At the Cannes Market, sales agency The Playmaker will be showing a teaser for Nikias Chryssos’ horror film “Bloody Tennis.” Variety spoke to the German director about his debut English-language movie, which stars Sandra Guldberg Kampp (“Foundation”), seen in the first-look image from the film, above, and Golden Globe nominee Helena Zengel (“News of the World,” “The Legend of Ochi”).
The cast also includes Elina Löwensohn (“Amateur”), Zlatko Burić (“Triangle of Sadness”), Lucie Zhang (“Paris, 13th District”), Lily Taieb (“The French Dispatch,” “Bergman Island”), Vincent Romeo and Tracy Gotoas.
Chryssos’ first feature film, “The Bunker,” premiered at the Berlinale, and was shown at over 40 festivals,
winning several awards. His second feature, “A Pure Place,” premiered at the Munich Film Festival and won the award for best director. He then directed the feature “Rave On,” starring Aaron Altaras and Clemens Schick.
“Bloody Tennis” is produced by Jonas Katzenstein and Maximilian Leo at Augenschein, whose credits include “Mother Mary,” starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, “The Weight,” with Ethan Hawke and Russel Crowe, and the upcoming “Flesh of the Gods,” starring Kristen Stewart and Wagner Moura.
Anyone for tennis?
The film follows Sophie, who has been admitted to an elite tennis academy hidden deep in the South of Europe. Here, she must contend not only with fierce competition but the school’s increasingly sinister undercurrents.
Chryssos was drawn to tennis, in part, because there is “such a big contrast to the usual aesthetics and look of horror.” Referring to a tournament like Wimbledon, he says, “There are these beautiful surroundings, the sun and the white clothes, and I thought this would make a great contrast for a horror story.”
He adds, “Tennis has such a strange combination: there is something very delicate and graceful about it, but it’s also very athletic, and can be very brutal. You can get into these duel situations.”
He adds, “I like these microcosms, where people are locked away in isolation. These boarding schools are the epitome of that, and then you have a competitive spirit – an arena where things can go a bit crazy.”
While he says that films set in the world of elite sports or dance like “Black Swan” or “I, Tonya” were an influence on him, the movies that inspired those films were more of a direct reference point, such as Dario Argento’s “Suspiria” and “Phenomena,” as were, to a lesser extent, American high school films like “Mean Girls.”
Chryssos appreciates having a mainly female cast for the film. “Because the last film I did [‘Rave On’] had a testosterone-driven male protagonist, it was nice to have a more female energy in this movie,” he says.
The roles taken by Burić, the grumpy coach, Romeo, who plays a scary janitor, and Löwensohn, who is the academy’s strict yet maternal manager, allowed Chryssos to toy with sports world tropes.
Boris Becker
Chryssos, who was born in the same town as Boris Becker and went to the same school, had in mind an elite tennis boarding school like that created by Nick Bollettieri, whose students included Andre Agassi and Anna Kournikova, although Bollettieri’s school wasn’t anything like the awful one in the film of course.
Burić’s coach, he says, is inspired by the larger-than-life people that were around top tennis players like Becker and Steffi Graf in the 80s. It was “a way of having characters that are a little bit over the top and play with those,” he says. “These real-life figures are already so over the top that they already feel like stereotypes, but they become these fascinating characters.”
Mother’s day
Löwensohn’s character is “like a motherly figure for the girls,” Chryssos says. “It’s very important that you have in this situation someone you trust and look up to; someone who is always between administering punishment and giving you love, in a weird dependency relationship.
“I did a movie about a cult before, and I did a lot of research about them, and I think you have a cult-like quality in these elite boarding schools because they’re so isolated from the surrounding environment. In my case, the school is housed in an old monastery, so you have a religious element to it. There’s something a little bit occult about it. The students are striving towards one goal. You have to cut off everything else around you if you want to succeed. And then you have these figures who are projection areas for the young players, and Elina Löwensohn filled that with her own flair. And that was really nice – between dominance and tenderness and understanding towards the girls. And there’s also something a little bit mean about her.”
The smell of vomit
He says that someone told him of a ballet school where “the smell of vomit” permeated the air, and he tried to instil an “underlying creepiness” in the academy. Then there are the stories of abuse at sporting academies that add another layer of menace. Added to that was the extreme pain that athletes have to endure in order to reach a high level of achievement. “This environment I thought was a nice playground for me to explore,” he says.
Ancient world
Speaking of the location in Gran Canaria, he says, “We were looking for something that’s really isolated from the rest of the world, so that it creates its own atmosphere, and also there’s an element of danger. We have a protagonist who comes from the U.S. into this European environment, so she’s very far away from home, which already feels like it’s a prison. We also wanted to find something that has something ancient about it, so that it’s an academy with a long tradition. And we found an old mansion on the Canary Islands. It had an old chapel that we could use as a classroom. It is really nice if you get the chance to not build something from scratch, but play with something that exists and has patina and history. And it had red walls, which fits very well with the clay courts, and, of course, the blood.
“At the beginning, we were a little bit reluctant as we were looking for something a bit more modern, you know, more straight lines. But then we saw this, and we thought it’s also such a nice contrast to the players, who are these young women, and they come from our world into this environment. This is a nice contrast that they enter this ancient world. And when I saw this house for the first time it seemed to us a little bit ‘Suspiria’-like and we fell in love with it. And I lived there with my DOP [Constantin Campean] while we were shooting there. We had little rooms above the house, so we could do our shot list at the location and live there for a few weeks.”
Microcosmos
Chryssos likes films that take place within their own cut-off world. “What I like to explore in my films are these kinds of microcosms where people live in isolation. In the first movie, it was a family. In the second, it was a religious community. And in this one, it’s a sports academy. And what I find interesting is mixing genres in the sense that what they have in common is that they have horror, they have an element of something uncanny going on, but still take place in a kind of reality. And they have moments of absurd comedy which contrasts with this horror. And there’s always some element of social critique in them as well. And this is something I’ve been trying to explore.
“So they’re this little cosmos, little worlds, I would say, with these special tonalities. Someone who’s doing this but in a very different way is Peter Strickland, who’s doing it in a very absurd way. His first film was kind of mythical, but he’s also creating these little fantasy worlds which are kind of weird and strange. So I think this element of something little bit dream-like or nightmarish, I think that’s what I’m interested in in these films.”
Social satire
There’s something of the social satire to his film.
“I think you can see the academy as an exaggerated version of a society that puts pressure on people to succeed, where ruthlessness is rewarded, not compassion and pity, which, in a way, comes with the territory of sports, because they’re, of course, competitive, but it’s here taken to the extreme. So there is something like that in there.
“And I was also looking at this character of Sophie, who enters the academy as someone who enters an environment that is not obviously violent, but that is violent. It is very violent, but it’s not really detectable. But step by step, she accepts the rules of this environment, and she becomes violent herself, and she sacrifices her friendship and her love for the greater good, which is to become a pro-athlete. And this is something that we have to pay attention to: How slowly violent environments, ruthlessness and an emphasis on competition and everyone on their own replaces a community that could strive together. That is something I was thinking about under the disguise of this horror movie.”
Leave a Reply