In The Company Of Glenn: Interview: "The Lives of Others" director Florian von Henckel Donnersmarck

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German-born director Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck, whose debut feature The Lives of Others is a very deserving nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, (see my review here) loves to talk. I was assigned to interview him briefly for a movie preview package back in November, basically to get a soundbite, and we wound up having a terrific, free-wheeling, conversation that encompassed Hollywood, Cold-War-era Polish and Czech cinema (with which he said he needed to catch up), Shakespeare, Tolstoy and more. Von Donnersmarck's got a moviemaking sensibility that’s pretty unusual for a young European filmmaker: mainstream, and not afraid of saying so, this despite his considerable intellectual attainments (he read philosophy at Oxford). In fact he sees no disparity between his intellectual attainments and his preferred filmic mode, as you’ll see below. As you’ll also see below he’s also not at all shy about what he thinks is wrong with contemporary filmmaking. What you won’t see below is our jabbering about Shakespeare and Tolstoy.

Kenny: One of the things I noticed in your director’s statement on the picture, which was part of the press notes--you had mentioned that a number of the films that had been made after the reunification of Germany were of a more comedic bent than you necessarily thought appropriate. And I'm not sure how many of those have actually made it over to the States. I guess one that did would be the picture that was titled Goodbye Lenin here.
Von Donnersmarck: I liked Goodbye Lenin, I thought it was a likeable film and very entertaining. But at the same time one wrriter the Sud Deutsche Zeitung in Germany wrote something very interesting. He said that in a way it's not films like Goodbye Lenin that distorted our view of history, it's the fact that there weren't any films like The Lives of Others. So it's always valid to make a comedy about something. It's always I think healing--laughter can always be healing--but I think that in Germany it was going a little overboard, you know. There was comedy over comedy over comedy. And when I came up with this idea people said, oh, we really like your screenplay, obviously you can write, so why don't you rewrite it into a comedy and then we'll finance it. And I said, look, what does that mean, rewrite it into a comedy? That's just so absurd. But people felt this was the way that we dealt with that dictatorship, just by laughing it away. And I don't think that that's necessarily the most healthy way to go about it.
Kenny: Although the film does brim with a lot of irony and a sort of mordant humor.
Von Donnersmarck: Oh, of course, I mean, sure. A humorless film of course would be terrible. And I mean a lot of the things are absurdly funny. It's just how it is, you know, I mean it's an absurd thing if you think that there were 300,000 people in this tiny state in charge of looking into nothing else but the lives of others, that in itself is weirdly funny. And the fact--the absurd detail of things that they were reporting. It was so funny when I looked through [lead actor Ulrich Muhe’s] files [Muhe had been under surveillance by Stasi in East Germany]; he showed me his files. One day there was one person monitoring him saying, look, “This guy--so many men are visiting this guy, he must be gay.” And the next day this other person who hadn't read that report says, “Look, there are a lot of women going in there, I mean this guy is really quite a womanizer.” But at the same time next to those funny things there were pretty extreme things. Another thing in that file is a discussion on how if there was any kind of internal political crisis [Muhe] would be sent to a special camp, where he was on a special list that they had for people who would be isolated from the rest of the camp’s population the second that a certain level of political crisis was hit within the GDR, because they thought that such people could stir up some kind of rebellion. So that was the crazy thing, that the weird funny human stupidity was right next to the menacing sides of human stupidity. And that I think is normally a good kind of starting point for film dramatics.
Kenny: One of the things that I found interesting about the character of Weisler, the spy played by Muhe, is that he seems to be almost a Winston Smith in reverse, you know, he begins by loving Big Brother as it were and being a very true believer. And then when he's exposed both to the hypocrisy of his colleagues and also to the humanity of the people he's sort of been put under orders to ruin, his humanity starts to emerge.
Von Donnersmarck: Because the movie is set in 1984 and goes on into ’85, I thought I was going to call the film 1985 and--but then when I told people that idea, people didn't catch on to the thing that this means, you know—1984 plus 1. Like taking it one step further, because in a way that's what the GDR was. It was the Orwellian state taken to a weird level of reality. I remember in that year, 1984, I lived in Berlin and we were in the East a lot, because my mother is from there, and when we traveled there I always thought, this is it, you know, this is what Orwell has been describing; so I wasn't necessarily thinking of the character but sure, that kind of atmosphere is definitely there.

Von Donnersmarck directs Sebastian Koch and Ulrich Tukur.

Kenny: I just wondered if I could get a few words about your beginnings in film. You collaborated on shorts with your brother; I wonder about the things you were aspiring to with those and how they led up to Lives, which is a very accomplished film.
Von Donnersmarck: I have probably an unusual background for film in that I'm not one of those people who has really seen every film under the sun, because I grew up mainly with literature. My background is a weird combination of a lot of literature, pretty much doing nothing other than reading for the first maybe 25 years of my life, and at the same time watching the big mainstream films of the day, like the films by, let's say, Peter Weir or Robert Zemeckis or Steven Spielberg…and Alfred Hitchcock or something like that. I think sometimes that may give me a kind of a unique perspective in that my film grammar I hope is very mainstream because those are just the films that I watched. The other day, Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung, this German newspaper, called me and said, look, we would like you to do a big piece of--what was it?--it was some Italian director who had an anniversary. And it was one of those big names in Italian films and I hardly even knew who it was… and they said this person surely must have really influenced your work. And I said look, I think we saw a few of his pictures in school. But that is not really what has influenced my work. I could say how I don't know, Thomas Mann influenced my work or how Rilke influenced my work or Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky and I could tell you how Hitchcock influenced my work or Peter Weir did. But I don't know about the more obscure films. I sometimes feel there's a weird tendency in films which I even fear something quite dangerous. It's probably not so much the case in the U.S. although I think it's turning that way, that in a way because of you critics, the kind of films that are becoming more and more critically hailed are actually films that are quite obscure and don't really I think hit the core of the human soul. And I somehow fear that if that direction goes on, and that only people like Michael Haneke are hailed as geniuses, then I think that what will happen is that film may turn into something like modern day classical music, that pretty much no one listens to. And then suddenly you have the only kind of serious music there is, the kind of stuff that no one listens to in concerts and that has to be subsidized by the government, and at the other extreme then you only have musicals. And so the kind of serious actually authentically pleasing music is somehow gone. And I think that that's a real problem because I think in a way films I think should really aim for the heart but at the same time they should provide the kind of psychological depth that literature provides. So in a way I'm almost wary. I'm not the kind of person who goes to a festival and wants to discover things and therefore has to watch 100 terrible films, because I'm almost afraid that they'll kind of spoil my sense of grammar, you know what I mean?
Kenny: Sure.
Von Donnersmarck: So before I watch a film it's almost, I consider that as hard as before sleeping with a woman, that kind of thing. I really look--is this really something I want to do? Do I really, really want to see this film? And I'll really ponder the situation, I'll really look into it in great detail, who wrote the screenplay, what is this film about, who are the actors? Is this something that I'm going to find pleasing? Is this something that will send me out with a feeling of hope or is this something that will give me a sense of, oh my God, this world is such an awful place. And very rarely will I make an exception to something like that. And then I'll watch a film by David Fincher just because he's just so amazingly good at the craft of film making, I know there are a few things--I like to hone my skills and while watching his films. But I don't like his view on mankind.
When I began in film I thought about going into producing, and even started my first film internship--this was on the film In Love and War by Richard Attenborough——thinking that. I told him, look, I want to be a producer. I was his intern on that project, I had won that place, a prize in an essay competition that he hosted.I spent a lot of time with him. He both produced and directed the film and he was really an incredibly kind and generous person. He's the kind of person who will, while you're talking to him, he'll put his hand on your arm and you can feel it just warmth coming out of that hand, it's really--it's--I mean physical warmth. He's like one of those healers or something. During the production I kept on going up to him and somehow trying, to convey, politely, that I felt he was taking this film in the wrong direction, and how I felt that it could be salvaged. I was a 23-year-old intern. And he was really patient and kind with me. At the end of that he said, “Florian, I have to tell you this thing. If you really decide to become a producer, no director will ever work with you again.” And I was really shocked by that. And he said, “But if you become a director, you know, I prophesy for you a great future.” And then I could see what he meant, because just all the details and all the minutiae of acting and of a moment or how something was phrased or intonated or so, that was just so, so, so, so important to me. When I felt that something could be improved with the frame still or something, it would drive me crazy that he didn't care or didn't feel that this was so important. And then I went to film school in Munich. He said, look, you have to go to film school. I really didn't want to because I felt that film school, I had already spent by that time I had already spent 5 years in school. And I didn't want to do another 4 years, which is what film school takes in Germany. And he said look, no, you have to do this. You have to have a portfolio. I'm not so sure he was right but I followed his advice anyhow. And then made many short films. And yeah, then when those short films had kind of won the necessary awards that you need to convince people to put up the money for your full length feature, I decided to go for this. Actually there were many opportunities to do full length features even before then. In 2000 I won an award from Universal Studios called the Shocking Shorts Award. I was invited to the Universal Studios and the prize was that I would do a project for them. And I thought, well, great. And actually the most concrete project that I was offered was Universal Home Entertainment, straight to video Beethoven, the Saint Bernard dog (laughing)
Kenny: They're very big. (Laughing) They don't call it straight to video anymore, they call it made for DVD. The studios are very big on that as a business model these days.
Von Donnersmarck: Well it was amazing, I was sitting in there in the room of this executive who was in charge of this made for DVD market. And she was describing to me how this I could do Tremors Part 4 or Saint Bernard Dog Part 6, and a call came in. I could tell that the call was about the lead for a picture that they were going to shootin something like 3 days time. And this person who was going to play the lead had vanished, or said she was not going to do the picture. And then [the executive] said, “OK, well look, what about”--and she went through a long list people who she could think of off the top of her head that they could use to replace this actor. Without even consulting the director, they decided in this two-minute conversation who they were going to use for the lead. And then she resumed this conversation with me, describing to me what the advantages of doing this film would be. And she had given me a full stack of all the direct to video films that they'd done and I even watched them and you know one was more terrible than the other.
So I saw there would be no way that I could show what I think I could do under those circumstances.So I went back to Germany. Although the budget for a German film is always less than even for a direct-to-video film in the U.S., I thought I would be able to do a lot more with that. Because I would be able to use it completely freely. I decided to start work on this film, then worked on it for quite a long time. Most of which of course was spent trying to convince people to put up the money. You know those stories.
Kenny: Well I imagine that your next offer from an American studio will happen, and it will be quite a bit different.
Von Donnersmarck: Yeah, I was actually amazed how watchful the American companies were of the German market, and how many interesting things I have been offered. But at the same time I feel that it's weird—somehow there's a strange spirit to them. I can see that in the films that have been shown over the past years and also in the screenplays now that I've been sent, even if they're kind of big names, or big actors and everything, there's a certain spirit of darkness or something there in these films. They're not as positive and upbeat and hopeful; there are many [projects] that are very dark or are very brutal and very hopeless. And I look at them and I think, “What's the matter with you guys, you know—you are the people who are supposed to be giving hope to the world, you're Hollywood!” I’m interested in telling a story honestly, but at the same time trying to look for a solution to the problems that I’m are describing. It is so easy to tell a dark story. It's just like for an actor, it is very easy to play an unsympathetic character. There are 10 billion ways to be unsympathetic. To play a likeable character is the hardest thing an actor can do.