All this we sort of incorporated into our story. And that's the same here again, now with the pattern pyramid and the triangles. Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar have earned patience. Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar discuss what they kept from set and the difficulty of letting go once filming on the series ended. Its both hopeful and ominous at the same time. So where does the show go in Season 3? I think we we focused on the stuff where we just personally felt it adds to the overall mystery and we need to deliver the ending. Jantje Friese - Wikipedia We had to get cars from England for some shots where the steering wheel had to be on the other side. Weve heard people say its perfect timing because the issues in 1899 are very present today. Hopefully it feels like something really fresh and new, while still [being] exactly what Dark fans would like to watch." Friese said, That was the centerpiece of it all. We really wanted to get every culture, all the languages, right and not have people speaking in clichs. There are actually two things. When we arrive at the start of Season 3, the big twist of Season 1 that main character Jonas Kahnwald is actually the son of Mikkel, the young boy who mysteriously vanished from 2019 and somehow ended up 33 years in the past seem quaint by comparison. Chris Emil Janssen/Action Press/Shutterstock, Bo and I met in film school and since Day One, we were convinced that it was possible to tell local stories coming out of Germany that could hit an audience anywhere, Friese said. But of course, the number is also very magical: 1899. 'Dark' final season: here's what happens at the end of the Netflix time travel thriller. Its also an interesting time because there were such extreme points of view back then. Baran bo Odar: As we have so many different timelines and characters, we would figure out things like, if we use a certain color in this decade, we wont use it in another one. One is theme, the other is character and the other is plot. One must watch it. So you didnt have to really change the way that youre shooting; you can do the shot and the reverse shot in one day, which was really helpful. Do you first have the themes and then drop in characters and develop the mystery out of that or do you have the puzzle first and then see how the characters and themes fit into that? I still think that young Katharina is related to Old Katharina now because they just look the same. Its a very long and also very complicated process. Then, of course, just like in Dark, we have a big philosophical theme at the center of it all about perception and reality. The show is the first from Netflix shot entirely in a virtual studio, using cutting-edge LED-Volume technology with a video game engine that creates virtual sets and locations, allowing complex visual-effects shots to be done in-camera. Its heart-wrenching and really put a lot of press pressure on Season 2. But usually, its the theme that starts the whole process. Were just consumed 24 hours a day and never take the time to sit down and just think, oh, I am. From the creators of Dark, the mystery-thriller will melt your mind. For a long time, even already in film school, we had this urge to change that, to really have characters from particular countries speak in their own voices, because language really defines character. All Rights Reserved. To be honest, we had them all in these pods; they couldnt move. Offers may be subject to change without notice. The past shapes you and everything that happens.. Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information. For me, its a very happy ending, realizing its not just about you all of the time. Sign up for our Email Newsletters here. We always approached it as a global show, but we never, never, never expected that kind of success.. Robot, earned critical acclaim and three German movie awards, Netflix approached the duo to adapt the film into a series. The passengers of the Kerberos encounter the biggest mystery of their lives. See how the filmmakers used Volume to create a story at sea. The series ends with a dinner party in the origin world. Studios, is getting another shot at an adaptation from Netflix. Even a camera is a tool for me, I love to play around with it, or with a lens. If you turn that around, it's the infinity symbol. Everything is planned in that one holy book. Do you already have the world of 1899 built out in your mind for the potential next two seasons? They would need to completely crash. It creates such a powerful illusion that, in the beginning, the crew and actors were actually getting seasick because the horizon was moving on the volume screen. We thought: We really want to take a look at Europe, just take it, put it on a ship, in a confined space, with lots of ocean around, where you cant escape, and have like a little bit of an experiment, almost like a laboratory experiment. It was really challenging for us in the third season to establish another world with maybe even other timelines, too. I was like, Wow, its such a cool concept. Were going back and forth. It was such an interesting challenge. 1899 Netflix TV Show Creators Interview - The Hollywood Reporter Friese: It was absolutely the perfect amount. They are very good at putting pieces together. And what I just found so interesting about that, or what became even more clear to me, is that through language youre actually expressing culture. Its the same with Blade Runner, and how there are still people thinking Harrison Ford is not a replicant; where Im thinking, How can you think hes not a replicant? Thats the beauty of that story, that theres a question amrk. Because if you cannot express certain emotions through your language then theyre almost non-existent in that culture. You know if something is urgent or not important. So every riddle we put in there, we feel we have to solve it, she said. It was so easy for them to just react. But you can only read it once you see how it ends. bo Odar: It was a bit tricky at the beginning. Its not every word but you learn how a language sounds and, especially if you do a lot of takes, you get really used to it. Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter. We have the 'triquetra' and stuff like that [a three-pointed knot shape from the Iron Age that was adapted to represent the Christian Trinity]. "If you don't look at the narrative chronologically, but you pick out single characters and just look at their character arcs, it becomes a lot easier," Friese said. Like letting go of some love affair.. And he's not just talking major landscapes, but also more intimate set pieces, too. I was so miserable because somehow youre really more prepared for failure then success I guess. "I think I personally read probably one hundred books or so over the course of the three seasons, and not only on the science stuff behind it, but also philosophical pieces, a lot of spiritual writing," Friese said. Like if one stone starts to roll, and hits another and that ends up leading to the First World War. This Article is related to: Television and tagged Dark, Jantje Friese, Netflix, TV Interviews. Do Ellis Dragons Unstable Inventions Exist in Real Life? The 225 Best Horror Movies of All Time You see Adam blowing wind on the one world, and on the other, you see Eva blowing wind on the other world. Friese also warned viewers from making assumptions about certain characters, such as Jonas mother Hannah (Maja Schne), who has done rather unforgivable, selfish, and malicious acts throughout every timeline. 2023 IndieWire Media, LLC. For fans who are still trying to figure out season three of Dark who was Noahs dad again? 2023 The Hollywood Reporter, LLC. But if you know where you want to end, it is even harder to then lay out the structure for the episodes to get there. So with every project we did, we, we always had that in mind that one day we want to reach a global audience., After the 2014 film Who Am I No System Is Safe, a techno thriller thats been compared to Fight Club and Mr. Friese wouldnt drop any spoilers not even saying how Season 3 will differ from the first two cycles but gave a few clues as to the faces viewers can expect. Odar: I definitely view it as a happy ending, though you can also interpret it as a suicide mission, of course. the prospect of diving into another twisty metaverse from the minds of Dark creators Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar likely comes with equal measures of excitement and trepidation. Is the final season truly the final season, or will the cycle continue, as it does ad infinitum within the context of the story? 'Dark': Creators Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar - IndieWire Season 2 ended with Jonas being whisked away to another world, possibly another dimension by a version of his now-dead girlfriend Martha (Lisa Vicari). "There was a huge pressure because, first of all, we never expected that kind of success, and then it grew season for season," Friese tells EW. ", Friese says she was bothered by this for the first few months actively working on the scripts for 1899, but, "At some point, we just said, 'Let's shake it off.' ", Someone at Netflix mentioned the volume tech, and Odar and Friese were very impressed by how it looked. That was actually very difficult to have a big enough pool of women to choose from, which I thought was quite sad.. It just looked pretty. They always knew where it would go, but they recently watched the last episode in the cinema and they were like, oh my God!, Odar: We dont play with the audience and treat them as fools and idiots; rather, the opposite. In the Eliott Sumner version we use in the title sequence, the line that features so prominently is feed your head. That was such an important phrase for the entire show that it felt like the absolute right fit. Most people dont understand, that, because theyve never used it. Thats why, for me, its a very happy ending, even though it feels very sad. Odar revealed on his Instagram in a behind-the-scenes featurette that filming for the series took place in a newly custom built virtual production stage known as the Volume. Thats why theres a viewer learning curve at the beginning, trying to tell one German person apart from another. Once you rewatch it, its obviously great fun to find all of those little things. If seeing an entire reality flipped in the last season of Dark seemed jarring, know that it felt just as dissonant to the people helping to bring it to life. '1899' Ending Explained: Series Creators Reveal Meanings of the Come along for the ride! But in English, it means something positive. You can search, for example, for a character, and then you see the character arc, or you can search for a timeline and then you can see everything that's happening in that timeline.". Science and religion clashed a lot. Weve talked to a lot of people whove had the opportunity to see the first six episodes, and its kind of half and half. For example, on Dark, the idea of the parallel universe was always planned to be in the second season. Its a new kind of thinking for filmmaking: You have to think in layers and how you combine those layers. You can change anything. ", If all goes according to plan, fans have many more episodes to look forward to. We need to know what are we actually talking about. '1899' First Interviews: Netflix & 'Dark' Creators - Deadline "We always work with symbols and objects, and we always have usually one specific object that is tied to one character. Do I actually have free will? When Jantje Frieseand her partner Baran bo Odar created their German-language science fiction series "Dark" for Netflix, they had no idea that it would become an international hit. 1899 Netflix TV Show Creators Interview - The Hollywood Reporter For example, if a stair goes from left to right, in the other world it would go from right to left. But this is a big, new toy and not a lot of people have used it yet. Im still not sure about the percentage, but its probably 10 percent [of the mysteries] we are not goiong to answer just for the fun of it, but they will be smaller. What resonates with a lot of viewers is this feeling that we also sometimes have: do we matter? In an interview on Zoom, the Playtech team spoke to the producers and some of the cast of the psychological thriller 1899. . ", The poster for 1899 (below) shows a ship perched on the edge of a triangle in the middle of the ocean, leading some fans to speculate that the mysterious Bermuda Triangle myth could play a part in the story. By the end of Season 2, we're dealing with a number of different time periods spanning more than 100 years but we're also introduced, in the last seconds of the finale, to the possibility of an entirely new and potentially identical dimension. We said from the start that1899should not look likeTitanic. ", Odar explained that, if you're looking to keep track of everything, follow the symbols. Also, we actually thought about putting some of the stuff thats now in Season 3 into Season 2, but then decided to move it backwards. We always think we have to answer everything. "I gave that to a couple of actors and they all had the same experience. But first, EPs Shannon Burke, Jonas and Josh Pate tell us all about the Season 3 finale. So it was finding out which puzzle pieces need to go in there so that we have the feeling of the characters really going full circle. But the mid-ground, the thing in between, thats what actually glues these two layers together, and its the most important part of the whole process. With all that in mind, they set out to make 1899, which follows the multicultural passengers of a migrant steamship heading west to leave the old continent, whose journey takes an unexpected turn when they discover another migrant ship adrift on the open sea. 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