Christoph Hochhäusler

Dreileben is a gripping new trilogy from three of Germany’s most acclaimed directors, showing the events surrounding a killer’s escape into East German woodland from radically different points of view.

Christian Petzold’s Dreileben 1: Beats Being Dead seems to be an unknowable volatile summer romance between a rich boy and refugee Bosnian girl, till it takes a nightmarish turn. Dominik Graf’s Dreileben 2: Don’t Follow Me Around focuses on a psychologist brought in to track the killer, but is more interested in her boozy, talky stay with an old female friend and rival.

Finally, Christoph Hochhäusler’s Dreileben 3: One Minute of Darkness – which screened at the BFI London Film Festival last week – brings the hunted, tormented killer centre-stage. In whatever order you see them, nothing is quite what it seems.

Hochhäusler is one of the leading lights of the ‘Berlin School’ of slow, contemplative cinema, and critic and co-publisher of Revolver, inspired by Cahiers du Cinema, in which he’s passionately debated what German cinema should be. Dreileben is one attempt at an answer. Hochhäusler sat down with LWLies after his film’s UK premiere at the LFF to talk about fairy tales, facelifts and German TV’s nightmare vision of England.

LWLies: How did Dreilben come about?

Hochhäusler: Actually the whole thing started by invitation. The director of the Berlin Film School wanted us to discuss the ‘Berlin school’ on stage. He wanted Dominik [Graf] in because Dominik was an outspoken critic of this undeclared movement. And Dominik didn’t have time. And so we agreed to do it online, and we wrote each other emails over the course of two years. They were about everything – what film can do, how cinema has changed and why, and what we should do about it. What hopes we have with cinema. That was very inspiring, and full of revelations. And eventually Christian [Petzold] suggested to continue that on film, and we all liked that idea. We met and talked about what it could be.

When you say you talked about everything, do you mean more than cinema?

Of course. Sometimes it would be about literature, or real life. But what I find so intriguing about cinema is that it is about everything – or can be. It’s about movement and sound and faces, and the building of spaces and stories.

When you were heading towards making your film, what questions or conclusions were you working with? What did you think needed changing in your filmmaking – and German cinema?

Well, after I make a film, I have the feeling that it’s a ruin of my ambitions. So when the next project is coming up in my mind, I am trying to improve myself, to do it differently this time and to change everything. This is at least the desire in me, and it might not be so different – but I am trying! I tried to use a much more subjective camera, to have a more elaborate set-up, and be much more sensual.

Did the three of you continue to talk as you made your films? How did you connect it all up?

Well of course we had meetings, and agreed on the script. But the momentum of a production is enormous. You don’t have the time to share your thoughts on filmmaking while making it. So we became everyone on his own. And then the big thing was when we actually saw each other’s films for the first time, at the premiere [at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival].

And what did you think when you saw it all joined up?

I was afraid that it wouldn’t work. Because the films are so independent, I was afraid that they wouldn’t add up to more than that the sum of the parts. I had a pleasant surprise at the premiere. My feeling was that they enrich themselves. And somehow it adds the dimension of memory also, and time. I think it would be very interesting to see them not in one day, but in the course of months. Because the films will change in your memory. I think they partly succeeded. We were very polite when we met afterwards. I think it was too soon to say what we really think.

Watching Beats Being Dead, there’s an awful murder. Then watching your film you think, did that happen? And who is this killer really?

It’s like you have three witnesses, and they would have very different stories to tell, because they don’t know about each other, and they have very different lives. I find that very intriguing, that we can never be sure about anything. We have to construct reality, it’s not just there.

What was the importance of where you shot, in the Thuringian forest? What did that give your film – and the whole project?

First of all, the place Dreileben was imaginary. I drew a map of what we needed like a board game – a hill and the woods and the hospital. And so we had that on a piece of paper, and then we gave that to the location scout, to have a look! And we looked in Thuringen because of Christian’s memories. His parents are from there. They were DDR refugees, but he returned with his parents for summer vacations. So he had very intense memories, and not very pleasant ones actually, of this area. And then going there was very interesting to me. I tried hard to incorporate as much as possible of this particular place into my film. Lots of settings and incidents came to me there.

What was special about it?

For example, the shooting range. The strange sport of shooting, I hadn’t seen it ever before in Germany, and there it’s a big tradition. And of course the way the woods are came to be very important. But also some minor characters. I always try to integrate things I discover.

Your film In This Very Moment was a sort of version of Hansel & Gretel. And here again, there’s a fairy tale element to a film about someone in the woods, becoming a monster.

I’m actually really infatuated with fairy tales.

Is that from your childhood?

Yes, it is. My father used to tell us fairy tales a lot, and Biblical stories. But also, the question is always, what can a story actually do? And I think it has to be a device that, once you have to put it into your heart [striking his chest], becomes enormous. It’s like poetry. You can’t decode poetry without your personal memory. It needs your imagination, and that’s the same for the fairy tale. It’s usually very brief. Some of the most famous fairy tales are two, three pages. And they contain a lot of irrational, strange things. And you really have to connect it with your imagination. That’s what I like. They’re stories which are rich with experience, but you have to translate them. They need you. And I think cinema should function in the same way. Cinema needs the audience, to come to life. Otherwise it’s just pictures and production values.

Those sorts of stories light up something primeval inside.

Exactly. Or there are two components of explosives. And the story’s one, and the other one must be inside you. Because otherwise there’s no explosion! [Laughs]

The social context about the recent past in East Germany in these films seems to work almost like archaeology. In Dominik’s film there’s wallpaper going back to when a house was a worker’s collective, and in your film the photographs that are discovered at the end.

Yeah. What I really like about this place is that it hasn’t been treated very nicely by time. Which means that all the layers of history are there, there’s no fresh paint over it. That’s something I really appreciate, if you can read history.

Do you like that process of decay – of time working on something?

Not for its own sake. But I’m interested in cities or people or things that don’t deny their story. I’m totally in horror of plastic surgery. Because why would you erase the book of your life, where you can read everything – the beauty and the cruelties? If you erase it, there’s nothing left to explore – visually, because I’m a filmmaker. There might be some stories in the voice left…

People tend to look like monsters the more they have plastic surgery, don’t they?

Yes. It’s monstrous to erase your past.

One of the worst things here is heritage cinema, giving the idea that everyone in Britain lives in a country house with Hugh Grant. You’ve said that in Germany, the equivalent is Hitler and the Baader-Meinhof group – they’re the signifiers that ‘this is German’, to get the film exported…

Yeah, it’s ethnic stereotyping – branding cinema. It’s funny, that makes me think of one of the most successful German TV formats, which is an imaginary Britain, where everyone speaks German, but they say ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ and ‘Goodbye’ and things like that. It’s shot in England and it’s… unbearable! [Laughs] It’s terrible! It’s this dream of upper-class melodrama, like a cheap version of The Remains of the Day.

That sounds like a lot of the films we make here.

It’s true! It could be very interesting as a source for horror.

Are there things you can draw from Dreileben about German people now?

I think so. In Dominik’s film, he’s doing sketches of this provincial restaurant, and the way he shows them uncomfortably having dinner there, I liked very much. That really could happen. Little things. For example, Dominik shoots all the signposts, so you get an idea of a specific place. Christian’s is looking more for a movieland. There are lots of German details, but in the end it’s quite artificial. He could shoot it in the studio, if the money was there.

What are the things in yourself, and that you see around you in Germany, that you would like to express? I know you have thought about what your cinema should be, and what German cinema should be. What notions are swirling around in your head?

Well I always thought that you should make films about things that you know. That doesn’t mean they have to be realistic. They don’t have to be about German forests! But if I watch a film about Britain, I would want to see something that is specific. My favourite British director is Alan Clarke, and the way he expressed himself was very British, from my point of view. Of course, his subjects were closely based on reality, but not always. He did some fantastic stuff also like Pender’s Fen, with the last king of pre-Roman England and meeting Elgar, all in the present day. It’s not his skinhead stuff, it’s so tender. If you’re very precise you can be very universal. I would rather see something that’s really precise about something than beautifully general. We don’t need to look at even more advertising. But I like all kinds of films – very, very different films from the whole of history – from Raoul Walsh to Apichatpong Weerasethakul, or Michael Mann to Vincente Minelli. So it’s quite difficult to define what has to happen. But stories should engage the spectator in a way that is endangering their perception of life. That’s something good cinema is doing. Endangering our securities.

So as with fairy tales, it wakes something up in you?

Right. I think all art should be a tool in your head to discuss or understand what’s going on. I think that’s the question behind every kind of storytelling that’s worthwhile. What is real, what has actually happened? And some will give you metaphor, like the vampire, which is a metaphor for a certain aspect of our lives which I find contemporary. And others will try to do a much closer, almost documentarian look at what’s happening. That’s fine too, there’s no right or wrong. The effect has to be that you can use it in your life, that you can take the fiction to understand or feel something better. To sharpen your idea of the world. That’s it.

Can you remember the first time a film did that to you?

I have to say that I started watching films very late. I grew up without television, and my parents always thought that film is a waste of time, and that impressed me a lot. And then, aged 17 or so, I started watching films. And one of the first massive impressions was Wild at Heart by David Lynch. Because it was so awful and beautiful at the same time, and I was so confused. How can that be, that someone who smashes a head at the beginning can bring me to keep watching? At that time I was quite strict. I would have said that, ‘You shouldn’t do this.’ This confusion was very productive.