"Tender Interface " Director: Enyedi Ildiko Co-production: France, Hungary Genre: Science-Fiction Romance Actors: Paul Giamatti, Poésy Clémence

play clip

Film Synopsis

“The chances of gaining useable energy from the splitting of the atom are no greater than those of cooling the oceans to freezing point and utilizing the extracted heat.”
(Lawrence, creator of the cyclotron, 1938)

Two points in time, Two geographic locations

New York, the summer of 1939. It is almost minutes from the outbreak of the Second World War, but nobody knows this, especially not in America. Nor do they wish to know. Europe is a far-off, confusing, and tiresome place. America is preoccupied with something entirely different. People are worried about attacking aliens.

This is the year Orson Welles' famous radio-play “The War of the Worlds” –imitating an on-location report of an alien attack – sent waves of panic all over America.

Budapest, the spring of 2005. We do not yet know what historical moment we will call these months a few years from now. People watch the evening news, but their center of attention is not occupied by this. Older people watch TV shows. Young people play computer games.

New York, 1939

Round shadows glide soundlessly across the buildings of Manhattan. People on the streets flee in terror. Mars attacks. A man stands on a street corner. He is calmly reading the paper like nothing out of the ordinary is going on, when…

... it turns out that everything we have seen so far is the “intro” to a computer game. We are in a high school’s basement computer room. It’s Friday night, and there’s a party going on at school. There’s dancing in the gymnasium and a computer party downstairs. The boys are playing the usual “shoot-the-enemy” game.

Martians attack the city. The citizens try to defend themselves and attempt to destroy their attackers. Some players are Martians, some are humans, and everybody concentrates on gaining points.

Two boys, Péter and Tamás sit in front of one of the monitors. Behind them stands Lili, Tamás’s girlfriend.

Lili, a lanky, awkward teenage girl, joins the game as an observing bystander. She will be our heroine.

She listens to music on her walkman and is bored. She watches the streets of New York, the Martians, and the frightened people.

Suddenly she is stirred from her reverie: she notices someone in the game. He is a man in his forties, reading the funnies and chuckling to himself. He completely ignores the attack of the Martians. Lili watches him.

He isn’t particularly good-looking, but somehow he is very attractive. His face looks familiar, but Lili can’t figure out where she’s seen him before.

Lili annoys Tamás. She keeps butting in. And it’s always something stupid that has nothing to do with collecting points, the goal of the game.

Tamás seats her in front of a free terminal. Lili wants to play a human, not a Martian. Tamás picks out the first name from the list of possible characters – “Jim” a man in a suit – registers Lili’s new identity, and hurries back to his own computer.

Jim

Lili, now a man around twenty with a gun in his holster and his hat pulled down over his eyes, starts walking the streets of New York. His name is Jim, and he’s a typical FBI agent.

He’s on his way towards the center of the Martian attack to collect points, just like Tamás explained. But he stops almost immediately in front of the shop window of a lingerie store. It’s really odd to see an FBI agent with a stern face engrossed in staring at silk slips while shrieking, fleeing people rush past him.

Jim looks back towards the corner and sees the strange, attractive man absorbed in his newspaper. Jim starts walking towards the man. He has already forgotten his point-collecting mission.

Here, beyond the corner, the city is going through its daily routine; no one knows about the Martian attack two streets away.

Another agent, who looks strikingly similar to Jim, nods to him: the agent transfers his job to Jim. Jim’s job is to trail the target: the peculiar man reading the paper on the corner.

Jim diligently performs the work his character has been assigned.
The situations in which he sees the man are unusual; the tension and energy emanating from him is staggering; his reactions are amusing. Lili – inside Jim’s skin – is curious to find out who this man is, and what it is that he is so obsessively occupied with. A phone conversation makes everything clear.

The man is Leó Szilárd, atomic physicist. He is working on making sure the first atomic bomb is made in America, not in Germany. And now Lili knows why his face looks so familiar: She’s seen him in her physics textbook.

Tamás, Péter, and Lili watch their peers dancing in the gym. The room is packed and the music is loud. The two boys talk about the game, about points and new records. Lili stands around by herself. A pile of backpacks towers in the corner. She sifts through them and finds her own. She leafs through her physics textbook and finds a picture of a mushroom cloud and a portrait of Leó Szilárd. He is older on this picture than he was in New York and has curly red hair Lili once drew on him with a red pen. Three smaller portraits of the other Hungarian scientists who took part in the Manhattan Project are underneath Leó’s picture.

Lili doesn’t tell the boys what she’s up to; she hurries down the empty hallways back to the computer room downstairs. The only person there is a twelve year-old computer junkie, but after a while he goes upstairs too. Lili is now alone in the large, dark room.

She gets absorbed in the game. As Jim, she is witness to an important historical moment: the beginning of the Manhattan Project, initiated by Leó Szilárd, the largest top secret project in the history of science.

Summer of 1939. The war has not started yet, but Szilárd is sure that it soon will. He knows from the news that the experiments of his former physicist colleagues in Germany are on the right track, and that they are sharing their knowledge with Hitler.
Szilárd, terrified that the Germans will succeed in making the first atomic bomb, does everything in his power to call the government’s attention to the enormous danger and the great need for action. The bomb could decide the outcome of the war.
Jim, the tough FBI agent – who has a naïve teenage girl living inside of him – is witness to this struggle: Leó Szilárd’s mind is filled with doubts and fears.

Lili, from Jim’s unique perspective, gets to know Szilárd like no one else. She sees what he’s like when he’s with others and what he’s like when he thinks no one is watching. She sees him when he is cheerful and amusing, but also when he is timid and uncertain.

What is this unfamiliar, tender feeling Lili feels for this man? No, it can’t be love, that’s silly…

Or is it? Lili, like most of her peers, isn’t too interested in history. But this strange man interests her more and more as she gets to know him better. She is seized with excitement and captivated by his dedication.

Three Days

Friday night passes at the high school in Budapest. The last of the kids goes home, and the security guard locks the building for the weekend. Lili notices what’s happened; she could use her cell phone to call for help. But she doesn’t. She’s too immersed in the game, too interested in the man; weariness and the vibrating monitor have made her stray too far from reality. She stays where she is. She occupies the huge, empty building with the same natural ease as if were her own home. She cannot sense time passing downstairs in the windowless computer room. Sometimes she goes upstairs and sees that it is early dawn or late afternoon or finds the empty hallways basking in the light of the moon.

She scavenges something to eat in the school cafeteria’s kitchen, buys chocolate milk and soft drinks from the vending machine in the hall while she still has money, and when that’s gone, she drinks from the tap in the girls’ room and munches on some stale pretzels from the bar cupboard in the principal’s office. Her ten year-old sister manages to get a hold of her on the phone. Lili doesn’t tell her where she is, and her sister covers up for her at home. Tamás also calls her, and after a short, unfriendly conversation she breaks up with him, much to her own surprise. By that time Lili’s spirit has taken up residence wholly in 1939, New York.

She follows Szilárd; she sees him as he glances stealthily around and enters a restaurant where – quite obviously from the window – he hides a slip of paper under the flap of the table. When Szilárd departs, Jim does not follow him, but gets hold of the paper. It’s contains a message written in code.

Lili pores through the books in the school library, trying for hours to decipher the code; finally, thanks to luck, she succeeds. The message is for her. In his own sarcastic way Szilárd lets her know that he is quite aware that Jim is following him. Wouldn’t it be easier if they just walked together?

A peculiar, acerbic, but warm relationship develops between Jim and Szilárd. Lili is happy because she is near the man she loves. But her happiness vanishes when she sees Szilárd staring with obvious interest at a pretty, brown-haired woman in her thirties. Lili has had enough of friendship; she wants more. She switches character. Jim’s figure was chosen at random by Tamás. Now she makes a conscious choice from the list: she clicks on the pretty, brown-haired woman Szilárd was staring at. Lili dresses her up in fetching clothes and names her Dóra.

Dora

Dóra sets out to get her man, and teenaged Lili learns a lot from her. Up till now, the comedy of the whole situation was watching an adolescent girl animate a grown man. This time, a femme fatale is the one who reacts like an inexperienced, inhibited teenager. She confuses people. Szilárd soon goes crazy for her. When he confesses his feelings to brown-haired Dóra, thin, blond Lili cannot control her awakening emotions. She becomes jealous of her own creation and destroys her.

Lili

With the help of the webcam on top of the computer, Lili takes a picture of herself. With the help of the game’s settings she perfects her two-dimensional image; the program then creates Lili’s 3-dimensional figure based on the picture. Lili chooses clothes for her and names her Lili.

And so, for the third time, now in her own form, she tries to win Szilárd’s attention and love. Szilárd is preparing for a crucial experiment: demonstrating and proving the chain reaction. Finally, after waiting several years, he has managed to collect the money and all the needed equipment. Lili accomplishes the impossible: she is at Szilárd’s side as his assistant during the fateful moment. The excitement and anticipation of the work has brought the two individuals closer together. The relationship between Szilárd and Lili matures; it is friendship, as with Jim, attraction, as with Dóra, but it is more than both. It is love.

By the time the school bell rings in the school building on Monday morning, Lili has already been through one of the greatest adventures of her life.

Director's Concept

The Genre
A science-fiction romance. The story of a first love.
A teenage girl matures from child to woman over the course of a weekend. Her curiosity and passion help her break through the limits of space and time, and she becomes part of a historical moment.

The Back Story
One of the basic scenarios of computer games and science fiction stories is saving the earth from destruction before time runs out. Only one person – usually an ordinary person with no special powers – is able to save the world.

The 1930s: the rise of fascism. Germany prepares for war. Most of the world underestimates the danger they face, and America takes little interest in what is going on in Europe.

In the summer of 1936, Leó Szilárd, a Hungarian theoretical physicist, discovers how to sustain a chain reaction long enough to generate an explosion of hitherto unknown destructive power. For three years he keeps this dangerous knowledge to himself.
In the summer of 1939, Szilárd learns that Germany has sequestered Czech uranium stocks. The governments of the world seem unaware of the significance of this apparently minor economic news item.

From the news, Szilárd knows that his former colleagues in Berlin, now under Hitler’s protective wings, are continuing their nuclear experiments.

Szilárd – with the help of Albert Einstein – informs President Roosevelt of the danger. His efforts are successful. A few months later the American government’s top secret research plan, the Manhattan Project, is launched.

The countdown has begun. Scientists battle against time and each other. Who will be the first to complete the atomic bomb? Will the world be saved from the enemy, or will the fascist leaders get their hands on the ultimate weapon?


The Visual Concept of the Film

New York, 1939

The colors of the film do not adhere to the soft, pastel ambience of period films. The New York backdrop offers plenty of possibilities for substantial play of light and shadows. The blades of light jutting from in between the tall buildings divide the space.

The camera angles and the light recall the “The Hungarian Style” of 1920s photography, linked primarily to the names of Kertész and Brassai. The perpendicularly tilted camera, the specific lighting effects, and the falling shadows are important elements of the composition.

The buildings repeat themselves in the variation of a few basic types like they do in computer games. Buildings which can be easily identified – such as Columbia University or the Waldorf Astoria – will be photographed in their original locations. Based on these photographs we will then reconstruct them in their 1939 condition and environment.

Locations which can be viewed from the sidewalk, such as shops and restaurants, also repeat themselves. The same butcher shop – with the same butcher inside – the same shoe store, pharmacy, etc., all repeat in random order. Sometimes the exact same shop windows stand side by side.

The movement of the camera is parallel to the picture-plane in most of the street scenes; the characters seem to walk along in front of a ribbon-strip background. We do not use the winding camera-movement common in most computer games. This reduction is an important stylistic element, just like the building façades that peel off to reveal cross-sections in all their detail. Zoom-shots will be achieved by cutting the individual shots on top of each other: the switch between the shots is accompanied by a computer beeping sound.

In contrast with the long, parallel panning of the street scenes we use vertical shots from the rooftop level for wide shots to catch the abstract shadows of downtown traffic.

All these give the world of New York a strong, unified character. We are constantly aware that we are inside a computer game. However, this technique does not spoil the mood of the intimate scenes. In these instances we work with fixed shots, using the shot-technique of American films of the 1930s; this fits well with the style of the aforementioned exterior and wide- shots.

The reflections in the glass surfaces dissolve the camera’s static movements parallel to the image-plane. The figures and events reflected in the glass are not simply blurry stains but a part of the story and possess dramaturgic function. Since every point on the flat field is equally sharp and in focus, this makes it seem as if we are working with a lens with great depth of focus. The result is similar to the visual world of Richard Estes, the American hyper-realist painter.

A High School in Budapest , 2005

The artificial world in the film – the New York of 1939 – is constructed to be visually dense; it is full of details and motifs, crowds and events.
The so called “real” world, the locked, empty school building, where our heroine, Lili, spends a weekend, is a reduced universe similar to those in virtual reality games. It is a world of identical hallways, doors, stairs, and empty spaces all filled with silence or sounds filtering in from far away; it is an almost monochrome world. Downstairs in the windowless, basement computer room, Lili cannot tell whether it is morning or evening outside; the only time she ever feels passing time is when she ventures upstairs to attend to her most basic physical needs. But these upstairs spaces don’t give her much more sense of reality: they are places that were designed for many people at once, places she’s only seen when they are filled with kids, shrieking and talking.

Technical Realization

The film will be shot with HD technology.

The New York locations will be constructed with 3D models so we will be able to move around in it with the same freedom as if it were a real computer game.
The building textures will be made by photographing various actual buildings in New York. These will be used to construct the 3D buildings which will then make up the street corner where Leó Szilárd’s hotel is located and where the main action takes place in this imaginary Manhattan.

The characters act in front of blue- and greenscreens. Only the ground and the props they touch make up the set.

With the exception of the main characters, all the roles in the film are played by twelve actors. This handful of people makes up the crowd on the streets of New York and plays the various other parts in the film.

These twelve individuals also appear on a list as characters the computer game players can chose from: the figures stand like rigid dolls until the players assign them new clothes, hair, and eye-color. Jim is the character Lili animates in the first third of the film. He appears in various clothes on the streets of New York; the same is true for Dóra, the character Lili chooses in the second third of the game.

Today’s computer games offer the possibility of creating your own character based on a photograph. This is what Lili does in the last third of the film when she appears on the streets of New York in her own body.

The costumes and make-up of the characters are a bit stylized. The goal is to make them look like realistic people in a computer game. Our aim is not for the viewers to believe this, but to experience the illusion. The main idea is to push the 3D background and the living characters together so the two elements will compose unified parts of one world.

Digital lighting and a slight computer manipulation of the characters’ movements serve the same purpose.

 

back to top