Interview: Ildikó Enyedi on Working with Tony Leung and Léa Seydoux and Her Triptych Storytelling in ‘Silent Friend’
Ildikó Enyedi’s eighth feature film is already a highly acclaimed success. Silent Friend, the Hungarian filmmaker’s ode to the relationship between nature and humanity, won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival alongside the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Luna Wedler, one of its many stars.
Wedler stars alongside Tony Leung, Léa Seydoux, Enzo Brumm, and many more in a generations-spanning triptych following residents of Marburg, a small university town in Germany. At the center of the three stories, a looming gingko tree connects them all as Leung, Wedler, and Brumm’s characters all connect to nature through various experiments that end up bringing them closer to the people around them.
Enyedi’s odyssey is patient and enthralling in a quiet reflection on what it means to participate in the world you inhabit. It’s unlike anything you’ll see this year. Enyedi sat down to speak with me about her film during the 69th San Francisco International Film Festival, where Enyedi was awarded a Sloan Science on Screen Award by SFFILM and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
August Hammel: I saw the film a few days ago and I was struck by its patience and its quietness, something I think is in such short supply, especially in the 2020s. You set the segment with Tony [Leung], right at the start of the pandemic, which captures the mundanity of modern living so well, and you contrast it with how he is attuned to nature. How have you found yourself, through the process of making the film, either more or less attuned to your surroundings?
Ildikó Enyedi: What I find so interesting is that the more you are isolated from something, even if you isolate yourself, the stronger the longing. For the missing connection becomes – it’s a bit the same with the quick and available media and the rising of real slow cinema. This film is not among them. It’s more in the middle, but this sort of hunger of having sensory experiences in the cinema, and not just be governed by a story. I feel it in the generations of my kids. So, somehow, these two poles are very present. I find it the same for how and what aspects we focus on in our life. The 90s were very much about making it. There was a sort of harshness and pushiness in it. And the 70s were the first wave of this plant experiment. They were very naive and new agey, a bit too much. Nevertheless, this sort of turning the focus towards the more than human, happened there, and it definitely happens now.
AH: You were speaking to the kind of naive, wide-eyed optimism, the kind of curiosity in the 70s, and one of the three segments is in the 70s. The science in that portion is also quite naive and comes from a place of almost innocence. It’s a boy with a crush who then suddenly finds that with that passion comes another passion, and that connection between human desire and the natural world around us, I found so unique and it threads through all three segments. How did you go about writing your lead characters or capturing the essence of your lead characters in each of the three segments?
IE: They are, you’re right, but in a way, all the three, or perhaps four, of them are outsiders, outside of a system, which is a bit of an uncomfortable position. Not just a bit, but it has its advantages. When you are an outsider, or when a system is pushing you out, then you seem to have two ways to react. To revolt against it, or do everything to fit in. What I really adore in all three of them, is that they are doing something different. They just don’t care about it, and they are just following their very genuine curiosity and not afraid of making a fool of themselves.
AH: Something in your film that struck me as unique was not just a slowness or languorous quality, but it’s entertaining and personal. How did you go about casting each role? You have Tony Leung, a screen legend, but you also have two segments [where] what struck me was when you travel to the past, periods I wasn’t alive for, you’re with more unknown actors, so you kind of are being thrust into an unknown time with unknown people, and I found that really unique.
IW: The 2020 period needed someone with such an [elemental] screen presence. You could tell a lot without words and without actions. It’s a very rare quality. The 70s, Hannes, is very much my husband, actually, so there was an extra responsibility to find the right guy. This is his first film and it took nearly a year to find him. I was quite desperate already. I had casting sessions with more than 70 young German actors, all talented and bright, but that sort of mixture of power and virility and shyness, that sort of puppy-like aspect when someone is just barely out of teenage times, who nevertheless is already a man, was so important. With Luna Wedler, yes, she’s young, she’s not a big star like Léa or Tony, but I worked with her on The Story of My Wife, which was my previous film. She is amazing, she was in my mind when I wrote the role, so that one was quite easy, but also the tiny roles are important.
AH: The photographer was someone who really struck me when watching the film, he just has this kind of disarming quality because you’re met with all of these misogynistic men, but he’s gentler and you feel something in his presence that is just a little warmer. How’d you go about handling the early period of the film and casting those roles?
IE: Martin Wuttke is a great actor, very great theatre actor as well, and a very, very intelligent person. We were really aligned in thinking together. Rainer Bock, who was among the professors, the one with whom Greta had this sort of duel, he was the protagonist of The White Band, by [Michael] Haneke. So, they were intelligent enough to understand that even the one, two, or three-day shooting is super important, and they accepted these roles. It is in the cracks, in the details. It was so important for me to not paint any aspect, any relationship, black and white. Mostly, there is just fear of the unknown and the clumsiness of communication, for example, between Tony and the caretaker.
AH: Yeah, they come to an understanding by the end and I don’t want to generalize, but it feels like a stand-in for our relationship to nature and to the world around us, because it’s this great volatile thing that we don’t understand in any capacity, even as we learn. It’s there for us, it provides for us, it also harms us and kills us. I’m sure if we knew what nature knows, that they would feel every species is unknown to them. What is the one thing that, once you finished the film and you were in editing, realized about all three stories narratively, but also about yourself and your relationship to the characters?
IE: First of all, the editing in this case is always very important, and I love it, and I sit there for the whole – I am not one of those directors who, from time to time, come and check it and give feedback, but it was the heart of the film because I knew that I wanted this sort of structure, what you have seen, but I knew if I write it that way, it would make the whole film very rigid. On paper, you have dramaturgical clues where to move from one time frame to the other. I didn’t want that because we are so much trained to story. We have a story hunger, and then we would look for connections between these humans, which is absolutely, absolutely not the case, in this film. I had to feed this story hunger and at the same time, offer other experiences, sensory experiences, to soothe it, to make spectators, hopefully, forget it. So, I wrote the three timelines as separate stories, each of them with a sort of open ending. We also shot in that way, so we had camera positions, we also marked the lens and the height of the camera to return there for another time, in another season, with another protagonist. We very much were shooting material which is flexible and rich enough to play around with it in the editing room, and find these unpredictable moments of sliding from one to the other. When you have parallel stories, generally there is a little bump when you move from one time to the other. Here, except the very first one – when Greta arrives, it’s a surprise – I really wished to very naturally slide. It’s like surfing, somehow.
Silent Friend opens in limited release May 8 from 1-2 Special and expands throughout the month.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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