology System Profit" and that was really a lot of fun. We had created a list of all these words and sometimes we were looking for what word we could use and asking did we already use this word somewhere? iW: Your press bio for Terrence (Gregor) Gillespie simply says, "Stand up Comedy Artist," is this his first film role? Helmer: I think he did some kind of B or C blood horror film. I had sent character breakdowns to a casting services and we received something like 3,000 pictures and I chose forty actors in New York to audition and he was the first person to arrive that morning at the Chelsea Hotel. What is funny is that I originally was auditioning him for Anton, but he came in and you could feel this underlying anger from spending so many years doing the clubs, doing all this humiliating work he really doesn't like doing. I think there was a lot of type-casting in this film with actors who have gone through experiences similar to what they are depicting on screen. You know the father, Karl (Philippe Clay), he was a big star in France in the fifties and he still wants to be treated as a big star. He loves to talk about Renoir and all these great directors he?s worked with, but no one remembers him today. That's so tragic, exactly like the character he portrays in the film that still believes he has this beautiful pool when in actuality everything is falling apart. We treated him like a big star. He was picked up each day by a limousine; we wanted him to feel that we were honored that he had agreed to be in the film. iW: Was it difficult to find financing for a monochrome film without traditional dialogue? Helmer: Yes, it was quite an obstacle. I never told anyone that I was going to shoot in Black & White. Some of the financiers were a little shocked when they saw the first rushes. I said, "Don't worry, it will be colorized later" and they weren't sure what I meant and began calling post-production houses. When I was at Sundance four years ago with my short "Surprise!" everyone was saying, "We would love to do your first feature. Send us your script." And everyone who read the script said, "That's impossible, you can't do it." That rejection challenged me to prove that such a film was possible. It is possible. When I went to Moscow the first time to do casting, the board of police sent me back on an airplane because my visa was going to expire the next day. On the way back to Berlin, I was really frustrated sitting on the plane, but I knew I would have to go back to Moscow. There's a reason for everything. I'm not religious, you know, or superstitious but I felt that if there was so much preventing me from going there I had to go back. I did return and that is where I discovered Chulpan Hamatova, who was splendid. iW: Where did you find Emil Christov, your cinematographer, and what did he bring to the look of the film? Helmer: After my second visit to Bulgaria, I decided to try to work mainly with a Bulgarian crew. First of all, it was less expensive and I had experienced a lot of conflicts on shoots in Berlin with mixed crews. I learned that in Bulgaria there had been forty film productions a year before perestroika and now most people were without jobs, so I tried to find these people. Some were working in restaurants or driving taxis. There were two or three directors of photography who were still working for foreign productions. I invited them to Germany to shoot commercials with me. Usually the commercial companies would ask if I wanted a D.P. from England or the U.S. and I'd say "No, I want someone from Bulgaria." They didn't believe me. They would take the first can that returned from the lab to check that it had the right exposure. It was fun to work with all of those three, but Emil was great at lighting. Looking back at all my shorts, I think I always had great cinematographers. I always knew the set up clearly, but would let my directors of photography do the lighting. I'm not too much into lighting. I know what I want from lighting and I can tell who will be able to deliver what I want to see, but I don't interfere with my director of photography. I had 1,200 pages of storyboards. I was never a slave to my storyboards, but they were there if I wanted to refer to them. It gave me confidence that allowed me to improvise. I let the actors go when they have something to offer. I think twenty people are better than one and the best ideas came from the others. [Bryan Wendorf is director of The Chicago Underground Film Festival (http://www.cuff.org) and recently joined the board of directors of IFP/Midwest. He is also a contributor to Newcity, a Chicago news and arts weekly.] | |
