European Films

Dutch director Nanouk Leopold at the Berlin Film Festival. Portraits by Fabrizio Maltese for european-films.net, all rights reserved.

On the subject of European cinema, the director immediately enthuses: "I feel at home in European cinema, especially the cinema of the 1970s. I was born in Rotterdam and a lot of European cinema screened there, sometimes it screened only there. It is opinionated, searches its own voice and incorporates so many different stories and structures. European cinema is sharp, unafraid not to please its audience or to let it work a little while watching a film. It tries to be coherent and faithful to an idea".

Though her native Netherlands are obviously a part of Europe, Leopold’s thoughts on the Dutch cinematic landscape and her place in it as an auteur filmmaker are not as bright. "Dutch cinema as such does not really exist," the director says. "A group of young people are trying to make what they think the public expects of them. They try to copy films from the US but this is really a waste of time; there is not enough continuity in these projects to make them work".

On her own influences, the director says: "They are not from the Netherlands, but from other parts of Europe and from Asia. What I tried to do with the long opening shot of a dead pine forest in Wolfsbergen is to indicate straight away to my audience what they are in for. That patch of forest tells a little story of its own: it’s dead and a bit dreary, but when the sun breaks through the clouds it looks warm and almost pleasant, and then the shafts of sunlight disappears again and it looks dreary again. This back and forth movement could also describe the family that is shown in the film".

The single most important thing the director tries to pay attention to when filming is subtlety. Says Leopold: "The whole world changes in the film, and in the last shot, when the woman is simply ironing her dead grandfather’s shirt we know that the world has changed. The scene makes the ironing seem like an airy pastime, it focuses on practical details to get the story across. I realise this might be difficult for some people to really focus on, and if during the film some people in the audience want to leave, then that is fine with me. I prefer to focus on making a good film rather than what anyone in the audience might want".

The catalyst of Wolfsbergen’s story is a letter written by Konraad (Piet Kamerman), the old family patriarch, to his extended family in which he explains he has decided to end his life this summer. His wife’s death by disease approaches its first anniversary and he does not feel like celebrating it. The letter, however, only seems to move the men who married into the family to action, as the man’s only daughter Maria (Catherine ten Bruggencate), a middle-aged politician, and her two daughters and their offspring remain stuck in their everyday routines.

"I actually wrote the screenplay before Guernsey," confesses the director, thus deflating the idea she is riding on a wave of recent Dutch films that deal with euthanasia, such as Ik omhels je met duizend armen (A Thousand Kisses) and the Dutch Foreign Language Oscar submission Simon. "When I started filming, I did think, here is another film about euthanasia, but quickly I switched to thinking: it really is only a very small part of the film".

As for the fact that all the women in the family seem unmoved or at least immobile by the announcement while the men try to do something for the family patriarch, Leopold says: "It is really just a coincidence that the two characters who react most obviously to the letter are men. The film in that sense could be taken as something more abstract, as if all the characters together are really but one person, stretched over different ages. Perhaps men are capable of a little more distance. For example, Micha (Oscar van Woensel), an outsider, repairs the broken record player that belongs to Konraad. One man thinks ‘it’ll only take a minute to fix it,’ while Konraad had no problem living with the small defect of the record player".

Though especially the women seem to live in isolated cocoons that allow for little intrusion from the outside world, the director explains that "the people in Wolfsbergen are finally united despite everything, at least physically. There is a moment in the film when all are together, but their problems are not solved because of it. The death of a family member is something concrete that forces families to come together despite themselves".

On the difference between her on-set work and her work in the editing room, the director says: "I filmed a lot of scenes that did not make the final cut. When we were editing it, I focused more and more on just a few scenes and staid with them until it was absolutely necessary for the story to cut to something else”. Like Guernsey, Wolfsbergen’s serene rhythms are unlike most other films coming out today. Says Leopold: "The pulse of people should go down. People should take the time to watch a film. Such as the scene where we focus on Maria applying a cream. Why is she doing this? The whole interpretation depends on the editing, on how long you show this moment. It is all about the breathing rhythm of a scene, and I tend to focus a lot on the sound to find out how long it should be".

Sound and visuals are as important as the rhythm in Leopold’s films and though she has only made three features, they can already be labelled as "Leopoldian" for the way in which these three elements are aligned to create a particular atmosphere. "I have always worked with visuals; I went to art school before becoming interested in film," the director explains. "I think in images even when I am writing the screenplay. If something takes place in a dark and narrow corridor, then the next shot should be set outside in a field in broad daylight. This work with contrasts also extends to the sounds and silences in the film and is very important when we are scouting locations. 

"With my art director I collect pictures and try to find the right colours and atmosphere that visualise the idea of the film. Small details are important: what someone’s front door would look like, or their toilet. Sometimes you can also find small presents on location that are perfect: Maria sleeps in a room where trees are painted on the walls, while her father’s house is actually in the middle of a real natural landscape. Her room is like a deformed, straight-jacketed version of her father’s house. The room was actually like that when we found it, but it took a long time to find that room!"

This interview originally took place in Dutch and has been translated into English by the author.