Anna Hoffmann: As an artist, you work in different fields. You paint, you’ve made music videos. I was wondering if you could speak a bit about the background to the film. Why did you choose to make this project your first feature?
Anna Cornudella: It actually came from our research project, which wasn't supposed to become a film. I carried out all this research on what effect it would have on the other species and the environment if humans hibernated. So many questions and ideas came up while thinking about how to stop climate change. It was a kind of game in my head to think about possible universes to stop it. This started an art research project for which I received a small grant in Barcelona. Based on these investigations, I started to film people who lived really close to nature and animals, who I felt could become characters in this universe I had imagined and which was becoming bigger and bigger. I presented the project at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona and they told me: “Oh, you should make a film!” They put the idea into my head, but I was scared, because I hadn't even made a short film before, which meant it was like going straight to a feature. Suddenly it made sense though, and the film just became alive while I was doing it. So the filming was also a research process.
Christiane Büchner: I was wondering how the location where you shot your film was connected to the script? Did you have the location in mind for the script?
AC: During the research phases, I was traveling around the United States. I was half living there, half in Barcelona. We had a long casting process, because the characters were the most important thing for me in the film, they were going to determine the screenplay. So I went on a trip with my cinematographer Artur-Pol Camprubí and his photography assistant Lucía Ajuria from New York to South Dakota searching for farmers, cowboys, ranchers, people living in the fields and rural areas of the US. So the locations are actually their homes and their places.
All the animals that appear in the film are wild animals or animals in sanctuaries that are going to be returned to the wild. I didn't want to shoot with animal “actors”
AH: That also explains why the film is shot in English. That was something that I was asking myself when I saw it for the first time. At the beginning, there's very little dialogue. Then you have the three people that Clara meets. How can I imagine the script for such a film?
AC: The script had twelve pages and was based on previous interviews I had conducted with the characters. When I met these people, I used to do an interview that always started with the same question: “What do you feel when you look into the eye of a cow?” Through questions like this, I started to understand who was going to be a character. I then wrote the script together with Lluís Sellarès based on these interviews.
But there were no dialogues. I knew what questions I wanted to ask them. But the interviews that we shot for the film were really free and open. I chose questions where I knew the answers they were going to give. And then we recorded the interview. That’s why it was a sort of research process, because sometimes they’d pop up with an answer that made me connect other things and change the script a little bit. So the script was really alive.
CB: When Anna and I watched your film for the first time, she thought it’s a fiction and I thought it was a documentary. It’s really interesting how you worked with a documentary approach with elements of fictionalisation, where the cows look like actresses and the people like themselves. It’s a very strange combination, and I really like it.
AC: All the animals that appear in the film are wild animals or animals in sanctuaries that are going to be returned to the wild. I didn't want to shoot with animal “actors”. We shot all the cows mainly at Grimaldi Farms, a farm where they care for and love their cows, and they helped us a lot. At the beginning, the cows didn’t trust us at all and it was a long process to become their friends. The main cow was the leader of the group. She is really lovely, and we became really close. And then she was following us like a dog and it became easy to lead the group into the woods or the fields. But it needed a lot of patience. And the other wild animals, like the deer, we were just waiting in the snow until they appeared. That was the difficult part. And with the human, there are really fictional parts and parts that are really documentary. It's just a combination of both.
I wanted to explore how family structures would change, like groundhogs who hibernate in families, and every time they wake up, they reorganise their structures
AH: Humans and animals become more equal in your film, a part of the same world or no longer in a relationship of superiority and inferiority. Simply by hibernating, humankind loses control.
AC: Yeah, for me it was about taking humans out of the world for a while. It was a way to not let them control the world and get really attached to a biological will. If we hibernated, we would have a reproduction cycle like the hibernators have. We would be biologically much more attached to nature and lose a lot of power in some ways.
AH: You mentioned that your research started with the idea of how to minimise climate change or work against it. But as a kind of utopia, I had a feeling that the film isn’t just about the relationship between animals and humans, but also that between humans and humans, and that other aspects, like heteronormativity, are called into question too.
AC: Yes, exactly. At the beginning, the idea was focussed on species that are changing their habits due to climate change. I thought there was a possibility that humans could become hibernators in a future when the world becomes inhabitable. It’s an idea that’s not that crazy, but I didn't want it to turn into a dystopia. I wanted it to be an utopia. So I started to think about all aspects that would change. I wanted to explore how family structures would change, like groundhogs who hibernate in families, and every time they wake up, they reorganise their structures. I felt that was interesting. One of my characters, Neil, seemed to me like a character from a film when I met him because he had been raised by three parents, three dads. And when he was 17, a sister knocked on his door and said: “Hey, I'm your sister.” And it was clear that he would be a character in the film.
We consider cows to be really weak. But I saw that they have this community spirit where they don't care about individuals, but rather the group
CB: That’s amazing. I was thinking that most of the animals that are really prominent are domestic animals. Did you choose them because it was just easier, or did you choose them because they know so much about humans already?
AC: Well, there was a little bit of both. I chose the cows to be characters that are superior to humans, and the humans are scared of them, because they’re huge animals. We consider cows to be really weak. But I saw that they have this community spirit where they don't care about individuals, but rather the group. This kind of intelligence is really impressive, and I wanted to place it above that of the humans, who are really individualistic characters who think about themselves. I also wanted to change the perspective of a really domestic animal, flip it. We tried to never displace an animal from its place. For example, when there was an animal inside of a house, we built the house in the animal’s place. That also made it easier to work with them.
AH: The house with the horse was an abandoned house?
AC: It was their stable and we decorated it like a room to make the horse comfortable. We took all the animals into their spaces, so that they were comfortable and calm. We tried to be as unintrusive as possible. My art director Gala Seguí Delgado did a wonderful job of transforming abandoned caravans or stables into house interiors.
There were not a lot of hands, we were all responsible for everything, it was really horizontal. We could just stay in one place one morning just to film snails. That was a really fortunate way to film
CB: Can you tell us something about your concept of time? When we as humans lose control over a quarter of our time because we sleep, how does that affect the rest of the time?
AC: Pregnancy, for example, is shorter than it would be in an almost identical mammal that doesn't hibernate. When I was doing this research and playing around with how this world would be, we were thinking that pregnancy would be only four months, and that all the babies would be born in summer. So I tried to create this structure where you first have spring, the reproduction time, and then summer when the babies are born. In the film, it is the moment when the chicken is born. And when autumn comes, the animals are starting to prepare for the winter. So the seasons are exactly the same as we know them. Just the cycle of the humans changed a little bit.
CB: My last question is about the pond. There is this membrane reminiscent of STARGATE, with all these baskets with food on the bottom of the pond. They don't go anywhere. So the membrane’s not permeable?
AC: Brian sends these baskets of food to what he thinks is another dimension. They are gifts to his mom, who is dead. He's trying to take care of her. And the last shot is when you see all those baskets under the water. I try to leave what it is trying to say open, because I want everyone to believe whatever he or she wants. There are people who immediately think, okay, all these magic worlds that you were trying to tell us about don't exist. There’s nothing under the ground. And other viewers think that the fishes are their ancestors or that nature is more magical than we could ever understand or see. So it's linked to what Jane says, that cows can see further than what we see. We are not able to see further than these fishes in the lake. I feel like all interpretations of the lake and the fishes are okay.
AH: I also wanted to ask about the pond. Apart from the domestic animals, there are all kinds of other animals there. The snake, the egg, insects, and then this liquid or slime. I had a feeling that in a way you are going back to the origins of all life. And while for me, there's absolutely no romanticising of nature here, there is an immense beauty in the film. And I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about your cinematographer and the way you worked together in creating your visual concept, because it’s really stunning.
AC: Arthur Pol Camprubí is my cinematographer. I admire him so much, and we are truly friends. So we immediately understood each other and the project developed really quickly in working together. And it was really fun to work with him because it was like playing. We were a crew of six and filming everything really slowly. There were not a lot of hands, we were all responsible for everything, it was really horizontal. We could just stay in one place one morning just to film snails. That was a really fortunate way to film. And it was the only way to capture this film. If you want to get the perfect shot, you have to wait a long time, especially with animals and especially with nature. You might have to search one morning to find the vegetable you want to shoot. So it was so fun.
I wanted to respect the times of light and only filmed with a tripod and a camera. And Pol is really good with natural light. The only scene where we used lights was the theatre. Everything else is natural light. So we were trying to respect the hours and the timings, and we were shooting each shot at the exact time we wanted. We took so much care of the image and the lighting and the compositions, and we were working – all the crew together – to compose every shot we made perfectly.
