Last Saturday, August 17, the Locarno Film Festival ended and of the biggest name that was snubbed from the awards ceremony was Ramon Zürcher. At the festival, the director presented his third feature, The Sparrow in the Chimney, which is the final chapter in the “animal trilogy” that started with The Strange Little Cat (2013) and continued with The Girl and the Spider (2021). His new feature is focused on Karen (Maren Eggert) and her husband Markus, who live with their two sons in her idyllic childhood home. Their peaceful life is disrupted on the occasion of Markus’ birthday, as the whole family gathers at their place and the arrival of Karen’s sister Jule comes to create a continuous tension, a situation that escalates and provokes a certain destruction in their lives.
A couple of days after the Locarno premiere, I sat down with Ramon Zürcher and his brother Silvan, co-writer/director of The Girl and the Spider and producer of The Sparrow in the Chimney, with whom I talked about the film’s core themes, the use of animals, and the cinematographic inspirations behind their projects.
Omar Franini: I remember I read in an interview that for The Girl with the Spider that you drew inspiration from your personal experiences. Was that the case with The Sparrow in the Chimney?
Ramon Zürcher: I would say the film, like the previous too, is very personal, which concretely means that every character is close to me, or in a way, I understand them, even when they behave in a mean way. But the events that take place throughout the movie, or their actions, are not out of my “personal videography” — that’s all invented. For example, I don’t [have] such a big family, or things like that, but the emotions, the topics and the characters are very close to me. I was able to create a connection with each one of them, and that’s why I would say it’s a very personal film, but not a private one at all, because these things never happened in my family. We were only a family of four, but we were surrounded by many families like the ones of our mother’s brother and sister. We all shared the same garden, and I was able to observe certain energies or communication habits.
OF: Given the family dynamics we see in the movie, especially between Karen and her sister, or even his son, I noticed that she’s behaving in a certain way because of her resentment toward her mother. Would you say one of the main themes of the movie is generational trauma? Was it one of the starting points of the movie?
RZ: I wouldn’t say that it was there from the beginning. The starting point was the present of this family with those symptoms, blessings, and all that. And then the character of the grandmother, the mother of Karen, entered the script and became more and more important. And with the grandmother, also the past of this family entered the whole script, and then that picture of this generational trauma, as if the past is part of the present. Consequentially, the grandmother becomes an omnipresent figure, but you never see her because she’s deceased. Actually, that was a really important image also because I wanted to make a film about liberation with a fairy tale approach. I wanted to show how a person can overcome that trauma, live with it, or just make sure that the past is not a dark shadow over the present.
OF: Speaking of this fairy tale approach, I rather loved how the second half becomes more dreamy, especially when compared to your two previous movies. Why did you decide to follow that oneiric path?
RZ: I kind of like a certain fluidity in my movie, and I always try to create different layers; the first part is a rather simple portrait of this family, but then there’s that night sequence, which represents a shift in the narrative, followed by the dreamy second half. We don’t really know whether the things we are watching are real or not. Is she sleeping or dreaming? Is it rather an inner reality? Is Karen a ghosty projection of something she would like to be? You could also say the same about Liv, the neighbor: is she something created by Karen, like a ghostly projection?
OF: Animals have played an important role in your movies. Would you consider them on the same “level” as the other characters?
RZ: Not exactly. Human beings are the main narrative focus, while the animals are more like witnesses, as if they were “guests” of this family gathering too. They are part of the setting woven into each relationship, but they are highlighted though. In this movie, it was rather nice to have those flying animals, like sparrows, fireflies, and butterflies, because they are also like guests, they come and go, assuming a foreshadowing meaning, like when we see the sparrow flying out of the chimney. It foreshadows what is going to happen next, the incoming Karen’s metamorphosis. Because it’s like a fairy tale, at the beginning Karen wakes up in her bed, and at the end, she wakes up in the bed of the wooden cabin. So for me, it’s like how it came that Karen wakes up in the wooden house, and how she changed the setting and what is present around herself.
OF: What can you tell me about the use of music? There’s a nice contrast between the use of more classical music in the beginning and the more EDM in the second half.
Silvan Zürcher: Actually, we like contrasts a lot, not only for the music, but also on a visual level, like the contrast between the sunny, idyllic setting during the day and the darkness of the night that reflects the abysses of the main relationships. As for the music, we also like to first have classical music that is joyful, pleasant, and rather light, poetic in a certain way, and then to create a contrast with these electro-driven tracks, where the beats are rather destructive or monstrous. These contrasts enriches the universe and help us break things up a little, and get into the realm of imagination and experiment with it. We like to have joyful colors with dark topics, or contrasting feelings being shown in different atmospheres, or to have static movement order and chaos. In short, we like to have these contradictory siblings being combined.
OF: I noticed that blood plays an important role in the movie. We see it several times; for example, at the beginning it’s present because of the headless chicken, and there’s also emphasis later on after Leon gets beaten by other kids. What were you trying to convey through the use of blood?
RZ: I think that the amazing thing of making films, or just filming, is to make visible things that are invisible. The scars and wounds you see don’t represent only physical pain, but an inner bleeding. I think when characters have many psychological or inner wounds, maybe you can kind of show it also through the skin and the surface of a person. And for example, when Karen has blood out of her nose, it shows her inner pressure and that her body isn’t functioning anymore. She tries to keep everything together, and it’s becoming destructive. In the movie there’s tenderness and laughs, but also violence, a psychological one where these characters keep saying mean things to each other and every sentence is like an invisible knife. This psychological aggression creates destruction, and this becomes more apparent as the movie goes on. I wasn’t interested only in showing these wounds and their destructiveness, but also the aftermath of these. After destruction you can construct something else, so you can draw something positive out of that situation.
OF: So through destruction, we can reborn?
RZ: When something is destroyed, it doesn’t exist anymore. But the ground is still there and you can build something new. Often you say destruction is negative and construction is positive, but they are like siblings; sometimes the former has a rather positive effect and you can construct something which is less toxic and oppressive.
OF: What can you tell me about the casting of Maren Eggert?
RZ: During the casting process we chose five actresses for the role Karen, and then we made combined castings with the actresses chosen for the role of the sister just to see how they were acting together. In the novel, Karen is described as a very mean and dark character, but we knew we wanted someone sensitive, with a certain softness inside. Maren Eggert had exactly what we were looking for, and there’s something special about her face and how she can reflect the lack of emotions without being static because we can still feel the sensitivity of the characters she plays. We found out that she was the perfect Karen, because many other characters are rather typecast, like Johanna, who is like the blonde stereotype. That was important — she had to be sensual and show sexuality, the complete opposite of Karen.
OF: What were the main difficulties from a production point of view?
SZ: The main challenge was the financial one. We tried to co-produce the movie, first with Germany and then with France, but both didn’t work because of their TV rights. So, like with The Girl and the Spider, we were just a Swiss production without international partners. Another challenge was a logistic one; the film is told in two days only, and it was shot only in 33 days. The house caused us some troubles as well, because we wanted some kind of visual fluidity, like you can come from the inside and see the outside, the nature, the field, and especially the wooden cabin where Liv lives. And from the outside, you can also just look through the window and be in the kitchen. So this fluidity and the fact that we had to shot the movie chronologically was another challenge. Let’s take the main field, for example. There was a farmer who wanted to cut down the grass. When you have a narrative set in only two days, you can’t have it high, then low, and then again high. There has to be a certain continuity. But probably the biggest challenge is a personal one since it was my debut as a producer. I also produced Strange Little Cat, but it was within the framework of the DFFB Academy. And this is very different because when you make a feature film within an Academy, you can use the facilities; they give you technology, there are no salaries being paid. Now, it’s very different of course. I have to handle a different budget and respect some rules, like with the contracts and other stuff.
OF: The Sparrow in the Chimney is set in two days, as it was The Girl and the Spider, while Strange Little Cat was set over the course of one day. Why are you interested in telling stories set within such a short period of time?
RZ: I think within this trilogy, one of the main ideas was to condense the time, to have a real-time storytelling. And we also like to operate with certain spatial and temporal limitations, so it’s kind of a chamber piece and there are not so many jump cuts or ellipses. Now that we have done it three times, we feel like we have to do something different next, because that idea of chamber piece and condensed time is becoming like a prison. And maybe it’s good to liberate yourself from that idea, to try other things, to see how it works when you can jump much more from space to space.
OF: From your response, I’m guessing you’re already working on a new project?
RZ: Well, now I’m just starting with writing a new project. It’s about teenagers or young adults, and it’s about a person who loves somebody who doesn’t love her, so she has to find another love interest and has an affair with another person. It’s not really a road movie, but more of a “dating” movie, and where I explore different dating situations through the point of view of this group of young adults that want to reinvent themselves. It will also be an ensemble film. Silvan is also working on a new project.
SZ: I’m approaching the psycho-thriller genre, and it’s about a narcissistic doctor and his assistant, who is deeply in love with him. The movie mostly focuses on this psychosexual aphasis. There will also be other characters whose stories intertwine, like in Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma, so I will pay homage to many classics of the genre.
OF: What are the movies and the directors that have inspired you the most in your career?
RZ: I think it’s impossible to just name one or two movies and directors. Sometimes I take inspiration from a scene that I love from a film I don’t like. When I was a teenager, I started watching Ingmar Bergman movies, and I found myself deeply fascinated by the psychological reality in these and how he represented it. I also liked when he explored body horror topics, where the blood and other things become part of the psychological processes, as if it’s not only a physical illness. I took inspiration also from Giallo films and the way color is used, or the way the day-to-day life is told by Lucrecia Martel, like in La Cienaga. I’m also fond of the formal strength of Robert Bresson and some of the Berliner Schule directors, like Angela Schanelec. And finally Eric Rohmer — I like the vividness of his works.
OF: It’s interesting that you mentioned Rohmer, because last year I interviewed Christian Petzold on Afire and he mentioned the director as one of the main inspirations inspiration for his movie, and he also told me that there’s not a “summer movie” tradition in German language cinema. And while I was watching your movie, that comment suddenly came to mind.
RZ: Well, we are doing our part too, because The Sparrow in the Chimney is a summer movie, with a lot of sun… and darkness, of course.
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