Köln 75: making music history

“It’s an amazing story,” says Dries Phlypo of Lemming Film Belgium, which co-produced the film. “It’s so empowering and so uplifting, which I think we need in these times. It’s a crazy adventure.”

When Phlypo was approached to join the project, it was already quite advanced as a two-country co-production between One Two Films in Germany and Extreme Emotions in Poland.

“My first idea was that Belgium could provide the opera house, since we have quite a lot of similar buildings, but Poland had already claimed that location,” he recalls. Instead, he put together a package that brought all the visual and sound post-production to Flanders.

Fred Burle, the producer with One Two Films, agrees. “Our co-producing partners from Lemming Film Belgium provided us with the best talent we could have from the country,” he says. “These were creative partners that added a lot to our project, people we're happy to go back to with future projects.”

At the time of shooting, the Köln opera house was being renovated and so could not be used as a location. The task of making the Polish stand-in look just like the original fell to Flow Postproduction from Antwerp.

“We knew how the building had to look, so then it was a collaboration between the DoP, the set designer and our visual effects team to recreate that setting,” explains Jules Debrock, managing director of Flow.

Green screens were set up on the square where the concert hall was located, allowing images of the actual Köln opera house to be integrated into the scene. Lines of people waiting outside were also added digitally. Inside, the VFX team recreated the opera house’s distinctive balconies and other features, which they had researched on a visit to the original. They also filled in the audience for the concert.

Thanks to the increasing sophistication of digital tools, this kind of effect can be produced to a high quality without breaking the bank.

The team made an impression on Fred Burle when he came to Antwerp during post-production. “I visited Flow when we were doing the colour grading and found it to be a company that has a great sense of community with its collaborators and co-workers and an impressive capacity of reacting fast and solving problems,” he says.

The grading itself was handled by Peter Bernaers, an independent colourist from Flanders. “The images are already there, so my job is to bring out their best possible form,” he explains. “Sometimes I do very little, sometimes much more, while making it look like very little.”

With Köln 75, the main task was to channel the rawness that director Ido Fluk and DoP Jens Harant had brought to Vera’s story. “The film came out of the edit with a roughness, a sort of improvised jazz look,” Bernaers recalls. “Together, we decided where we liked that and where it was too rough and needed to be cleaned up, but without over polishing it.”

Their aim throughout was to evoke the 1970s without turning the film into a period piece. “We wanted to give it a certain energy that is linked to the main character, to the period, and to events.” This involved some improvisation, going back and forth through the film until the balance was just right. The final effect should be felt but not noticed.

Köln 75 does not show Jarrett’s iconic performance, letting the recording speak for itself. But sound still plays an important role in the story, in particular with the sub-standard piano that Jarrett has to play during the concert. Part of the legend is that overcoming the piano’s limitations inspired Jarrett to even greater heights of creativity.

Recreating the sound of this damaged piano was the job of sound designer and composer Frederik van de Moortel, whose company is called Sum of Sines. His starting point was an old grand piano he had bought to compose the soundtrack for Inside, another Dries Phlypo co-production.

“I put 11 microphones around it and inside it, not just to record the piano but the mechanics, the wood, the strings, the metal,” he recalls. “I recorded everything in an immersive format. I even invited a percussionist to come and bang on the piano while I was recording.”

The sounds from this broken-down piano were then matched and blended with music composed for the film and played on a pristine instrument. “So, what you hear is that there is something wrong with the piano, but it is still beautiful,” van de Moortel says.

Another task was to create the sound of the car in which Jarrett travels from Zurich to Köln, a beat-up Renault 4 belonging to record producer Manfred Eicher. This also had to have its own sound.

“When you do a road trip in a car like this, it’s not an American Mustang driving through the desert, it’s and old Renault driving along the autobahn,” he explains. “To achieve that we took sound of the car recorded on set and recordings from the archives, and built a sound character that roars, rattles and rumbles all through the film.”

The same attention to detail went into the whole sound design, to meet the director’s demand that it should be as immersive and specific to the period as possible. “The apartments, the streets, the cars, how the clothes and shoes sound when people moved. Everything was made with this Seventies vibe.”

The budget for Köln 75, which was around €7 million, is relatively large for a European film, and joining the co-production meant Phlypo had to raise a significant amount of money. Screen Flanders and the Belgian tax shelter both made important contributions, but there was still a gap.

His first solution was to approach local distributor September Film for a minimum guarantee in return for the Benelux rights. “They were more than happy to put a reasonable MG on the table for a project of this size,” he says.

For the rest, he secured a personal investment from two Flemish entrepreneurs. This kind of equity investment is relatively new in the Benelux countries, but Phlypo has used it successfully in recent years for both international and majority Flemish productions.