“Doors and Passages” | Tallulah H. Schwab, Mr. K
A travelling magician finds himself in a Kafkaesque nightmare when he can’t find the exit of the hotel he slept in. His attempts to get out only pull him deeper inside, entangling him further with the hotel and its curious inhabitants.
Starring Crispin Glover, Sunnyi Melles, and Fionnula Flanagan, Mr. K screens Saturday, May 3, at 11:59 p.m., at the Chicago Critics Film Festival (May 2–8, at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago), ahead of U.S. distribution later this year from Doppelgänger Releasing, Music Box Films' genre label.
“Mr. K explores the way we try to mold reality into something we can control and understand,” Schwab wrote in press notes for the film’s world premiere at last fall’s Toronto Film Festival. “How we protect the status quo by surrounding ourselves with others who share our view, making the world bite size and relatable. But any personal truth is a paradigm waiting to be popped. There is always something more, something that comes from left field, something you hadn’t thought about that bursts your bubble and forces you to reassess all your previous assumptions.”
Ahead of Mr. K screening at the festival, Schwab graciously took the time to answer this year’s CCFF filmmaker questionnaire. Below, her individual responses.
How did you first become interested in filmmaking? What was your path toward directing your first film?
My father had a 16mm camera and involved me and my sister in small projects from a very early age. At first, I would appear in front of the camera, but as I grew older, I would be increasingly involved with the work behind it, creating stories, directing, doing camera work and editing. My father loved film with a passion, and his love was contagious. Making films seemed like the most important and most wonderful thing one could do.
I studied film and theatre-directing in Amsterdam, where I directed my first short films and for a while I had a small theatre company.
One of my shorts caught the eye of Peter Greenaway’s producer Kees Kasander, who invited me for a chat. Our talk resulted in me starting to develop Mr. K. Unfortunately, Kasander fell seriously ill and I was stuck with a very ambitious project, little experience and no producer to back me up.
I realized I had to put it on the shelf for a bit and work myself up. I made more short films and slightly longer ones, then a mini-series, until I got the chance to make a movie called Confetti Harvest. It was a story set within a strictly religious Protestant community in Holland. Taking on that project was exotic to me and yet personal. I was not brought up within this kind of community, but my father was born in the Netherlands, to parents who were members of two different branches of a similar, strictly Protestant community.
Sinking into the material, I discovered an important part of my father’s background as well as my own. The film was invited to the Berlin Film Festival and competed in the Generation section.
What inspired you to make the film you're bringing to the festival?
The idea for Mr. K comes out of my own social awkwardness. The real world has always felt as a complicated puzzle to me, one in which others seem to have been given clues I somehow missed. Fiction has always felt safer.
The titular character of Mr. K is like me in one way. He is dropped into a strange place he doesn’t understand the logics of. He desperately tries to find out how things work, what is expected of him and how to get out in one piece.
Tell us about a film that you consider a guiding influence (whether it has informed your overarching vision as a filmmaker, directly informed the title you're bringing to the festival, or both).
If I have to mention only one movie that had a profound effect on me, It would have to be Wild at Heart by David Lynch. I saw it in Oslo when it came out, and it blew me away. I had never seen anything like it. The mix of humour and violence. It was bold and unapologetic with its larger-than-life expression, following no rules but the creator’s own. I couldn’t stop crying on my way home from the cinema. It was pure perfection in my eyes.
Being unafraid like that is something I strive for in my work.
Wild at Heart is also the film in which I saw Crispin Glover for the first time. A delightfully peculiar performance, unlike any I had ever seen and unforgettable.
Tell us about a location that's held significance to the film you're bringing to the festival: a setting where filming took place, a geographic area that provided a source of inspiration, or another type of space that comes to mind for you in thinking about the film. What made this place so special?
Small doors, narrow passages and alleyways are irresistible to me.
Old buildings and old cities have in common that you will find passageways and doors in the strangest places and of the oddest sizes. If you venture down them, you never know where you will end up.
I generally have an excellent sense of direction, but places of a certain age and history have secrets and ways of tricking you. Therefore, if I come to such a city for the first time, I love to walk around at random. I will pop down the smallest paths and if no one is watching, try to open doors, especially if they have a peculiar size or are situated in an unusual place.
Most times, logic will prevail, and my expectations will be confirmed; I will see a closet or simply step into the next street. But sometimes, and this is why it is addictive, a wonderful new world opens up to me. There is something magic about it.
Buenos Aires is for example a city with many secrets and many faces. I was there many years ago as part of a film crew. One night I stepped into a very grey and boring residential building. There was a lift and post-boxes and a narrow concrete stairway leading up. Initially there was nothing special or exciting about the place. But after walking up two boring stairs, hearing only my own footsteps, a narrow passageway appeared leading to the right.
At first glance there was nothing out of the ordinary about the passage. It was grey and silent like the rest of the building. An unobtrusive passage, except that it was not straight. The passage had a slight bend to the left, which made it impossible to see where it ended. I ventured down it, expecting nothing but grey doors leading to grey apartments, and at first there was just that, grey concrete and silence. But the passage was long and, as I came further around the seemingly never-ending bend, sounds started fluttering in my direction and suddenly I found myself in a full-blown tango joint. Not a small one. It was a huge and crowded place with the longest bar I have ever seen and a big dancefloor with couples swirling around. How this enormous, circular room could fit into the square and average-sized building that I had just stepped into is still a mystery to me. My obsession with doors and passages has most certainly influenced Mr. K.
The theatrical experience brings us together to celebrate artistic experience and expand our horizons as human beings. Tell us about a memorable theatrical experience from your life.
I watched Pan’s Labyrinth, directed by Guillermo del Toro, in the beautiful art deco cinema Tuschinski, in Amsterdam. The exquisite beauty of that film, combined with the stunning surroundings, made it a fantastical and almost otherworldly experience.