In Depth with the Director - Daniel Sax

Tell us a little about yourselves and your background in filmmaking.

Daniel and me both studied at University of Applied Science in Wiesbaden but never met. A coincidence on Facebook brought us together and since 2014 we are collaborating as filmmakers and mainly as directors. Apart from our human connection, we are very different in our thinking, working process and abilities and we try to bring this together in order to go, where we could not get as solo artists.

How did You Don't Understand first come together as a project?

The people behind the band SoSoon are old friends. We love their work and did our first music video in 2016. When they reached out, I connected very strongly to the song „You Don*t Understand“. We had about 6 weeks until the deadline and I wasn't sure at first if we would be able to pull off anything cool in such a short time with the very small budget. But somehow I had the impression that there was a story waiting on the other side that wanted to be made. So we asked our friends from the filmmaking collective COOP and when they felt the same way, the race started.

The concept of a time loop is fantastic. How did the storyboarding and shooting process look?

Thank you! We had a few loose ideas for a story to be set at night and our writer Dominique Stang then came up with the idea of telling the story as a loop. With each cycle, the audience should get more clues. We had no previous experience with night shoots and found the challenge exciting. So we had 2 nights on a weekend with equipment and crew at our disposal. 

We basically shot the third and final loop as chronological as possible. For loop one and two we just had to reduce footage, which made the editing process pretty quick and gave us more time for pre-production. Daniel Knußmann draws the storyboards for all our projects. A week before the shoot we had all the storyboards ready and arranged on the music in an animatic and were just waiting for a location to be approved. But when we realised that this would not come, we had to rewrite our script 2 days before the shoot and part of the storyboards became obsolete. Also in the first night of shooting we had some time problems due to weather and equipment, so we had to cancel one location. It turned out that this was not a drama.

You are handcuffed in music videos by not having the benefit of dialogue. How did this restriction influence your stylistic choices?

We decided to use the dramatic arc of the song to drive the story. To make the audience understand that the protagonist's mistake lands her in the same situation over and over again, we used the identical takes - that was up for debate at the beginning. We also love the possibility of closeup shots to make the viewer understand what we're about. On the other hand, we also wanted to keep the story open, so there's room for your own interpretation. We received very interesting and diverse reactions from the community.

What projects are coming for you in the future?

We have just finished our first short film "Traumhaft Echt“ (translated in english: "Dreamlike real“) wich also originated in collaboration with the German musician „Nepumuk“ and will be released on March 17th. Unfortunately we don't have subtitles in English yet, but if you're interested, here's a link to the trailer (Password: coop). The protagonist works in an agency that hires out actors to people to fill in as husbands, best friends, close relatives or in other social roles. In this way, they are supposed to fill the gaps in people's lives for a few hours. Nepumuk is one of these actors. In the short film, we follow his work. We experience his process, how he slips into the most diverse roles, as well as the consequences that such an activity entails.

We are currently developing the material for 2 more films and trying to evolve in commercial and free projects with the coop collective. 

Do you have any message for our Melbourne audience?

We thank you a lot for taking the time to engage with our project. We hope that the material will entertain you and make you think. For us it is about the human dilemma of "being trapped within oneself," for example, in one's own views, behaviors, beliefs, etc. The main character makes a mistake and looks deeper into the abyss with every step. As long as she doesn't manage to break her patterns, she is doomed to relive the consequences of her mistakes over and over again and thus ends up at the beginning of an infinite loop.

If you need any more information, feel free to get in contact again. Have a good time at your festival and all the best from the other side of the planet/Germany!