Aylin Tezel

Source: Stefan Klueter

Aylin Tezel

World premiering at Filmfest Hamburg, Falling Into Place is the directorial debut of German actress Aylin Tezel.

Tezel, whose acting credits include thriller 7500 and series Unbroken, also wrote the script for Falling Into Place, and stars alongside Chris Fulton, known for Bridgerton and Outlaw King.

The English-language contemporary love story centres on two 30-somethings who meet briefly over a winter weekend on the Isle of Skye and form a sudden, deep, and surprising bond. Back in London, they try to move on with their separate lives - but both have to stop running from themselves before they are ready to truly meet.

Germany’s Weydemann Bros produce, with Glasgow-based Compact Pictures co-producing. The film received funding from broadcasters WDR, SR and Arte, as well as Film- und Medienstiftung NRW, Creative Europe, German Federal Film Fund (DFFF) and Screen Scotland. Munich based Global Screen handles international sales.

How did you come to make your writing and directing feature debut with Falling Into Place?

It started very playfully. In October 2017, I was walking with a friend in Victoria Park in London and we talked about dreams. We both had big dreams – mine was to make a movie. I said to her maybe we have to start with the tiniest step. I invented a little game for us. I set a timer for 30 minutes and said we have to either write a scene, a poem or a song. We sat down in Victoria Park, both with our pencils and a piece of paper. Straightaway I started a dialogue between a woman and the man who talk about the sense of life. He says, ‘Life is just the repetition of distractions to make people forget that you die.’ And she’s like, ‘Really, this is why we’re sent here?’

This dialogue, which ended up in the film, just shot through my system onto the paper. Then I looked at my phone and I still had 15 minutes left. Then I thought, ‘Okay, who is he? Who is she? What could possibly happen?’ I wrote down a few things and then my timer went off.

Those two people just didn’t leave me for two or three months - they kept coming back to my consciousness. Then I went to Scotland for New Year. The next morning I sat down in a little cafe in Edinburgh and just started writing the script. I never knew what was happening. I didn’t have a plan. I just knew that it’s about those two people. I wrote the script within four weeks, it just flew out of me.

What happened next?

Falling Into Place

Source: Julian Krubasik / Port au Prince Pictures

‘Falling Into Place’

I showed it to a couple of friends who really liked it. That made me be brave enough to show it to my acting agents at Curtis Brown, my London based agency. They said they would like to read it – and then said they would like me to meet an agent from the literary department. So, a moment later, I suddenly had an agent at Curtis Brown in London as a director and writer.

How did you team with Weydemann Bros to produce it?

I didn’t know them. A year later, in February 2019, the Weydemanns were in the Berlinale competition with their film System Crasher. They were really the rising star producers in Germany. A friend of mine said they are the producers who will help finance a film that is nearly impossible to get financed. That’s because it needed to be financed out of Germany, but shoot in the UK with a UK cast. That’s very, very hard to put together. I met the brothers, Jakob and Jonas, during the Berlinale. They read it really quickly said, ‘We want to do this. And we believe in you and we think you should do it all – you should direct and act in it as well.

Did you want to direct this as well? Or was that a surprise when they said that?

I have directed a couple of short films before. So directing was also part of where my journey was leading. I was basically open to do it all.

How did you put the financing together?

The first very big and important step for us was to get our broadcasters on board – we got WDR and also got the confirmation on the same day from Arte and SR. And then we got the NRW film fund who came on board with a big sum. We had some money from Creative Europe too. The last ones on board were Screen Scotland.

We were at a point where, even though we didn’t really have enough money, we said we’re going to risk it now. We’re going to jump. By then we already had such amazing people on board – our DOP from Germany, Julian Krubasik, and our production designer Andy Drummond from Scotland. Those two on the creative level were really important partners for me. We also had Jon Hopkins on our composer side. So we had three really important positions on the creative team. We also got really lucky and got Des Hamilton as our casting director. That was a big one for me. He has just cast the most amazing films, and I knew he was going to get good actors into the room. And so he did.

How was it directing as well as acting and having written it?

Somehow it just worked. Something about the whole process was very intuitive. Very often, I made my decisions on instinct because we had super full shooting days. In terms of budget, we were still a small film. But I had a big cast. I had a lot of locations, travelling from the Skye, to Glasgow, to London and to Germany, where we also filmed some of the scenes.

We had 29 shooting days. We started on the Isle of Skye. Then we shot the majority of the London scenes in Glasgow because we were working with a majority Scottish team. Most of the interiors shot in Glasgow, and then we came to London for a few days to film mostly exteriors. And then at the end of the shoot, we went to North-Rhine Westphalia, and shot more locations there. 

From which films and filmmakeres have you taken inspiration? 

I would say indie films dealing with the topic of love, but in a very honest way. One example is Blue Valentine, a film that always spoke to me because it’s so raw in the way that two people deal with each other. The things that they say to each other are very honest, and very real. There’s another called, Like Crazy, by Drake Doremus. There is a lot of improvisation in it, which makes it very direct.

What are you doing next? Are you acting in other people’s films? Or are you looking to do more writing and directing?

I’m very excited about this new writer / director journey and I hope it will be long. The acting has been around for longer now - I do not want to do lose that either. I’m just grateful to be able to live a creative life and in whichever way I can do that I will go and explore it.