Although it’s a dark, surreal, and sometimes disgusting film, Taxidermia is also beautifully shot and impeccably crafted. One of our top picks from the Tribeca film festival, the film follows the lineage of a strange family that is not only related by DNA, but by their all-consuming obsessions as well. Already winning numerous awards at international festivals and following a successful feature debut – which uses only ambient noise and an old man’s hiccups to tell a story – it’s clear that Hungarian director Györgi Pálfi is well on his way to leaving a permanent mark on independent cinema.

What started your interest in filmmaking?

I’ve wanted to make films since I was a child, since I was conscious of myself. I looked around for a profession where the people working in it still looked okay at age forty or fifty and they weren’t completely worn out and half-dead. I was [also] the generation of Star Wars inspired [kids]… I was about twelve or thirteen when it came out in the cinemas. It was a big inspiration for me. It caught my imagination at exactly the right time in my life when I was easily influenced by things… since the age of twelve, I’ve done everything I can to make it as a film director and to be able to direct films.

You mentioned that your screenplay is based on stories by Lajos Parti Nagy. What was it about those stories that lead you to write Taxidermia?

When I read Lajos Parti Nagy’s novels something clicked with those short stories and I said this is the kind of film I want to make. He thinks the same way I do, he sees the world in the same way as I do – which is a weird mix of realism and something mysterious and magical… it’s a strange mix of both.

And that lead you to this story of a grandfather, a father and a son and how they’re united in their obsessions?

So this is a combination of two completely separate short stories by Lajos Parti Nagy, and I combined it in such a way to make it three generations because the two stories originally didn’t connect to the characters in that way. So for this reason, I sewed the third character, this son, into this story myself. When I was completing my university, my professor asked me to write something personal, this was kind of this search for your own individuality. So I added a personal touch… That’s why I decided to talk about the past sixty years, which is a period of history which is the most important to people today…

So you’re also commenting on Hungarian history as well as the background of this strange family?

The two are inseparable. The history of a family is inseparable from the history, the times, the era that the generations are born into… and the political background you’re born into. In Hungary, in the last sixty years, in kind of thirty-year cycles, there have been such radical shifts, from the far right under the Second World War era, to the far left under communism afterwards. Now this what Hungarians call wild capitalism because it’s something that again seems very extreme to them. Having gone through a far right political era, to a far left political era, and this one doesn’t seem too perfect either! [Laughs] It isn’t something that’s very nice to live through, it can kind of wreck a person – but it’s great story material.

We’ve described the film as having some visually disturbing moments, but it’s shot so beautifully that it’s hard to look away!

I’m glad to hear you say this. We always wanted to have an outsiders kind of [view]… We used a lot of long crane shots to keep some distance from what was actually happening. But the story itself was told in a very personal way, with a lot of interior storytelling and looking in to the character. So these two oppose each other, the nature of the narrative and the nature of the cinematography. They’re two sort of different points of view.

Were you surprised how shocking some of the scenes are when you saw the first edit?

Yes it did have a big affect on me, but it wasn’t a surprise so much, because we knew that this was what we wanted. It was more a question of how we could use these disturbing shots in the film. So we decided, actually in the editing room, that every shot which served the purpose of telling the story would remain in the film, whether it was disturbing, or disgusting or not. [Laughs] And everything that didn’t serve the purpose of telling the story we just cut – which usually weren’t the disturbing, disgusting scenes.

Just the “boring” stuff huh?

Yeah… that’s right! [Laughs]

There are some fantastic camera moves in the film! Like when the camera rotates around the bathtub over and over, showing us all the different ways the bathtub had been used. How was your experience creating that really complex shot?

Unfortunately our budget didn’t allow us to use the most expensive kinds of technology to achieve this shot – that would’ve been a motion steady camera – but luckily one of our technicians had made a commercial using this exact same trick… It was a crane that was run by an electrical gadget, which he luckily had. We called this technician and we asked him for the date [when we’d get the] crane, and how long it was, and… calculated it so we could make the shots. Then we entered all this data into an architectural program on a computer. We measured, each point of view, what we would see in a picture if we took it (the camera) all the way around. We made an animatic of it.

The real problem was building a wall in such a way that the camera would actually fit around it. So we built a wall were the camera would fit… the camera started on it’s round and then as the camera was going up, the wall was closed on the stage (behind it), and when the camera comes down, and it looks back on to the wall, it looks – from the point of view of the camera – as if you were in a room. And then on the other side the wall opens to allow the camera in… Since the camera was on this crane – which moved at the same speed all the way around – it was very easy to edit in the end.

Wow. So how long did it take to finish that shot?

It was half a day to shoot. The planning was much, much longer. If you don’t have money, you have to spend a lot more time planning your shots so that you can fit it into your budget. So for this reason… [we] thought up every trick, every shot and how we would do it before hand, and invented ways to achieve some of these complicated shots.

What was the most challenging thing you had to deal with during production?

As a second-time film director, one of the biggest challenges was to prove that I could do it again and make a good film. That as a director, I was able to bring a film to realization – to actually create it – so I felt I needed to prove myself professionally. With your first film, critics or the profession may say, “Oh well, it was just a one-off,” that everything came together in the edit and it became a good film. But by the second film, you really have to prove that you’ve got what it takes. For the film itself, the challenge was that these three stories, or these three generations, shouldn’t become three short films and they should follow one narrative line and have a unity, a train of thought which carries all the way through.

How have audiences been reacting to the film?
< br /> The most interesting thing about audience reactions around the world is that they were pretty much the same everywhere. Basically we didn’t want to make a film that was middle of the road… We wanted to make a film everyone would have an opinion about, and where everybody would react to. Of course there are people who hate or despise this movie, but frankly there are plenty who really love it.

One interesting reaction was that in the Far East, audiences seemed to find a lack of feeling and emotion … from the movie.

They feel like the characters don’t have much emotion?

The story as such, seemed to lack emotion – because my prediction was that, looking at films from the far east, Japan, South Korea and places like that was there’s quite a lot of violence, aggression and perversion even that comes out of their films and I thought they would like this kind of style. Then I realized that all this aggression, violence and perversion that comes out of their films is always paired with a big love story or some sort of union between people. So they were missing this kind of emotional response within the story…

How about your New York audience? Were they expecting more violence? [Jokingly]

The audience at Tribeca had a lot of questions for me. They seemed to really appreciate this kind of film, which could never have been made in America. One of the most interesting things that happened was that a big man – a very overweight man – came to me after the screening and asked me what cultural aspects there are in my presentation of people who are quite over weight. And I explained to him that we were basically thinking of the body itself as – the two extremes of the body, where it can be hugely overweight and enormously big and when it can be extremely tiny and very, very skin-and-bones. And I just didn’t understand why the tiny skinny people did come and find me afterwards. [Laughs]

Was there anything in the film he wanted to include but couldn’t?

Whatever the story allowed for, we allowed for. If it didn’t need certain parts, then we just cut them at them end, and we cut a lot… we cut thirty or forty minutes of useful material. These weren’t the disgusting parts – because they’re all there in the film [Laughs] – but some of the narration of the story was digressing and slowing it down a little bit, so we had to cut that… and make it very sharp. For example the wedding scene, which is about five minutes in the film now, was thirty minutes long. But five minutes was more than enough for us to get a sense of the characters, and get a sense of the situation that they’re in at the time.

Is there any chance the film will be coming out to the US?

Yes, Tartan films will distribute this movie. I don’t know when, but they want it!

What advice would you have for new filmmakers?

Do it... don’t talk about doing it.