Jessica Hausner on the Cult Appeal of “Club Zero”

For a director who’s always had a remarkable ability to bring things into focus, Jessica Hausner had to be pleased recently upon the occasion of having to revisit some of her earliest work for new restorations.

“That was an interesting journey for me,” says Hausner, whose latest film “Club Zero” might become a bit of a trojan horse for discovering one of the world’s great cinematic observers of social orders and those who dare to challenge them when U.S. distributor Film Movement will be bringing her first three features to the States, some for the first time. “We did those first films ‘Lovely Rita’ and ‘Hotel’ in the early 2000s and you could hardly see anything anymore, but now those films are well-restored, and it was also a very pleasant experience to see them again and to see them in the context or the development of my work.”

Hausner’s work has grown more ornate in style over the years, but the attitude behind them remains refreshingly tough as nails as she’s created indelible portraits of cultural alienation with such films as “Lourdes” and “Little Joe.” “Club Zero” could be her most incendiary to date, putting Mia Wasikowska in the uncomfortable role of Ms. Novak, a teacher of “conscious eating” brought into a well-to-do private school for talented teens to teach them mindfulness and starts to look like the leader of a cult. Parents concerned with their children’s education seem less attentive to what the kids are actually learning, surely believing that part of their hefty tuition to the boarding school is alleviating their own responsibility to keep track. But as Ms. Novak gradually narrows down their diet from an already sparse regimen of pineapple, cabbage and butternut squash to not eating at all, the dangers of a society invested in convenience over all else is made apparent when school is made to look less like an educational institution than a holding cell.

The director’s ability to present a gilded cage has allowed her work to rattle around in the head after dazzling the eye. In the case of “Club Zero,” an immaculately clean campus gives way to the messy dynamics of parents and students who have a lot to learn about one another as people outside of their familial bond and as bleeding edge as Hausner’s modern designs on narrative storytelling seem to be, it can’t be too surprising that she often takes inspiration from the classics when skeptics of systems will never go out of vogue. With the colorful and an unsettling satire now in theaters with “Lovely Rita,” “Hotel” and “Lourdes” to start streaming later this week, Hausner spoke about her creative process, inviting the cast into the work of creating such distinctive characters and how she’s found peace with making work that’s bound to be divisive.

How did this come about?

I started to develop the idea for “Club Zero” because I thought of a fairy tale that I knew very well called “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” about a man who seduces the children of a city to follow him. He has a flute and he plays a very beautiful melody and he leads the children out of the city, away from their parents into a foreign country, which we think of, metaphorically speaking, as death. When I thought of that story about this manipulative person who takes away the children, I thought that this could be an interesting way to show how nowadays manipulation and radicalization are very important topics in our society.

I remember “Frankenstein” was an inspiration for your previous film “Little Joe” accompanied by a lot of research into science and I know you were visiting boarding schools for this. Is that mix of a time old tale and something happening in the moment usually a starting point?

Yes, at the beginning of a new project, I always try to find my thin red line. I always start from a very simple plot idea and this plot very often comes from a fairy tale or an old story because my films are often about a very basic human need. In “Club Zero,” this basic need has got to do with the wish to belong to a group and to find meaning in life, and to be part of something that gives you the feeling that your life is worth living. I think every one of us relates to that, and then when I have that basic idea, I find topics and bits and pieces to make the film relevant for us nowadays, but it really has those both sides and I start to research.

I [also] very much like to create a style that is so-called heightened realism or a slightly fantastic environment that the story takes place in through the set design and the costumes. The colors are very bright and sort of artificial, and this is maybe also my hint to the fairy tale that I relate to, but I invite the audience to look behind the obvious action of the film.

It surprised me to learn in another interview you gave that you won’t often think of the visual aspect of the film until after writing a draft of the script, but it’s such a key component of your work. Is it like rediscovering the story when you start to think of it visually?

Yes, it’s a sort of rediscovery. My impression is that it’s really two pairs of shoes — to create the plot and to make a story work is really different to finding the images. So I really try at first to concentrate on making the story work and create scenes in a way that the action really delivers what I’m trying to say. Then I go on and think, okay, now what is the visual element in it? Sometimes when I create the visuals for a film, I imagine an image which already tells you everything, so it’s not necessary anymore to have this or that dialogue because you can see it already and this is an interesting process for me. Through finding the images, I’ll change some of the scenes, but I don’t change the thin red line and I find that it’s quite important because otherwise it gets confused and then maybe I lose the storytelling. That would be sad.

This has an interesting structure where you center the school and how the students act there, but then can pull back and see their lives at home when they visit their parents. Were the parents always that much of a presence?

That was right from the beginning because I talked about the Pied Piper, I didn’t say that the parents of the abducted children play a very important role in that fairy tale because the parents didn’t pay [the Pied Piper] well out of revenge and he takes away the children. In “Club Zero,” you find that triangle between the parents, the children and the teacher as well and I think for all of us in our society, that triangle is important. As parents, we try to believe and hope that the teachers take good care of our children because adults don’t really have the time to take care of their children themselves, so they have to rely on the teacher. And what if the teacher misuses that power and that influence? It was the dangerous question I asked myself, and of course, the parents are the ones who feel guilty in the end because they think they didn’t protect their children well enough.

At what point do you bring the actors into the process of developing the characters? They all have fascinating details to them, such as the tattoo that runs up Fred’s neck, and I imagine even if they aren’t involved in making that choice, it informs their work, but I suspect you may have been inspired by their personalities as well.

The young actors are first-time actors, except for one girl, and we had a quite long casting process [where] we got to know each other. They started to really develop their acting skills and from time to time they became more self-confident and also introduced their own personality to the roles of the film in a way, so as I got to know them, I could implement a little bit the mindset, the style and the world they live in, because of course, it was also important for me to make this group of young people as plausible as possible, so we discussed that. I also asked the actor who plays Fred, if he would ever wear a tattoo and if he liked the tattoo, so the design of the tattoo was really a mutual decision.

When it was a school for specialized talent, did you actually know what the skill was for each of them going in, or was that something that developed?

It was part of the casting process to find out which kid is able to do which performance. The girl who plays Elsa is a very good piano player, and the actor who plays Fred is a ballet dancer, but of course we asked them then to take lessons before we shot the scenes to even improve their talents a little bit.

You show you have a real ear for music as well with this wonderfully piquant score and it seems like there was already a musical element to the film with the hymn that Mia Waskowska’s character will use to gather the group, so what influence did that have on the score?

Yeah, Markus Binder, the composer, and I developed this humming song that’s part of the ritual of Club Zero and we recorded that humming in a sound studio in London with the young actors and and with Mia Wasikowska. They were humming in different tones and then he edited in a way that it sounds like a choir with different sound levels. As for the other score [in the film], our plan was to have a percussion set because for me, the drum is really an instrument that is very often connected to rituals like voodoo sessions or they are often used in Buddhist religion or in Asian cults, to create a rhythm that also encourages everyone to have a spiritual experience. This was something we researched and then the composer is a drummer himself, so he created those percussion sets basically alone in his studio and then we edited it together, according to the scenes.

As always, it’s a provocative work. Have you been enjoying the response to this one so far?

The response to this film was interesting. As you might know, all my films have a slightly distant perspective and this creates room for an audience to find their own opinion on what they see. You can see something from a slightly different perspective and you have to decide yourself what you think of it and what your feelings are, and this creates an interesting, very diverse echo on my films. Some people think this and the other think the opposite and I will probably never get used to it because I’m always surprised about how different the opinions about my films are. But I have to learn from time to time that it’s probably always going to be like that.

“Club Zero” opens on March 15th in New York at the IFC Center and March 22nd at the Laemmle Royal before expanding across the country. A full list of theaters and dates is here.