Luxembourgish director Eileen Byrne discusses her first feature, The Mariana Trench [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Eileen Byrne
scheda film], which is based on Jasmin Schreiber’s best-selling novel of the same name and follows the journey embarked upon by a pair of seemingly incompatible characters: a girl tormented by feelings of guilt over the death of her little brother and an eccentric elderly man.

Cineuropa: Paula’s decision to return to Trieste on her brother’s birthday is both symbolic and deeply emotional. How did you navigate the portrayal of her grief and suicidal intent, ensuring it felt authentic and sensitive to audiences?
Eileen Byrne: I think intuition and empathy play a big role. Personally, I was very touched by the story while reading the novel. I have three younger siblings myself and was able to understand Paula's pain very well up to a certain point. From the very beginning, it was important to me that I managed to convey this unspeakable feeling of grief that she has to experience at such a young age as genuinely, directly and comprehensibly as possible.

For me, making films means touching people. I think every director has their own focus when working - be it the visual aesthetics, the technical challenge or the story. Personally, I'm happy when I manage to get the audience to emotionally participate in the character's journey, and empathise with them and their situation.

It's easy to write a character and say: “She's sad now,” or “She's in love now.” But it's quite different to consider whether you assert these feelings in a character or let them feel them. If I feel the character's sadness in my own heart, then I learn something about this character, and about people and their inner world in general.

But of course, I must also mention our lead actress, Luna Wedler, who played a big (if not the biggest) part in bringing Paula to life and making her emotions palpable. Luna is a very empathetic and highly intelligent young woman who intuitively understood Paula from the very beginning. She threw herself into this emotional world with a degree of courage and sensitivity that impressed me enormously. We sometimes communicated without words, purely through emotions, which was a very valuable experience for me.

The relationship between Paula and Helmut forms the heart of the story. How did you approach directing these two contrasting characters to create a bond that feels both organic and transformative?
One big advantage was definitely the fact that Edgar, Luna and I got on very well right from the start. That helps when you work together on such an emotional level. We decided relatively early on not to rehearse the scenes before shooting, in order to maintain a lightness that was important for the tragicomic tone of the movie. This meant that the situations on set were still fresh and left us some room for humour and surprises.

It was very interesting for me to observe that both actors had their own unique approach to acting and to their emotional world. Edgar is a very experienced and well-known stage actor in Germany and approached the role of Helmut much more thoughtfully and "exploratively" than Luna, who had already been in front of the camera as a teenager and threw herself into the role more intuitively. For me as a director, both were very exciting: through the long conversations with Edgar, I learnt a lot about Helmut's feelings and motivations - he was naturally less close to me as a character than the young woman. I definitely learnt a lot from both actors and am very grateful for this experience.

The road trip to South Tyrol serves as both a physical and an emotional journey for Paula. How did the locations and the cinematography contribute to the narrative and the themes of rediscovery and healing?
The mountain landscapes in Austria and Italy definitely contributed a lot - both in the writing process, and in the preparation and filming. You can't help but be emotionally moved by them. I remember walking the narrow path to our "Helmut’s house" location every morning in South Tyrol and stopping briefly each time to look down into the valley. The view was phenomenal, and every day of filming began with this fulfilling feeling of happiness - it was a gift and certainly influenced the actors, too.

It was my wish from the beginning to shoot in autumn because I wanted to avoid the typical, clichéd images of Austrian and South Tyrolean landscapes - lush, green meadows against a deep-blue sky. The red-brown autumn tones simply fit the inner life of the characters much better. And they are at least as beautiful as the summer landscapes.

What makes me particularly happy is that nature slowly blossoms more and more over the course of the story. This was absolutely not planned but is due to the complications of the shooting schedule in three different countries, which forced us to shoot the end of the film in South Tyrol in September and the beginning of the movie in Luxembourg in the darkness of November. In terms of continuity, this is, of course, completely illogical, but it supports the characters' sense of healing.

The visual contrast of depth and height reflects the inner journey of the characters very well. And it forms the aesthetics and colour palette of the film. With my DoP, Petra Korner, we decided to show almost no sky at the beginning of the film in order to support the feeling of oppression and confinement. Only as the story progresses does the horizon appear, and later, the mountain peaks and the sky - when the characters are finally able to breathe again.