Christian Schwochow

"In actual fact, I wanted to study Fine Art and Painting," recalls director Christian Schwochow who wasn’t one of those budding filmmakers one reads about who are spending their teenage years making "mini-masterpieces" with the aid of a super 8 or video camera. "I did all sorts of different things and spent night after night painting and drawing, he continues. I also played a lot of music, published a magazine for young people and acted in school plays." But the seed for his future career as a filmmaker was perhaps unknowingly sown when his German teacher in the 9th grade had the class make a version of "21 Jump Street" and Christian assumed the role of director.

"With time, somehow all the various strands came together in me wanting to be a director because I liked being the leader. It was always difficult for me to subordinate myself to other people’s ideas," Christian explains. "At the same time, what has always interested me is creating images and telling stories rather than the technical aspect of filmmaking."

However, due to the way film schools were structured at the time, he couldn’t apply to a film academy straight after leaving school. "Instead, I first went to work for radio and wrote comedy scripts and texts for news bulletins. Then there was my year doing alternative civilian service before I took up a short internship and then an editorial traineeship at the TV magazine program 'Polylux' for two years," Christian says.

When he applied to film school and was accepted at the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy at the age of 24, Christian wasn’t fazed by the prospect of actually directing films. "The detour through TV journalism was a great experience for me – I was one of the youngest TV reporters working in Germany – and I was able to make so many programs during my time at the TV station that I didn’t have any worries about producing in my first two years at film school."

"I had a lot of luck with my graduation film 'Novemberkind' ('November Child')," he recalls. Producer Nico Hofmann, who has been teaching at the Film Academy since 1995, showed the local public broadcaster SWR an exposé which Christian had written with his mother Heide, and commissioning editor Stefanie Groß immediately signaled her interest in coming onboard the project. "Although we had relatively little money for the shoot, everything just came together. There was a good omen: the film won lots of prizes and also worked in the cinema where it was seen by over 190,000 cinemagoers."

After such a successful collaboration with Groß and producer Jochen Laube, also a graduate of the Film Academy, Christian was happy to follow the adage of 'never change a winning team' for his second feature film "Die Unsichtbare" ("Cracks in The Shell"), which was produced with teamWorx and premiered in the Official Competition of the 2011 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

"I’ve been particularly impressed at the very intensive reactions to 'Die Unsichtbare' by audiences abroad," he says.  "The film seems to be showing somewhere every week since the premiere last summer."

As with his previous two films, the children’s film "Marta und der fliegende Großvater" and "Novemberkind", the screenplays were collaborative efforts with his mother Heide. But how do they divide up the work? "We usually go somewhere together to do some brainstorming on the ideas," he explains. "On 'Novemberkind' we rented a holiday flat in Thuringia to work on the story, while we discussed our ideas for 'Die Unsichtbare' as we were preparing the goose for Christmas lunch."

"Then we each go away and do our research before coming back and sitting in a room together and taking turns to talk and tap our ideas into the computer."

Meanwhile, his third feature project – an adaptation of Julia Franck’s novel "Lagerfeuer" which is set to go into production this autumn – has been largely written by Heide Schwochow. Christian has also been involved in another literary adaptation with teamWorx’s production of Uwe Tellkamp’s allegedly unfilmable novel "Der Turm" for the ARD network last year with a planned airing in late 2012.

"I read the book when it came out and was totally fascinated by the story," he recalls. "When I heard that there were plans to make a film version, I thought that would only be possible for TV and as a three-parter. Then, at the Berlinale last year, Nico Hofmann approached me with the project which was planned as a two-parter. I was fascinated at how the screenwriter Thomas Kirchner had managed to squeeze all of the material in this book into two parts. He succeeded in retaining the spirit of the original book and yet made it into something standing on its own and interpreted this all in a cinematic way. It is an intimate story about four members of a family who struggle to adopt a position and viewpoint in the last seven years of the GDR. I was interested in doing it because of the complexity and epic nature of the story which is also present in the film and gives it quite an unusual structure."

Asked if there is a common link between his three films – "Novemberkind", "Die Unsichtbare" and "Westen" ("Lagerfeuer") – Christian suggests that they are "all stories about searching, loss and re-discovery of one’s identity. And there is always a young woman in the lead role who is very clearly at the center. The search for an emotional basis in life is something common to all three films even if they are located in different kinds of worlds."

Schwochow finds it hard to answer the question of whether he might have role models among his filmmaking colleagues: "What I can say is that my friend Andreas Dresen is for me the most important filmmaker in Germany because he has, I think, found a way of being both radical and commercial in the way he tells his stories; his films really touch me because he is a great humanist. I am one of those people who look for a feeling of warmth in films and he is one of the directors who offers this. 'Halbe Treppe' ('Grill Point'), for example, is a film I always look at again before I start work on shooting a new film. 'Sturm' ('Storm') by Hans-Christian Schmid is also an important film for me, as is Jacques Audiard’s "Un Prophète" which I consider to be one of the greatest masterpieces of recent years.

Author: Martin Blaney