16/09/2024 - The director and star converse about their film and their mutual desire to let the audience interpret it for themselves

(© Thomas Attila Lewis)

Starring acclaimed character actor Crispin Glover as the eponymous magician stuck in a mysterious hotel, Tallulah H Schwab’s Kafka-esque, surrealist sophomore feature, Mr. K [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Tallulah H Schwab, Crispin …
film profile], enjoyed its premiere in the Platform strand of the Toronto International Film Festival.

Cineuropa: Your first feature, Confetti Harvest [+see also:
trailer
film profile], was fairly naturalistic. What led you to the surrealist tone of this project?
Tallulah H Schwab: Actually, I started out more surrealist. I had made a couple of shorts that are more in that direction, and then I wrote a screenplay for this. The first draft was already 20 years ago, but it's not a movie that is immediately easy to make, especially in Holland, because they're much more used to naturalistic realism. So, they were like, “What is this?”

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

I had just come straight out of film school when I had this idea, and it was quite big, and the producer that I had worked with had a haemorrhage, so he was out. I found I had to get more work on my CV so that I could make it. I did a few things that I hadn't written myself and which I found interesting in different ways. This one I've written all by myself, so it's more my own fantasy.

The connections to Kafka are apparent, of course, from Mr K’s name to the film’s imagery and themes.
THS: I love Kafka's characters. They come out of nothing, and you don't know much about them, and then they are put into a social system that they don't understand. I've always been fascinated by these characters. So for me, that's who he had to be. I also think that when you play a character, you also have to flesh it out a little bit by yourself. Crispin does his own thing, but I knew that he would be perfect for it. So that's also how I cast: I cast people that I think will find the right tone, and then, you can just go for it.

Crispin Glover: You said that I do my own thing, but there was something that I had in my mind that was different, to a certain extent. The way the script was written, it was interpretable in a way – which is good. But then, when we were shooting, there were interpretations that I had that were altered while we were filming, which was fun. The most important thing to me is that the film retained interpretable elements. I don’t like films that dictate, as an audience member – there has to be something that’s left up to the audience. If something is absolutely cut and dried, then I feel like that becomes propaganda, which I’m very sensitive to. So, if something has a mystery to it, then I can enjoy it.

THS: And the logic should be there, but it shouldn’t be in your face.

There seems to be a complex social allegory embedded in how Mr K is treated within the system and also how he treats those within it. However, I wasn’t sure how much you expected the audience to read into it.
THS: What for me is very important about the story is that it tells us about how people try to control and understand the world. You use all the information you’ve got, and then you draw conclusions. From that, we make systems and we make ways of being together. There's an element of illusion about it because it’s like a bubble. Inside the bubble, like a paradigm, it all makes sense, but there's so much we don't know that is outside of the bubble. Suddenly, if something comes in that we don't know, which happens all the time, then it all falls apart, and we have to build up this truth again. We have to deal with the fact that we want to know the truth, but it's impossible. And how do we know what's important or not important if we don't know all the aspects?

Over the course of the film, the hotel reveals its many secrets. Could you speak about the process and thoughts behind the production design and the set?
THS: I had some big rooms that were real places but all adapted to the story. There were parts that were built specifically. We had two sets with different corridors because we had to change the corridors every time we would play. We would do one set and then the other set.

The hotel, in many ways, acts as its own character, which viewers learn in different ways through to the very end.
CG: There was something about the end for which I had a different interpretation, but it would be difficult to describe. The character of the hotel was always a really important part of the entire film. In a way, it's the most important.

THS: Yes – it’s about thinking that you know what the world is that you’re in, and finding that, actually, you don’t.