In conversation with Jessica Hausner and Markus Binder: Exploring 'Club Zero'
Trigger warnings for mentions of eating disorders, emotional manipulation, implied suicide, malnourishment.
Club Zero (2023) follows the lives of Elsa, Ragna, Fred, Ben, and Helen, who come under the influence of Ms. Novak, a mysterious teacher brought in to teach students about “conscious eating”. With excruciating precision, the film delves into how Ms. Novak's authority leads these students into self-inflicted harm, convincing them that their minds can override their physical need for food. These teenagers, manipulated and weaponised against themselves, with their insecurities being preyed upon and misused, end up unanimously leaving the world that they lived in to join Club Zero, a shadow organisation whose members practice not eating. I sat down with the film’s director, Jessica Hausner, and its music producer, Markus Binder, to discuss the implications and impact of the film in today’s world.
Markus, I was especially interested in the score of the film - I think in conversation with the other elements, such as settings and colour grading, the music added a lot to legitimise the personal isolation and victimisation of the main characters. I was wondering if you had that idea going into the film or if it was something that happened through the audience’s experience.
Markus: The thing that you’re speaking about, the victimisation and the sound, that it has to do with the victimisation of the actors in the story, I didn’t think much about that - we tried to bring in the sound as a very independent element to tell its own story. I guess we made the experience in the editing room, putting sound to a scene that didn’t have a sound before, it changes the scene completely, and the impression you get of it. This isolation you speak of is interesting - (Jessica and I) talked about that aspect; maybe I would say that it is kind of an aspect found in the sound connected to the people in the film, but it was not my aim to do that. My aim was more to find sounds that came from elsewhere, and the other element you were speaking about with the singing - the string instruments and the drums we have on one side and the chorus singing we have on the other side, are the main parts or tools that I used for the sound. This was connected to the story - we talked a lot about the elements we found that did best for the movie.
I also just wanted to ask you about the particular musical instruments you used for the percussion and the non-verbal chorus singing that you described. What kind of vision did you have for the instruments you used?
Markus: The chorus came out of the scene in the movie where the pupils and the teacher are singing by themselves - they make this humming sound. We thought about this humming and singing and this kind of special tune it has, it could be an element of the soundtrack itself. Usually in my band I write lyrics and sing words, but this was interesting for me to leave words out and just use the sound of the voice. This was one element that we found to come out of the story and it’s connected to the soundtrack and it could be an eternal and typical element of the whole soundtrack.
The instruments are from tours I did with my band, we were travelling a lot in Asia and so I brought some instruments, mainly string instruments. This sound is very unique and it comes from Siberia, Vietnam, and other countries. This combination of chorus singing and string instruments as well as the drum sounds.
While I was watching the film, I thought it was really interesting - some of the choices in the dialogue and the themes that you made while shooting and writing the film. I think performative activism comes up a lot, especially when you think about Helen saying “Why doesn’t she understand how important our work is?” and other lines in the film where characters think of themselves as part of a greater good, but ultimately don't achieve anything - words are contrasted with their actions, like actively wasting food and not participating in “too much consumerism” when they still hyper-consume in different ways. What were your thoughts when designing those particular elements or writing those dialogues?
Jessica: I like to walk a very thin red line with my films and I think it comes from the fact that in my films, the characters are not exactly original individuals. So when I, for example, work with the actors, we don’t talk so much about the backstory or biography of each character but we talk about the basic situations and human interactions that they have. For example, I shout at you and you are afraid; you get sad when you are fired. In my scenes, and my films, I try to catch something that is beyond the individual rightfulness of sorts. I have a certain distance to the people I show and I think in the case of the young students in my film, that distance protected and showed young people who definitely want to try to create a better world and they do something for it because this is what happens to them - they have this opportunity in the form of Ms. Novak and they grab it and go for it, but it is not 100% what really makes the world better. But, maybe it is also not completely wrong - when Elsa holds her speech about the nutrition industry, I think every word she says is right, and she uses her not-eating as a hunger strike, which is a political method also. So, it is not one single perspective that tells you exactly what their intentions are - a greyness and ambivalence coming from that distanced perspective, from that perspective none of their actions are either good or bad - they have both in them.
Building off what you said already, a lot of what I experienced about the film has a lot to do with the teenage psyche and the liminal space in which teenagers exist - not quite children or adults, and they don’t know if they want to be childlike or grownup yet. I think the way that the film played with the mobilisation of teenage freedom, the way that they understand their bodies, and the way they live in the world is really well done. Was the choice to set this in a boarding school with teenage main characters intentional or was something that worked out well for it as you were making it?
Jessica: It was a core part of why I wanted to make the film, showing the relationships of the teenagers with their parents, and the teacher as well. That power triangle interested me and moved me a lot - I'm a parent myself and the basic questions as a parent are “What can I do to protect my child and guide them well so that they do survive?” so I am confronted with questions of self-responsibility. I would say that the same way the children are portrayed slightly distanced and also slightly stereotyped, also the parents show stereotypes of parenting and I think that it is the same thing here that I tried to show that as human beings we fulfill certain options or stereotypes. nobody of us is free from being influenced, manipulated, or shaped by the world we live in. So, all of the characters, are not exactly characters that I identify with but it’s a little bit different - it’s like a mirror, a moment of “Oh that’s what I’m like” - so I think it’s slightly embarrassing to watch the film also, as a young person or a parent, because you see the weird side of yourself where you’re just repeating things that are in our society.
Building off the boarding school and the interplay between the school setting and the home setting. The characters in the film speak about consumerism and the overabundance of resources, and this is contrasted with the homes that they live in, with those incredibly large swathes of gardens and forest space that are not being used but exist as a symbol of status and power -
Jessica: but at the same time I still believe them when they say they want to reduce their consumerism, I think that is the weird thing about us all in the film, of course, we sometimes try our best, and on the other side we’re totally blind maybe to what would actually be necessary to do.
- the juxtaposition of the settings along with the messages of the film is really human, but also very political in the world that we live in of course, where you’re told that these are the solutions you can have to a problem but not given the space or the opportunity to think beyond what that solution is. Ms. Novak even tells them that the solution to their consumerism is to not eat, which is a very literal understanding of the word “consumption” in the first place, but the larger aspects of their incredibly extravagant homes and their needless waste of food at school, are more practical things that they’re not taught to think of. I was also looking at the scene where Elsa and Ragna were looking into more radical forms of self-purification and Ms. Novak cuts them down instead of encouraging their independent research, she calls those practices primitive or unnecessary. With regard to things like knowledge systems or beliefs, what do you want the audience to take away from the film?
Jessica: I think the best thing for you to take away from my films in general is self-reflection; that maybe there is a moment of mirroring our own weaknesses and also our ridiculousness but I embraced that ridiculousness, I personally love the characters in my films. I think it is interesting and very important to understand that we all have flaws and weaknesses and we are open to manipulation - sometimes we think we’re so right but sometimes we’re not, or maybe we are. But it is important especially nowadays, I have the feeling that there is a lot of black-and-white thinking - either you’re anti or you’re pro. I think my films try to be in the middle zone where this can be right but the other thing may be too, and they talk more about absurdity and the fact that we want to think we’re right but maybe we’re not. That’s probably what I would want an audience to take away from the film.
I also wanted to explore the choices made in the costuming and colours throughout the film - there is so much green used throughout the film and it represents so much prosperity and lushness and the thriving society that the kids are in, while the children themselves waste away. There is so much interesting use of colour to show fun and flavour, but it does not reach the experiences of the characters. I wanted to get your thoughts on that - what were you thinking of when you made the film look the way it did?
Jessica: I think you’re right when you say that the colour green and also maybe yellow are supposed to create the feeling of spring and the freshness of youth - the vulnerability of a spring flower that can easily be killed by winter coming back. For me, I think that’s the saddest thing about my film, which is that we see these young people in a rich world of opportunities killing themselves. That is really sad and on the other hand, I have to say I do think that for example eating disorders are happening in the rich Western developed world, not in a country where there is hunger, and what does that tell us? I cannot present you with the answer right now, but it is a perversion that bothers me a lot. It really is hurting, and emotionally hard to understand or bear the fact that people starve themselves in a world of over-equipment.
The absence of resolution was something I was looking at throughout the film, and you’ve spoken about it already, but I just wanted to hear about the ending. It is very ambiguous; we don’t know what practically happens to the kids, and we don’t know if they’re literally dead - when they say that they’re in a place far far away, that is physically depicted in the film but also in the mental aspect where they feel alienated from the people around them who they don’t believe love them. I was wondering if that was a specific critique you wanted to draw or if that was something that struck you while you were writing the film and you realised that you cannot solve these problems right now or they cannot be fully addressed.
Jessica: I don't even know if I think these problems can be solved - in all my films I also take advice or inspiration from fairy tales. What I like about fairy tales is they confront you with quiet dark realities or fears and in the end they offer you that moral solution, but what they really push to do is portray very basic or universal human conditions and I don’t know if we can solve our human condition - I think the fact that we are influenceable and we are influenced all the time and we influence each other and we are open to manipulation and radicalisation and that we think we are right when we are wrong, it is not something that will ever be solved. I don’t know if the aspect of the story where you said that maybe the kids don’t feel loved by their parents is one aspect, but as you said, with the mother of Ben for example, I don't feel that that is their problem; and yet Ben still follows the rules. I did that on purpose to really give the audience a kaleidoscope of a chaotic situation where there might be no solution. I mean, this might be a part of our nowadays times that frustrates me a little bit; we are all made to believe that we might find solutions for ourselves, and we optimise ourselves all the time, and this can be bad or that can be had for us - I find that kind of stressful, and we must also be allowed to sometimes be weak, ugly and stupid.
What was going through your mind when deciding to make a film like this in the first place?
Jessica: I would say the initial urge to make this film came also from my fear as a parent of a teenage boy that I might be blind to the real threats. I think that suddenly came to my mind when I met a manipulative teacher not too far from the story; nothing bad happened but I had a vision of what happens if this gets bigger. If there is some adult that I don't even know - I don’t see what is happening to him all the time - is taking that sort of influence.
As a final, closing question: your films have been compared a lot to Wes Anderson and Yorgos Lanthimos - I just wanted to know if you take personal influence from those directors or if other things influence your creative process and your execution, and the things you understand about writing and directing.
Jessica; I definitely feel very related to those directors (Anderson and Lanthimos) but I will also say I have a relationship with the experimental or surrealist filmmaker Maya Deren. She was a filmmaker in the US in the 1940s and she made surrealist films that I saw when I was a film student, and suddenly it made a bing! In my head and then “Ahh, this is interesting”. Before and after that, the film school I went to showed me the typical ways to make a proper film and how it should be done, and sometimes I was super bored. It was also mainly male filmmakers, I have to say that - but then we watched Maya Deren, and I understood much better what she was trying to say than any of the other films. She has been a companion in my heart ever since then, and I rewatch her films frequently. I also used the same composer (as Maya Deren); Little Joe was composed by Teiji Ito, who also worked with Maya Deren. I would also say that I am inspired by visual art. Cindy Sherman is a photographer who inspires me a lot - that way of dressing yourself up and creating your weird mask, and performative performances, is very inspiring for me, so I would add those two women to my inspirations.
Club Zero will be released in UK and Irish cinemas on the 6th of December 2024.
Edited by Humaira Valera
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