Since winning the European Film Academy's European Discovery – Fassbinder Award in 2002 for Hukkle, György Pálfi has explored a number of unique realms, as proven by Taxidermia [+leggi anche:
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Cineuropa: Where did the crazy idea for a fiction film revolving around a hen come from?
György Pálfi: I’m always searching for a unique perspective for my films because I believe cinema is the perfect medium for looking at the world through a different lens. It's a kind of intellectual game that allows me to build a truly special visual universe. On top of that, directing is a very practical profession. I always start with the opportunities available to me. After all my support was withdrawn in my own country for political reasons, I had to find a project that I could make on a very small budget, anywhere in the world. I needed a single-location story and an animal I was familiar with – one that's present everywhere and easy to move around. As soon as I landed on a hen, I knew I had a fresh perspective for exploring human stories. It was clear from the outset that I needed to place this small creature in a grand human tragedy and see what happened when those two worlds collided.

What was your main focus when writing the screenplay with Zsófia Ruttkay? Did you have to adapt the script much during filming?
The story is multi-layered, like a hologram, revealing the same picture through two distinct fates, and on different planes and dimensions. Of course, these two paths are interdependent, intertwined and, despite being driven by different goals and motivations, inseparable. Our core concept was to create a dual narrative: the hen's story moves towards a Hollywood-style happy ending, while the underlying human story unfolds as a tragedy, following the traditions of classical Greek drama. The two threads meet for a brief moment, and then diverge again. Because our main character is an animal, we had to plan every scene with great precision. Once we’d found a location that was almost a perfect match for what we had envisioned at the writing desk, Zsófia and I made a few minor adjustments. These changes allowed us to plan the shots in even greater detail alongside our cinematographer, Yorgos Karvelas.

What balance did you want to strike between the animal's misadventures and the parable-like dimension of the human activities that the hen observes?
The focus puller would always ask me where to pull focus, and my answer was always simple: “On the hen.” The hen is the protagonist; the human story just provides the backdrop for her adventures. At the same time, while our focus is on the hen, only humans watch movies, and humans are capable of making moral decisions. This creates the tension that forces the audience to think: “How do I live my own life? Can my individual happiness truly be separated from the events unfolding around me?”

The film touches on many genres: quasi-animal documentary, road movie, and social and family chronicle, as well as broaching the criminal aspect with human trafficking. How did you want to navigate between these genres?
This film can't be confined to a single genre – being an auteur gives you the freedom to play with different styles. In making this movie, I wanted to merge distinct filmmaking methods. I approached the locations and characters with a documentary-style focus on authenticity, while I used the techniques of nature films to capture the chickens and other animals. At the same time, the camera work and imagery follow the style of classic Hollywood films from the 1950s. Bringing these three approaches together gave the film its own distinctive aesthetic.

The hen's adventures among humans are often comical, even though there is always an underlying drama. How far did you want to take this tone?
The simultaneous use of comedy and tragedy always reveals a unique truth. This is the grotesque worldview that has defined all of my films, from Taxidermia to Free Fall and Perpetuity [+leggi anche:
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scheda film]. For me, this approach more accurately reflects the absurdity of our era. We had to be very careful, though, to ensure that the comic and tragic elements always chimed with one another. We wanted to make sure the viewer could find an emotional connection to both storylines, not just an intellectual one. It was very important to me that this film would intentionally not force you to "choose a side".

We often hear that filming with animals is difficult. How did you manage this feat?
It seems the hen is the exception to that rule. She was an incredibly easy animal to work with, and we also had the help of highly professional animal trainers. The only real requirement was that we had to plan every scene with absolute precision. The real challenge was for the actors, who had to be both highly professional and incredibly humble, as they always had to adapt to the hen's actions.