To Create the Atmosphere in ‘Sound of Falling,’ Mascha Schilinski Asked, ‘What Does a Black Hole Sound Like?’

The German filmmaker tells IndieWire about making her Cannes-winning international Oscar entry, a sprawling portrait of generational family trauma, on location at a farm with child actors tackling adult ideas.

Mascha Schilinski arrived in Cannes as a fully formed filmmaker with “Sound of Falling,” technically her second feature after her student film, “Dark Blue Girl,” which she made at the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg in Ludwigsburg.

Her first film was “supposed to be released in the United States, but the film school couldn’t handle [the release], and they were the producer, and they were not used to this [idea] that there is an interest from the U.S.,” Schilinski said.

The actor and casting director turned filmmaker Schilinski won the Jury Prize at Cannes for the arrestingly atmospheric haunted house story “Sound of Falling.” The film tracks four generations of women, all with a kind of death wish as a result of abuse, across the 20th and 21st centuries living on the same farm in Northern Germany. From the early 1900s to the present day, four girls — Alma (Hanna Hekt), Erika (Lea Drinda), Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) — experience patriarchal violence, self-doubt, and forced sexual awakening in the Altmark region.

Their traumas echo off each other in a delicately crafted memory piece that, with cinematographer Fabian Gamper and editor Evelyn Rack and sound designer Billie Mind, acquires the hypnotic pull of a horror picture — like staring into a daguerreotype of the dead for too long. And it’s that very sort of image Schilinski and her co-writer Louise Peter discovered when entering the abandoned farm that would become the film’s shooting location and the film’s central character. As IndieWire wrote, “This stunner unfolds like 100 years of home video footage shot by the family ghosts.” Comparisons to Sofia Coppola’s “The Virgin Suicides” are apt, but “Sound of Falling” is closer to an experimental chamber piece than coming-of-age drama.

Schilinski’s film is representing Germany in the international feature Oscar race, and opens from MUBI in January following its qualifying run earlier this year. IndieWire sat down with Schilinski while she was touring the film in New York to discuss its unique production process, working with child actors who are not always privy to the terrible adult events going on, and its burned-in-your-brain sound design. One of the darker, richer entries in a strong year for international Oscar contenders, “Sound of Falling” is impossible to forget even if you can’t quite put your finger on its elusive meanings.

The following interview has been edited for clarity andlength.

IndieWire: I loved the original title of the movie, “The Doctor Says I’ll Be Alright, But I’m Feelin’ Blue.” I was immediately intrigued. Then, the German title is something like “Staring at the Sun.” How did you land on “Sound of Falling” for the English-language release?

Mascha Schilinski: Unfortunately, me and my co-author were the only two who were intrigued like you. [Laughs] And Thierry from Cannes loved the title as well, but the distributors and the producers were pretty sure it was too long. We ended up with “Sound of Falling.” This is the original title which I love, pretty much, but the German distributor wanted a German title as well. The translation from “Sound of Falling” doesn’t [work]. It’s not so easy because there’s no word for “sound.” It’s more like “noise” or something. It’s not as poetic. We ended up with “Looking Into the Sun,” a completely different title, but what I loved about “Looking into the Sun” was that it was my first image I had in mind when I stated to write the screenplay, that people take a step into the sun and close their eyes, and there’s this orange, wavy flickering thing, a pre-ancestor picture. Of course, you can’t look into the sun without pain.

Can you explain the writing process with your co-writer, Louise Peter?

We were sitting next to each other every day, 10 hours a day, for three and a half, almost four years. It was really intensive work. The first two years, we discussed every single day all the questions we were interested in, things like what is written into our bodies, what determines us through time, and we were interested in the simultaneity of time, and that we don’t understand, as human beings, something about time. We think we understand it, but we don’t. We were collecting all these things about transgenerational trauma, stories around us, as well as, of course, psychological signs and everything. We were interested in subtle questions that were almost about invisible things, things falling out of this nameable world.

We were not sure how we could turn it into a film, and then COVID hit. We escaped the city and went to the countryside, and there was this farm that became the main character in the film. This place has been empty for 50 years, an abandoned place that the owner left, so all the furniture is still there. You can go from room to room and discover things. We found a photograph, and this was surprising because this photograph was a snapshot, and there were three maids looking directly into the camera. This photograph and this farm were like the ignition to start this whole process. It was like a vessel for all these things we wanted to explore.

We realized that it’s all about memory itself and how memory and imagination flow into each other. This became the structure. When we tried to create a plot or some characters, it was like the screenplay itself screamed, “No! Don’t do this!” All the invisible things we were looking for we would lose. The film becomes the structure of memory itself, fragmented, associative. The pictures we see in the film are important but the pictures we don’t see are even more important because it’s about the things that we forget or that we shut out of our minds to survive.

What about your research process?

We read every single book we could find about this particular region where the farm is. One book was very important for the whole process because it was written by a woman, and she described a lost idyllic childhood in a chatty tone… how the father filled the pipe, or how the kids are playing the hay, and how the mom did the laundry. There were half-sentences in between, like how the woman must be made to be not dangerous for the men anymore. Or one sentence was from the maid who said, “I live for nothing.” We asked ourselves, what’s happened there? And we discovered more and more violence. The thing about violence from [the perspective of] these women and what they received of the violence was written in this pragmatic way. It was really the same as they described how they do the farm stuff. We put this tone into the film.

You shot on location at this farm, and shooting in all these different time periods, did you treat them as if directing separate movies? There are different casts, costumes, and set design to fit these periods.

It was quite a challenge for the art department logistically. We only had 33 shooting days, and with kids that are only allowed to shoot three hours a day. It was quite an effort to get this house prepped for every time [period], and then to shoot time after time in this house. You had this overlapping where some actors would disappear and others were arriving, and then you had these ‘80s and 1910s-style costumes, and we told the actors to collect movements from the others and use it. It was almost like they were looping each other. It felt like doing a long family story.

What are the challenges of working with children on set given the serious adult material of the movie that the child characters are only sometimes privy to understanding?

I love to work with children because they have this almost hallucinative force to discover things that should be hidden. They are so smart and have great instincts, and feel directly if there’s something wrong or right, even if they can’t tell what it’s about. The kids have their own ideas and conceptions of death, for example, which is a topic for this film… We worked very closely with the parents for each child to see what they know about things, and what they [didn’t]. With kids, it’s not about rehearsal. It’s about setting up a scene so that it’s fresh, that they have the first impulse, which is important to cover. We never shot more than three takes.

There was a specific ritual that I did with the kids that helped a lot. Every morning, I did, for example with little Alma, Hanna Heckt is the actress, I did an imaginary shower and said, “OK, now you turn into Alma.” It worked so well that, in the evening, I did the same thing to get her back into Hanna. Then there was the moment where, at the end of shooting, going to the weekend, and she was leaving with her mom far away, and three hours later, on the highway, she realized, “Oh, Mascha forgot to turn me back.” They came back because she must be Hanna again. The adult actors were skeptical about this technique. “What is she doing?” Then, after a couple of weeks, they were asking, “Mascha, can you do it for me?” Because it worked so well that they could come out of the role.

“Sound of Falling” has this enveloping sound design, this thrumming, hypnotic white noise almost. Some of those descriptions were written into the script.

I am a really visual thinker and also am thinking in terms of sound. As I was writing, it was all describing this atmosphere, this image that I had in mind. In the editing process, I had to find these sounds, and these were the moments where some great sound artists came into the project, for example, Billie Mind. We asked ourselves, “How does a black hole sound?” Or, “How does sound at a thousand meters under the ocean sound?” Or, “How does a big bang sound?” These women are looking directly in the world in the camera at us, and the world is answering. It’s also about ho,w when you have a trauma, there are only fragments of images or sounds. The sound, often in this film, knows more about things than the characters know at this stage.

Academy voting for the Best International Feature Oscar shortlist closes Friday, December 12, with finalists announced Tuesday, December 16.