– The Hungarian director reveals some intricate details about the making of his first feature, a powerful, absurdist thriller
(© Margaux Gatti/Luxembourg City Film Festival)
In his feature debut, Feels Like Home [+see also:
film review
interview: Gábor Holtai
film profile], Hungarian director Gábor Holtai channels the absurdist, critical streak of Yorgos Lanthimos’ early films to depict a group of people who are forced to act like a family in order to appease their Papa. We follow Rita (Rozi Lovas) as she is kidnapped and told that her name is Szilvi, slowly discovering alongside her the dark secrets of the Árpád family. The movie, whose festival run began last year at the Sitges Film Festival, was part of the selection of the recent LuxFilmFest, where Cineuropa caught up with Holtai to discuss the making of his debut.
Cineuropa: What’s the most terrifying thing about family dynamics?
Gábor Holtai: Family dynamics can outgrow their social structure and become bigger than that – the way of being of a small family can spread into larger groups and even to the whole of society.
Like a virus?
Yes. If you get used to a certain power dynamic in your family, that makes it easier for you to replicate that. It’s also easier to become a victim of oppression if you’re already used to it in your close family.
The Árpád family exerts a scary kind of oppression over the main character, Rita. How does one render the presence of fear in a script?
You don’t write fear; you write reality. If you can pull that off, it will appear scary because you realise that what you’re watching on screen could actually happen in your neighbourhood or in your neighbouring country. I could find myself in a situation like hers, and one of my loved ones could, too. What would I do?
Your film is at once absurdist, quasi-dystopian and realistic. Why did you turn to fiction to tell such a story?
With fiction comes a wider scope. If I say that my film reflects the viewer’s exact reality, then I have to be very specific about the details of what I depict, while the scope of the themes gets narrower. On the contrary, having a high concept helps to establish a wider scope and to address bigger social structures. With a more stylised approach to storytelling, there can be several layers to the film: for example, you can watch it purely as a thriller or read between the lines.
Why did you choose to depict a family of eight?
There’s an intellectual answer that has to do with the types of conformism that each of the characters represents, but there’s also a practical answer: how many people can you sit around one dinner table? Eight is just a perfect number to signify a big family.
The Árpáds’ flat is a character of its own. How much of what we see was the real location, and how much was set dressing?
The apartment we found was almost exactly as you see it in the film – the big steel door with multiple locks, the secret door, the library room, the wallpaper, the furniture, the chandelier… Of course, we dressed it up a bit, and we repurposed the rooms, but 80% of the flat was like that.
Seeing the apartment, an international viewer perceives a certain status and class, but what additional things does it signal to a Hungarian viewer?
For the domestic viewer, it would signify the past, but there’s usually two interpretations harboured by the Hungarian audience – one is that it’s the place where Papa grew up, and the other is that we are in an artificially created place that makes him feel safe. Both of those interpretations are correct, actually, and it was always my intention to show this flat like a place of full control for him.
Your background is in music, so which came first: the soundscape or the images?
I edit my films as a silent sequence, without any music or sound design, and then I do picture lock. My thinking is that a film has to work well without music first, and then the music would help you just fine-tune certain scenes, giving them a bit more of a push or pull. So only then did I compose the music, and only for some parts of the film.
