The first two episodes of Thomas Stuber’s television horror tale Hausen arrives on Sky Atlantic today. Set in a high-rise concrete building that seems to have a mind (and malevolent thoughts) of its own, Hausen is a haunted house story with a difference. Paul Simpson chatted with the German director about the challenges involved…

 

So how did it all come about – were you involved in the initial creation of Hausen or did you come onboard when it was already moving?

Somewhere in between. I was asked if I wanted to come onboard when there was a pilot and the outline of the series and it intrigued me very much. Then I became part of the scriptwriting process and I shot all the episodes.

Did the pilot still finish where episode 1 does now?

That was always the cliffhanger. I remember my first reading experience: I thought ‘Oh that’s a great cliffhanger. What’s with the baby?’

What were your other impressions when you read it?

At first I wondered “Do they have the right number? Do they really want me?” because I didn’t have any experience in horror but then when I read it I thought ‘OK, this is not horror, this is a crossover, which I haven’t seen or read before.’ That intrigued me. It could be something really new, it could be avant garde.

Of course there’s nothing new in art and in film, everything has been done, but I liked this very much. I just liked the synopsis, the idea behind it: in the middle of nowhere there is this house, a high rise [building] which does what? Which feeds on its inhabitants, which is a creature, a monster itself. That, in Germany especially, I haven’t read before which is why I wanted to do it.

Various things came to mind watching the first two episodes – The Shining seems a very definite influence but also Ridley Scott’s original Alien.

Oh yes.

When we’re within the walls, those bits, I kept half expecting a little tail or a pipe to move round and you realised that the Xenomorph was there. Were they conscious influences on you or are they just something that the material brings out?

No, no, absolutely. It sometimes happens that after you’ve done a film that critics tell you what your inner deal was and you realise that you are fond of [what they mention].

But here, as well as the two examples that you mentioned, I would even add Żuławski’s Possession. These three were very important role models for Hausen.

What did you bring to the project from your own thoughts on the synopsis?

Well, we structured the whole outline of where we were going. I don’t want to spoil anything but a whole world opens up behind that. You will find more Kubrick in it than just The Shining.

What we did – I talk of “we” as a team with my art director and my cinematographer and my editor and so on – was create the world as you see it right now. Besides the casting process of the actors, we created the whole building, the whole atmosphere, the whole world.

Whereabouts did you shoot it? I’m assuming it wasn’t a built set, it had some sort of pre existing structure.

Yes, although there is CGI added to the outside shots of it. We shot it near Berlin for almost 60/65 days, two-thirds of the whole principal shooting time, in a former hospital.

It’s a run down hospital that we found that we took and created a studio like location within. It doesn’t have so many storeys [as the building in the series] but there was this labyrinthine maze which it has as a hospital which we wanted. That is why we built everything into that location and stayed there pretty long.

Did you, as cast and crew, find it oppressive being in that location all the time? Or did you have to create areas that were sunny?

Yes, we had to create them.

I remember the first time walking to the set, I couldn’t find my way and needed to call someone to help me out. Of course after some weeks of shooting I knew where everything was.

It was not nice: there was a whole abandoned parking lot there and another hospital right next to it – the former Stasi hospital, built by Mielke, where we shot the cellars. Hausen found its right location – at some points we didn’t have to do much, it was oppressive by itself.

We shot through the autumn and winter and it was raining all the time. I didn’t see any [day]light because we didn’t get out because we were all inside. So, it was a good time but also a hard time, yes.

The sequences inside the walls, are they all CG or were you filming real stuff for the pipes? For instance when Juri reaches his hand through…

It’s a combination. That particular shot I’d say 90% CGI, 10% original stuff. You create a wall where he reaches his hand through, you have some pipes which you extend afterwards.

What was the biggest challenge for you in terms of shooting this?

Żuławski’s Possession

It was the constant shooting and shooting and shooting such complex stuff, special effects wise. Every day – or almost every other day – you had this ‘Oh, now we’re shooting this big special effects scene’ and next day, ‘Oh we’re shooting this’. There was no time in between where you could say ‘OK, now we’re shooting several days of dialogue’. So every day it challenged you this much, that was very exhausting.

There’s lots of CGI in it but there are also lots of classical special effects in it. This is why Alien or The Shining or Possession are good examples because they come from a time where they have things that are done through miniatures or even [physical] effects.

Hausen has some CGI in it but we have a lot of these classic ’70s/’80s special effects too. The slime mostly is [real] black slime, Juri is bathing in slime, there’s something coming out of the walls and so on. On the one hand that is fun and on the other hand it challenges you a lot because it takes so much time to build it up again.

Did you find that once you’re actually on set and you’ve got the Hausen around you that sequences changed because where you were? Obviously where you’re creating CG or practical effects, things have got to be very particular otherwise it screws up in the edit but were you able, to an extent, to improvise some of the scare tactics?

In some ways you were able to improvise.

I found it funny: sometimes you don’t know what the outcome of a certain special effect will be. Of course sometimes you have testing and prep, but at other times we were like, ‘We don’t know what’s going to happen, just pull the trigger’ and we have cameras set up.

At first this is something you try to avoid of course, but at certain points we didn’t have a choice and then It felt very uplifting to go, ‘Well let’s try it’.

We were rewarded several times by something that was great. There is a behind the walls shot with this big bubble of air thing coming out – that was not planned. The slime was coming out at the bottom and I kept telling them ‘I want more, I want more, this is not enough’ and at a certain point it just exploded. The whole thing exploded!

Throughout the editing I didn’t know where to put that shot until I came to the point which is the first expression of joy or almost orgasm that this house character creature has.

They always say a film is written three times: in the script, when you’re shooting and in the edit.

Absolutely.

How much did it alter in the edit?

It always does. In terms of it having some episodic structure you could easily change what [order scenes come in]. So that could be changed a lot and we changed a lot in the editing stage. On the other side, we started editing throughout the shooting process so I was running back and forth. This almost became a simultaneous process: we’d get feedback from the editing room of ‘Don’t you want to do this again? Don’t you want to do that in addition?’

It was the first time for me to film for such a long period of time that the process of editing and shooting kind of almost fixed together.

Were you shooting each episode and then moving onto the next?

We shot continuously for 90 days. It was all mixed together. On the first day I remember we were in the garbage room where we shot the first week, so I had to shoot a lot of scenes from later episodes. I get frightened a bit so I wanted to just dive into it.

We shot so long [at the hospital] that we could easily go back and forth to certain points in the location and that also made it easy. We learned a lot throughout the process.

Are there any bits that now you’ve seen it you think ‘Oh I wish I’d just got that shot’?

Whenever you leave the last stage of sound editing, which is usually the last thing you do, then you say ‘Ahhh’. Even on the last day of shooting you’re like, ‘Ah we should have gotten that’ of course. Because it’s almost a 500 minute piece, of course there are a lot of points.

But I watched the first three episodes some days ago here [in Germany] on Sky. I hadn’t seen it for a long time and I was drawn into it. I thought, ‘Oh this is pretty good.’ I liked it, I just followed the story.

I love that as a filmmaker after a certain period of time you are able to really follow your own story and not see it in little bits and pieces because you’re just working on those bits.

If you had to pick one moment or scene that sums up the experience for you either in the shooting or in the way it’s turned out, what would it be?

It’s in a later episode than you’ve seen but in the first two, I like the moments when there’s no particular horror or suspense to it. I like how Juri and his father come into the apartment for the first time, I just love the atmosphere, it’s so cold outside. The only way to get out of this cold hell, out of this nightmare, is if they stick together and it’s only these two. I don’t have any message [in this] but if there was any message it would be that.

The second episode starts with the son sleeping in front of the father and there again you have the best shot of what I like to be transposed in a dramatic way to the audience.

Hausen airs on Sky Atlantic on Fridays at 9 pm. Click here for our reviews.