Shaun Grant, Germain McMicking, Jack Hutchings Berlin Syndrome Interview

Shaun Grant, Germain McMicking, Jack Hutchings Berlin Syndrome Interview

Cast: Teresa Palmer and Max Riemelt
Director: Cate Shortland
Running Time: 116 minutes

Synopsis: Clare, a twenty–something Australian photojournalist, arrives in Germany on a sabbatical from work. She intends to photograph Soviet–designed architecture in the hope of publishing a book. However on her first morning in Berlin she meets Andi, a charismatic German man who teaches English at a local High School. The instant connection and chemistry between Andi and Clare leads to a night of unbridled passion. But when Clare goes to leave the next morning she discovers that the door is locked. Not only that, but she is the only inhabitant of an otherwise abandoned apartment complex.

Clare desperately attempts to free herself from the apartment but is unable to. The windows are reinforced with Perspex and the door is bolted shut. Clare tries to reason with Andi, believing it must be some kind of misunderstanding, but he won't let her go.

Clare becomes distraught, lashing out at Andi and he has no choice but to tie her to the bed while he goes to work. One morning however he agrees to leave her untied – she convinces him there is nowhere for her to go. Upon arriving home that afternoon Andi is pleased to find Clare busying herself with a jigsaw puzzle. She gestures for Andi to help her and as he lets his guard down, she stabs him in the hand with a screw driver, grabs the keys and attempts to escape. Andi soon catches up with her and smashes her hand in the external courtyard door, breaking her fingers.

The days, weeks and months pass by as Clare becomes accustomed to her life of captivity. Meanwhile outside the apartment walls, Andi is forced to deal with what he believes to be the infatuation of a female student, Franka, and the persistence of his father, Erich, who suggests Andi meet with his estranged mother.

As autumn turns to winter, what began as his obsession has now become theirs as Clare becomes reliant on Andi to be both her provider and her only companion. When Franka comes to the apartment wanting to see Andi, he threatens Clare that he will kill Franka if she says anything. Franka gets a glimpse of Clare in the hallway of the apartment and is upset to hear Andi has a girlfriend – she thought he was interested in her.

After a violent outburst, Andi abandons Clare and goes to stay with his father. Clare starts to wonder if Andi will ever come back. Meanwhile, Andi wakes to find his father has passed away and spends several lonely days alone with his father's lifeless body.

When Andi finally returns to the apartment, he and Clare reunite – emotionally and physically. For a moment, life seems to return to normal. Christmas comes and Andi surprises Clare with an outing to a beautiful forest. When they come across two young boys, Clare takes her chance to cry for help but the language barrier prevents this from being a success.

On New Years Eve, while Andi is at a colleague's party, Clare breaks into his locked spare room and discovers a strange massage chair and albums full of photos that he has taken of her. She also discovers photos of another girl, trapped like her in the apartment and realises her fate is sealed unless she can find a way out.

Andi's obsession leads to the murder of a homeless man attempting to free Clare, and she realises time is running out. Meanwhile, Andi becomes increasingly unhinged and when he discovers Clare's photo in a newspaper article about a missing person, he announces that he is getting the apartment fumigated. Clare now once again fears for her life and knows that she must flee before it is too late. Clare puts together her final desperate plan for freedom. While preparing dinner for Andi, Clare purposely burns her hand on the stove. This forces Andi to search for ointment in the bathroom. While he is gone, Clare searches through his student's book. The following morning when Franka opens her school book, she discovers a terrifying photo of Clare, clearly a cry for help.

Franka, remembering meeting Clare at Andi's front door one evening, immediately flees the school grounds and upon arriving at Andi's apartment, she frees Clare, but only just in time for Andi's return. The two of them hide in an upstairs apartment as Andi searches for Clare. Just as he thinks he has got her, she locks him in the apartment and escapes.

We go out on Clare leaving Berlin in a taxi, taking in the world for the first time since captivity, putting her past behind her, hopeful of the future.

Berlin Syndrome

Release Date: April 20th, 201

Interview with Shaun Grant, Screenwriter

Question: What is this story about for you?

Shaun Grant: For me Berlin Syndrome is about many things, be it man's never–ending search for meaning and connection in life, or the destructive impact that past events can have on you if you let them. I also wanted to touch on the loneliness and isolation I've felt when travelling, despite being surrounded by people.


Question: What was it about this story that you were drawn to?

Shaun Grant: Melanie's novel is so beautifully written that it drew me in straight away. Also at the time, I had just seen a relationship end and became interested in dramatising the breakdown of a relationship, where one person wishes to escape but where the other desperately clings onto the idea of what the couple could be.


Question: How did you approach the adaptation? What were the biggest challenges?

Shaun Grant: Like I do with any adaptation, I looked to convey the tone and heart of the source material without limiting myself to its plot, action or characters. Thankfully, the author was supportive of me -opening up' her work and bringing to it my own ideas, beliefs and themes and crafting the best possible screen story that I could.

Interview with Germain McMicking, Director Of Photography

Question: What is this story about for you?

Germain McMicking: Berlin Syndrome is about two characters that meet by fate on the street one day. Clare is a backpacker from Australia and Andi is an English teacher, Berlin born and bred. They're sort of inextricably drawn to each other through past traumas. Both seeking love and intimacy, but both with very different ways of approaching this. Clare approaches it with openness, and Andi approaches it with a need to control, which leads him to lock her up in his apartment.


Question: What was it about this story that you were drawn to?

Germain McMicking: When I first read the script I was blown away, it was such a page–turner. I couldn't put it down. It's a survival story, a love story and it has a lot of intimacy to it that was extremely powerful. I was particularly interested in the characters in the film and the way they are drawn to each other, despite being on different ends of the spectrum of good and evil.


Question: How did you prepare for the shoot? What was involved?

Germain McMicking: My pre-production time on Berlin Syndrome was quite intense. From the moment we landed in Berlin, I spent almost every day with Cate, going through the script, looking at visual references and absorbing the world in Berlin and living out the story. We spent a lot of time travelling around together, feeling out each environment, absorbing the light, observing the people and trying to get a feel for the characters. We were very focused on figuring out who Andi was and where he would have grown up, and how it would feel to be Clare with wide eyes looking at this new world, how she would see things, and how she could potentially be vulnerable in this situation.


Question: What camera did you shoot on?

Germain McMicking: We worked with a couple of different types of Arri cameras: the Alexa, the Amira and the Mini, pared with Leica Summilux lenses.


Question: What were the biggest challenges of the shoot?

Germain McMicking: Like a lot of Australian films, the biggest challenge on Berlin Syndrome was time. Trying to get it all shot in the time that was available to us. It inevitably creates this environment where you have to get things done very, very quickly and be quite immediate in trusting your instincts and just going for it. It's always a bit of a rollercoaster ride trying to get through it in a day, and incredibly stressful wondering whether you've made the right decision. It's a constant grind on you just trying to make sure you're doing the very best you can for the film, the director, the actors and the whole team.

Question: What was your favourite scene or filming location during the shoot?

Germain McMicking: Usually shooting on location is my favourite thing to do, being out in the real world, in real locations. The feeling you get from this is very hard to emulate in a studio. Particularly, the excitement you get out of reacting to natural light and the real things that happen that force your hand in a way. On this film, we got to film on some amazing locations in Berlin, but shooting in the studio in Melbourne was especially enjoyable. Largely because of the scheduling restraints, we were quite time poor, so we had to be able to work very quickly, and often on a shoot moving around from one location to the next soaks up a lot of time that you could be using to experiment. So once we got back to Australia, where we shot all the interiors of Andi's apartment, we found that we had a bit more time to play. I found it to be a great challenge having to emulate the light from Europe from Summer through to Autumn and Winter and it was lots of fun.

Interview with Jack Hutchings, Editor

Question: What is this story about for you?

Jack Hutchings: The story for me is a psychological love story. There are elements of Clare as a person looking to find something that is outside of her home, and I could relate to that having travelled at a similar age. She's seeking connection, and it can be a wash of emotions being away from family and friends in a foreign place. You can feel very lonely. She finds a connection with someone that is essentially preying on this vulnerability. I remember thinking when I first read it that it's also about someone who is obsessed with the idea of perfection. Andi uses his camera later in the film and it's revealed that it's in a ritualistic way for him and the film comments on the ideas and themes of pornography being an image and the idea of something which the character can't actually deal with the reality of. Obviously the abandonment issues and issues of a country divided which perhaps caused this are touched on but we are really sheltered from the exact details in a way that Andi has repressed and hides these things way way down in his being. Still waters run deep as the saying goes.


Question: What was it about this story that you were drawn to?

Jack Hutchings: I loved how Clare and Andi connected on a number of levels, and obviously the physical connection was strong. I liked how things were revealed from his side of the story and drip fed piece by piece until you realise that things that might have seemed entirely innocent at first glance, or perhaps were only tinged with a sense of 'something not being right' were actually hiding very dark parts of his personality and past. I remember thinking that it all relied on the chemistry between the two characters, and that if that worked during the shoot, then we'd have something magic. When the rushes started coming back I knew we had something special, as the tension between the characters felt quite electric.


Question: How did you prepare for the edit? What was involved?

Jack Hutchings: Cate mentioned a few films at our meeting; so I did rewatch a few films again and searched out one or two that I hadn't seen. The most commercial film Cate mentioned was Misery, and I realised watching that film that not a frame is wasted. It's incredibly taught and literally every shot is telling the next part of the story and it's very lean. We ended up somewhere between that as a guide, the idea of not letting the story slacken and to keep the interest up in a genre trope way, and a love story which at times needs to just -sit' and be with them totally immersed in their passion, or their stillness whether alone or together.

We also rematched scenes from Audiard's Rust and Bone, more of a stylistic cutting sense of Cate wanting me to remember that the emotional cut is the most important aspect at all times, and not to worry about matching things; feel free. We also referenced the killer whale scene in relation to the moment that Andi connects with Franka in the gym, paying particular attention to the music and sound design. The moment is literally our character seeing something that should be incredibly innocent but we portray this in a way that allows us to get inside his head and feel that he's realising this young teenage girl could be something more than just a student in his classes, in his warped world. The moment needed to slow down; and things fall into place both visually and metaphorically. It's a beautiful moment of innocence colliding with this dark character who is capable of anything… which is essentially a good analogy for the film as a whole.


Question: What program did you edit on?

Jack Hutchings: We cut on Avid Media Composer at DDP Studios in Melbourne. We had an assistant for the shoot and assemble stage (Paul Rowe), and then one for the later edit stage of the film (Andrew Chaplin).


Question: What was your favourite scene of the film?

Jack Hutchings: Favourites would be the Gymnastics scene, the IKEA chair assemble scene and the scene on the couch with Andi cutting Clare's fingernails. All of the action scenes were fun to cut, door slamming etc. as were the sex scenes and the post coital chat scene.

One sequence that really jumped out at me in the script as being transcending in style and which really lifted off the page was the chat with the father in the kitchen about Andi's new girlfriend – and then showing the reality of that situation. That was changed around a bit during the edit and at one point wasn't showing Clare while they spoke, but we went back to it and I think it's strong and affecting; and it was fun to cut.


Question: What were the biggest challenges during the edit?

Jack Hutchings: The biggest challenge at first was the post schedule, we started off with 11 weeks but ended up pushing out to 12 weeks, which was invaluable as there were still a lot of big decisions being made in that last week of the cut. Other than that the challenges were; condensing the start of the film to get them to the apartment quicker, we had to cut out several moments, sometimes whole scenes, from the script and find a neat way to condense the story.

The scene with the Schrebergarten was one of the biggest challenges to cut. It was the first scene shot with Max and Teresa, and the light was going as it was approaching evening, so overall the coverage was a challenge on this one. But we got there in the end! We also had the usual repetition of information in places in the film that were easily fixed and then some making sure that Clare's character felt like she was at the right place in 'her journey' once inside the apartment – this required a fair bit of careful manipulation to get the arc right.

Besides a few tricky scenes, it really was a hugely pleasurable experience working on the edit with Cate, Polly, Angie, Troy Lum and the overseas Memento guys.


Berlin Syndrome
Release Date: April 20th, 2017