Mascha Schilinski reveals the extensive writing process for her Competition title Sound Of Falling, and why she let her young cast ‘wash off’ their characters at the end of each day.
Mascha Schilinski is that rare bird among Competition directors: a virtual unknown, a fresh face and a new voice. Sound Of Falling is the German filmmaker’s second feature following Dark Blue Girl, which she made in her final year studying at the Film Academy Baden-Wurttemberg in 2017 before working briefly as a casting director. The film is told from the perspective of four women and girls from different generations who all live in the same house in Germany, and is an exploration of how memory distorts and trauma can be inherited. It premieres in Competition today (May 14) and is sold by mk2 Films.
What was your inspiration for the film?
My co-author Louise Peter and I spent the summer in the Altmark region in Germany, staying on the farm that became the farm in Sound Of Falling. We started to wonder who might have lived in this place before us. We found a photo, perhaps from the 1920s, that was unusual and very striking. It showed three women standing in the farmyard who were looking straight into the camera — or, as it seemed to us, straight at us. I’ve always been interested in the concept of synchronicity, of several time periods merging into one.
How did you pitch the film to your producers?
I met [Maren and Lucas Schmidt of] Studio Zentral at the Meet the Maker pitch event at the Berlinale. I told them about the farm, about the actual place that existed, and that we had a story that played out on four different time levels, about four girls as protagonists. We’d show their everyday life through their eyes.
What was the biggest challenge of moving from your first film to a very ambitious second film in terms of scope?
We were fresh from film school and had to finance a quite extensive development process. We are grateful to the German federal commission for culture and media who gave us a grant to finance the script development. It took us about three years. Once the script was there, the process of filming became increasingly complicated — perhaps more than we had imagined — because working with a huge ensemble, working with children, on a debut film budget was extremely challenging. But the challenge forced me to become more precise. The limitations worked in our favour.
Were the time jumps in the finished film in the script from the beginning or did you find them in the edit?
We treated the script like an edit. The material we were working with was recalcitrant; it didn’t want us to impose a plot. So the script was created from something that was more like fragments, individual parts of the story. Over the roughly 10 months of post-production and editing, we faced the challenge of finding out what the best sequence really was, and therefore we did make changes to what was originally scripted.
What were your visual references when working with your creative team?
The photographer Francesca Woodman was a huge inspiration to us. There’s something ghost-like but also lucid in the way she depicts almost dream-like scenes. And the film is about the work of memory, of perception. The challenge became how to translate that into moving images. I worked with my DoP [Fabian Gampar] to develop the technical concept to express this sort of wraith-like imagery. We used all sorts of different lenses and even a pinhole camera to try to get that down.
How did you create the atmosphere you wanted on set, especially working with children?
We had a long, extensive casting process and that helped a lot. Long before we started shooting, we had a very good idea of how people work, what made them tick, what they needed and, equally importantly, what they didn’t need to turn them into a family.
With the children, I had a ritual we started right at the beginning of the shoot of the magic shower. With children, you have to make sure they find their way into the role and then they find their way out of their role too at the end of the shooting day. So we would shower them, wash them into their characters. And in the evenings, after the shoot, we would shower them again, to wash off the character and let them be their own selves. They really enjoyed that. That became quite a thing. The adult actors joined in, too.
Do you mean an actual shower with water?
No! It was a magic shower. No-one got hosed down.
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