Remote Control
The Bavarian answer to “The X-Files”
When the drummer of a speed metal band explodes during a rehearsal in Kleinhartpenning in Upper Bavaria, the police are faced with a major mystery. But after the two UFO hunters Frank Müller and Dörte Skalski are called in on the case, a mysterious trail emerges that leads via a local UFO sect directly to an extraterrestrial spaceship hovering over the small village. And to make matters worse, a chicken also seems to be involved in the case…
Cast: Dominic Raacke, Georgia Stahl, Sepp Schauer,
Maria Peschek, Joseph Hannesschläger
Production: T4-Filmproduktion / Claudia Gatzke
A Co-produktion by T4-Film, HFF München and CineImage supported with funds from the FilmFernsehFonds Bayern
TV: Bayerischer Rundfunk, arte, WDR
numerous festivals
Skalski: But don’t start with your aliens again!
Müller: I wouldn’t go that far, but I have to admit that this case has a certain paranormal flavour.
Making of
As my major science fiction project “Space Zoo” was not financially viable as the second film after my camera exercise “Jamaica“, I urgently needed new material in 1997. After several unsuccessful attempts, the penny finally dropped during a holiday on Sylt: my training film was to be a Bavarian X-Files spoof. The idea was captivating: “The X-Files” was the big TV series of the 90s and the transformation of a series into a short film format appealed to me. But what appealed to me even more was the possibility of setting a pair of investigators in the style of Mulder & Scully in rustic Bavaria, who pursued their UFO cases as passionately as their American role models.
Financing was child’s play compared to “Space Zoo”. My producer Claudia Gatzke’s professor had an ominous special pot of money from the Bavarian film subsidy. As this had to be utilised as quickly as possible before the funds expired, we simply queued up in front of his office. When it was our turn, the same professor didn’t ask for long about the contents, he just wanted to know how much we needed. We had no idea how much we could ask for here, so we brazenly said 10,000. The professor nodded and brought in the next ones. Of course, the 10,000 (marks!) wasn’t enough – and yet we threw ourselves into the fray. We got ourselves a cheap camera and begged Munich advertising film productions to give us rolls of film material that they had stored in their fridges and no longer needed. I found two wonderful actors for the main roles, Dominic Raacke and Georgia Stahl, and organised a few cool loactions in the countryside through an uncle of mine. I found the spaceship in a corner at the Magicon animation studio, where I had started my career as a young intern, and the trick with the landing spaceship is probably the cheapest in science fiction history: a black frame, a lamp, some fog, plus a lighting technician as an operator who slowly retracts a tripod. All together the perfect illusion.
Incidentally, the continuation of “Exploded” is my major project “Aliens in Upper Bavaria”, in which the mystery of the Bavarian aliens is to be solved once and for all…
