Your film WINTER SLEEPERS also captivates the audience with its stylized look. Did you have a clear image of that from the beginning, even more so than the story?
In general the images tend to come first but that wasn’t the case with WINTER SLEEPERS. The starting point was in fact a novel. After DEADLY MARIA it was exactly what I was looking for, something that was closer to me. Sure, I had some connection with the character that Joachim Król played in DEADLY MARIA, but only from a distance. This time I wanted to be able to get closer to the characters, as I’d done in the two short films I made before DEADLY MARIA. For a film to feel authentic it’s very important that you can somehow identify with the characters.
But it’s not really a film adaptation of a novel, is it? It says in the opening credits, ‘based on the novel…’
The character of Theo isn’t in the book. And Françoise Pyszora’s novel takes place by the sea in summer. But I’m not a big fan of the sun, and I can’t imagine being able to create a seaside atmosphere that would interest me in the least.
The combination of the two couples – one that communicates more verbally and the other who in strong contrast, relate more physically and whose conflicts tend to be played out on a physical level – this combination was already present in the book. But the book was almost without dialogue, you would constantly see things like, “he thought…” and the like.
I felt I could identify with these characters, all circling each other and at the same time all seeming to lack direction. However, they are by no means generation ‘X’. That’s my generation, one that grew up in a relatively protected world. None of the four characters come from the area where the film takes place. There is this widely propagated idea that you can go somewhere else and live your life quite differently – and then end up living it exactly as before. To that extent at least I wanted to portray these characters authentically. Only then did the world of images take focus.
This world is heavily influenced by the fact that I wanted to have the story take place in winter, in the snow, creating a completely different aesthetic. However, it took time for this image to take shape, and that’s why it took so long to write the script. In the end it took about one-and-a-half-years to write, with breaks in between. And there were many different versions where we changed the structure significantly. It wasn’t until the seventh version that the structure really became clear. In addition it took some time for me to really make this material my own. That’s what it takes to be able to create the corresponding images.
Onto casting. Bierbichler as Theo is, to put it bluntly, an obvious choice. But to cast the character of Marco, wasn’t that fairly difficult?
Yes, it certainly was. Heino Ferch was in fact the very last person to come on board, since he was the only one who could offer the character a certain irony of expression, which was essential. So that Marco’s intense egocentricity seems somehow forgivable. He has a certain charming quality, in contrast to the self-destructive tendencies of the other characters in the film. It was very important to me that Marco had a sense of humor, particularly since I’d seen first hand that precisely these sorts of guys can be extremely funny. If I’d cast someone who’d created an earnest, existentialist figure out of the role, the character would have been a complete flop. Heino is the sort of person who always offers the lighter, more fun take on things. Who always asks whether something can’t be toned down a bit, which is exactly the right approach. As director I just had to watch out that the substance didn’t get lost. And it’s through his humor that Marco becomes a figure of tragedy. A bit like Pierre Brasseur in “Children of Paradise", to whom your heart goes out, someone who you like far more than that cry-baby Barrault. But someone who in the end doesn’t get things together either, who lacks the passion to do what’s right at the critical moment. That’s tragic. That he is charming, and still loses out.
Your actors are, on the whole, unknowns. How did you find them? Is that the contribution of An Dorthe Braker, who did the casting and has also discovered new talent for Detlev Buck?
Absolutely! I looked at an awful lot of actors. I’d already considered Ulrich Matthes for the Król role in DEADLY MARIA. In WINTER SLEEPERS I knew I wanted unknown faces, and while I’d already spoken to a few well-known actors, at some point things just took a different course. I did really long auditions with everyone and tried out different combinations. It became clear to me that a far too well-known actor would tip the foursome right off balance. In WINTER SLEEPERS I just decided I’d take a chance. Marie-Lou had never made a film before and Floriane had only played small roles. In private life Floriane possesses a mixture of youthfulness and mature self-assurance that rounds out the character of Rebecca and makes her believable. Rebecca is supremely unambitious, which for me is a phenomenon of that generation now in their mid-twenties. In sharp contrast to her lover Marco, who seems to have been driven on by his parents all his life, Floriane’s character is probably a loved child. This is, in my opinion, the big line of demarcation between people. Those who were loved as children, and those who weren’t.
The constellation of characters
Aren’t the four young people in fact the strangers, and the farmer Theo the native son?
It’s really about the confrontation between the two worlds. Yes, Theo is deeply rooted in his native soil, but no longer has a grip on things. His farm has gone broke and his life is in ruins, whereas the four young people are well able to take over the roost.
It’s this conflict I wanted to portray, the fact that they are intruders entirely devoid of malevolent intent. Just as with the accident, where the apportion of guilt is not entirely clear. It’s the four young people rather than Theo who have a monopoly on the future. If a new generation is replacing the old one here, then it’s taking place very quietly, without a fight. More and more of the nest is being occupied and at some point it will be taken over completely, without confrontation. They won’t even meet one another. That is an underlying theme for me, which particularly occupied me on location. I don’t think the country in which I live is characterized by distinct parameters, we live in a much more diffuse environment. To portray people who vehemently fight for something they believe in would be false, since this kind of mentality certainly doesn’t set the tone of political life at the moment.
All four characters seem to be fleeing from something in their past, while with René there’s also the opposite tendency, the fight against his memory drop-outs, where he tries to hold onto things he’s experienced using photographs and sounds. That’s a subject that could occupy an entire film, yet you refer to it only in passing.
To put the memory loss thing in the foreground would have had serious consequences for the overall structure, because it would have determined the rhythm and intellectual stance of the whole film. The various conflicts all have a similar structure but quite different aspects. I didn’t want to lose sight of the fact that this is very much a kaleidoscopic approach. Even after the first few screenings I noticed that each member of the audience had a different attitude to the characters. A lot of people liked one couple, and couldn’t believe that others preferred the other couple. Some thought Laura and René were more sympathetic whereas others felt they were just prattling on all the time and liked the other two because they were more straight forward. That’s exactly what I intended! That applies to the narrative structure of the film too. At the beginning René comes across, at the very least, as rather strange. Later we discover his warmth and sincerity. We in fact accompany this character on a long journey. Or perhaps Marco strikes you as the most likable. He has a sense of humor and a lightness of touch that has a high level of appeal for men (in my experience), without them perhaps wanting to admit it in retrospect.
That’s why I find Marco’s character intriguing because, of the four, he is the most torn. Naturally René has the strongest conflict in objective terms, but that is biologically determined, whereas it’s Marco who actually has the greatest area of conflict – between his own demands on himself and what he represents. He is the one who has most difficulties with his own self-image. Clearly he has some sort of yearning, but he is unable to put it into words. Heino Ferch has managed to ensure that this character always has a twinkle in the eye, even when he’s behaving like a complete idiot. So for a long time he remains someone who you keep on forgiving. My heart goes out to people like that.
Landscapes/Emotions
What role does the snow play?
What fascinates me so much about snow is that on the one hand it always imparts a feeling of innocence to a landscape, a land with an unblemished surface. On the other hand, what we found was this landscape scarred with glacier crevices. The craziest thing about it is that it looks so flat and smooth when you see it from above (from a helicopter), but when you see it up close wounds seem to open up everywhere as if the skin of the earth has been torn and injured. It couldn’t have been a more fitting metaphor as a setting for the characters in WINTER SLEEPERS. In contrast, the snow has this strange twofold function of blinding as well as reflecting. That the four people barricade themselves inside this dark mountain villa indicates that they find the outside world too hostile or stressful. But ultimately it offers no real refuge. One always stands out clearly against the white glare of the snow. That is extremely burdensome if you are not entirely aware of where your personal boundaries are. The main characters in WINTER SLEEPERS might be looking for this challenge but at the same time they hole up in this dark mountain villa, whose elaborate decoration is an ideal means of distraction and retreat from the bleakness of the clarity outside. And from the pragmatic and sober demands that are symbolized. The villa is like a cocoon from which the caterpillars are only very reluctant to emerge, and perhaps they won’t at all. The contradictions that characterize our heroes are also sharply mirrored in the very spaces through which they move.
Structure
The symbolic montage at the start of the film comes full circle at the end. In a certain way, however, it’s also a film in itself. Can this be seen as an attempt to draw the audience into the events, perhaps even to deliberately put them off the scent through the use of suspenseful music?
That was certainly at the back of my mind, but in fact I wanted to develop a microcosmic structure for the whole thing. During the opening titles we see the route the characters travel, how they come together. Afterwards they are torn apart and individually introduced with all their conflicts and problems. At the end a noose is drawn tight, where I build up the suspense without, however, using any particular effects. Suspense is created far more by getting closer and closer to the characters, so that the noose is tightened as fate slowly takes its course.
The slow unfolding of this film was very important to me, where the tension slowly mounts. I couldn’t have maintained the pace of the first twenty minutes, nor would I have wanted to. That would have made it a completely different film.
The compression of the opening is very filmic, with the montage and the frequent use of dissolves. Was all this already in the screenplay? Alfred Hitchcock always emphasized that for him the film was in effect made when the script was written. Whereas other directors shoot a lot of footage and the film first takes shape in the cutting room.
I’m more in the Hitchcock mould – everything is planned out. I plan the whole film with the storyboard. But the work with the actors was also particularly critical in this area because there were several characters of equal weight who didn’t fit into some good-guy/bad-guy scheme. That takes time. And there are many things in this area that you can’t put your finger on. This can also be very productive if, for example, you discover during the process that someone has something quite different to offer, and you decide to work on that. With DEADLY MARIA everything adhered strictly to a plan – which had, however, a very hermetic construction. For WINTER SLEEPERS it would have been fatal to work like that. But for me it was of course far more difficult, because I tend to set strict parameters for things that I film. In the final analysis I see this as giving the actors a great deal of freedom in which to move, for if someone wants to do something different, they have to have a reason for doing so. That raises the level of the debate. In the end, within that cosmos you are trying to portray, you will in fact have more possibilities. Always having this structural sweep under control, the rhythm, the timing, how things should be dramatically resolved, how fast a camera movement should be, that’s the work that takes place on the set. You have your base model and then you can think about whether you want to deviate from that, whether something else might be possible.
Blueprints of life
When René and Laura go ice-skating on one occasion they play the game ‘ten big catastrophes’, what could be the ten most awful things that could happen to you. Having children is named as one of the very worst, along with a number of other things that become reality by the end of the film.
With this Laura is articulating the fear people have of leading a completely normal life. Everybody imagines that they have to be something special, however the reality is rather different. The film’s ending is very ambivalent. I find it fascinating, with most people I know, their lives do tend to turn out quite normal in the end. Everything repeats itself, even if in modified fashion. In this banal process of repetition something very basic is revealed. The emphasis on the cyclical, however, also creates a certain irritation because – with the exception of Marco’s fall – I show very everyday things, even if I put them together in an exaggerated context. The intimate moment that takes place at the end of the film was quite important for me after the big sweep of events. But the idea of the film is also not to bring everything to an end. This is a film that doesn’t end and so the story must continue, things are brought full circle but the stories go on. The child’s face in the final image gives us the feeling that life goes on.
