Swiss director Jonas Ulrich makes his feature debut with Wolves [+lee también:
crítica
entrevista: Jonas Ulrich
ficha de la película], which tells the story of a young woman who falls for the new lead singer of the titular black metal band as he begins to show signs of being affiliated with the far-right NS black metal scene, also known as the “Nazi black metal” subculture. At the Zurich Film Festival, where the film premiered in the Feature Film Competition, Cineuropa spoke with Ulrich about his connections to music, casting non-professionals who know the black metal community and its underbelly well, and subverting the male-dominated nature of the scene.

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Cineuropa: The black metal subculture is integral to this story. What is your relationship to music or this subculture in particular?
Jonas Ulrich: I do have a background where I did some concert booking and organising for some really underground bands – also concert photography and films. I know the underground rock ‘n’ roll and metal scenes quite well. I always dreamed of a film taking place in this world, which would also take this world seriously. From there came my interest in the specific niche of black metal, which wasn’t my home base. It’s probably the smallest genre in the music world, but it contains the greatest disparities. It’s such an interesting microcosm: it has so many contrasts and a rich, but sometimes problematic, history.

You specifically cast folks from the black metal community – in doing so, you place us very close to this precarious world.
That was exactly what was important to us – finding an evolved community, so to speak, which wasn’t always easy, because you have to distance yourself from parts of the community [who hold hateful, extremist views]. It was a really interesting process where my producers and I tried to be very open about the intentions of the project. We tried to scare off the people who wouldn’t want this film to happen [because of the critiques it makes]. It was a long process but also amazingly fruitful. Every time we had a new non-professional actor or band joining, the project got better. A lot of stuff that was quite rough in the beginning got more and more specific with each actor we added.

Could you elaborate on this – and the casting?
It definitely started with research. For at least a year, I was just going to every gig possible, listening to all of the bands and also finding out the problematic parts of the subculture. There, I also made some connections. We have a side character called Amelie in the film. I was at a concert purely for research, and I saw someone playing a gig, and when I saw her on stage, I was like, “Oh yeah, she could be that character.” I just asked her after the show, very simply.

Did you co-create the music with the bands included in the film, or did they bring their own music to the project?
We had the interesting idea that we wanted to have a band for real. It was a long process that started with hiring a very good and quite successful metal composer to write the songs. We created a foundation with the songs first, and then we cast the band and also cast the main role with Bartosz [Bielenia]. Then, it was a process of rehearsing the songs, and they had to learn them as if they were an actual band and create a stage performance out of it. You have to decide: in what order do you play the songs? What’s the lighting setup and what are the costumes like?

We did all of this in pre-production in parallel with normal pre-production. Then we had to do some bookings for the band because we had some actual shows in the film in front of a live audience. We were like, “Nobody knows our band and nobody will come and see them,” so we took a more famous, international band and had our group open for them. They were super open to this. They played an actual Swiss tour only for the movie.

We access this world through the character of Luana, who could be described as naïve to the extremist, hateful views of some members of the subculture. Was this choice present from the start?
We knew it was going to be a story from this character’s point of view in combination with this musical scene. For me, it wouldn’t have been interesting to make a male movie about a very male world. I know a lot of women in this world who have stories similar to what happens [in the movie]. It was really important for us to challenge this world and also discuss gender roles in this environment. It is a traditionally male milieu and also quite traumatic, in a sense. It is contradictory in terms of how women are portrayed or what roles they are allowed to have in this [subculture].