Q&A Session with Marcel Zyskind, DFF, about Tea Lindeburg’s film “As In Heaven”

The screenplay is the adaptation of Marie Bregendahl’s novel En dødsnat, or A Night of Death in English translation. It recounts the night where young Lise, the eldest daughter of a large family living on a farm in Denmark in 1880, loses her mother during a particularly complicated parturition. The question of maternity seems to haunt the very origin of the film, given that the director found this novel on her own mother’s bookshelf, and read it just after having given birth to a son herself, around nine years ago. These conditions certainly impregnated the film with a particular aura, both feminine and sincere, full of deep empathy for each character. The director added : “Over 300,000 women still die in childbirth each year,” yet the topic is rarely dealt with in the cinema and is even less frequently shown.

The director says that she found the novel quite visual : “Reading it was already practically a cinematographic experience.” Yet, her adaptation takes interesting liberties with the novel, while remaining faithful to its tone, namely in developing the character of Lisa. The young girl becomes the main character of the film, while the novel was more choral and narrated from an omniscient point of view. The film takes the stance of placing itself in the young girl’s gaze, which gives her greater depth. Beyond a family’s tragedy, the film also explores the destruction of a young girl’s dreams, who ceases being a child and becomes a woman in the space of a night. The dream scene which opens the film, is a particular addition that did not appear in the novel. Speaking about that scene, Marcel Zyskind explains that it was shot during preparation. Indeed, the scene takes place in a field of wheat, under a dazzling sun. Shooting was planned for September, but that scene absolutely had to be shot in June, before the fields were harvested. Shooting the scene during preparation also allowed the DP to convince the producer that it was necessary to shoot the film in 35mm.

Because the film’s gaffer was also in the audience, Zyskind interacted with him to try and give us an idea of the various lighting setups. For the interior night scenes, which make up a large portion of the film, they recalled having worked in a slightly underexposed chiaroscuro whose warm tones were supposed to round out the candle and oil-lamp lighting. They shot during the day, blacking out the windows, sometimes with slightly less-opaque fabrics, in order to allow a bit of light to enter, reminiscent of moonlight. For exterior night scenes, they used the hilly location to place three Sky Panels above head to imitate moonlight.

Preparation was short and was mainly devoted to location scouting. Indeed, the limited budget prevented reconstruction or redecoration of the parts of a period farm. The team found museums on a island in Denmark that had kept the interiors of these homes intact. The locations had to be adapted for the requirements of shooting, nonetheless, namely by moving the bedrooms to larger rooms, because the small period bedrooms did not allow the camera enough distance from the actors.

The rest of preparation was dedicated to rereading the script and establishing a cinematographic language that was unique to the film. The most complex scenes, namely those requiring VFX, were storyboarded and made into a shooting script, as were the first scenes shot. The film was shot in nearly the same order as its final cut, and for the director and her DP, it was important to have an anchoring point they could rely on, at least during the first days, so that the whole crew would understand the directorial intent.

The rest was less prepared. The duo said they sometimes prepared rapidly the night before. Marcel Zyskind added : “We sometimes changed everything at the last moment because of an idea we’d had that morning when we saw the location. The film had found its style and it all became quite natural.” The crew stayed open to unforeseen circumstances and surprises. They said they stopped one evening by the side of the road to shoot a particularly beautiful sunset. Flexibility was always used to further the film’s tone. The crew shot with very little equipment, and no dolly. A few days of Steadicam shooting had been planned for in advance, but the remainder of camera movements were done by hand. There were few takes, and the constraints of 35mm shooting were augmented by the specificities of a shoot involving children, whose limited attention spans make efficiency of the essence.

The director revealed the stakes present in the aestheticization of the images : “We wanted to create a beautiful and bright world, because although it’s a sad story, we didn’t want to depict a horrible and painful environment ; we also wanted to show the children’s joy and carefree nature.” Zyskind followed the children in their games with an acrobatic and sensitive handheld camera. In terms of aesthetics, he said he was inspired by L. A. Ring’s paintings. Since the lighting was supposed to be natural and warm, the costumes and the sets contributed colour. Red was treated with particular care, and was eliminated from all sets and costumes, in order to make the presence of blood even more striking and to translate with greater intensity Lise’s shock at seeing it. Nature is omnipresent on screen and constitutes the world in which the characters grow ; it was treated almost as a character in its own right. Its green tones envelop the entire film, and enter into opposition with the red, making its presence even more striking.

(Summary by Margot Cavret, for the AFC – Translated from French)

In the portfolio below, a few paintings by Laurits Anderson Ring (1854-1933), which inspired Marcel Zyskind.