At the Cannes Market, sales agency The Playmaker will be showing a teaser for Nikias Chryssos\u2019 horror film \u201cBloody Tennis.\u201d Variety spoke to the German director about his debut English-language movie, which stars Sandra Guldberg Kampp (\u201cFoundation\u201d), seen in the first-look image from the film, above, and Golden Globe nominee Helena Zengel (\u201cNews of the World,\u201d \u201cThe Legend of Ochi\u201d).<\/p>\n
The cast also includes Elina L\u00f6wensohn (\u201cAmateur\u201d), Zlatko Buri\u0107 (\u201cTriangle of Sadness\u201d), Lucie Zhang (\u201cParis, 13th District\u201d), Lily Taieb (\u201cThe French Dispatch,\u201d \u201cBergman Island\u201d), Vincent Romeo and Tracy Gotoas.<\/p>\n
More from Variety<\/strong><\/p>\n Chryssos\u2019 first feature film, \u201cThe Bunker,\u201d premiered at the Berlinale, and was shown at over 40 festivals, \u201cBloody Tennis\u201d is produced by Jonas Katzenstein and Maximilian Leo at Augenschein, whose credits include \u201cMother Mary,\u201d starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, \u201cThe Weight,\u201d with Ethan Hawke and Russel Crowe, and the upcoming \u201cFlesh of the Gods,\u201d starring Kristen Stewart and Wagner Moura.<\/p>\n Anyone for tennis?<\/strong><\/p>\n The film follows Sophie, who has been admitted to an elite tennis academy hidden deep in the South of Europe. Here, she must contend not only with fierce competition but the school\u2019s increasingly sinister undercurrents.<\/p>\n Chryssos was drawn to tennis, in part, because there is \u201csuch a big contrast to the usual aesthetics and look of horror.\u201d Referring to a tournament like Wimbledon, he says, \u201cThere are these beautiful surroundings, the sun and the white clothes, and I thought this would make a great contrast for a horror story.\u201d<\/p>\n He adds, \u201cTennis has such a strange combination: there is something very delicate and graceful about it, but it\u2019s also very athletic, and can be very brutal. You can get into these duel situations.\u201d<\/p>\n He adds, \u201cI like these microcosms, where people are locked away in isolation. These boarding schools are the epitome of that, and then you have a competitive spirit \u2013 an arena where things can go a bit crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n While he says that films set in the world of elite sports or dance like \u201cBlack Swan\u201d or \u201cI, Tonya\u201d were an influence on him, the movies that inspired those films were more of a direct reference point, such as Dario Argento\u2019s \u201cSuspiria\u201d and \u201cPhenomena,\u201d as were, to a lesser extent, American high school films like \u201cMean Girls.\u201d<\/p>\n Chryssos appreciates having a mainly female cast for the film. \u201cBecause the last film I did [\u2018Rave On\u2019] had a testosterone-driven male protagonist, it was nice to have a more female energy in this movie,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n The roles taken by Buri\u0107, the grumpy coach, Romeo, who plays a scary janitor, and L\u00f6wensohn, who is the academy\u2019s strict yet maternal manager, allowed Chryssos to toy with sports world tropes.<\/p>\n Boris Becker<\/strong><\/p>\n Chryssos, who was born in the same town as Boris Becker and went to the same school, had in mind an elite tennis boarding school like that created by Nick Bollettieri, whose students included Andre Agassi and Anna Kournikova, although Bollettieri\u2019s school wasn\u2019t anything like the awful one in the film of course.<\/p>\n Buri\u0107\u2019s coach, he says, is inspired by the larger-than-life people that were around top tennis players like Becker and Steffi Graf in the 80s. It was \u201ca way of having characters that are a little bit over the top and play with those,\u201d he says. \u201cThese real-life figures are already so over the top that they already feel like stereotypes, but they become these fascinating characters.\u201d<\/p>\n Mother\u2019s day<\/strong><\/p>\n L\u00f6wensohn\u2019s character is \u201clike a motherly figure for the girls,\u201d Chryssos says. \u201cIt\u2019s very important that you have in this situation someone you trust and look up to; someone who is always between administering punishment and giving you love, in a weird dependency relationship.<\/p>\n \u201cI did a movie about a cult before, and I did a lot of research about them, and I think you have a cult-like quality in these elite boarding schools because they\u2019re so isolated from the surrounding environment. In my case, the school is housed in an old monastery, so you have a religious element to it. There\u2019s something a little bit occult about it. The students are striving towards one goal. You have to cut off everything else around you if you want to succeed. And then you have these figures who are projection areas for the young players, and Elina L\u00f6wensohn filled that with her own flair. And that was really nice \u2013 between dominance and tenderness and understanding towards the girls. And there\u2019s also something a little bit mean about her.\u201d<\/p>\n The smell of vomit<\/strong><\/p>\n He says that someone told him of a ballet school where \u201cthe smell of vomit\u201d permeated the air, and he tried to instil an \u201cunderlying creepiness\u201d in the academy. Then there are the stories of abuse at sporting academies that add another layer of menace. Added to that was the extreme pain that athletes have to endure in order to reach a high level of achievement. \u201cThis environment I thought was a nice playground for me to explore,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Ancient world<\/strong><\/p>\n Speaking of the location in Gran Canaria, he says, \u201cWe were looking for something that\u2019s really isolated from the rest of the world, so that it creates its own atmosphere, and also there\u2019s an element of danger. We have a protagonist who comes from the U.S. into this European environment, so she\u2019s very far away from home, which already feels like it\u2019s a prison. We also wanted to find something that has something ancient about it, so that it\u2019s an academy with a long tradition. And we found an old mansion on the Canary Islands. It had an old chapel that we could use as a classroom. It is really nice if you get the chance to not build something from scratch, but play with something that exists and has patina and history. And it had red walls, which fits very well with the clay courts, and, of course, the blood.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the beginning, we were a little bit reluctant as we were looking for something a bit more modern, you know, more straight lines. But then we saw this, and we thought it\u2019s also such a nice contrast to the players, who are these young women, and they come from our world into this environment. This is a nice contrast that they enter this ancient world. And when I saw this house for the first time it seemed to us a little bit \u2018Suspiria\u2019-like and we fell in love with it. And I lived there with my DOP [Constantin Campean] while we were shooting there. We had little rooms above the house, so we could do our shot list at the location and live there for a few weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n Microcosmos<\/strong><\/p>\n Chryssos likes films that take place within their own cut-off world. \u201cWhat I like to explore in my films are these kinds of microcosms where people live in isolation. In the first movie, it was a family. In the second, it was a religious community. And in this one, it\u2019s a sports academy. And what I find interesting is mixing genres in the sense that what they have in common is that they have horror, they have an element of something uncanny going on, but still take place in a kind of reality. And they have moments of absurd comedy which contrasts with this horror. And there\u2019s always some element of social critique in them as well. And this is something I\u2019ve been trying to explore.<\/p>\n \u201cSo they\u2019re this little cosmos, little worlds, I would say, with these special tonalities. Someone who\u2019s doing this but in a very different way is Peter Strickland, who\u2019s doing it in a very absurd way. His first film was kind of mythical, but he\u2019s also creating these little fantasy worlds which are kind of weird and strange. So I think this element of something little bit dream-like or nightmarish, I think that\u2019s what I\u2019m interested in in these films.\u201d<\/p>\n Social satire<\/strong><\/p>\n There\u2019s something of the social satire to his film.<\/p>\n \u201cI think you can see the academy as an exaggerated version of a society that puts pressure on people to succeed, where ruthlessness is rewarded, not compassion and pity, which, in a way, comes with the territory of sports, because they\u2019re, of course, competitive, but it\u2019s here taken to the extreme. So there is something like that in there.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd I was also looking at this character of Sophie, who enters the academy as someone who enters an environment that is not obviously violent, but that is violent. It is very violent, but it\u2019s not really detectable. But step by step, she accepts the rules of this environment, and she becomes violent herself, and she sacrifices her friendship and her love for the greater good, which is to become a pro-athlete. And this is something that we have to pay attention to: How slowly violent environments, ruthlessness and an emphasis on competition and everyone on their own replaces a community that could strive together. That is something I was thinking about under the disguise of this horror movie.\u201d<\/p>\n Best of Variety<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the Cannes Market, sales agency The Playmaker will be showing a teaser for Nikias Chryssos\u2019 horror film…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":948915,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[264679,41535,258510,264677,77,264681,33617,142448,3943,264676,264682,144075,16,15,264680,264678],"class_list":{"0":"post-948914","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-boarding-schools","9":"tag-boris-becker","10":"tag-cannes-market","11":"tag-elina-lowensohn","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-helena-zengel","14":"tag-horror-film","15":"tag-michaela-coel","16":"tag-movies","17":"tag-nikias-chryssos","18":"tag-sandra-guldberg-kampp","19":"tag-tennis-players","20":"tag-uk","21":"tag-united-kingdom","22":"tag-vincent-romeo","23":"tag-zlatko-buric"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116546242618934122","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/948914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=948914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/948914\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/948915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=948914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=948914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=948914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
winning several awards. His second feature, \u201cA Pure Place,\u201d premiered at the Munich Film Festival and won the award for best director. He then directed the feature \u201cRave On,\u201d starring Aaron Altaras and Clemens Schick.<\/p>\n