Claudio Fäh is no stranger to the action genre having previously helmed Sniper: Reloaded, Sniper: Ultimate Kill, Northmen: A Viking Saga and many more. His latest movie, Turbulence stars Hera Hilmar, Olga Kurylenko, Kelsey Grammer and Jeremy Irvine and tells the story of a married couple who embark on a hot-air balloon adventure, but unforeseen circumstances lead to life-threatening situations that test their love and resilience as they fight for survival.
Claudio stopped by to chat with us about Turbulence.
Hi Claudio, how are you?
Hi, Eoin, I’m good. Oh, I love the hat by the way.
Thank you! Gotta love JCVD.
Are you in Ireland? Where are you?
I’m actually in Toronto. My family is Irish but I was born and raised in Scotland and now I live in Toronto, so I’m kind of all over. I feel like me and you should have chatted sooner because like you’ve directed a couple of the Sniper movies which I’m a huge fan of.
Oh my god, yes.
Chad Collins is awesome.
Oh my god, yeah, I love Chad. Absolutely. Well, we can always do another call about the Sniper movies. I’m always open to that.
Oh absolutely, yeah. Today we’re talking about your new movie, Turbulence. The bad news is it has put me off ever setting foot in a hot air balloon, which I was never really planning on doing anyway (laughs).
(laughs) Okay, well there’s no loss.
What was it that appealed about the script for you that made you want to direct it?
Well, so this was written and produced by Andy Mason with whom I already did the previous movie No Way Up and Andy and I have become close friends and great friends and when he called me up to do this as a sort of a follow-up to combine with the idea that this is on a hot air balloon, he said, “well this sounds like a challenge I shouldn’t pass on. This is fantastic”. So, it was very easy choice and then of course you’re like, oh what have I gotten myself into? How am I going to pull this off?
How did you research the mechanics of how hot air balloon works and was there a lot of detail in the script?
Well, there was some detail in the script and some of it was wrong (laughs) and we had to adjust it and stuff. The process of research kind of pointed us the right way and of course with a movie like this, so just full disclosure, this would not happen. Some of it could happen, but it’s very unlikely to happen and particularly this whole thing would not happen (laughs). So, you have to kind of think, okay, so how, where do we feel like we’re allowed to stretch reality and change reality? Like Kelsey Grammer says, “this is the safest mode of air transport”. It actually is the safest. It’s the most uneventful as well. It’s very serene, very meditative, very quiet, until it isn’t.
His character would disagree (laughs).
(laughs) It’s true. But no, we had this wonderful balloon company, Cameron Balloons in Bristol, who helped us; they also helped us get some of the balloon elements that we needed for production design and they were really kind. But also, we don’t want this to have a bad effect on ballooning. I think people understand that this is not completely taken out of real life.
And generally, don’t go in an air balloon with someone who’s psychotic.
Yeah, but that’s the thing. But precisely, it’s not the balloon that fails. It’s the people that are on the balloon. Those are the problem. And that’s also what made it interesting to me because it inevitably then makes it a movie about characters. That’s why we go to the movies, no?
Absolutely. Yeah. Speaking of which, I thought Olga just nearly stole the show. I thought she was amazing, quite unhinged. How did you work with her in bringing Julia to life?
Oh my God. I mean, I will say, Olga was phenomenal. I did not know what to expect. But she is somebody who comes in with all her heart. And we were on the phone for hours and hours on end beforehand. And I kept having to pinch myself because I consider her a bonafide movie star. She’s fantastic. She’s so talented. You can basically watch anything that she does, and she’s always good at it, good or great. So, I couldn’t believe the time and attention that she gave this movie. And I felt really blessed but that’s how she goes about. She does everything. When she does something, she does it all in and it shows. She has a way of understanding character and has a technique and an approach that is just absolutely inspiring.
Were Hera, Jeremy, and Kelsey on board earlier on?
So, Hera was the very last one to come on board. We had Jeremy, Olga, and Kelsey in that order committed to the movie. And that allowed us to kind of mount the movie and get it going. And then it fell apart in the meantime. So, financing kind of was on the brink and we had to push and then people’s schedules kind of didn’t align and stuff. So, we were left without, I think, an Emmy until the very last week of pre-production, until I finally saw her materials that were sent to me. I was blown away. She was not familiar with Hera beforehand. And when I saw what she’s doing, I was just absolutely blown away. I showed her reel to Jeremy. And he goes, “oh, she looks fantastic”. And boy, we had no idea who we hired. She was just unbelievable. Never seen anything like it. She had a way of making things natural. And they came up with ideas and suggestions that went way beyond the page. And just, you know, it was really wonderful.
How did you prepare like the cast for getting into character and helping her and Jeremy create the chemistry between each other?
Yeah. Well, that was, thankfully, that’s what people say “the right kind of casting is 90% of your job” and it’s definitely true. They hit it off. It made it very easy. The process became very easy between the two. But of course, I spent any minute that I could to get to know them as characters, not necessarily as people. Of course, I got to know them as actors as well (laughs). But the process that I found was most helpful is to interact and ask them and converse with them as their characters. So, they allowed me in and it made it very easy for me to then understand what it is that’s going on between the two of them. And they were great in filling in all the details and building out the subtext in the lines and going off script very often, only to then sometimes come back to the script. But really understanding what sometimes we do, we talk about scenes that are not in the movie or that preceded the movie would have their backstories and stuff and just kind of build that three-dimensional space in their characters that then informs me as a director in terms of where to put the camera. What is important? What is it? What are they all about? Who are they? Make it easy.
Do you find that improvising like that just makes everything sometimes just seem more natural?
Yeah, totally. That was, but that was the first thing that I said to Hera when I said, “you have a way of making things sound unscripted that I have rarely seen”. There’s sometimes with lesser actors, you do notice they can be beautiful people, wonderfully engaging and charming, and then they turn on, they start to act and then they act (laughs). And it’s not the case with them and particularly Hera has this ability to make things, not her own words, but make them sound like they just come out without her having to think about it. I don’t know how she does it, but that’s, yeah, they were ready to improvise and just go with it. Whatever came out, it came out and it was truth and it was good.
Now, I’m a big movie score guy and I particularly like the music to this; how did you work with Marcus Trump in creating the musical sound for the film?
Well, see, I tell you, this is one of the easiest processes I’ve ever experienced. Marcus and I go way, way back. This is, I think our fifth movie or so together. It was a little bit of a break in between that we couldn’t make things work because of scheduling and all crap. Now finally coming together again, we were so giddy to make this happen and he just kind just got the movie. He sent me a sketch of something and I go, “well, Marcus, this is better than I could have imagined”. It was really like that. He just hit it out of the park. I mean if you look at the stuff that he does, if you go to his IMDB and look at his body of work, I mean he does all the big movies, many big movies for Marco Beltrami as an additional composer or as a composer with him. He did A Quiet Place and several others. Anyways, I know his work in and out and I knew that he was going to be able to notch this up another level.
How would you like audiences to react to the film?
Well, so I hope, I hope they like it, of course and I hope that they’re willing to take this leap of faith with the story and are engaged with, this is a little bit of a, that’s a gamble, right? That we hopefully have interesting enough characters in the first 20 minutes. So, they go like, okay, let’s go on this crazy journey with them and let’s believe that we’re up in the balloon with them. Because let’s face it, there is a bit of a artificiality to it all. There’s a sort of an allegorical sort of tale to this that hopefully will feel more like a fever dream than complete reality. Hopefully the desire to find out who’s telling the truth and what’s behind them all is big enough for people to watch to the very end. Hopefully even at the end, they go like, “oh, I wonder what that last character does next?”
Yeah, for sure because the balloon is just where it takes place, but it’s always about the characters and their conflicts.
Yeah. Yes, exactly. In many ways, the storm that they have to go through is the storm that’s also cooking between them. It’s always a visualization of what’s going on between the characters.
Well, thank you very much for taking the time to chat with me and we’ll definitely have to have a chat soon about Snipers and all the other stuff.
Absolutely. I’d love that. Thanks for taking the time.