‘Cuckoo’ Director Tilman Singer Explains Why He Apologized to Dan Stevens When They Met
Cuckoo filmmaker Tilman Singer knows what he wants. That confidence was apparent when his film school thesis project, Luz, received distribution in 2018, kicking off the German writer-director’s promising future. The 70-minute supernatural horror film was made with the most modest of resources, but Singer’s talent was so evident that you couldn’t help but imagine what he’d be able to do with a healthy budget. It may have taken six years, but the answer is now here in the form of Cuckoo, which may or may not be connected to Luz. Hunter Schafer’s main character in Singer’s genre-bending horror film is named Gretchen Vanderkurt, while Luz’s Julia Riedler played a character named Nora Vanderkurt.
As of this moment, Singer is choosing to remain tight-lipped about the potential relationship between his first two features.
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“I don’t want to answer that too concretely, but it’s a good last name. I really like these Dutch frontier-sounding names. They work greatly for Europeans and Americans, so I’ll leave it at that,” Singer tells The Hollywood Reporter.
Singer may have been coming off his senior thesis film, but he still had a few nonnegotiables when setting up Cuckoo at Neon.
“The line producer tried to talk me out of [shooting on 35 mm], but it was one of my very early demands: ‘I’m bringing my production designer, sound designer, cinematographer, composer and I’m shooting on film,’” Singer shares. “And I told them, ‘We can shoot 35 or a mix [of 35 and 16]. I don’t care, but I need to shoot analog.”
But before you categorize Singer as another uncompromising artist, he’s actually more than willing to let the best idea win.
“A good indication is when I am struggling with a line or how to make a beat work on a script page,” Singer says. “So I’d go to a [Neon] executive that I like and ask, ‘Could you just give it a try?’ And then they’d write the line in a perfect way. I’d be like, ‘All right, copy-paste. That goes in the script. That’s good.’ So that’s how most of our process together felt.”
Opening Friday, Cuckoo chronicles Schafer’s Gretchen as she reluctantly moves with her father, Luis (Marton Csokas), and his much younger wife, Beth (Jessica Henwick), to the Bavarian Alps resort of Dan Stevens’ Herr K?nig. While her father and stepmother plan to expand the resort they first conceived eight years earlier, Gretchen quickly begins to notice that her half-sister Alma (Mila Lieu) is acting strangely in their new environment. A mysterious woman in a trench coat starts to stalk Gretchen as well, leading to her discovery of a uniquely sinister plot.
Stevens helped Singer reimagine Cuckoo‘s antagonist role of Herr K?nig, who was originally a 60-something-year-old German character that John Malkovich was going to portray until the pandemic upended schedules across the industry. During their initial meeting together, Singer also had to apologize to the English actor right out of the gate for overlooking a key skill of his.
“I don’t do proper research before talking to actors … When I first talked to Dan, he introduced himself and said hello in perfect German, and I almost fell off my chair,” Singer recalls. “I then immediately apologized because I shy away from digging too deep.”
Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Singer also explains how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine affected Cuckoo‘s production.
So did the idea for Cuckoo actually originate from the parasitic behavior of the cuckoo bird?
Absolutely, yeah. I watched a BBC documentary around the time that we were mixing and finishing up Luz. And this one image of host parents nurturing this cuckoo chick after their whole offspring had died just didn’t leave my brain. It just did something to me. So I came back to the idea at some point and I was like, “OK, I’m supposed to project this onto humans.”
Cuckoo certainly makes a number of points about reproductive health, but I would argue that it’s equally about the many forms of sisterhood.
I think both [readings] are true, and of course, everybody is extremely welcome to find whatever meaning it is to them. I don’t think we make any extremely concrete points. To me, it’s about sisterhood, family and the circles of family, whether they’re good or bad. It’s about repeating patterns and generational conflict and love.
In 2021, Dan Stevens played a German-speaking robot in a German film called I’m Your Man. Is that when you realized he could convincingly play Herr K?nig?
No, I’m an idiot. I don’t do proper research before talking to actors, and I have not seen this movie. When I first talked to Dan, he introduced himself and said hello in perfect German, and I almost fell off my chair. (Laughs.) I then immediately apologized because I shy away from digging too deep. I knew how good he is, so I was already convinced about his acting. But then it really was about getting to know him and seeing if we speak the same language. And we did!
With the exception of Hunter Schafer, you had an entirely different cast at one point. Did the film change a great deal to account for these new actors?
That’s a really good question, and the cast did change over a long time. It was crazy COVID times, but this stuff happens all the time in moviemaking. You push, you wait for something and then scheduling conflicts arise. So you have to work around that, but then somebody else has a different project. The thing is, I was working on the script still, and I’m very sure I condensed it quite a bit with the knowledge of new actors coming in and their vibe and energy. So I did tweaks here and there, but I don’t think anything fundamental changed. For example, we previously had John Malkovich attached, and then he couldn’t do the movie anymore. So Dan convinced me — he didn’t have to try really hard — that this role doesn’t need to be a 60-plus-year-old man. He just has to be 60, metaphorically, or a symbolic grandfather, so to speak. So the only thing I really had to change was Herr K?nig’s age description in the script.
Hunter’s character, Gretchen, has the same last name as a character in Luz: Vanderkurt. Are your first two features in the same universe? Are these films connected?
Well, I don’t want to answer that too concretely, but it’s a good last name. I really like these Dutch frontier-sounding names. They work greatly for Europeans and Americans, so I’ll leave it at that.
An unsettling character known as the Hooded Woman (Kalin Morrow) hangs over Cuckoo. What was the evolution of her design?
I wanted a ghostly character that could exist in the real world. You could see her pass in the corner of your eye and not think too much of her. But, obviously, if you look closer, there’s something very off with her. I was going for a certain archaic idea of feminine beauty, and when we tried out her costume and her hair and makeup, we were going through all these different wigs. Wigs or fake hair are important for these characters, and at some point, they put a Marilyn Monroe-type wig on her head. And, together with the hood, I was like, “That’s it! That’s exactly it.” I don’t know why exactly, but it was important that it was a bygone era’s idea of feminine beauty.
How did you create the film’s pulsating effect on the day versus in post?
Our cinematographer, Paul Faltz, is really crafty, and he achieved that in camera by shooting through a mirror. It was one of these mirrors that they use for the lighting, and then he drilled it so that it would shake the mirror on two axes and have this parallax view. We knew we couldn’t just shake up the picture because that would just look like an earthquake is happening. You also couldn’t see behind the character. But we didn’t have time to do it for every scene that we wanted [to pulsate]. And, as we were editing the movie, we were wishing for way more of this state that people drop into, so we tasked the VFX company with reproducing that effect. They struggled at first, but then Paul drew up a plan of exactly what he built [on the day]. And then they had no more problems and could do it.
Whenever a moment loops, how often was the same take used?
That’s a very good question, and now I really have to think hard. I think it’s a different take the majority of times. The origin of the idea came from the fact that I thought it would be cool to put a different take of the same shot into a film. I’ve never seen that, or if I have seen it, it wasn’t in an exposed kind of way. We progressively did different takes of people being a little bit more distressed, a little bit sweatier, a little bit more hectic, more scared, and while we used them, there still might be the same take once or twice in the movie.
I’m a big fan of Jessica Henwick, and I’ve long believed that she should be leading her own projects.
Oh yeah!
What pointed you in her direction?
Honestly, it was one of those very classic recommendations by the casting director and producers. So I looked at her and the things she’s done, and as you said, she’s amazing. So I was really, really happy that she came on board for a small role.
You’re credited as writing some of the music in the film including “Gretchen’s Song,” which contains a bass line that recurs a number of times.
I’m so happy you noticed that!
What’s the backstory there?
Well, I wrote part of the song — an origin, so to speak. I was thinking about what kind of music Gretchen would play with her band, and actually, at that point [in the writing], she didn’t have a band. I knew she was a musician, and I knew the bass would be the right instrument for her. So I thought about all the bands that I could imagine her playing on the bass, and I felt that The Jesus and Mary Chain were the perfect band for her. They’re a band I really love, and their music is very noisy and very romantic and has all of this reverberation. So it felt super fitting for her, and then we asked for the B-side of an extended edition of “Darklands.” I thought, “That song cannot cost that much,” but the quote came back way too high. So the producers said, “No, we really need to put this money into something else.”
And then I looked at the rest of my list and was like, “Oh shit, the rest will not work either. There’s Suicide, The Velvet Underground. None of this will work.” So I asked our composer, Simon Waskow, “Can you write me a song that Gretchen wrote in the style of The Jesus and Mary Chain? And can you use that little spaghetti Western melody?” I had previously written a lead guitar melody for a little Western that we shot on a soundstage for a student project, and Simon, back then, turned this melody into a score for this short film. So he did all that [for Cuckoo], and that was maybe what led to Gretchen now having a band and being a singer. We were like, “Well, maybe Hunter can sing this.” And, sure enough, she was up for it, so we recorded it.
Most filmmakers in the States have to put up a fight to shoot on 35 mm. Is that the case overseas as well?
Usually, yeah. I think you do [have to put up a fight]. The line producer tried to talk me out of it, but it was one of my very early demands: “I’m bringing my production designer, sound designer, cinematographer, composer, and I’m shooting on film.” And I told them, “I don’t care. We can shoot 16 mm. Wide shots will be blurry, or we can shoot 35 or a mix [of the two]. I don’t care, but I need to shoot analog.”
Neon and A24 are currently the premier destinations for indie horror. Has Neon been as great as advertised?
Honestly, I don’t think there was a better partner out there for us. What makes Neon such a good partner is that they see something very early on in a project. Not everything is on the page. Not everything can be on a script page. So they really committed to this idea, which was kind of out there, and then they were nothing but supportive whenever we needed something. And the way we interacted was extremely respectful and extremely nourishing.
We had this back and forth about the script that I was really happy with, and a good indication is when I am struggling with a line or how to make a beat work on a script page. So I’d go to an executive that I like and ask, “Could you just give it a try?” And then they’d write the line in a perfect way. I’d be like, “All right, copy-paste. That goes in the script. That’s good.” So that’s how most of our process together felt.
It’s about shaping the vision together. A lot of times, I don’t see the forest for the trees. But, sometimes, I know best because I feel something that’s just not there yet. I can see it because I feel it, but nobody else can see it yet. So, sometimes, I need somebody to help me focus on the most important parts, and they were very great at pointing out this beat or that storyline: “This is what we’re getting or not getting.”
Every filmmaker has to compromise along the way. Is there one such compromise that worked out for the best?
You’re absolutely right. That happens all the time. When little or big catastrophes happen, it’s really good to see the creative chances that come with the struggle. For example, we lost a couple of our main locations that we had. It was mainly this hospital or treatment center complex that you see in the end. We lost the locations because the buildings that we had were turned into refugee camps from the Ukraine War, which is, of course, a good thing. But it left us with the problem of, “Where do we shoot now?”
We then had to relocate a big chunk of that to the shooting grounds of this huge village that the British Air Force [RAF] abandoned 15 years ago at the Belgium border in Germany. So that was honestly a great thing because we had our base camp there. We could hop between locations, but it also brought a lot in terms of vibes and atmosphere. These buildings were falling apart. They were dilapidated, and sometimes, it was good patina that we could use. But, most of the time, we really had to arrange our filming around the parts of the buildings that weren’t too in ruins or unsafe to go into and shoot.
This also speaks to having to recast. When that happens, of course you’re bummed out. You set your mind on somebody, you imagine the character, you work toward it, and then you have to redirect your thoughts. But I wouldn’t want to miss out on our absolutely amazing cast; I’m so grateful for what they did. This is all just filmmaking in a nutshell. When you come up with an idea, it has to fight reality, and then the movie is what that fight leaves.
Do you have a sense of what you might make next?
Yeah, I was actually writing all day during this summer thunderstorm [in Berlin]. I thought I was in between weird, magical worlds. But I’m writing a script. I can’t say too much. It’s a little bit of a different genre, but in terms of how it feels and how the story is told, it’s very much alike. I’ve never thought before in genres, like, “Oh, this is a straight up horror movie, or this is a straight up thriller.” So I can’t really do that now, but there’s elements. There’s thrills and maybe a little bit more romance than usual.
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Cuckoo opens in movie theaters on Aug. 9.
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