It wasn’t always that simple for the shooting unit to improvise with A Hidden Life being a period film, but nevertheless Terry would wander off sets with the actors and the director of photography, Jörg Widmer, in order to capture his unspoiled moments. He always called it “picking the low-hanging fruit.” He always wants to capture the beauty that is created in an unforeseen moment by chance or by natural light, the actor that is caught in an unexpected moment, when he feels unwatched, an animal that is doing something unexpected, or simply the beauty of anything that appears by accident in front of him and the camera.
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Since 2011’s The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick has continued at an uncharacteristically steady pace. The latest film in Malick’s flurry of activity is A Hidden Life (2019), depicting the life of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer, devout Catholic, and conscientious objector who refused to join the Nazis in World War II. The film premiered at Cannes, where it was met with acclaim. A Hidden Life has been recognized for its open-hearted portrayal of the life and death of Jägerstätter. The work is a sanctification of film and filmmaking, with Malick’s esoteric and expressive brand of cinema serving its true story well, adding indelible images to Jägerstätter’s words as written in Franz Jägerstätter: Letters and Writings from Prison. Erna Putz, Jägerstätter biographer and Letters and Writings from Prison editor, said the film captured “Franz, as I know him from the letters, and [his wife] Franziska, as I know from encounters.”
Malick continues to portray both the intimate and the epic with the same devotion to detail, with something as small as a hand gesture and as large as the South Tyrol summits captured with equal grace. Through his use of editing and inclusion of indirect and allusive sequences, Franz and Franziska live again. Malick’s way of both beginning scenes late and cutting scenes short allows the film’s world to exist outside the confines of what the audience sees. In turn, the audience feels the weight of everything beyond the film’s final form. The fullness of vision and world is mirrored in A Hidden Life’s setting and design. Franz and Franziska’s Radegund (St. Radegund) and the world outside their idyll are imagined in such detail that it feels alive and in danger. To discuss the setting and design, the film’s production designer, Sebastian Krawinkel, illuminates working with Malick, the patchwork of locations, and scouting for light.
Could you take me through the process of researching Franz Jägerstätter for the film?
After the first conversations with the producer, Grant Hill – and later with Terry – I started doing research on Jägerstätter’s life online. My sister-in-law, Stefanie Hoffmann-Kluge, is a lawyer [in Germany] and helped me to find the original documents of Franz Jägerstätter’s court files.
The most impressive part of our research was our tour to Radegund, to Franz Jägesrtätter’s house – which is now a museum – his village, and the church. We also had conversations with his daughters. We discovered very quickly that the real Radegund isn’t much of a cineastic surrounding. In order to show a contrast between the somewhat wide, open, and romantic life of peasants in the countryside and the sparse cruelty of the prison, we needed to find another, similarly appealing surrounding.
The most important feature for Terry was the church tower, as a symbol of Jägerstätter’s religious belief, within the countryside geography.
After thorough research into Jägerstätter’s home and his surroundings, the various stages of his life, his military training, the myriad prisons and courthouses he had been to, and, finally, the guillotine in the Brandenburg-Görden Prison, the location manager Markus Bensch and location scout Leo Baumgartner started to look for locations to shoot the movie. We found most of the locations in the Alto Adige region in Südtirol.
How did your involvement with Terrence Malick begin? How does he operate, in terms of collaboration?
The first couple of months I corresponded only via telephone with Terry. As soon as I had put together a first booklet with locations that I had seen together with Markus and Leo, we met with Terry in Salzburg and showed him what we found, together with some of Jägerstätter’s real locations.
We started the project one year before the actual prep, in order to see all locations in the season that we would shoot in. For the entire year, up to the prep, Terry would phone me every Sunday to share his thoughts and ideas that he was putting into the script. It was a very intense collaboration, and a good process to fully understand what was important to him.
Terrence Malick has a circuitous style of filmmaking. I’ve read, for instance, on Knight of Cups, a block or two of neighborhood would be closed with little planned, allowing for improvisation and the unexpected. Did you have to account for this particular style in your designs and scouting?
The script had about 70 different sets. For most of the sets, I had prepared two or three different choices of locations during my location tours, for Terry to choose from. This method usually helps to identify the best locations faster. With Terry this did not speed up things, it made them more complex instead! Terry, unlike others, did not favour one location to another – he wanted to use them all. Suddenly I had three times more sets to prepare than anticipated.
It wasn’t always that simple for the shooting unit to improvise with A Hidden Life being a period film, but nevertheless Terry would wander off sets with the actors and the director of photography, Jörg Widmer, in order to capture his unspoiled moments. He always called it “picking the low-hanging fruit.” He always wants to capture the beauty that is created in an unforeseen moment by chance or by natural light, the actor that is caught in an unexpected moment, when he feels unwatched, an animal that is doing something unexpected, or simply the beauty of anything that appears by accident in front of him and the camera.
On A Hidden Life, the lighting was often natural. How does one create for natural light?
“The sun is our best boy” is Terry’s dogma. Always front lit with dark foreground. Light from one direction only. Never crosslight – always like Rembrandt, Caravaggio, or Vermeer. If the set wouldn’t face the right direction, it was not good.
Shoot towards east in the morning, towards west in the afternoon – never look north!
Terry was not interested in artificial light sources. Even the interior sets had to have windows to the right side – so as to be front lit.
What draws your eye to a location after seeing so many potential locations? What makes a farmhouse or a church exciting to your eye?
There were many parameters that had to be right in order to work for the film and for Terry. The location had to be front lit. It had to be as genuine for our period as possible as we had very little means to change or build locations or sets. All surroundings needed to be unspoiled, with no traces of modern architecture or signs of modern life. Textures, colors, and architecture had to look like they had always been there – the more aging and character the better – and only sometimes did we have to help a little! But most importantly, the location had to be embedded into an amazing scene of nature.
How does one avoid signs of contemporary life, especially on a budget? How does one begin dressing a location to fit a remembered past?
The biggest challenge was to find those right locations – with an entire year of location scouting, time was on our side! When designing a period film on a tight budget, there is only one way to achieve a genuine look – finding the right locations that require little work. We were lucky that we found those locations that needed little amendments.
Yesim Zolan, the wonderful set decorator I had, managed to give the locations the final touch – she added the right few necessary elements to transform the sets into the right period. Peter Naguib, the prop master, did the same with all those genuine props – the animals and carts and carriages.
How much was filmed in Radegund? How do you make a town come alive? I’m thinking of sequences set at the gasthaus and the alleyways or, later, in Berlin with period vehicles.
The Radegund village was also filmed at four different locations in three different countries. The various villages that we found as options were equally liked by Terry, and therefore have all been used. The exterior gasthaus with the impressive mountain panorama in the background was one of my favourite sets – in Sappada in the Dolomites. The scene where they drive through Berlin was shot at the backlot set in the Babelsberg Film Studio, while all the scenes on the train were shot on two historic trains from East Germany.
Were any of the sequences filmed within the Jägerstätter home?
We visited the real Jägerstätter house very early on in our research, and Terry always wanted to use bits of it and its surroundings in the film. Unfortunately, the real house was freshly renovated with plain white walls and many modern elements. We were not allowed to repaint or age the house. The real house had a very powerful spirit; nevertheless, it didn’t have the rural charm of the other old peasant houses that we ended up using as Jägerstätter’s house. In total we used four different houses for the Jägerstätters’ house – I am sure no one noticed!
A Hidden Life features a pivotal sequence in the Kammergericht building in Berlin. What was that like? Did the building need to be altered to fit the film’s tastes?
Actually, the Kammergericht where Jägerstätter was sentenced to death had been transformed into luxury apartments years ago. The location we used for the scene was another Kammergericht, one that had a similar history. It was bigger and more intimidating than the Kammergericht Witzlebenstrasse, and there was very little we had to alter – only the swastika flags, a bust of Hitler, some tables and chairs. The room of the judges was a total re-dress and paint job, though.
You filmed in a few prisons, both closed and operational. How does a film crew operate within a functioning prison?
We filmed in four different prisons in Hoheneck, in Zittau, and in two prisons in Berlin – none of those prisons were operational. We filmed outside the Goerden Prison in Berlin, in which Jägerstätter was executed. This prison is still in use; however, the inside was too modern and the room with the real guillotine is now a memorial and museum area and was too small for filming the scene – and getting the film crew in and out of an operational prison was too complicated to be achieved. We built a replica of the guillotine and a set of the execution room in the Potsdam/Babelsberg Film Studio.
Is there a particular moment in the film that you are especially proud of, as an artist?
Timing the shoot in order to get the different stages of the fieldwork was very tricky. The ploughing with the real cow was a nightmare, as the trained cow was stubborn. All those harvesting scenes that required the right tools, the right way to cut and stack the hay, that needed a big amount of extras to do the work and that took a long time to plan – I think it paid off well. I am very pleased with the look of those scenes.
There are various other sets that I also like a lot – like the well he climbs into, the village gasthaus at Sappada, the big prison interiors at the Zittau prison, or the military prison at the Franzenfeste in Süd Tirol.
Most of all, I am proud that I had the opportunity to work with Terry. The collaboration was a life-changing experience. Terry’s approach to filmmaking, his way of treating the team and encouraging everyone to do their best, was fascinating and taught me a lot about how to treat your colleagues and how to make movies. “We float around problems like water around rocks” was another of Terry’s quotes.
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All images supplied by Fox Searchlight Pictures and reproduced with their permission.
