21/11/2023 - We met up with the makers of this multi-layered love story set in Scotland and the UK

Yvonne Wellie (left, © Peter Hartwig) and Aylin Tezel (right, © Stefan Klüter)

German actress Aylin Tezel presented her directorial debut, Falling Into Place [+see also:
film review
interview: Aylin Tezel and Yvonne Wellie
film profile], in the First Feature Competition of this year's Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Tezel not only directed the film, but also wrote the script and played the female main role. We spoke with her and to her producer Yvonne Wellie, of Weydemann Bros, based in Cologne, about the challenges of producing a German film abroad.

Cineuropa: Why did you want to tell this story in the UK?
Aylin Tezel: The way the story came to me was very playful. I was in London with a friend of mine and going for a walk in Victoria Park. We talked about dreams. We both felt very small and the dream seemed so big. So I said to her, you know, maybe we have to start with a tiny step. And I said to her, I would set a timer for 30 minutes and we would write a scene of a film or a poem or a song. Straight away, I heard in my head a dialogue between a woman and a man. The man says: “Life is just a repetition of distractions to make you forget that you'll die until you die.” The woman answers, “That's why we're sent here to distract ourselves from ourselves?” So this is how the dialogue started. And I just wrote it down until the very end where they nearly kiss. Then the timer went off. From then on, the two characters lived in my mind. I visited Scotland later to celebrate New Year's there. On the first of January, I sat down in a cafe and I started writing the story of those two people, Kira and Ian. I guess this is why the story came to me in English also. My mother tongue is German, but I feel like there's something in the English language that activates my creativity in another way. And there's something in the humour of the English language that I love. 

Yvonne Wellie: Of course we talked about whether it was going to work to do the film in the English language and outside Germany. We knew it would be difficult to get the funding for this kind of project. But on the other hand, the Scottish Island and London as film locations also seemed very obvious to us story-wise. I thought of Kira, the female protagonist, as a person who is not in her original place and struggling to find her own place – so running to London made sense for her. 

What were the biggest challenges for the production?
YW: The biggest challenge was the financing, because it is in fact a majority German production, therefore a German movie, but it's completely set outside of it. It's more difficult to find partners. With funders you have, of course, obligations to spend money in Germany as well. We were lucky to find broadcasters in WDR, SR and Arte as well as to have funding from Film und Medienstiftung NRW, DFFF, Creative Europe and on the Scottish side from Screen Scotland. Of course, we had to make many compromises due to the final budget, also because it's a first feature. And the setup of this script is quite big, containing two parallel storylines. We had a reduced budget, but Aylin, as the creative writer that she is, managed to find a way. 

AT: It was a pressure to have a very small budget for a big film with loads of locations and a lot of characters. We travelled around, too, to Scotland, to London and to Germany. Our shooting days were very full. We had to cover a lot of content during the day. But I think there is a form of magic in films with small budgets. The people who get on board really do it from their heart, with inspiration and passion. Everyone was extremely invested in that project. 

How is your love story different from the others?
AT: Even though we're telling a love story between two people or between two lost souls, we're also telling two self-love stories. We're meeting those two people, who at the beginning do not feel a lot of love towards themselves and who are running away from themselves. Then they start to find a way towards themselves, which enables them to really see each other, too.

What was your concept for the visuals of the film? 
AT: I wanted to use a handheld camera from the start. The camera should be close to the story and the two main characters, it should move with them. It should feel their heartbeats. And I had a precise idea about the colour concept, for which I was inspired by the autumn colours of the Scottish landscape. Additionally, certain characters are associated with a specific colour based on Kira’s perception of them. Kira, for example, has all the blueish tones. Her ex-boyfriend the red ones. 

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