A year into our series "The Making of" Berlin director Konstantin Bock's
feature film "The Ice King", I caught up with Konstantin while he was in Venice in September —see the camper van they bought to drive down from Berlin— for the premiere of his husband, cinematographer Christopher Aoun's new feature "The Man Who Sold His Skin." The drama is directed by Kaouther Ben Hania, starring Monica Bellucci, and went on to win the Inclusion Award as well as Best Actor in the Orrizonti section. Bock also used the Venice Festival to promote "The Ice King”, which recently received script funding from the German Federal Film Board FFA.
Congratulations on securing major funding to move ahead towards pre-production for “The Ice King”! What will the fall bring?
We were very anxious to see how Covid-19 would affect the funding situation this year, and it’s true that the number of script submissions has gone up after the lockdown. So we were even more honoured to be among one of the selected projects to receive funding from the FFA to write our script. We applied with the treatment that we spoke about last time and got very encouraging feedback. As much as a treatment is a way for us to figure out the story,
it’s essentially a selling tool to present the project to other stakeholders, so we were excited that it sparked the same enthusiasm that we share for this incredible story. Now all we have to do is write it!
Let's revisit that ambitious and tenacious small town developer Heinz Weifenbach, your protagonist, then: How do you envision his journey?
One of the most prominent questions in (classic) dramatic writing is how your main character changes over the course of the story: What do they learn, how do they apply a new skill, and, essentially, how are they transformed at the end? With Heinz, that’s a bit tricky, because during our research people described him as staying ‘same ol’ Heinzi’ during this whole experience -- but of course we can imagine that hanging out with a dictator and being prosecuted by the Federal Minister of the Interior of West Germany at the time does leave a mark on someone! And that is what is interesting for us to explore psychologically: Did he change or did he just find "his final form" because the circumstances allowed it? Am I still a good human being even if my actions don't reflect it -- as long as I mean well? We are creating a drama not a documentary, so we can also depart from historic facts and create our own Heinz.
Talking about Heinz, tell us about the two women he lives with, Maxi und Renate.
We’re digging deeper into each of our characters right now because although the film seems fairly plot-driven, we’re more interested in delivering an intimate character study. After all, we didn’t fall in love with the sports or the politics of the project -- our hearts are with these fascinating characters who inhabit this wild narrative. Especially after meeting many of them in person, we grew very fond of each of them. Heinz unfortunately passed away in 2015, but everyone around him has been extremely helpful in getting to know a man who constantly wanted to outgrow himself.
Some of the core characters that we’re currently developing are the female characters around Heinz. The women in the story are far from incidental or ‘passive’ female characters, as you might perhaps expect from a story set in the 80s in a testosterone-heavy environment of professional sports. Maxi is Heinz' partner Margarete ‘Maxi’ Adams, at the same time the hockey club's treasurer, and Renate is Renate Bigell, Maxi's best friend and second chairperson of ECD Iserlohn hockey club — they live in a shared household and a shared business situation together. Both are quite extraordinary women and unconventional for their time, which we definitely want to highlight. Ultimately, it’s through these strong female characters surrounding Heinz that we’re able to force ‘Heinzi' to reflect on himself.
After your treatment, you tackled a scene overview. Where does that get you in the process towards pre-production?
To begin the actual script-writing process, we’ve started to break down the treatment into a scene-by-scene overview and it was in this very detailed process that we figured out some structural issues that hadn’t been as apparent before. Especially in building the third act and the film’s climax, we really started to dig deeper into the question of what we’re essentially trying to say with the film. Because it’s really in that part of the film that our voices as filmmakers come through. So the conversations that producer Tine Mikkelsen, who I am just about to visit in Copenhagen, writer Stefanie Misrahi Schmitz and I are having right now are less about specific scenes but rather broader thematic discussions, for example about what it means to be ‘a good person’, while engaging in (possibly) morally questionable actions.
interview by
@JuttaBrendemuhl
photo: courtesy K. Bock
