In March, we debriefed Berlin filmmaker Konstantin Bock in our series "The Making of" on being on location and interviewing contemporary witnesses for his feature film "The Ice King" ... when
Covid-19 struck and halted that process. Two months later, the team has a treatment in hand and is moving ahead (* special event announcement at the bottom!):
Konstantin, congrats on your 50+page treatment! For all of us who aren’t making films: Where’s a treatment in the process of filmmaking, what does it do?
Thank you so much! It was an incredibly important step for us, in the process of figuring out the best way to tell our story. A treatment is like a short story;
we tell the story in a condensed way but also try to capture the tone we envision for the movie and sometimes even hear our characters talk. It's the first time we've put the whole film on paper, with beginning, middle and end -- and all of a sudden, it has become really visible.
Essentially a treatment is more of a selling tool, a document you'd send around to show other stakeholders what the film will be like --its tone, style, structure, and especially the character outlines-- and convince them that what you're up to is thought-out and support-worthy. But in our case it was also super useful
for us, because it gave us an opportunity to structure our vast research from our time in Iserlohn into a narration and also figure out the elements we’re still missing.
Your treatment starts with the words “This story actually happened.” As you’re about to write the book for your film, what does that interrelation between “based on true events”, narrative interpretation and cinematic fiction mean?
It's important for us to stay close to historical facts while telling a fictional story and creating an original and unique film of its own. We're not making a documentary after all, but we do want to stay truthful to this incredible true story. One thing we did for example was to combine certain real-life characters, because you can't overload the film with too many people, so we basically merged some of them. We also took some liberty with the chronology of certain events for dramatic purposes, but actually less than you’d think -- the story develops pretty dramatically on its own!
Essentially, using a historical event allows us to mirror our current situation and invite the audience to laugh and reflect about the times we're in. The combination of the sports world tied to oil money is as explosive today as it was thirty years ago, if you look at how modern slavery is building the FIFA World Cup 2022 and its stadium in Qatar for example.
Another phrase that jumped out at me in your new treatment that I hadn’t connected with your story up to now is political satire. Tell us more…
"The thousands who crowd sports stadiums to view, applaud and laugh are foolish people who have failed to carry out the activity themselves.“
Muammar al-Gaddafi, author of the "Green Book"
The tone of our narrative is absurd, but not comedic in a classical sense -- the humour lies in the absurdity, without the characters becoming silly, stereotypical caricatures. For team president Heinz everything is at stake: his reputation, his finances and of course his great love -- the club. We want to tell the story of his love and pain with intensity and directness in order to feel the force of this dilemma without making fun of him -- it’s the only way for this Faustian pact to become relatable.
The political satire lies in the fact that Heinz gets condemned for his actions at a time when the West German government has quite a lot of business and oil connections with Libya -- that’s the hypocrisy! Members of the German parliament even visited a symposium in Libya about Gaddafi’s Third Universal Theory, basically a sales conference for his in itself bizarre Green Book. A lot of people were trying to get money from him. Again, I don’t need to reemphasize how history is repeating itself right now and oil money doesn’t seem to lose its attraction -- regardless of human rights violations.
Last time we spoke, you were directly impacted by the Covid-19 restrictions in that you had to stop live interviews. What does the Covid-19 situation mean for your timeline and plans right now?
We'd love to go back to Iserlohn as soon as possible to continue our work there. In the meantime we're trying to stay in touch with people over the phone. The next step for my co-writer Stefanie and me is to break down the treatment into scenes and make a scene-by-scene overview. Basically a list that allows us to see the whole film in all its elements, play around with its structure and find out what elements are missing before starting the actual script-writing process.
Also, thanks to the extra time at home, we’re taking advantage of all the incredible talks and masterclasses --like
Sundance Co//ab or
The Film Stage-- that are available for free online and are an amazing source of inspiration and reflection.
interview by
@JuttaBrendemuhl
*Canadian Cinema Editors have invited Oscar-nominated editor Dody Dorn, who has worked with Christopher Nolan, Ridley Scott, Patty Jenkins and others, for an online conversation on June 14 with Konstantin Bock about his editing of "Capernaum" (which plays on Netflix). Bock will provide an in-depth look at the editing process behind director Nadine Labacki’s film "Capernaum" (“Chaos”), which won the Prix du Jury at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival and was an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film. He will take the audience into the unique process behind the film (with mostly non-actors and an improvised script), which was edited chronologically on set in Beirut.
image from the treatment of "The Ice King" courtesy Konstantin Bock
