3 questions for... Luise Donschen

I worked on the film for five years, with the individual production phases alternating again and again. The starting point was a newspaper article about the research at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology on the foraging behaviour of female finches. Contrary to my expectations, I immediately liked the place, these rooms in the middle of the forest, and I liked the seriousness and calmness with which they worked there. The mating dance of the finches was beautiful to watch and I soon learnt to distinguish the females from the males by their song. So the finches and their researchers moved me from thinking to looking and listening. I took up this movement again in the editing.

The scene with John Malkovich was the first one we ever shot for the film. I met him in Prague after the performance of an opera in which he played the aged Casanova and asked him if he could imagine a scene like the one we shot. He could. To get the documentary setting, we had to travel to Toronto just three weeks later. On our day of filming, he performed the opera for the last time so far.