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| Almost Home |
Making a student film set in space, in a zero gravity environment, is a huge challenge. Making it well enough to get it shortlisted for the Oscars is something else – but that’s the story behind Norwegian contender Almost Home. It was produced by Jonas Lembeck, directed by Nils Keller and shot by Georg Nikolaus, and it stars seasoned actors Susanne Wolff and Stephen Kampwirth alongside rising star Jeremias Meyer – all of whom reunited when an opportunity arose to talk about the film.
“It’s intensely humbling,” says Nils of the Oscar news. “We dreamed of being there, but still, you can’t calculate with that. It has already been a great journey going to the Student Academy Awards, being nominated there, receiving an award there, then being qualified for the Oscars, then making it to the shortlist. So this is all like a huge journey we never anticipated and in a way it's a big honour for me, but even more the whole team, that all this effort and the things we got through for this production are seen and liked, and people find relevant. It's very humbling.
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| Almost Home |
“It started with a with a newspaper article I read in April 2020, about a cruise ship that where the people were stuck on board, not allowed to enter any country because of Covid fear. In the article was that actually a faction [developed] on board of this ship that actively thought about even if they were allowed to leave, if they should rather stay on board. Because it was safer there, it was just so crazy outside.
“I thought like, firstly, this sounds stupid. Do they want to stay on a cruise ship indefinitely, or for two years? But then next, I thought maybe for every one of us there's a line somewhere, which is very personal, between safety and freedom. And I thought, okay, maybe the coming years – I didn't know that it was going to be two years – but that time would be about those specific decisions that we have to decide as a society but also for our own? What do we want to sacrifice for safety?
“I'd say I'm really in love with the genre itself, and with the chances that are in there to create this backdrop and the bigger world to talk about real world problems. And then, and in this specific case, the reason I thought it's best to set that on a spaceship was to get far away from Covid. On the one hand, to use this collective experience, we had to find a connection to a worldwide audience, and to make it relevant and to share these thoughts, and on the other hand, not making make it about Covid and not about the pandemic itself but rather about what's not worth living.
“How do we decide things in life? Where do we stop thinking about our safety and start taking risks for our freedoms as well? And it really felt like this is the perfect surrounding to pinpoint that and to reduce it to the minimum of a mother/son relationship, with a father who is not present, and to not have the whole society in that mix but really talk about the basic underlying emotions that are in there and the questions that are being posed.”
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| Almost Home |
“We met at film school, soo when he was pitching the project, I was, I was amazed by the concept of setting this drama in space,” says Jonas. “It elevates drama so much when when using the genre of sci fi, because it's more contained. So that was my first thought...And then I thought, ‘Okay, this is quite ambitious for a short.’ And then the whole process started, convincing partners...We always have to find our creative ways of working around, because we did not have the budget to say, ‘Okay, we can afford this.’ So just to give you an insight, we could not afford a proper stage. We had to rent the whole hall from the wastewater management, so smell was kind of an issue.”
“So we were very, very happy and lucky to get this cast we have in the film,” says Nils. “especially as Susanne and Stephan, they're quite renowned actors in Germany. So basically, the casting process here was writing a letter and asking them if they wanted to be on board in this project, because they’ve done incredible projects before. For Susanne, especially, there was this film with the name Styx, which won a German film award, where she played the role of a very multi layered character that was really fighting on her own.
“For me, it was important in casting the mother in the story to not just have a mother there, but an independent woman and someone who normally has her very own life going on, which makes for conflict because she is not used to the everyday feelings of a teenager wanting to be in love and running around the world or whatever. She's more like this scientist, rational and so on. And Stephan played also in the series Dark, so it was great having him on board.”
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| Almost Home |
“I was really interested in the story, in the relationship between a mother or a woman of my age, and a young man of 16 or 17 who is her son,” says Susanne. “On one hand, it's a relationship between a man and a woman, but it's not the the normal heterosexual relationship. But there is kind of love, a kind of hate, this kind of knowing each other and whatever, but in a different state of mind or under different conditions, and this is what I'm really interested in.
“It's different to play a mother relationship to a 17 year old boy, to with a child normally. And so this was the most important thing, and that it seems to be in a very intimate play. I like this kind of working in an intimate way. That's a huge part of my scenes. On the other hand, I was interested in flying in zero gravity. It's, let's go, I don't know how to do it.
“In the end, when I saw the film, I was completely amazed by the result. I can't believe it. And it really worked, especially the beginning scene with Jeremias. “
The scenes of weightlessness do look amazing. I ask how they achieved that on a low budget.
“We tested a lot beforehand,” says Georg. “I would say that the most convincing stuff was really having the actors doing a really good job of just going like this and this and just mimicking everything.” He moves around slowly, as if there were no gravity holding him down. “And then on the other hand, having established a camera system on a Steadicam arm and then operating it remotely, so that everything was floating. So little things where you have to take the weightlessness with them with the body movement, we could enhance with with the camera movement.
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| Almost Home |
“We tried this because the technical stuff of having the actors on wires on with harnesses and everything takes a lot of time, and also there's a lot of different angles you have to avoid, otherwise you would see the wires. And also we couldn't afford too many of the wiring movements. So we had to fake a lot.
“We had very little limited days of stunt crew. And also, even Jeremias, we were just so amazed when I was following him around with this gimbal system. Everyone was looking at the monitor and was like, ‘Okay, this guy is flying.’”
“I want to say something about the day of shooting Georg mentioned, because it was actually great fun,” says Jeremias. “Because we have had to learn how to move as if we would float when in fact we were just standing and it looked really bad in the beginning. So we had to do a lot work and I remember that I kept on sending daily updates to Nils. And on that day – it was the day where Jakob was cleaning his room – we were basically, like, it was some weird way of dancing together, because we couldn't use the rigging, because there was not enough space. And so Georg and I did this weird dance.
“For me, it was basically like a really long squat, and he had all these kilos of camera equipment on his back. So it was really, really exhausting. But in the end, I'm just grateful that we have been part of these experiments, because we didn't know if it would work. There's this logic behind all movement in space, of course. It was just trying to mimic it without using anything.
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| Almost Home |
“We all experienced some sort of isolation during the last years, and we just came out of lockdown when we started shooting, and I was so afraid of jeopardising the shooting that I stayed in isolation during the whole time. And my friends and my family started meeting again, and it was hard. So I guess that made it way easier to empathise with Jakob in the beginning. He is just a young guy who desires to become independent and self determined.”
He likes the fact that his character achieves that in the end, he says, even if it’s not in the way that viewers might expect.
“The answer why I'm in this piece is, of course, very easy, because it was a great script,” says Stephan. “If you read it, and if you're clever enough to know that it’s a good script, you'd say yes. I like to work with students, in a way, because it's a great experience, working with young people doing their first steps. And then I love the setting in space. I love this claustrophobic setting. And I love the family drama. I mean, it's about parents knowing what's good for their son, or pretending to know what's good for their son. It's about letting go, it's about growing up, and this dysfunctional family. And the setting is reducing everything to a point where it hurts.
“Of course, my character has great longing for his son because he didn't see him for about two years...so he he stands in between making a good decision to his son and his emotions, having him back.”
Susanne says that this interpersonal drama was a lot of what attracted her to the film.
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| Almost Home |
“It's more drama than science fiction. It's based on science fiction, surrounded by science fiction, and there's so much tenderness, especially between the young girl and the boy in the beginning and also in the spaceship. And everything is so reduced, each thing you can see in the film is useful. We don't need just to show you it's expensive or it's important or something. And this is something which really got me when I saw the film yesterday, again, that everything is reduced and so clear, and so in a way very, very beautiful. Because there's so much love in it.”
Science fiction has a long history of being ignored when it comes to awards. Does that make them more excited to have been shortlisted, or do they think that attitudes towards it have begun to change in recent years?
“I'm pretty happy that the concept worked and the people are seeing that drama there because the next projects we are planning are also genre films with an emotional core,” says Nils. “Some I'm pitching together with Jonas and his production company, because we did this film and think we can do the next one. It's humbling in a way but also gives you a lot of power or self confidence, to really tell people that you would like to tell a horror film that's coming of age and has an emotional core and all these things to say, that we are confident that genre and drama can meet at a relevant point for audiences that are not just interested in the genre, but want to see something that is human or touches them or that feels relevant and that they feel they can connect with.”
It’s also rare to see films with chronically ill characters in the lead, I note. Jeremias says that he did a lot of research so he could portray Jakob’s condition accurately.
“It started with asking me already, for the audition, to think about Jacobs disease, which mainly causes pain and stiffness in his joints. So I remember – I mean, it sounds stupid – but I remember starting to tape my joints, and when that felt still too mobile, I taped a broomstick from my back to my right ankle. I did that while lying on the floor, so the first thing I found out was that I couldn't stand up anymore, and I had to call for my roommate. And you can imagine how she looked at me. Later on we were talking with experts, and decided on an orthosis, which I was wearing on my right knee, and which limited my mobility severely.”
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| Almost Home |
I ask if his own experience of Covid lockdown also factored into his performance, and he nods.
“Yes, yes, it did. I mean, I was living in Munich and I had to cross the border in order to prepare and stuff. So because I crossed the border, I had to isolate for two weeks, completely alone. And I was alone with the script. So of course, all feelings and emotions which came up because I couldn't see it person, influenced my view on the script and my entire connection to to Jakob, who really needs friends.”
“Our whole goal was not to give answers, but to pose questions about these things,” Nils says. “The takeaway is that life isn't easy and it takes a lot of various paths, and the only solution to emotionally survive is that we start trusting each other and connect with each other and find each other as a support to go through these things. Because life is not predictable and I think the pandemic has taught so many of us that can take very cruel turns, maybe through losing a relative or being stuck at home or having to give up your...I think we should really go back to this notion that in the end, it's we as people helping each other going through these things and sticking together and being strong as a society, but also as families or friends.
