Michael Guillén: Andy, Urban Explorer is your second feature?Īndy Fetscher: It's my first movie after film school where my graduate thesis film was a long-feature horror movie Bucharest Flesh. The central villainy of Klaus Stiglmeier is a horror to behold. Grating, tense, nailbiting, Urban Explorer skillfully employs Berlin's underground tunnels to achieve a claustrophobic mise en scène.
Myself, I found Urban Explorer a satisfying thriller. Indeed, his one-man-band combination of direction, lensing and editing proves crucial, displaying a balance of craft and patience in building layers of suspense under a horrific setting that goes beyond any urban explorer's worst nightmare."Īt, Scott Weinberg gave high marks to Urban Explorer 's "intangible components like tone, style, and intensity" but expressed irritation with what he perceived to be a lazy script that failed to flesh out its characterizations. His subsequent review for Variety proved favorable: "Fetscher avoids the temptation to push the situation into an exercise in torture porn-an option he easily could have gone for-while nevertheless ratcheting up the horror. This afforded the chance to gain a firsthand sense of Koehler's critical practice and how he times his films and notates impressions. My Fantasia experience of Urban Explorer was heightened for being in the company of Variety film critic Robert Koehler.
The Berlin-style horror thriller Urban Explorer is his first co-production with America." He graduated film school with his first full length horror feature Bucharest Flesh which has been invited to numerous festivals, including Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival and Germany's highly acclaimed Hofer Filmtage. In most of his pictures, in addition to directing, Andy has taken on multiple production roles including camera work, editing, and sound design. From 2001 to 2007 he studied cinematography and directing at the Ludwigsburg Film Academy, where he began to make a name for himself with a number of short movies such as Peste la Bucharesti (2004) and Kingdom of the Youth (2005). At the age of 19 he worked as a freelance photographer and journalist for a picture agency in Germany. In his teenage years he shot his first movies as PR stunts for a satirical magazine that he published with friends, though they were censored for containing graphic violence, sex, and crude language. premiere at Austin's Fantastic Fest, now seemed a perfect opportunity to transcribe the Fantasia conversation.Įljan Tomek writes in his mini biography for IMDb : "Andy Fetscher is a German-Romanian director, writer and cinematographer. Andy Fetscher's German thriller Urban Explorer (2011) boasted its North American premiere at the 15th edition of Montreal's Fantasia Film Festival, where festival publicist Jean Grégoire arranged for me to meet with Fetscher and his writer-producer Oliver Thau at The Irish Embassy Pub.