Goodnight Mommy has been chosen as Austria’s 2015 Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Film. It tells the story of a single mother who has returned home after having surgery and her twin sons get suspicious that more than just her face has changed. I recently sat down to talk to film directors and writers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala about how they created what’s been called, “The scariest film of the year.”
Awards Daily: What was the decision behind co-directing and co-writing?
Severin Fiala : It wasn’t really a decision. We were working on a documentary and had this idea for Goodnight Mommy and thought it would be fun to write it. Our interaction was fun and playful, and co-directing took away a lot of the pressures. We had trust which was crucial to what we wanted to do, and more importantly, we shared our vision of what we wanted to do. Veronika and I loved the same films, the ones that challenge your thinking.
AD: There’s a lot of usage of silence in the film, which in recent times makes one think of Michael Haneke. Was he an influence?
SF: Not really. We love history and films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Hitchcock and many other films that have become a part of who we are, long before Haneke. He’s a great film-maker and being compared to him is such a great honor, but he also is really precise in his film-making. When it comes to what he wants to tell, The Hunger Games isn’t really a horror film [Laughs]. This genre of film really talks about dark topics like death, grief and loss in a way people want to watch. Usually horror films make you turn away, but we make you watch.
AD: One thing I really liked was the way you change perspective halfway through the story telling.
SF: It was totally deliberate. John Ford was accused of being a racist because he always showed the cowboys as the good guys and the Indians as the bad guys, and he said, “Naturally I show the good guys as the good guys, and there has to be an antagonist as the bad guys.” Later on, he reversed the roles showing the Indians as the good guys and the cowboys as the bad guys, and it was really just a matter of perspective. That’s what we were wanting to show, that life is a matter of perspective. The children experience a completely different life to what the mother does, and you can’t show both at the same time. It’s not like black and white, it’s a matter of perspective and a matter of the circumstances. The question of identity and who makes you the person you appear to be, that’s all down to circumstances.
AD: You mentioned the children. Every time you put children in a horror film you know something isn’t going to be right. How did you find the twins Lukas and Elias Schwarz?
SF: Actually it was easier than we imagined. Our casting director said it was going to be an easy task and we wondered why she had said that, but she was right. Because it was so specific, you could call schools and they would know if they had twins in that age range. Boy twins from 9-11. We found 125 pairs of twins, and it was scary having them all sitting down in a room together.
The auditions were difficult because sometimes you’d have one twin more talented than the other, or one wanted to be in the film more.
We narrowed it down to three pairs who we thought could be really good. In the final auditions, we tied the mother to the chair and said imagine they’ve kidnapped your mother, you need to find out where she is, and you can do whatever you want. Two pairs only circled around, asking her questions.
The other pair, grabbed a pencil and started poking her, which was a sign of how courageous they were. They knew it was a game, and no one was really getting hurt. It was completely the right choice, they had great endurance and energy.
They’ll tell you it was the best summer of their lives.
AD: They were truly fascinating to watch because you didn’t know what they’d do next.
SF: Thank you.
AD: The house and the location almost seem like protagonists.
Veronika Franz: Finding that was even harder than the twins. It was difficult convincing the owner that he should rent out his house to a film crew because the rich owners didn’t need the money. It wasn’t easy, but we really needed it, because as you say, it’s a main protagonist for us.
It’s an extension of the mother’s character, because in the first half of the film, when we’re telling the film children’s perspective we couldn’t say much about the mother. We ended up using the house which was almost prison-like with the images she had on the walls and closing the blinds. It’s almost her.
The isolation was important because we wanted to intensify the atmosphere in the house by cutting all possible lines to the outside.
Also, the lake wasn’t in the script, the lake was a gift, we used it and re-wrote some scenes in the script to use the lake.
SF: One of the things about film-making is taking gifts that are given to you. For example, the hail scene wasn’t in the script, and most film-makers would use that as an excuse not to film. Instead, we ran out and shot the hail scene.
AD: You use reality to create horror as opposed to slasher horror, and that made the film so much more scary.
VF: Thank you for saying that, it’s exactly what we wanted to achieve. We thought if you rooted the film in reality, it was simple but also really effective. We don’t want to just show you violence or horror because of the effect. It’s more unpleasant to see violence that could really happen rather than seeing a child with a chain-saw cutting someone’s head off. That stuff doesn’t really touch me. But you can totally see a child using a magnifying glass, but to make it violence, we totally rooted it in reality.
AD: I loved that, and that’s really what increased the tension and fear factor.
VF: Thank you.
AD: How did you work with Olga Neuwirth (composer) to create the tension?
SF: We knew her work and had liked it a lot. We asked her to get on board. She saw a rough cut and said it needed no music at all. She actually went away and composed a lot, the hard part was deciding what part to take and not use too much because the silent atmosphere makes things eerie and adds that feeling of loneliness. It was all about finding a balance of how much silence to keep and how much music to use without destroying the silence in the film, and a lot of it was trial and error.
VF: Are you aware of the composer? In Austria she’s a huge composer. She composes opera, and is a rare case of a female composer and when we talk about that in the world of film, there are only a few female directors, but there are even less female composers.
She teaches in New York and is famous. Look her up.
