� Interview (SPROCKET: Cambridge University's cinema magazine)

Richard Tucker talked to the Brothers Quay about their new film Institute Benjamenta

Institute Benjamenta marks a new direction for the Brothers Quay, being both their first feature film, and their first film to make extensive use of live action. Their previous work has been in animation, where their surreal, unsettling imagery makes comparison with the Czech animator Jan Svankmajer inevitable. (Coincidentally, Svankmajer has also recently moved into live action with his version of Faust). The brothers say they walked away "reeling" from their first encounter with Svankmajer's work in 1983, having seen eleven of his films in one day. They went on to make a documentary about him that was instrumental in getting his films shown in Britain. But their interest in eastern European animation goes farther back than this, as they explain:

The eastern europeans have a tradition of puppetry in films, more than Hollywood or the west ever had. There's a Czech tradition, a Russian one, and Polish puppet films too. They have used animation in particular to smuggle through metaphysical themes that couldn't pass the censors up front. The authorities thought: animation is a minor form, they're not going to get anything through. But of course you can put a lot of veiled comments in animation, and the authorities weren't looking in that direction. We always think in America that all animation can handle is children's stuff or humour, and it's not for adults. That's mad. It doesn't have to be seen as separate from other types of film: film is film, and if you use animation you can take any theme in the world, and what you get in the end is a fiction which is perpetrated in a powerful way. At its best, you walk out saying: I didn't think animation could pull that off. That's the power of it, rather that just making you laugh your guts off, though that can be great too.

So how would the brothers describe Institute Benjamenta?

If you're looking for a way to snag what the film's about, I'd say it's a reworking of Sleepy Beauty and the Seven Dwarves! It's an enigmatic fairytale, only the prince doesn't bring the kiss of life; he brings the kiss of death in a strange way.

The "prince" is Mark Rylance's Jakob van Gunten, the newest and last student at brother and sister Benjamenta's school for domestic servants (in the language of the film, they are "the principal and the principaless"), where he must take lessons in smallness and the "beautification of zero". Jakob is, unintentionally, the catalyst for the institute's demise:

For Lisa Benjamenta [Alice Krige] the whole film is a slow descent. The brother [Gottfried John] is slowly ascending the whole time. The institute is implacably there; the students are slowly moving off; Kraus, the model student, is like a perfect pearl, secreted by the institute - the perfect zero, in terms of what the institute proposes. The privilege of the fairytale, to use a coded language. You can read it as you wish. It's a very quiet language.

I think fairytales have always used a lot of animal imagery and iconography, and it's all there in the film, the deer particularly. We created a fiction before the film even started. When Jakob arrives, there's a sign out front which says "Perfumery", and perfumes are made from deer musk. So it's as if the former owner of the perfume factory had lodged right at the top of the institute a sort of deer museum, which was slightly pornographic. When the institute moved in, they took over the place, and now use only certain rooms. But Jakob discovers the room at the very top, and wanders into it. It's like a maze - a room with three doors, each one leading him into the same room. You feel that Lisa's a part of all that, because her wand is a deer hoof, grafted onto a violin bow. It's as though it conducts her. And Herr Benjamenta is totally obsessed by deer imagery; he measures Jakob's head as though he's measuring the space in between his antlers. He's sizing him up - a young stag moving into the group. But you don't have to lock into all this - it's just there in the background, contaminating slowly the institute, waiting to be discovered on a second or third viewing, if you have that privilege or that wish.

The source material for the film is a book by the turn-of-the-century writer Robert Walser. Perhaps the central idea in the book and the film is that there's something almost desirable in being "very small and subordinate".

That had a lot to do with Walser's own history. As a writer, he was a failure in a sense. He took up odd jobs, like going to a servant's school. He said he loved entering that grey region of nothingness. What was far more fascinating for him was turning a tiny circumference around an apple. He said the infinitely large can be found in the infinitely small. His whole approach to writing was like that of a walker, who would just set off on a walk. He didn't say: here's my plot. He built the plot up out of what he saw as he went along. We sympathize with that: our approach comes through the retina. We always work very visually - we almost see the film before it exists as a script. Walser wrote this novella, and we've stayed true to the main themes. In the book, all the lines are from Jakob's diary. The narration in the film is his language, his lines. It probably wasn't a great success in his day (though Kafka loved it, and they often use Kafka to vouchsafe Walser's credibility) and Walser vanished into obscurity. Then he vanished into Switzerland, and into an asylum.

Coming from animation, we're fascinated by the small, the insignificant - what you might call the ascendancy of the everyday. You take insignificant matter or a found object, and you subsume those elements into the scenario as you go forward.

What was it like working with real-life actors?

On the animation, we each take turns animating, doing the camera, constantly swapping over. Whoever built the puppet tends to animate that puppet. But on the feature we were told by the producer that it would probably be a good thing if the actors focused on one of us. So we decided that one of us should take care of the actors, and one take care of the camera crew. But we always conferred. We always had the monitor to check after each take, and we do a lot of sign language to each other.

There's a range of acting styles: the older students at the institute - the "seven dwarves" - were choreographed, and Mark was like a cadenza, or an improvisation on top. Mark was amazing: he would be perfect on the first take. Alice would build and build over 13 takes. So sometimes it was difficult for Mark to maintain his performance for that long. In the script, we were unsure of the role of Herr Benjamenta; Gottfried make a big contribution there.

Really the star of the film is the institute itself. Together with cinematographer Nic Knowland, the Brothers Quay have conjured up a building that is both a crumbling, dilapidated old house, and an expressionistic dreamworld.

We decided to use black and white, and to go for a very shallow focus throughout (it's constantly set at 2.8). That was an intuitive response to the work. We said to Nic: we want the finest greys, the harshest whites, and the deepest blacks.

One of the most magical rooms in the institute is in fact an upside-down cathedral - in reality, a model in the brothers studio. It was there that, one afternoon, they noticed the sunlight passing across the model, and decided to film it, one frame every three, five, and seven seconds. The resulting effect of moving shadows is a visual theme that runs through the whole film. There's also great attention to architectural space, but don't call it "Gothic":

The whole area of English Gothic - we loathe that area. Everybody says it's gothic, but we're much more fascinated by the Baroque, the way the Baroque handled space. Usually Gothic is only decorative, like cake dressing.

We're not trying to render the book literally, but more like a ballet. When writing the script, we had very strong ideas about space and mise en scene. Sometimes the music came first: in one scene, with the students doing callisthenics and stuff, we wanted to use a certain piece of music that was nine minutes long. A lot of that scene was improvised. Nobody knew what we were talking about - we didn't play them the music -- we just knew we needed nine minutes. It looks synchronised, but we did that in the cutting. It wasn't dialogue first, then actors, then the rest. Instead every factor is crucial: music, dialogue and decor. This is the conception of cinema taught us by animation.