The majority of German actor Aylin Tezel’s directorial debut Falling Into Place, screening at London’s Raindance Film Festival this month, shot in Scotland, with a largely UK cast and crew.
The Germany-UK co-production is programmed as part of the festival’s focus on German cinema.
The Scotland-set tale details the story of two 30-somethings who meet briefly over a winter weekend on the Isle of Skye and form a sudden deep and surprising bond. Tezel, who also wrote the screenplay, also stars in the film. Scotland-based Chris Fulton co-stars
Tezel, who flits between London and Berlin, wrote her first draft in Edinburgh after going to Scotland for the first time in January 2018.
Emboldened by positive notes from friends, Tezel showed it to her acting agent at Curtis Brown. “They read it and liked it, I met an agent from their literary department and suddenly had an agent as a writer/director too.”
Cut to February 2019 and Tezel met German production company Weydemann Bros, headed by Jonas and Jakob and producer Yvonne McWellie at the Berlinale. Weydemann had a growing reputation for getting challenging projects such as Nora Fingscheidt’s Berlinale competition film System Crasher off the ground. The company has also gone to make further UK-German collaborations including Fingscheidt’s The Outrun.
“They said to me, ‘this is going to be your directorial debut and are you going to act in it as well?’ They were very clear about that I should do all three things.”
Tezel and the Weydemann team enlisted Scotland and London-based casting director Des Hamilton and Weydemann set about securing financing, initially approaching German broadcasters.
“Because it was a UK film script, content wise with only one character from Germany who didn’t speak one German word, it was more difficult. But Aylin is very well known in Germany so having it as her debut as a director and scriptwriter helped,” explains Jonas Weydemann of securing German backing.
German broadcasting giant WDR, SR and Arte all boarded, with Weydemann Bros’ existing relationship and Tezel’s profile with Film- und Medienstiftung NRW helping to bring in the German side
“The whole development was backed by us and then the broadcasters boarded for production,” explains Jonas Weydemann. “In Germany, usually we need first broadcasters and distributors on board in order to tap into the funding sites.
Creative Europe, the German Federal Film Fund (DFFF) and Screen Scotland also provided support and Munich-based Global Screen joined to handle international sales.
The UK partner, Glasgow-based director, writer and producer John McKay of Compact Pictures, hadn’t meant to join the project. McKay initially read the script as the boyfriend of Weydemann’s Yvonne McWellie.
“I read it first, just as a guy who’s hanging around, who came from Scotland and who could sense check the script. I was immediately struck by the maturity of the writing,” McKay notes. “I read a lot of scripts and thought how astonishingly fluent Aylin was in English, not just in a technical sense, but also in an artistic sense. It was clear this was a great little indie movie waiting to be made.
“When you are the producer’s boyfriend, it’s a little difficult to say, ‘maybe you should work with me’,” McKay continues. “I waited until it became inevitable and I qualified to become the UK producer.”
As the minority co-production partner. McKay was able to bring in production finance from Screen Scotland, and secured Scotland-based below-the-line talent including production designer Andy Hammond.
McKay says his experience of working with the German funders was that they were far less artistically involved than the UK funders.
“In the UK, and certainly Scotland, equity financiers often see themselves as having an artistic stake in the project,” says McKay. “On the one hand attention is a good thing. On the other hand, it’s different from what our German partners were bringing and expecting.”
Quite a lot of his work around financing was “diplomatically adjusting expectations each way, about why our funders were interested about what was going into the script and what would be going into the movie and so on so forth,” he explains. “There’s an equal interest in excellence, it’s just that they see themselves as standing in slightly different places in the creative chain.”
As McWellie puts it: “It seems like totally different kind of systems of financing, of seeing the work done, but in the end, it’s all the same goal.”
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