An interview with Barbara Seiler, noted down by Daniel Bickermann.

How and when did you decide to become a filmmaker?

I had been working as a cultural journalist for several TV stations for seven years, directing many short reports. The work was interesting and connected me to a lot of interesting people, too. But after a while it was all routine and I couldn't evolve my skill any further on this format. In 2004 I then directed my first documentary feature and very quickly realized that there is a huge difference between directing short reports and being a film-maker. So I decided to study as a film director at the Zurich University of the Arts.

How is the short film regarded and distributed in Switzerland?

Swiss short films are mostly done in film schools. Most of them disappear rather quickly into the archives. But there are also beautiful exceptions like Irene Ledermann's SCHONZEIT, which won the Max Ophüls Award, or Reto Caffi's AUF DER STRECKE, which won the student Oscar last year. I think short films are a wonderful possibility to experiment and in the best case create a calling card for bigger projects in the business.

Where did the idea of the fatal Scrabble game come from?

I desperately wanted to direct a short fiction film in my first year at the film school. But sadly we had so much theory to handle that we missed out on the practice. So writing my own script wasn't an option. I read the short story “Death by Scrabble” by Charlie Fish on the internet and at once images came to my head. Charlie Fish agreed to give me the rights via e-mail. There are, by the way, several film versions of this story on YouTube already. An animated version, done by Slurpy Studios is my favourite. It was funny that I actually met Katie Steed, who directed this version, at a festival in Istanbul, where my thesis film TANZ INS GLÜCK was shown.

The whole look of the film is symbolic and anti-realistic: Filming in black-and-white, the choice of prototypical furniture and the expressionistic acting. The film reminds one of the theatre of the absurd. What were your thoughts on camera and acting when you entered the conceptual stage of this film?

I am very much influenced by theatre. For example I'm very fond of the work of director Christoph Marthaler. His characters barely ever have a background story, they are thrown into an undefined space and time. I like it, when characters act surprisingly, for example starting to sing or dance right out of the blue or start walking into walls. I like games in general, and I like to lay with film as a medium. DEATH BY SCRABBLE is about a game within a game which spirals out of control and has fatal consequences. I was clear from the start that this could not be played naturalistically within in effect seeming implausible. So we tried to establish an artificial element in the look and the acting. The film also shouldn't be anchored in a specific time. The living room, which is recognisable as a film set has a look of the 40s or 50s about it. The music is more 70s. The characters might as well be contemporary. The black and white almost resembles a silent era movie. Originally I planned to go even further and create a game within the game within the game.

How did you chose the cast and crew and how was the collaboration with them?

I knew Valerie Cuenod, who plays the wife, from theatre improvisation workshops. There we always made fun of her laughter, which I remembered when casting the film. It is an almost diabolical character and I thought Valerie's laughter would be a perfect fit. Venus Madrid I found via an actors' website. Our make-up artist Fabienne Eisenegger gave him some extra-white make-up in order to make him look soft and almost like a baby. I've worked with the director of photography Christine Munz a lot before the film. Together we designed the storyboard. The big challenge was how to conduct an earthquake on our little set. Christine then came p with the idea to position the table and the chair and the carpet on a platform which would rest on tennis balls. The whole crew then had to secretly shake this platform with the table, the chairs and the actors on it. That was quite funny actually.
The crew consisted mainly of friends and fellow students. Michi Imboden, who now works as a production assistant with Triluna, was leading the production and his colleague Simon Liniger did the sound. Brian Burman, who I had worked with before on television composed the score, did the editing etc. It was my first short fiction film, and I was terribly afraid of working with such a large crew. But everybody did everything.

There are several mood swings within the films: At he beginning from boredom towards a thriller atmosphere; and later the homicidal fantasies of the husband always break the tension. Can you tell us something about the use of music and camera in those sequences and when in the production you decided to handle these scenes that way?

Our composer Brian Burman also edited the film. For him that was quite stressful, but for the film it was very good. During editing we had talked about what kind of music would fit in the film. We wanted a kind of elevator music theme for the woman, a bit cheap but uplifting. The tempo then gets faster and faster, until the music sound threatening – and in the earthquake everything comes to a halt. Brian composed and edited the music in just two weeks.
The husband's homicidal fantasies were already in my original script. This way we could tell the audience without using any dialogue, that he may seem nice and soft, but there's a whole different film going on inside him. We filmed his fantasies from his point of view, so that they would stand apart from the rest of the film. And we were looking for a different film language to accomplish that, so we shot those scenes hand-held.

What can you tell us about the film's reception? Where in Switzerland has the film been shown and what were the reactions?

Outside of my University the film was only shown in two small festivals in Switzerland. In Germany it was screened at several short film festivals, as well as in the Czech Republic, Poland, the UK, the US and a black-and-whit film Festival in Portugal. The reactions ranged from “I don't know what to think about this” via “It's interesting” to “Wow, this has 'cult' written all over it.” The first reaction actually was that of my professor.

Links

• DEATH BY SCRABBLE (CH 2008. Barbara Seiler)
• The Word Made Flesh – Daniel Bickermann about DEATH BY SCRABBLE
• Missed Opportunities – Tamar Noort about the Swiss film market