A troubled young man plagued — or guided — by visions of his absent mother is at the centre of Fridtjof Ryder’s atmospheric debut feature Inland [+lire aussi :
critique
interview : Fridtjof Ryder
fiche film], playing in UK cinemas from 16 June via Verve Pictures, following its premiere at the BFI London Film Festival last year. 

Cineuropa: How did this project begin?
Fridtjof Ryder: The big things really were to make something at home, with people from home. Knowing those environments and wanting to try and catch that, somehow. The other thing was the relationship in the film between the mother, the father and the son. But then there were loads of other bits as well, just in terms of stuff I was watching or reading, things I was picking up on. That process was way more fluid, even just from draft to draft. Then obviously it changes loads when you start shooting, and again when you're editing, and the whole way through.

The alabaster statues in the film, and the ambient mood of doom and horror, are very evocative of David Lynch and Twin Peaks in particular. How did you deal with those influences and reference points?
I think a lot of the way I ended up working with references was with my cinematographer [Ravi Doubleday], who is my best mate. We would exchange a lot of stuff backwards and forwards, and those references were much more practical — things like mood and tone in the way you're shooting one scene. It was less about taking inspiration from David Lynch's work as a whole. But obviously, people like David Lynch, you just can't get past them, they're so big. If you like that kind of cinema, they influence you in some way. But working with references was a much more open process of basically shedding skins the whole time — stuff that you would be interested in at one point, which would get you to the next step script-wise. Nicolas Roeg and other references that have been pointed out — they're all there somewhere. How consciously they're there, I don't know. But what's interesting is that by the time you get to making the film, you've almost worn through all your references, to the point that you're not sitting on set and talking about a specific reference or filmmaker. But references are also just useful as a shorthand with people you work with. You can almost say “I’d like something a bit like that” and if it's someone you've worked with and who's seen similar films, that's a good way of working.

How did this work when it came to convincing others to get involved in this project? 
That's again a point where references come in handy. Crew wise, it was kind of different because we had our core group of people who were essentially friends and who were filmmakers as well, who wanted to work on something together. So we all believed in it, I think, which makes you strong because it's not just you going into a meeting by yourself. But yeah, it's kind of a hard film to sell, and it was such a local thing. The original way it was funded was through a crowdfunding campaign, and it was shot for very little. When more money came into the film and it got a bit bigger, that was actually after it had been shot. 

The film has a dreamlike quality. What was the process of editing it and putting it all together like?
The edit was really open and I had a certain confidence in that because when you're young, you eat up all the stuff that other filmmakers have said about their processes, just to give yourself some kind of confidence, and a lot of the filmmakers I love really love doing that. The edit stays as open as it can, and the score informs back on the edit, as does the sound design. It's not about locking it off at every stage. You remain constantly open in case you hear a bit of music that does something to a scene, then you can go back in and recut it to work with the music. It was also about really learning how sound works in film. I was lucky to have a really great sound crew who are a bit further along the line, who could teach me things about how not literal sound is. Sound doesn't translate as literally as images do. Often, the right thing for sound is two steps removed from what you thought it was. Learning to hear was a big thing, in terms of working with other people. 

The character played by Mark Rylance brings a strange, unexpected touch of optimism to the film. How did he come about, and how did you cast Mark Rylance in the role?
We had a teacher in school who the character's named after, who is a big influence. He's a fun character because, from my perspective, he's a sort of guardian father figure character, but he's also sort of mythologized and self-mythologized and in the process of mythologizing himself. He's not quite real. He almost feels like a magic character, in the way he talks about things. It was a mix of a load of things. One of them was that I have loved Mark's work on stage and on film, and was incorporating loads of that because he's the most dynamic performer, in terms of what you can get him to do — from tears to laughter in a single line. Knowing how broadly he could stretch as an actor, it felt like you could write a character like that, this sort of father figure, guardian/mystic character, and he would pull it off.