“Berlin is over-shot”: Designer Amler on imagining the city

Hotel rooms are like little stages, concentrated human emotion. People spend time in hotels, alone or in pairs, for a variety of reasons. They find a refuge, anonymity, a place to do things they can’t do at home. I feel strangely secure here. Stories immediately begin growing in my mind ... I’m not an exaggeratedly esoteric type, but I believe that rooms store vibrations. A little bit of the people who’ve been here always remains. Let’s take this drawer here...

...from a curved, white Art Nouveau bedside table.
Have a whiff! Film always needs time to get somewhere. It’s faster with music. And it’s fastest with your nose. Here, I have a thousand pictures at once: It smells like my grandparents’ dark pantry, like the wet coat of my grandfather, who was a hunter. Here you can also see little particles embedded, did someone stick a needle in there and break it off?

Films and photo shoots have also taken place in this B&B.
I wouldn’t want to film here. Filming can destroy a place like this. Of course, as a guest, as a filmmaker, you try to behave well and do as little damage as possible. Still, you’re intervening in a grown organism.

What changes do you have to make to turn actual reality into life-like film reality?
Tough question. Let’s take MERCY by Matthias Glaser as an example. It’s about an emigrant couple whose marriage is shattered and who want to make a fresh start in Norway. The house we found on a fjord near Hammerfest was perfect – from the outside. But we noticed that inside, its energy was completely wrong. The family that lived in the house was happy; that permeated the house: lots of pictures, warm colours, lots of wood. We could never have gotten that out. The feeling was just too optimistic for us.

What do you do in that case?
We had to recreate the interior of the house in Studio Hamburg anyway, because of the film subsidies, which was convenient. I darkened the surfaces, encapsulated the children’s room, all the characters were isolated. The Norwegian family visited us, went into the studio and was surprised: That’s supposed to be our house? When the film was screened at the Berlinale, I was asked: Did you have to do something to the house? People thought we had shot it on location. I consider that praise for my work.

Do you sometimes have to exaggerate the design in order to have a realistic effect?
There are films where the will to design goes too far for me, like AMELIE. Every shot is so perfect that you could print it and hang it on the wall like a postcard. If it’s only about beautiful pictures, then for me the content is lost, and you lose the characters it’s actually all about.

What’s your approach?
Focusing can help make a character believable, introduce a dynamic. One that you can see at first glance: Who are we dealing with here? For example, Toni Hamady’s apartment in 4 Blocks. On the one hand, it’s an apartment in a pre-World War II building, which at first glance doesn’t suit the main character...

... this hulking Arab gangster teddy bear...
At the same time, the rooms have gravity, warmth, a sense of security with their rich wall colours, the Arabic calligraphy, the opulence. I tried to make the character understandable that way. Toni says at one point, “I want to be more German than all the Germans” – actually he wants to get out of his gangster world. The apartment reveals Toni’s origins and his longing.

The counterpart to it is the apartment of Abbas, Toni’s gangster brother: cold, smooth, adrift, like the character himself.
Right. Abbas lives in an apartment that might as well be a gambling hall or a nightclub. That was a loft on Mariannenstrasse in Berlin-Kreuzberg. We installed as many fluorescent tubes and LEDs as we could: under furniture, behind walls... Actually, we wanted to shoot at the Carloft on Reichenberger Strasse, where residents can take their car into their apartments. My idea was: The first scene we see is a glass coffee table, Abbas snorts a line, lifts his billiard ball head – and behind him is his white Mercedes, brightly lit. We got that apartment, but three days before the shoot got the news from the property management that the owner wasn’t allowed to rent it to us! I needed to find a new location in three days.

How did you find the new location?
Film-Parship! A location agency. I go to them when I can’t find anything on my own or when something unexpected happens, like in this case. You basically are given a picture from the files and if it fits, you’re in luck. But of course it always feels better to go searching yourself.

MERCY, 4 BLOCKS – you seem to have a preference for heavy stuff.
Yeah, I don’t feel comfortable with comedy. The most unfortunate time I’ve ever had in the film business was 15 years ago when my oldest daughter was born. I needed a job in Berlin quick so I could be with my family, so I worked on a sitcom that was two years of worries and grief. It just didn’t move me. At the age of 9I was reading stories by Edgar Allan Poe, the first films I inhaled were old Universal horror flicks like FRANKENSTEIN. When I was 14, I discovered TAXI DRIVER and ERASERHEAD. The really good screenplays are about people who have problems.

How do you develop your designs?
I can’t operate a computer, so I make drawings, draw over photos with felt-tip pens, build 1:50 scale cardboard models with little people, which the director can then implement. I studied in Babelsberg under Alfred Hirschmeier, the great Defa production designer, he was my guru. No project goes by without my thinking of his serenity and precision.

What did you learn from him?
The feel for approaching a space, grasping and shaping it for the film. There was an exercise we did: You have a chair, a door, a window: distribute them in the room! If I make the window very small, put the chair in the middle, directly opposite the door: confrontation. Or the chair is in the corner, facing the wall: retreat. You can tell a lot of the story with these basics; you don’t need a huge budget. Sometimes a small budget is better because it forces you to be creative.

The nice thing about these realistic Berlin series is that the filming locations find themselves, right?
Of course, Berlin offers endless locations. But I always try to find special places. It’s great when you walk through the city, see a house from the outside and imagine what it might look like inside. Then you ring the bell, talk the people into letting you in and find exactly the space you need. But that requires a lot of time, preparation and acceptance. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to shoot in Berlin. For one thing, everything’s been used, has been on camera a thousand times. Also there are huge constraints, there’s resident protection, costs are too high for public institutions... When I came here 20 years ago, Berlin was an Eldorado, you could do anything. But that was a long time ago. The people are less and less enthusiastic about it, you can tell. Berlin is over-shot. After the second season of 4 BLOCKS I’ll probably take a lengthy break from the big city.

Unlike actors and directors, production designers are hardly noticed by the audience even though they have a major influence on a film. Does that bother you?
Not at all. I’m happy to be unseen. I prefer to let other people answer the questions. Actually, I’m a loner; I’d prefer it if I could make a film with only five people. I also rarely go to the Berlinale. But it’s nice to see a movie you’ve been involved in, and get the audience’s reaction.


abridged and translated with permission; by Jan Oberländer, Der Tagesspiegel, "Berlin ist überdreht“, 9 March 2018
09.03.2018

Image: 4 BLOCKS: Toni smoking. courtesy TNT Series