filmportal.de




		Source: DIF

		Christian Petzold

Christian Petzold was born September 14, 1960, in Hilden, as the oldest of three sons. He grew up in Haan, where he went to school and finished his high school degree in 1979. After finishing civil service, Christian Petzold went to Berlin in 1981 and started to study German studies and dramatics at Freie Universität Berlin. After his graduation in 1989, Petzold continued to study at Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb). During his studies, Christian Petzold worked as an assistant director for Hartmut Bitomsky and Harun Farocki – who contributed to all of Petzold's later feature films – and worked as a film critic for several newspapers and magazines.

After several short films, including "Süden" and "Das warme Geld", Petzold finished his graduation film for dffb, "Pilotinnen", in 1994. The film production company Schramm Film Koerner & Weber participated in the production of "Pilotinnen", and Petzold continued to collaborate with the production company.

In 2000, Petzold followed his critically praised TV movies "Cuba Libre" and "Die Beischlafdiebin" with the movie production "Die innere Sicherheit" ("The State I Am In"). Besides the German movie award in Gold for best film, the intense drama about a young adolescent and her parents who are wanted as terrorists won numerous awards and finally turned Christian Petzold into one of the most influential filmmakers of contemporary German cinema.

	“Films that deal in certainties are boring”

Christian Petzold and Nina Hoss talk to filmportal.de about their new film “Yella” and discuss the visual identity of venture capitalism and how to peg washing on the line.

filmportal.de: “Yella” is your third joint project so far. What makes your working relationship special?

Christian Petzold: It’s never static; it’s something that keeps evolving. It goes back to 2000 when a project I was working on at the time had been shelved and ZDF wanted me to come up with another proposal at short notice. I decided to go for a short story that I’d written with Harun Farocki and I adapted the material, which formed the basis of “Toter Mann” [“Something to Remind Me”]. The story revolved around a woman who seeks revenge for her murdered sister, and the producers asked who should play the lead. Off the top of my head, I said “Nina Hoss”, even though I’d never seen any of her films, just an interview on a talk show that really impressed me. “Perfect!” said Hanns Jahnke, the guy at ZDF, and after that there was no going back. (Petzold and Hoss laugh.) At the time, I didn’t know anything about Nina’s acting or how she worked. When we started rehearsing, she wrote everything down and it drove me to distraction. I couldn’t understand what anyone would want with all those notes. On the fi rst day of fi lming, we were in Berlin and Nina was rehearsing a really straightforward scene. All she had to do was walk for a few minutes as Leyla, but it was a real eye-opener. The scene was charged with all the emotion of the character’s predicament. I’d never seen anything like it – from then on everything went brilliantly.

How did you bring out the nuances in the individual scenes?

NH: With the sleeping scenes, it took us a while to realize that Yella had to lie in exactly the same position and wake up in the same way – she never sleeps deeply. We needed to find a way of showing that, so we thought about what it’s like to wake up suddenly after falling asleep on a train, and we had the idea that waking up for Yella would be like spluttering to the surface – like drowning and coming up for air. These sorts of things are details, tiny details that probably aren’t noticeable unless you’ve seen the film several times, but they’re there for a reason. A lot of the time, we didn’t figure out how to tackle them until after the rehearsals when we were actually filming.
CP: In some ways, Yella sleeps in a kind of “recovery position”. We needed to find a way of sleeping that also conveyed an enormous amount of tension or even death; a kind of violent immersion. It worked until we got to the scene where she sleeps with Philip. We tried all kinds of solutions. It’s a scene where the tension drops away – the morning after a night of passion – but we needed to show the threat of death. Deciding these things takes time, but I think it’s worth it because you finish up with something new, something you hadn’t previously thought of.




	Source: DIF, Photo: Horst Martin

	Christian Petzold and Nina Hoss talking to filmportal.de



		How long did it take to rehearse the individual scenes? CP: In some cases, we spent a long time rehearsing. There’s a scene where Yella is in a hotel room and calls the information line to get train times from Hanover to Wittenberge. We probably rehearsed for an hour and a half – and that was just for a single take. NH: The scene with the washing took an hour and a half as well. CP: A producer would tell you that a scene like that takes less than twenty minutes to fi lm, but hanging out the washing isn’t “just” a background activity – it’s something very ordinary, very routine, and that’s precisely why it needs to be rehearsed. Moments of slippage – and moments of slippage are crucial to “Yella” – don’t become apparent unless what goes before is normal and routine. We went through the same thing with Christian Redl who plays Yella’s father: he had to peel oranges with the same routineness that Yella hangs out the laundry. He’s peeled a thousand oranges, but on that particular morning he’s peeling the last orange before his daughter leaves home. He stops peeling, and when he stops peeling, it’s important that the slippage is already present; it shouldn’t have to be staged. NH: The more time you spend rehearsing these details, the deeper your understanding of the character and the less time it takes to fi lm the other scenes, even if they’re objectively more difficult, because you know the role and you’ve managed to get close to the character. It makes the rest of the film a lot easier, so it’s a mistake to write it off as a waste of time. For the actor, it’s not a case of tying yourself down, but of maximising your freedom because you’re creating the character in these scenes. Nina, how do you prepare for a film like “Yella” where the character isn’t anchored in reality? NH: It’s really a case of forgetting that her life isn’t real. I have to keep it clear and simple, and assume that everything that happens to her, all the anomalies and oddities, are real. Everyone’s been through moments like that: you hear something, you’re confused for a moment, and you forget about it. Yella doesn’t grasp what’s happening to her until the very end, and it had to be the same for me as an actress. While I was playing her character, I had to treat everything that happened as real. CP: I think Nina’s right. Yella is running away from death, but also from dead relationships, dead landscapes, a dead-end life. She can’t afford to think. NH: She has to outrun death. If she stops to think, she´ll be caught. CP: Yella is constantly under an immense amount of pressure. It takes all her strength to cope with the things that happen to her – she’s struggling to keep her head above water in a literal sense. And for that reason, the viewer overlooks the peripheral anomalies such as the hotel rooms not being locked, or Yella’s lover peeling oranges in exactly the same way as her father – which, incidentally, is a layer of psychoanalytic complexity that only occurred to me afterwards. It summarizes in a single second the entire contents of Yella’s vision: she’s left town, she’s found a new man and he gives her the feeling of being at home – the feeling of homeliness that she was looking for when she phoned her father.




	Source: DIF, Photo: Horst Martin

	Christian Petzold and Nina Hoss talking to filmportal.de



		Christian, can you tell us a bit about the colours in the film? The use of red, for example, is particularly striking… CP: We didn’t have any kind of overarching plan. In my opinion, you can’t use a rigid theory of colours to make a fi lm. It’s too obvious and it doesn’t engage with the viewer; it tries to dictate an emotional response. I took my inspiration from a fi lm by Roger Corman that uses a lot of red, not as part of a rigorous theory of colour but as a leitmotiv throughout the fi lm. I was intrigued by how the red is somehow full of life and at the same time a symbol of death. In “Yella”, the idea was for the red blouse and red cars to convey the colour throughout the fi lm. It also has the effect of putting the spotlight on Yella. In the opening scenes when she goes back to Wittenberge, she doesn’t wear the red blouse because she’s trying not to be noticed, she doesn’t want to be seen. Later, she puts on the red blouse as if to signal that she’s starting another life, a life centred on her, a life she’s chosen for herself – she goes on the offensive. Harun Farocki regularly gets a writing credit on your films and you’ve previously cited his documentary about venture capitalism as one of the major infl uences on the making of “Yella”. Can you tell us about your working relationship? CP: I remember Harun once saying that he didn’t want to analyse our collaboration because it’s so easy. And it’s true – working with Harun is an easy, two-way process. For instance, I might send him whatever I’m working on – I usually start with a short story or a fragment of dialogue – and then I’ll drive over to see him and we’ll sit down or go for a walk and talk it over, and while we’re talking, we’ll keep adding bits to the plot. There’s a saying in the Rhineland, “vom Höckschen aufs Stöckschen”, which means to go from a bit of wood to a stick – to keep moving from one topic to the next. Letting our thoughts jump around like that is always a lot of fun, and by the time I get home I’ve already got a visual frame, a narrative framework that I can use to get a proper handle on the story. Harun’s documentaries have had a big infl uence on my work. In the case of “Toter Mann”, I was inspired by his work on call centres; in “Die Beischlafdiebin” [“The Bed Thief”], it was his documentary on job applicants. Harun is a whole lot more modern than me. I’d say I was a nineteenth-century writer – at least, that’s where my roots are – whereas Harun is more a James Joyce or a Wolfgang Koeppen. When I saw “Nicht ohne Risiko”, I realized that Harun was portraying a world that didn’t have a visual language; he was the fi rst to fi nd a visual form for the world of venture capitalism, and the images in the fi lm were very direct and not fi ctionalized in any respect. For Yella, it was an open space, a space she could move into – it didn’t exist in her head. She had no way of knowing what to expect.




	Source: DIF, Photo: Horst Martin

	Christian Petzold talking to filmportal.de



		Germany often appears unreal and ghostly in your films and some of your settings such as Potsdam Square in “Ghosts” seem dislocated from reality and history. Is Germany a place of ghosts? CP: In a sense, I think it is. Even when I was a teenager, I remember thinking, what’s everyone doing with their lives? Why do they live here? Like a lot of people, I grew up in a kind of overdeveloped no-man’s-Germany: not Berlin, not a cultural centre, not a big city or a hub, but a dormitory town with a pond, and a library, and benches where people sat in the evening, drinking beer and telling stories – a parochial Germany, a Germany parcelled into terraced houses and housing estates, unbelievably provincial. I’ve always been interested in what it means to grow up in that sort of place, to live to one side of the motorway, to fi nd your own way of seeing the world, to fi nd your own way of life – what it means to be seeking a place that belongs to you. There’s bound to be something of that in my characters – they’re always searching for something. Personally, I think films that deal in certainties are boring. Nina, you also star in Erica von Moeller’s new film “Hannah” about a woman who feels alienated from normal life. What draws you to this particular kind of role? NH: I’m interested in stories where the main characters are struggling with an inner confl ict, maybe struggling to achieve something or trying to come to terms with something and learning how to deal with it. There’s something inherently enigmatic about them because they don’t know what’s going on either. I don’t want to look at a role and think, yep, I know exactly who I’m playing. I like to have lots of questions. The answers are less important; it’s more about setting my thoughts in motion, keeping alert, having an urge to fi nd out more about the character and the plot. If everything is obvious from the outset, the character doesn’t hold much appeal.




	Source: DIF, Photo: Horst Martin

	Hinnerk Schönemann and Nina Hoss in "Yella"



		Do you have plans to work together again? CP: Yes, we start filming in April. The idea for the project came while we were shooting “Yella” near Wittenberge. I was looking for a bridge that would work for the scene with the accident, and I ended up in a part of Saxony-Anhalt called Jerichower Land. The East subscribes to a kind of “lighthouse” policy where towns are supposed to function as economic units and the countryside is given over to waste land. As soon as you leave the main centres, everywhere looks derelict and abandoned. It was really noticeable in this particular area. It gave me the idea for a story about a constellation of characters, a kind of “social lighthouse” consisting of two men and a woman who enter into a professional and sexual relationship – a bit like another fi lm that made a big impression on me, Visconti’s “Ossessione”. “Ossessione” starts with a couple, then a third person comes along, and the constellation gives rise to sexual desire, but also distrust and disloyalty. I’m calling my next film “Jerichow” and it takes its inspiration from “Ossessione”. It’s about a crime of passion.

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filmportal.de-Interview with Nina Hoss and Christian Petzold