Everything Will Change [+lire aussi :
critique
interview : Marten Persiel
fiche film] by German director Marten Persiel was the opening film of this year's Max Ophüls Prize, where it picked up the Audience Award (see the news). We talked to the director about the original concept for the film and the technical challenges it entailed.

Cineuropa: Where did the inspiration for Everything Will Change come from?
Marten Persiel: I was lucky enough to have had a childhood in close proximity to wildlife, through my environmentalist father. But that was in the 1980s; the film talks about today. I believe that the extinction of wildlife is the great untold story of the 2020s. Yes, there are books and documentaries about it, but it is not dominating our headlines as much as it should. We are losing hundreds of species every day right now, and this is not fiction. Once I’d processed those figures and what they meant for the wildlife that I love so dearly, I decided to put my energy into making this film.

How did you develop the dual concept of the movie?
I wanted to make a film that does two things at once: a wake-up call on one hand, and a super-enjoyable cinematic trip through the sheer beauty of nature on the other. That’s where the idea of the documentary-fairy tale came from. The film mixes those two ingredients with a sci-fi element and an animated comic sequence, too, so there’s a lot going on, genre-wise. I do hope that the result is that it subverts people’s expectations a bit and even allows them to have fun with this issue. I hope it lets them see nature as a super-fun gift, a fairy tale that becomes a reality for those who go there. We are not only the authors of a chapter in the planet’s environmental story by causing extinction; we are also characters in it. We can be Alice, and Wonderland is right there on our doorstep. I wanted to make people feel that.

Was it difficult to find such a huge amount of footage that you could use for the film?
Yes, but it was also so much fun. This was one of the earliest rules I set for myself in the writing process: I wanted the movie to be a celebration of both nature and nature filmmaking. I wanted to fill the screen with colours and the bizarre beauty of natural diversity, as captured by the filmmakers of the past. There are a bunch of scenes in there from David Attenborough’s movies, from Bernhard Grzimek, Heinz Sielmann and other classic nature filmmakers, starting from the 1950s. In a way, for me that was a revisiting of my own childhood. It’s a nostalgic perspective on the wild, which will soon be the only one available.

You pair images that are very painful to look at with beautiful ones. Was this intended to take the audience on an emotional roller coaster?
This is where I’d give all the credit to my cutters, Maxine Gödicke and Bobby Good, who built this ride. Editing those up-and-down emotional tones so close together was a challenge, and I believe they made it work so well. What we wanted was to keep the audience on the edge of their seats, emotionally. And maybe traumatise them into action, too. Maybe the intensity of a roller coaster is what is needed.

Where did you shoot the scenes in the wilds of nature with the red landscape? And did you shoot in a real laboratory?
Spain and Holland, primarily. I wanted to combine the extreme sun and drought of Andalusia with the high-tech waterworks of Holland to create our future. We shot the film in infrared, using a camera that ARRI modified especially for this production, in combination with a new kind of IR filter. The result is an image that looks largely natural but shows anything that is vivid green (leaves, grass or algae) as red.

Would it be fair to say that you are an optimist, after all?
I am aware that we are losing a real, existing paradise as we speak, and that freaks me out. I think there are urgent changes we need to make to our societies and our private lives, yet we don’t seem to be getting there. I think optimism means that you believe things will get better. If you look at the science, you will see that they won’t.

On the other hand, something new will replace the old – a post-wild ecosystem and some sort of place for humans in that. If we stay around as a species, it will be because we ended up confronting ourselves, our inner nature and our role within our ecosystem. So, in the very long term, natural ecosystems breaking apart and being replaced by artificial ones might still lead to something interesting. The film touches on those issues. While I would not say I am an optimist about the fate of natural diversity on this planet, I trust in the self-regulating power of nature. Either Homo sapiens manages to change, or we’ll have to go.