Francois Mori/Associated PressThe director Ulrich Seidl on Friday at a press conference at the Cannes International Film Festival.CANNES, France — The Austrian director Ulrich Seidl makes a habit of blurring boundaries: his work encompasses fiction (“Dog Days”) and nonfiction (“Animal Love”), and he typically works with nonprofessional actors using documentary-like settings and improvisatory techniques. But there is little middle ground when it comes to the reception of his films. Mr. Seidl tends to be condemned as a misanthrope who goes to unseemly lengths to prove the depths of human misery or hailed as a maestro of discomfort whose taste for confrontation masks a seriousness of purpose and a measure of compassion.
Last at the festival here with “Import/Export” (2007), a bleak tale of lost souls making their way through the economic backwaters of the new Europe, Mr. Seidl returns to the Cannes competition this year with “Paradise: Love,” another story of exploitation across borders. The protagonist, Teresa (the stage veteran Margarethe Tiesel), is a fleshy, middle-aged Viennese woman on vacation at a resort in Kenya, where young, lithe local men known as beach boys stake out the water’s edge, selling trinkets — and themselves — to Western pleasure seekers.
The movie, which gives entirely new, queasy meaning to the Swahili phrase “hakuna matata,” is the first of Mr. Seidl’s “Paradise” trilogy, each one subtitled for a Christian virtue. The next two installments, “Hope” (about Teresa’s sister, a flagellant on a religious pilgrimage), and “Faith” (about Teresa’s daughter, an overweight teenager at a diet camp), have been completed and will make their debuts at film festivals this fall. (“Love” is also the title of another Austrian competition entry, by Michael Haneke.)
Speaking in German through a translator, Mr. Seidl discussed “Love” and the “Paradise” project in an interview at a reception following his film’s premiere on Friday. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation:
The film was well received at yesterday’s press screening — some laughs, some applause, no boos.
[smiling] I don’t know if that’s a good thing.
You started out making one film — how did you end up with a trilogy?
The original plan was to make a film with three episodes, each about a different woman, two middle-aged sisters and the 13-year-old daughter of one of them — you see them together at the beginning. They each go on holiday, each looking for love, fulfillment, but in different ways. In the script the three stories aren’t interwoven, and we shot each one separately. I try whenever possible to shoot chronologically, which gives me the freedom to change the storyline, invent other characters.
During editing, I attempted to interweave those three stories into a single film, but the result was a six-hour film that didn’t satisfy me; individual scenes that were intense and emotionally strong were weakened. That’s when I decided to make separate films. I don’t know if it’s something that’s happened before — someone starts out to make one film and comes back with three — but fortunately I was able to convince my investors that was the best artistic approach.
There is by now a tradition of traveling filmmakers in Austria, from the avant-garde pioneer Peter Kubelka, who made the classic “Our Trip to Africa,” to your colleagues Michael Glawogger and Nikolaus Geyrhalter, who have made globe-spanning documentaries. What drew you to the subject of tourism?
For me, tourism is an important and incredibly complex theme: it describes very well our entire world, the network of global relations, a country’s position in the world, the exploitation of the so-called Third World by Western countries. For several years I worked on an episodic script about Westerners on holiday. One episode involved female sex tourism and that’s what developed into this film. Tourism is something we all aspire to; we all want to go on a holiday. At the same time it’s a taboo theme and the word has negative connotations: nobody wants to see themselves as tourists, as oppressors or exploiters.
Why did you choose to set the film in Kenya, and could you say a bit about the research process and shooting conditions there?
I investigated the Caribbean, where there’s also sex tourism for women. But I chose Kenya because it shares with Europe a past that unites them: Africa is also a divided continent with enormous internal tensions.
Two years before shooting, I started going to Kenya to cast the beach boys, research their life. I never considered actors; I wanted people who really came from this milieu. As you see in the film, it wasn’t hard to meet them. What was difficult was finding people who would be as authentic as possible on camera, who would have the courage to appear naked, next to white women. I approached the casting of the white actresses in the same way; I took several of them with me to Kenya to shoot scenes with the beach boys to see if they were able to let themselves go on camera.
During shooting, several beach boys we were working with were arrested, and they actually have beach boy associations, who were against us because they suspected that we wouldn’t present a flattering picture of them. We had to work to get them on our side.
How did you do that? And to what extent was the economic system that we see in the film reflected in the production?
In Kenya everything is always a matter of money. If you’re asking someone to do something for you then you ask what it costs. As a white person, you’re automatically a rich person from a rich country. It was tricky because the beach boys were always asking for more and more and more money. It was a kind of blackmail — after we’d been shooting for two weeks they stopped and said if they didn’t receive twice as much as promised they would pull out.
Your cast is made up of professionals and nonprofessionals. Did you direct them differently?
I don’t distinguish between actors and nonactors. Each scene is improvised because I don’t want them to have a pre-existing idea of what we should attain. During the very long preparation, I get to know the actors, and it creates a climate of mutual trust. You instill in them an idea of the kind of film that you’re seeking. I always speak to them individually, telling each one what I’m looking for. The other actors in the scene never know what’s coming.
What can we expect from the next two parts, and what is the significance of the overall title and the subtitles?
The second film, “Faith,” is much more difficult: it’s claustrophobic, a chamber piece. The first one has an element of humor but the second one is more severe. The third film, “Hope,” is again lighter; it deals with young girls in puberty and treats them with a great deal of tenderness.
All three women are in search of their personal paradise. The word also has a Biblical sense, of course, as the original state of constant happiness, and interestingly, it’s also a term that is overused, misused, flaunted in the tourist industry. Love is the starting point, the basis of this first film. If this woman didn’t go in search of love, no exploitation would take place.
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