As promised, here is the complete interview of Ivan Engler, who had been partially published in the January’s issue of Ecran Fantastique.
This interview is the first one of a series of three interviews about the movie CARGO.
Happy reading.
– Hi Ivan, how did you get the idea of CARGO ?
I’m very fascinated by solitude. During winter, directly after the snow has fallen freshly, I love to hike through a little valley nearby, where there is no cell phone reception and usually no people at all. The solitude I experience there touches me deeply. It’s totally quiet, no civilisation, everything immaculately white, only the sound of the river, and I am the first one to touch the fresh snow…
My primary urge in moviemaking is to transport moods. Solitude and its effects on people was one of the moods I definitely wanted to transport in CARGO.
I personally think that in today’s world, everything is demystified. Things and places become transparent, tangible, reacheable. Although interesting and helpful for everyday life, I actually miss the mystic, the special, the magic, the unexplaineable, the places where you can only go by imagination or by really taking the greatest efforts.
That was the reason to set the story in a spaceship, in deep space, where no one else has been before. And Laura, the main character, is all alone in the cold, while everybody else is frozen in cryosleep. And behind a big bold locked door lies a secret, deep in the darkness of the cargobay…
- What were your influences ?
My all time favourite movie is “BLADE RUNNER”. Next to a fantastic and very philosophical story, Ridley Scott transports so many moods, so many touching and dazzling snapshots of this unique future, that everytime I see the movie, the movie touches me not only by the emotional journeys the protagonists go through, but also by all its moods and moments. Same thing goes for “ALIEN”. So these two films were big and important influences for the creation of CARGO.
Next to that, I am a big fan of Michelangelo Antonioni and Andrei Tarkovsky. Both these filmmakers were masters in creating moods and setting special tones, so they are like idols to me and I have seen all their films many times. I am also a fan of animated japanese movies like “GHOST IN THE SHELL” and “AKIRA”. And of course, Stanley Kubrick and James Cameron were important influences as well – I grew up living next to a video rental store, and many of my afternoons were filled with just watching movies.
I also read a lot of comic books, mostly french and belgian stuff. There are so many good stories in these books, I sometimes wonder why they are not made into films?
On the literary side, I love Philip K. Dick (Do androids dream of electric sheep?), William Gibson (Neuromancer) and Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash). There is a pile of other SciFi books I wanted to read since a long time, like “Diaspora” by Greg Egan and all the books by Tad Williams, but during the last years I did not have the time and inner peace to sit down and read. I am looking forward to this winter where I can sit in the warmth and read.
Another very important influence for me is music and sound. I love the early ambient albums of Brian Eno, Michael Brook, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and the early Pink Floyd, very psychedelic, very inspiring for mind journeys. I love music that takes you onto a journey. I cannot stand the actual “radio hit single”, it makes me vomit. A good album should let you forget time and space and take you on a mind trip.
I remember listening to Pink Floyds “Welcome to the machine” when I was a 7 year old kid. I got up very early in the morning, just after christmas, and must have listened to the record at least 5 times already, when my mum dragged me out for a morning walk. Once outside, in the wintermorning fog, I suddenly saw two suns at the sky. Two suns! An emotional moment I will never forget. Of course, one of these “suns” was the full moon that was still up, and behind the fog it looked like an additional sun. But from this moment on I was deeply fascinated by all things in space, by the infinite possibilities and infinite depths of space. And all this will always be connected with “Welcome to the machine”.
- Doing the 1st sci-fi swiss movie is an quite impossible mission, where did you take your strength to do that ?
When we started, we knew that undertaking such an ambitious project would be very difficult, if not impossible. But my producer Marcel and me, we are both pioneers, and we not only love to tell about far away places in our movies, we also love to go to “far away places” ourselves, and to set foot on new terrain. That the project would need everything, really everything we had to give – I mean physically, emotionally and money wise – became brutally clear 4 years ago when we were ready to shoot and had to realize, that we had to immediately stop because the factory building we were setting our studio up, was not stable enough to hold all the sets. To stop production and compensate the crew and reboot the production from scratch 2 years later, Marcel and I had to put all our private money into the project to let it survive, regardless if we would survide this incident ourselves.
And one year later, I lost about 10 kilos in weigth because the stress was so immense. We were so extremely limited in budget, I had to fulfill many job-positions myself. For example, I had to create, animate, test and edit all previsualisations for all 3D CGI and compositing shots. Next to rewriting the script, casting the actors, working on the production design with Matthias Noger, writing and preparing the dossiers for the financing, and of course next to all my commercial jobs which payed not only my bills but also many bills of the movie. Several months I worked 20 hours every day.
Retrospectively I don’t really know how I managed to do this all. I just know it was not so much fun and I never want do this again. Of course it made CARGO possible, but the prize we had to pay for this on the emotional and physical side – was it worth it?
What kept me going nevertheless was the hunger to tell this story. The hunger to go for my dreams. It is a fascinating hunger, but it can be very dangerous at times.
- Are you happy with the final result ?
Yes, I am very happy with the final result and very proud of it. Of course, there are still things I would love to change, now that I see the finished movie in the cinema together with an audience, and there would be things I wished I had approached differently when writing the script. But the movie works really well, it is compact, the credibility is there, as well as the emotional involvement with the characters, and of course the visual effects and the sounddesign and the music are truly stunning. To put it in a nutshell: an amazing achievment on the technical and visual side, a good movie on the story and character side, where the potential of the story setting has not been tapped fully. Given the fact that this was my first feature film however, I am totally happy!
- Did you want to go to Hollywood ?
It was always one of my goals to be able to make movies where the budget is not the main limitation for visual storytelling. I want to tell stories, I want to transport emotions through images and not mainly through dialogue. In the international movie industry, the budgets are at least 10 times as high as the budget we had for CARGO. In CARGO, I had to abandon so many cool ideas just because it was not feasible.
Also this attitude of “it’s simply not possible” quickly becomes a dangerous mindset, that I experience a lot in switzerland and sometimes it even became my own mindset.
With this “It’s not possible” mindset, you can easily end up cynical, frustrated, and the dreams you once had and fought for, lie shattered in front of you – and the most absurd thing: people around you will pat your shoulders and tell you: “You see, we knew it was not possible, don’t be sad”.
However, I never want to give up dreaming and I have an extreme urge to tell my kind of stories, which are visually complex, and to transmit emotions through stunning imagery. And this is why I think I will have to leave Switzerland, at least for some time, to evade this mindset and to evade the limitations of the relatively small industry, which is not the best setting for making ambitious fantastic and science fiction movies. I love Switzerland, and of course the making of CARGO is deeply connected with this country and its film-industry. It is not that I would not be aware of this, and it is not that I am not thankful for all the support we got. But i need some fresh air after all this. If i will suceed abroad i don’t know yet, but at least I want to try.
- With CARGO you push the swiss cinema to a another high level. What will you do next ? Another sci-fi movie ?
I have several projects that I pursue. One is a script I am writing myself about quantum physics and string theory, of which I know I am not ready yet to make it – on the visual side it will be something you have never seen, psychedelic and high tech at the same time, and on the story side really something unique and new and mind boggling. Next to this, I am trying to acquire the rights to a book, a story that plays in the seventies and is about rockstars, drugs and aliens… However ,this project also cannot be my next, because to do this hilarious story right, I would at least need 40-50 mio USD.
So next to these 2 pet projects of mine, my agency sends me scripts to read, and some of them are quite interesting. They all need a lot of work and rewriting, but there are some really unique ideas behind some of the scripts. I will go to LA in january and then I will see what my next projects will be. Of course it will be in the science fiction / fantastic genre, because this is where my heart lies.
Interview by Vincent Frei
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