Before
Christmas, Berlin filmmaker Konstantin Bock told us about his pre-Berlinale travel plans in our series "The Making of" that
follows two German-Canadian film projects. Over the past months, Bock has made some important headway with the (true) story --featuring expensive Canadian NHL players-- of 1980s German hockey club owner Heinz Weifenbach who dreamt of making it big … with the help of a dictator.
Konstantin, you’re deep in research and finding a voice for writing the film. How is that going?
Screenwriter Stefanie Schmitz and I received a writing grant from the German Film Board (FFA) and immediately decided to pack our bags and move to Iserlohn, the small town in the Sauerland area of Germany where our story takes place. Previously, I had spent an entire evening on the phone with several people from Iserlohn and I realized that this is not something we can do remotely -- we really needed to be there, research and explore locally, we needed to become part of the social fabric there. Where did Heinz Weifenbach live? Who did he interact with? And who didn't want to interact with him?
Following from that insight we found that Heinz' environment needed to play a bigger part in the film than we had originally envisioned: small-town hustlers, local political quarrels and the determined dream of making it big in the German ice hockey league against all odds -- that's the foundation of our story, a scenario that quickly disintegrates when a Libyan terrorist, who seems to be their only solution against bankruptcy, enters the stage.
So for the first time in this process, you went "on location" to Iserlohn, the small town that hosts the hockey club at the centre of your story. How did that first encounter go and what did you take away for your setting and your characters?
Through this immersive research process, the story became much deeper, because we started to meet all these interesting characters that were either directly or indirectly connected to it. Everybody was so generous to share their experiences, stories, old photographs -- and hand-signed copies of Gaddafi’s Green Book with us. It was really powerful to visit the real locations where all of this happened: Being there, we realized how crazy it is that this little grey town in the middle of the Sauerland found itself wound up in an international conflict of that scale. We also got to feel how much ice hockey means to the people there. We met Herr and Frau Zietsch for example, who've had a club season pass for over 50 years, and we went to see our first game with them! But most importantly we got a sense of the people that surrounded Heinz Weifenbach: his friends, players, lawyers, advisors and enemies. Through that we became much closer to our protagonist.
Your subject matter is controversial and a difficult chapter for the club. How do you broach that sensitive history respectfully while trying to get what you need to make your film?
Understandably, the club has an ambivalent relationship with that part of their history. The fans really seem to be interested in the story, and anecdotes from "those crazy days" are still shared over a beer at the ice rink. At the same time, the club calls it "our darkest chapter".
What we found though --and this is the important thing to focus on for our story-- is that no matter what people's position on the questionable deal with Gaddafi, everyone we spoke to agreed that without Heinz and his tireless efforts to save the club back then, there wouldn't be any ice hockey in Iserlohn today.
You come out of theatre originally. How does that inform your storytelling, the way you write and develop your material?
The theatre work that I've done as a director together with Canadian performance company
Mammalian Diving Reflex and
Darren O'Donnell has always focused on people and social connections as material to create something. So much of the initial process there is spending time with people, creating connections, sharing experiences and doing extensive interviews. That's a big inspiration for what we're doing with our research in Iserlohn and how we're doing it, by immersing ourselves in this community.
None of us knew this check-in would involve a world of restricted travel, social distancing, isolation and delayed media production plans. What does the Covid-19 situation mean for your project right now?
For us the outbreak of Covid-19 meant that we actually needed to stop meeting people in Iserlohn face-to-face -- most of the people we met were in their late 50s to 70s, so they belong to the risk age group-- and eventually leave, to go back to our desks at home in Berlin and continue remotely and over the phone. It was the right thing to do, even though we were sad to leave. It was interesting to look at our film during those early stages of the pandemic, as a story about a group of people who wildly underestimated the disastrous consequences of their decisions, when a lot of people were still underestimating this virus --that’s definitely a perspective that the current situation has highlighted.
During our time in Iserlohn, we generated enough material through interviews and going through an extensive newspaper archive, covering the club's turbulent years from 1986-1993, that we feel good about structuring the story from home for now and putting all these fascinating puzzle pieces together…until we can return to Iserlohn.
interview by
@JuttaBrendemuhl
all images courtesy of Konstantin Bock during his first visit to the Iserlohn Roosters. The telephone in the last image was found in Weifenbach's office and is now in the
Industriemuseum Menden.
