Waldstille is a haunting Brabant drama. Read what Martijn Maria Smits says about it

Martijn Maria Smits (1980) does not aim for a large audience but has often won prizes with his work. With Waldstille he proves once again to be a Dutch filmmaker with a clear signature of his own. The Hollywood Reporter also discovered this and wrote a favourable review about this haunting Brabant drama about Ben, whose stupidity leads to the death of his wife. When his in-laws keep him away from his little daughter after serving his sentence, things start to grind in his head. His village throws him out and you hold your heart for the denouement. So the first thing we want to know from Smits is how he got that idyllic title.

"That's from a poem by Goethe. 'Above the treetops it is silent, rest child, soon you too will find your peace.' In the first of the 13 versions of my screenplay, the lead-up to the denouement was much longer. In it, the father kidnapped his daughter to a cottage in the forest."

Threat

That cottage in the forest has disappeared, but the threat remains. Was the film inspired by the kind of tragedy that the newspapers usually call a family drama?

"Absolutely. In 2013, when I got to Waldstille began, there were several family tragedies in the news. The most famous was the one with the father who kidnapped and killed his two little sons, then committed suicide. He himself was found first, two weeks later the boys' bodies were discovered in a drainpipe."

Smits' graduation film Otzenrath (2006), about two teenagers forced to break up, is set against the backdrop of a German lignite mine. The short film Anvers (Golden Calf 2009 best TV drama) and Smits' cinema debut C'est déjà l'été (2010) are French-language. The latter is set in a poor region of Wallonia where we see a family falling apart. With Waldstille we are finally in the Netherlands. Was this diversions sometimes necessary to get home? The true reason turns out to be quite prosaic.

"I have always enjoyed being an outsider exploring new territory, turning over every stone, so to speak. For C'est déjà l'été I first went to live in that area for a year, and also for Anvers and Otzenrath I settled the neighbourhood in question for a few months. But Waldstille I made as part of the Oversteek, the cooperation project of Film Fund and broadcasters. One condition is that the film must be shot in the Netherlands. So then I thought, let's shoot it right away in my most familiar surroundings, in Brabant."

Birthplace

"The story could have been set anywhere, but now I have tried to make it really rooted in the Brabant milieu, in my native village Prinsenbeek. Carnival, the church and the pig industry, those three elements define life there."

"In 2013, when those family dramas were in the news and I wanted to do something with them, two of my other projects had just been rejected. Added to that, at the time, there were also the budget cuts on culture so I felt: 'Do I still have a right to exist as a filmmaker? Does it still make sense to make artistic films if only a few thousand people come to watch them?' But I also thought, 'I refuse to leave.' The same feeling that protagonist Ben had in Waldstille has. That's how it started rolling."

"For the screenplay, I was also inspired by two US newspaper articles about a man who got into a car with his drunken head, causing his wife's death. He got seven years and was not allowed to see his two children."

"I need to hold on to reality. The film story in itself is not autobiographical, I am not a father either, but as I write, things creep in that I did experience myself."

An angry boy

"I grew up in a village just like the one in the film. Around the age of 13, I was an angry boy. Other boys and girls were not allowed to associate with me. When we went to high school, their parents made sure their kids didn't join my class. I loved setting fires and sneaked into the school through an open window with my friends. There we had a clubhouse in the attic that nobody knew about. I also took an egg with me every day to smash on the roof of the police station. In a village like that, you soon get a name. I really stood apart."

"You always have to make the film personal in some way, in this case through the location and the village environment. I also look for tension in silences and discomfort, and by getting close to the actors. For example, I start a scene very close to the main character, only to observe him again from a distance."

"I want the viewer to feel, 'I could have been in his shoes.' That you keep asking yourself, 'What the hell is he going to do now?' Ben is his own antagonist, so to speak. He acts in a rather narcissistic way and does not think about the consequences for others. For example, when he breaks into the classroom at school and wants to take his little daughter away, he believes he is in his right. Similarly, when he starts something with his sister-in-law, it evokes something very dubious. Are these feelings of his real, or is he manipulating rock hard to be able to meet his daughter through her?"

Sympathy

"I wanted you to be able to conceive sympathy for him too, but it's quite subtle. In editing, we struggled a lot with that. I edited at night, then my editor took over during the day. We spent two months like that, until it finally worked."

"Of course, if Ben had been sensible he would have hired a lawyer, but that's not how it works. It's like when you're heartbroken. All your friends talk about it very rationally and tell you that you'll find a new girl, but you can't do anything with all those words. The next day you do something idiotic again anyway."

"Similarly, with Ben, everything is driven by emotion. Towards the end, he actually seeks forgiveness."

"I see modern man as a mannered person full of silent desires. That's what I want to make films about."

Signature

Typical for Waldstille and other films by Smits is that the plot plays only a minor role. Tension is created by the highly charged situations, the highly realistic acting and the convincing way we crawl deep into the characters' experience. The - in his first films mostly non-professional - actors are given a lot of space. Especially in Otzenrath and C'est déjà l'été the style leans towards documentary. The landscape also strongly influences the signature.

"I actually came into contact with film very late. Before the age of 20, I had never seen anything by Godard. As a teenager, I went to Bruce Lee films or those with Bud Spencer and Terence Hill. I did want to be an artist early on. When I was a boy I saw myself as a dancer, then I thought of being a writer and even later I started drawing and painting, which I still do, but my parents didn't believe in any of that. I went from one school to another and eventually ended up at photography school in Antwerp. My father was a photographer with the technical police, so he thought maybe I could always do something with that. It wasn't until the third year that I had to make a further choice."

"The documentary nature of my first films has to do with the fact that I took the documentary direction at the Film Academy in Amsterdam. With actors, I was very insecure in the beginning. Now that I feel more secure, I also dare to make more cinema where the camera dictates to the actors. But for the carnival scenes in Waldstille the actors mingled among the real carnival revellers who then got involved in the brawl in the film. Actors have to make this real world they don't know in advance their own. I believe in that very much."

"With the next project, I want to move forward again. Maybe a comedy. I hope to be at the Berlin or Cannes festival one day."