TIFF: Tallulah Schwab reflects on Mr. K
The 49th Toronto International Film Festival runs September 5 – 15
SEE NL talks to Dutch-based Norwegian director about her surreal new feature, set in a very strange hotel and starring the mesmerising Crispin Glover as a travelling magician.
Still: Mr. K (credit: Kris Dewitte)
This is the Kafkaesque world evoked in Tallulah Hazekamp Schwab’s startling new feature Mr. K** (handled in the international market by the appropriately named LevelK and premiering in the Platform section at the Toronto International Film Festival).
“I have always been fascinated by buildings and doors,” the director declares. “Big buildings outwardly give the feeling of being predictable…you think a building is what it is. But when you go in and you start opening doors, you don’t know what you are going to meet.”
Schwab has made other films with a similarly twisted and surrealistic perspective on architecture. Her 2003 short The Man in the Linen Cupboard (which played at IFFR) is based on the true story of a man who hid in a closet. He was so afraid of somebody finding him there that he poked out his own eyes. He thought that if he couldn’t see anyone then no-one could see him. “His whole reality was upside down. I thought that was fascinating. He made this closet his whole world.”
In Mr K., the director pushes the “edges of reality and fiction.” She was drawing on inspiration from many sources - filmmakers like David Lynch, David Cronenberg and Roman Polanski and authors including Kafka and Haruki Murakami. Viewers might also be reminded of the Overlook hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, or the fading hotel in Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence where two sisters have a series of increasingly strange experiences.
The Norwegian-born director has lived in the Netherlands since she came to the film academy aged 18. And, yes, she has had some bizarre experiences of her own in hotels. As a young woman, when she was in a choir, she once came back to the place she was staying and only to discover that the other choir members had checked into another hotel without telling her.
Mr K. has some very strong producers behind it including Erik Glijnis and Leontine Petit from Lemming Film, Dries Phlypo from A Private View, Ineke Kanters & Jan van der Zanden from The Film Kitchen and the Berlin-based Judy Tossell. Els Vandervorst and Martin Koolhoven, the powerhouse team behind Brimstone, are among the exec producers.
“It was a very difficult film but I felt from day one that the producers were all really behind me. We fought our way through, all looking quite grey in the face sometimes…I always had a feeling that everyone believed in the story, believed in the film and thought we were making something interesting…we fought side by side,” Schwab stresses.
The main challenge? “Trying to match our ambitions with the available budget,” Schwab laughs ruefully. She adds that the production was “also fun.”
Schwab first noticed Glover in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990). “He was so…bizarre! So interesting,” she says of the cult American actor. “I’ve seen him since in a lot of different movies but he has always got this different kind of take on a character. He’s a profoundly unique personality, fascinating and difficult to decipher - and that is what I wanted for Mr K.”
Audiences, Schwab hopes, won’t know what to make of him. Should they like or distrust him? Is he the medicine or the disease? They’ll have to make up their own minds.
The film has an eclectic cast that also includes Swiss-Hungarian star Sunnyi Melles (famous for her projectile vomiting in Triangle of Sadness) as the imperious orchestra boss; Flemish actor and dancer Sam Louwyck (the man under the bed); Irish legend Fionnula Flanagan (a dotty old lady) and Norwegian actor Bjørn Sundquist (the temperamental chef).
“A hotel is a place where there are lots of people from different nationalities,” the director explains why she assembled such a mix of performers. “I thought that really went with the story. Also, I wanted them to be very strong character actors.”
Storm and Mimic VFX both contributed to the startling visual effects sequences. These include an octopus-like organism that seems to be part of the hotel’s foundations.
Following the Toronto premiere, Mr K. is expected to be released in Benelux by Paradiso early next year. Schwab herself is already hard at work on a new feature, The Souls, which she describes as “a magical thriller with horror elements.” This is currently shooting in Estonia. The project, whose Dutch production company is Amsterdam-based PPRL, came through the Berlinale co-production market and has support from the Netherlands Film Fund and Eurimages.
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Mr. K is written and directed by Tallulah Schwab and produced by Lemming Film (NL), The Film Kitchen (NL), A Private View (BE) and Take 1 Production (NO). International sales are handled by Level K.
Mr. K is financed with support from The Netherlands Film Fund, The Netherlands Film Production Incentive, CoBO Fund, AVRO/TROS, Creative Europe, LevelK, Eurimages, Screenflanders, Flanders Audiovisual Fund, Belgian Tax Shelter and Norsk Filminstitut.
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