As Berlinale Silver Bear winner Afire (trailer) launches across North America, director Christian Petzold's always-on mind is already on his next two projects. He spoke to us about wildfires, European summer films and which actress will be in his next film. Full video interview here, plus a teaser:
Jutta Brendemuhl: Dear Christian Petzold, you are in New York, I am in Toronto. What connects us both right now are the very near and threatening effects of massive forest fires. That's also the haunting background noise of your new film Roter Himmel (literally Red Sky), Afire – on the one hand a wonderfully breezy summer romance, on the other an eerie contemporary drama. Tell us how this came together for you as a writer: the love story against the backdrop of a literally life-threatening environment, the emotional and the real fire.
Christian Petzold: I thought we’ve had hundreds of years of summer stories – some tragic, some comedic, but they would always exist; there would always be people who on a summer day would try to become someone, and we watch them in that process. But standing in a burnt forest in Turkey, I had the feeling that maybe soon that would be gone, there might be no more summer films. If you have no more earth, no more forests, no more clearings and no more dreams and nights, then we have nothing to tell.
JB: These four actors who portray Leon, Felix, Nadja, and Devid couldn’t be more perfect as an ensemble, how they dance around each other but also have these moments of youthful forlornness and searching. Before your Berlinale premiere, I
asked your actor Langston Uibel how the casting went and how he thought he got the role, but he didn’t quite want to comment. So I am asking you how you composed this constellation of Thomas Schubert, Paula Beer, Langston Uibel and Enno Trebs. You had the script but then, as you described, a lot was co-created as you went along. Was it just serendipity, did you feel your way through that, was one role immediately clear and the others joined around that, how did that happen?
CP: Paula Beer was a given for me, all others weren’t, except Matthias Brandt, that was also clear from the start. We knew each other from Transit.
Our casting agent Simone Baer was still alive, and now the film is dedicated to her after she died on January 16. The beauty of working with Simone was not that we invited actors to the casting but that I would go over to her office. She had a huge table, there were litres of coffee and a big screen. We would start thinking about what kinds of characters would spend a summer vacation together. We watched and listened to different actors on DVD. What Simone was really good at was imagining ensembles. She never just looked for a single actor but always checked who could play with someone else. “Those guys could rub against each other…” So we listened. I never “cast” – that is the casting. We saw Langston and I loved him in a series by Maria Schrader
. He had a small role, in a kitchen, and he was so present and shy at the same time, I really liked that. He speaks so beautifully, so carefully. He can be so enthusiastic and young but at the same time already adult. That's generally something I like, with Paula, with all the characters: They are very young but they can appear 10 years older in a second.
JB: Let's talk about the new trilogy (while this one isn’t finished yet) about 'ruinous families.' You have described how you have almost conjured up Afire from a Covid fever. How did your focus shift to families, a phase of life that you haven’t dealt with yet in your films. What attracts you to families?
CP: This insanely beautiful day of filming Afire, filming this group of people at a table, sitting together, communicating with each other, with more conversation underneath that communication, to be able to hurt someone without words or being hurt – I loved that. Then I thought about how I am always interested in things in the moment of dissolution. Often, as things disappear, they once again show all their grandezza in exactly that moment of disappearance. We realize, oh shoot, we missed it. We throw away things, and at the moment of throwing them away we think, darn – we could have made something out of this. We throw away relationships and friendships and realize in the moment of parting what potential was left. That does not only apply to families, I am concerned with the larger community: trade unions as well as families, also religious communities. They intrigue me right now because they used to offer protection, a safe space to withdraw from the world but at the same time understand the world; a place where one would experience solidarity. These groups are currently dissolving. The family dissolves, unions dissolve and are no longer the big rallying point of the workers. That's what interests me right now, and the next film is about a family who one last time expends all their strength to protect its members. The film after that will probably be a film about the end of a female trade unionist.
JB: While everything seems to come and go around in your films, it sounds as if this is harking back (and I don’t mean this as ‘going backwards’) to the films you made with Harun Farocki, where you looked at the world of work; that will be exciting to see you revisit.
CP: Right!
interview by Jutta Brendemühl
More in our video interview.
image courtesy Berlinale, 2023
