ATHINA RACHEL TSANGARI
BY
Annabel Brady-Brown
An interview with the Greek filmmaker on her memories of making her breakout hit Attenberg, and on her forthcoming Western, Harvest.
Attenberg plays at Metrograph as part of Under the Skin: The Pleasure of Discomfort from Friday, February 2.
Opening with one of the most memorable “first kiss” scenes this side of the millennium, Attenberg immediately seized attention when it premiered at the 2010 Venice Film Festival. The second of Athina Rachel Tsangari’s three features to date—as she discusses below, Harvest, her long anticipated fourth feature, following the men-at-sea psychodrama Chevalier (2015), is currently in post-production—Attenberg stood out then, as it still does today, as a boldly original cinematic pastiche formed by a restless intelligence, employing everything from archetypes of ancient Greek theatre and the coming of age genre, through to choreographed dance and Kafka-esque gallows humor. Centred around the 23-year-old Marina (Ariane Labed, in her first role) and her terminally ill father Spyros (Vangelis Mourikis)—a melancholy daughter-father duo who share a love for language games, the band Suicide, and David Attenborough nature documentaries—the film captures the youthful feeling of un-belonging in all its skin-crawling, raw discomfort.
Attenberg was shot in Aspra Spitia, a declining industrial town off the southern coast of Greece, where Tsangari was born. At 21, she left for New York on a Fulbright for an MA in Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts, and then an MFA in film at UT Austin. While in Texas, she fell in with the active independent scene—you can spot her cameo as “Cousin from Greece” in Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991); made her debut feature; and started Cinematexas, an influential avant-garde shorts festival. Upon returning to Athens in the early 2000s, renegotiating the city she’d left so many years before, Tsangari continued to live by the DIY-ethos of the Austin scene, producing Yorgos Lanthimos’s first two films through her company Haos Productions, before being inspired to direct again and unleashing Attenberg (in which Lanthimos also acts) onto the world. In the years since, Tsangari has kept up a frenzy of activity, producing, teaching, directing for TV, such as the BBC polyamory drama Trigonometry, and guiding a new generation of storytellers in her role as artistic director of the prestigious Oxbelly lab for screenwriters and directors.
Taking a break from editing Harvest, Tsangari generously spoke with me over Zoom about her forthcoming film, her memories of making Attenberg, and her philosophy on filmmaking as a “career” and, more importantly, a life.—Annabel Brady-Brown
ANNABEL BRADY-BROWN: Before we discuss your previous work, I’d love you to tell me, if you’re allowed, about Harvest. How’s it all going?
ATHINA RACHEL TSANGARI: It sort of happened under the radar. We wrapped in October. Now, we’re in the middle of post. I don’t make films very often, and every time, it is agonizing when I’m in the editing room. It’s a pleasure when I’m preparing a film, and then we get on with the shoot, as it’s a communal endeavor, and especially Harvest—it literally took a village to make... And then, suddenly, I am ejected in some kind of exile into the editing room, facing this strange beast. A Western. We shot in Scotland, very muddy, lots of rain, plenty of horses, not enough time. Right now, I’m sitting tight, listening, trying to see what it wants to be.
Attenberg (2010), photo by Despina Spyrou
ABB: You regularly bring in repeat collaborators and have wonderful people around you—not just talents, but friends. For example, I heard the filmmaker Ben Rivers was on the Harvest set, shooting second camera.
ART: Ben is an old friend, and he joined us for a couple days to do his magic. So generous. Choosing the team behind the camera, each and every one, is as essential. Also it’s very much the way our producer on the ground Rebecca O’Brien likes to work. What’s the point of making a film if you’re not enjoying the people with whom you’re making it?!
ABB: This relates to a quote of yours from an old interview, where you expressed the desire for “living while making films,” which is, to me, so lovely. As you said earlier, technically, you aren’t making films very often, yet you’re constantly surrounded by films—you’re producing, doing the Oxbelly lab in Greece, teaching, TV work... How does that idea of “living while making films” seem to you now? Is any one thing more important to you, or do they all feel like equal parts of an ecosystem?
ART: Yes, you said it perfectly. I can’t really see directing films as, you know, a career. Also, because I didn’t grow up (in Greece) thinking that I was destined to make films. I was watching films voraciously, but it’s not like I said, “When I grow up, I’m going to be a filmmaker.” It happened by fate, almost, and I got hooked. I just couldn’t see myself doing anything other than cinema. But “doing cinema” for me is not just making films. It’s also watching, programming, teaching, talking about films. I’m not really interested in making films unless it’s a testament to a series of collaborations. And to be able with every film to investigate where I am in relation to the world around me. It’s a bit like a confession. It’s a process of being curious about this mysterious organism that’s growing, slowly, first in my head, then suddenly it gets legs and starts walking.
Talking about Attenberg, when I made Attenberg, I didn’t actually think I was going to make another film. My first film, The Slow Business of Going (2000), was my student thesis film in Austin at UT. I thought everything that I needed to say and the kitchen sink was in that film, so there was no reason to make another. I was happy producing during that time. And being back in Greece, reconnecting myself with the country I had left more than 10 years before. I don’t know—usually there’s something, an image, something that starts…
ABB: Was there an image that started Attenberg?
ART: Yeah, it was the kiss. It was the very beginning of the film. Someone who’s being kissed and finds it revolting. And the idea of a tongue being this little animal inside someone’s mouth, wiggling. What do you do with this tongue, if you’re not going to talk? And she [Marina] was not talking very much. It’s not like I said, “I’m going to make a coming of age film,” or, “I’m going to make an autobiographical film,” because it’s actually not autobiography.
So it started nagging me, this image. It’s like a thread you start following, to see where it leads. I was jotting down disorganized notes. Then I just sat down for two weeks, and one scene wrote the next.
It’s always the first scene—it was also the same with Chevalier, that’s how it started, too. It was the sudden vision of these men who’d come out of the sea and lie on the beach like whales. “Who are these men? Where do they come from? Why are all these men together?” A film always starts this way for me.
Chevalier (2015), photo by Despina Spyrou
ABB: With Attenberg, you wrote it very quickly.
ART: You know, I am probably the slowest filmmaker on Earth, and it is torturous for me to write. So this was a gift. It just kind of exploded out of me. Then, I was lucky enough to be able to get some funding and make it with, again, help from friends and through our company, Haos Film, to create a community.
ABB: The film expresses great love for cinema, playing artfully with many tropes and genres. I want to particularly ask about the coming of age genre, though: there’s great tension in the film from both embracing and rejecting some of its beats.
ART: It was instinctual. As I said, it kind of blurted out… I never really thought of it as a coming of age film. It was more feeling very much an alien, like Marina, and asking questions like: how do you belong? How do you find the tools or language for belonging? And especially if belonging doesn’t make you comfortable?
Since I don’t work with full on realism, I gravitate towards asking questions, rather than providing neatly packaged answers. With Harvest, it was a novel by Jim Crace that was offered to me by my producers and my co-writer Joslyn Barnes. I had no idea why they would ever think I could make this film. It took me some time reading the novel and wondering, “Why me? Why me?”
Then, all of a sudden I just knew that I could make this film during an undefined time and place. There was a sense of science fiction of the past that permeated the story. There needs to be an element of science fiction in everything I do. I call it “30 degrees off realism.”
ABB: Do you know now why you’re the right person to be taking this on?
ART: I like that the main character is a narrator who is not your typical Western hero. He has an intuitive, tactile way of being. He’s an innocent man who loves getting high on mushrooms and living free on the land. Until the land is robbed from him. Also, I’m a huge fan of Westerns. There’s one I love called The Furies (1950) by Anthony Mann that Matt Johnson, my long-time editor and creative partner, and I have been working on a loose adaptation. And Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) is one of my favorite films of all time. I’m keen on the archetypal structure of a Western which is not far from Greek tragedy. I’m always interested in: how do I enter genre and then mess with it?
ABB: Then each new project has to be something you are going to learn from, and grow.
ART: That’s right. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I kept making the same kind of movie. But yeah, between The Slow Business of Going, Attenberg, Chevalier, The Capsule (2012), even Trigonometry, I think it’s always about being curious about the surgeries I can perform in genres that have been delivered to us through the history of cinema. I’m a film nerd. My absolute pleasure is watching films obsessively, up to the point where I am ready to revert from the viewer role and then, through some kind of mysterious process, to make a film.
Athina Rachel Tsangari on the set of Attenberg (2010), photo by Despina Spyrou
ABB: Since making Attenberg, how do you think you have changed as a filmmaker? For example, you’ve been recently working with a new DP, Sean Price Williams, who has his idiosyncratic style—has your approach to or ideas about images evolved?
ART: The language that I choose changes according to the film, so it’s the film that dictates the language. With Attenberg, it was a very structured film from the script itself. I wanted it to be very bare. With three shots, I constructed each scene, if it wasn’t just a single shot. There’s something about this naked language—very still, very static—that was much like Marina. So it’s always about shaping a body, creating a body that contains the bodies of all the characters. There is a verisimilitude in this process.
With Sean, we had worked together in Trigonometry, the series I directed the first five episodes for. It was an intimate story between three people in love. I’d worked with Sean briefly, in a commercial, and I liked his tactility and intuition. I thought because Harvest is so much about being immersed in the madness, as everything unravels and goes to hell, it should be anarchic, untethered. Not because the camera keeps moving, because lots of the time it doesn’t. And also… working along someone where we hardly need to speak, you know?
The way I work is to shoot the entire scene from the beginning to end uninterrupted, over and over. We have an idea of how the camera is going to move, but I don’t want to know where it’s going to land, so the actors are always fully present because they never know when they’re going to be onscreen. Everyone is always engaged. And again, it’s almost like a children’s play. It’s really beautiful working with Sean because he is really in it. It’s like we all get into a trance on set sharing a rite of passage. Anything can happen. Anything. Every day on set is actually a beautiful day of catching things in the air—David Lynch describes it this way, and I love it. You’re just catching things, and then they’re transformed into glances and gestures, imperceptible movements; words that no one wrote, suddenly, they’re out in the air.
ABB: One of the things I find so impressive about your cinema is that quality, exactly—the power of a raw gesture to erupt from the screen and startle, to say everything we need to know and hear.
ART: You know in Attenberg, Ariane, when I cast her, she spoke almost no Greek.
ABB: That blew my mind when I found out that.
ART: It was also her first film role. She was fearless. She could not read the script, so we got her a dialect coach—Natasha Giannaraki, a friend who spoke perfect French and perfect Greek. They worked on the script together, line by line. But most of our rehearsals were basically playing birds and bugs, and that’s how she, as we say, “got into character.” We didn’t go through the script per se, but rather through the senses of each character and their physicalized interactions… How we could ultimately replace words, completely useless words. There’s lots of play, lots of improv, but when we are finally on set, we’re not trying to find anything. Everything has been found already.
ABB: Last question: do you have a favorite scene in Attenberg?
ART: I think the beginning, the kiss scene. And also when Marina sings “Be Bop Kid” by Suicide to her dad while he’s dying. I think it might have been one take. It was like shooting a love poem, from Marina to her father. And from me to Suicide.
Annabel Brady-Brown is an editor at Metrograph, and the co-founder of Fireflies Press.
Attenberg (2010), photo by Despina Spyrou
