Dominik Moll

Yeah, I couldn’t deny that. There was the pressure and of course when you make a film that’s quite successful you’re always afraid that you might disappoint the audience with the next film.

I went right into Lemming after promoting Harry all over the world which took a year. Then after that year I started working on Lemming so I would say I worked on it for about three years.

The original idea was really the situation of a guy finding more or less a dead lemming in his sink. In the beginning I didn’t really know where this was going to lead me or what the film was going to be about. But I liked that situation because of its strangeness and also because it threw up quite a few questions of how the lemming got there because lemmings don’t live in the south of France. I thought that it was an interesting starting point. Then little by little I began to explore the different paths and the different possibilities and things added to one another and the next element was probably the idea of a person who was very much in control of things and who thought in order to be happy in your life you had to control things. Then there was the idea of the young model couple in opposition to an older couple that was more on the destructive side and so that is how it built up.

Right, but I’m not quite sure I’d call it a thriller. That seems a bit one-sided or a bit strong. It’s a mixture of different things. It’s partly thriller, partly ghost story, partly a story about couples. So it’s a mixture of all that so blending all those genres is what I found challenging.

Yes because there are things that you cannot explain rationally that are quite unreal. The spirit or the ghost or whatever you call it takes over a living woman’s body. Then after that you can also imagine that the whole thing is a fantasy of the main character, Alain, but apart from that, it is partly a ghost story.

First I didn’t want to cast him, because I thought it would be better to change the cast every time we do a new film. But he kept coming back to my mind and I wasn’t satisfied with the other actors I saw. Alain has some similar qualities to Jimmy Stewart for instance, meaning that he’s quite neutral. He’s Mr. Everyman so you can really pull him into different directions because he could play a psychotic, a victim and an everyday person. Even when all those things happen to him, another actor could have looked like a complete victim, and that was something I wasn’t interested in. He always keeps a certain strength and dignity even when he gets beaten up.

Yeah, I don’t know why I have this thing with flying things but it’s almost as if I had taken the flying monkey from Harry and cut it in two and made the flying webcam and the little lemming out of it. There is a link somehow.

When I was writing the screenplay and I had this idea that he liked to control things. So I thought it was a good idea that his job should be a home automation designer and then I started to research on that and I wanted to go a bit further than what I had seen. Also I thought that the flying webcam would be an interesting device because it has something very playful and it is almost like a toy. It’s true that Alain, at least in the beginning, has the innocence of a child as if he wasn’t aware of the complexity of the adult life yet.

I think that until now my films have always been autobiographical to a certain extent because I always use personal experiences or what I observe around me to feed the screenplays. Then I will also to bring it away from my personal life and make a real fiction out of it.

When I write the screenplay I try not to think about the actors until once I’m satisfied with the screenplay. But when I did start to think of actors she was really my first idea because she really has that mixture of well-being, still being very attractive and at the same time being a bit frightening. That was something I was looking for.

It would really depend on the project. After With a Friend Like Harry I had quite a few offers from the US so I started reading screenplays from there and I just didn’t find anything I could relate to. I thought it was all things that had been made before and for me it’s important that I really find a personal relation to the project. If ever a screenplay comes along that I connect to or if I have an idea for a screenplay that could be in the English language, then why not. For the last few months I have been working on a project that should have been an English language project, which was an adaptation of two short stories by TC Boyle. Unfortunately I got stuck with it so I put it aside and I’m looking for a new idea but that would have been a perfect English language film.

Yeah, they bought the remake rights. I know that they have a screenplay but I don’t know if they have a director yet or if it’s really going to be made or not.

No, from the beginning I said I don’t want to have anything to do with it. I don’t see the point of doing the same film twice.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck