A conversation with von Donnersmarck

The film is an ode to the power of art and in this interview with director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck he explains what he was trying to achieve with The Lives of Others. Here is an extract:

“What we are and what we display to the world is what we choose to reveal. It is the artist, he states, who would go into those dark parts of the soul where normally you never shine any light, find that part and use it and display it in their art. And I think that holds true for writers. While writing something, I’m kind of acting out these parts in my head, and if I don’t take that from inside then it won’t be true. It just will not be true.”

All this begs the question, what is it about art that makes it so dangerous to those in power? “I think it is related to exactly that thing we were just talking about,” answers von Donnersmarck. “An authoritarian society, a totalitarian regime, will try and tell you which of those facets of your Jungian character you are going to display. They have a certain vision of what mankind should be, and this is what they try and force you to do.”

“Now comes the artist, putting you on a sort of virtual reality ride of the soul for the soul and then has you see that this [forced] reality is not what you are really about. There is no way you can force a [person] into their old way of being after they have recognized that they are not what society wants them to be. And that is very scary to a totalitarian regime, so they try to weed out the [artists] who take people on that virtual reality ride of the soul.”

“And this is what the Stasi always did. They tried to get rid of actors and writers and directors who did not stick to the government’s ideas of how people were going to be. They hated real individualism, because individualism is just far too complicated and dangerous for a [government] to deal with. Even with 300,000 police officers they couldn’t keep individualism in check. They like people, or certain groups of people, to behave in more or less the same way because then they don’t have to deal or cope with them, they can predict their behavior.”

“They hate unpredictability. They hate anything which is in any way different. Since real art encourages you to be different, encourages you to recognize that you are different and special, and that’s in a way the essence of art. I mean, art is the perfect antidote to any sort of collectivism, so it is just the natural enemy [to totalitarianism], which is why I think the art that rose to the top in the GDR for me isn’t art at all. It is something that vaguely resembles art, but it is not at all the deep kind of experience that will help you explore your soul.”

Interview: ‘The Lives of Others’ Director Florian von Donnersmarck

Go here to read an interview with director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. He is interviewed by Cinematical and he chat about his film, his views on filmmaking … and which actor he’d want as his commanding officer in an actual war situation.

Here’s a taste –

The central theme that I got out of The Lives of Others was change and the capacity of people to change, and I wondered if you could talk a bit about that, and how you wove that theme throughout the film.

You’re right that that’s a central theme, because I think it’s one of the big questions in life: can we change, or are we just what our horoscopes tell us that we will be? At Oxford I studied Scholastic Philosophy, which included studying the works of Thomas Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas always formulates things as a statement, and then he’ll have pros and cons about them and come to his own conclusion.

In one of these he debates the question of astrology. And he actually comes to the conclusion that astrology will tell you something about your future and where you are and where you’re going — maybe even tell you exactly. And he says that is why it’s so hard to change, why change feels like swimming upstream, because you’re fighting against all the stars and all the weight of that, against the current of the universe. I think it’s important to realize that when people change it’s always a legion of things that drive the change, not just one thing.

Director’s Portrait

When his film The Lives of Others was released Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck was aware that the topic of Communist dictatorship would give rise to discussion, and what is more – that is exactly what he wanted. No system of spies in the world, the director knows, is as comprehensive as that of the GDR was: more than a quarter of a million people were employed by the “State Security” (Stasi) to sound out their fellow citizens. This is a bitter truth that has now – in the 17th year after German reunification – been examined in a feature film for the first time. Donnersmarck did not make his material into a didactic film, but backed a technique of emotionalising personification. Peter Schneider, German author and member of the German Film Award jury, summed this up: “For a long time, there was a tendency to portray the GDR as a state where no one really suffered and the Stasi was regarded as something of a joke.” He went on to say that The Lives of Others was the first serious attempt at showing how the Stasi terrorized millions of GDR citizens. Even though the Stasi officer and the poet that he keeps under surveillance were not taken directly from official files, Donnersmarck insists that his film plot is very close to reality. “Everything could have happened that way at that time in GDR history.”

The director experienced the Stasi-debate “as something necessary for Germany, but also as something sad. I can imagine that the success of, shall we say, Run Lola Run was a reason for pure celebration for Tom Tykwer. For me, there is also a sense of despair over The Lives of Others and its victory march. Daily, I receive letters from people who tell me how they were mistreated and how they recognise themselves in the film. And the poet Guenter Ullmann sent me one of his volumes of poetry, with a grateful dedication. He was the one who – after endless, brutal Stasi interrogations – had all his teeth pulled, because he was convinced that bugs had been implanted in them (in fact, his closest friend was an IM – an unofficial Stasi employee – something he simply could not fathom). And the next day, the actor Henry Huebchen tells an audience of millions that people in artists’ circles laughed at the Stasi rather than anything else. That is the kind of roller-coaster ride I have experienced over the last 4 months. I will be glad to leave the subject behind me. I have just turned down a big American project because it would have brought me back into contact with the same set of themes.”

From Director’s Portrait

The Lives of Others and 1984

I have added and extract from an interview with Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck that is on the Premiere site. In the interview he links his film to George Orwell’s 1984.

Kenny: One of the things that I found interesting about the character of Weisler, the spy played by Muhe, is that he seems to be almost a Winston Smith in reverse, you know, he begins by loving Big Brother as it were and being a very true believer. And then when he’s exposed both to the hypocrisy of his colleagues and also to the humanity of the people he’s sort of been put under orders to ruin, his humanity starts to emerge.

Von Donnersmarck: Because the movie is set in 1984 and goes on into ’85, I thought I was going to call the film 1985 and–but then when I told people that idea, people didn’t catch on to the thing that this means, you know—1984 plus 1. Like taking it one step further, because in a way that’s what the GDR was. It was the Orwellian state taken to a weird level of reality. I remember in that year, 1984, I lived in Berlin and we were in the East a lot, because my mother is from there, and when we traveled there I always thought, this is it, you know, this is what Orwell has been describing; so I wasn’t necessarily thinking of the character but sure, that kind of atmosphere is definitely there.

Read more here.

The Lives of Others – Sound, Set and Colour

I have added a section from an interview with FHvD on sound, set design and colour below.

What was your approach with respect to sound, set design and colour schemes?

To capture the atmosphere of East Berlin, we did not record in digital but in analogue in order to convey a sense of “reduced calm.” Set designer Silke Buhr and I had a very definite idea about the colour scheme. The GDR had its own world of colours and forms. The cars and fabrics were pale and desaturated. We proceeded through reduction. Since there was more green than blue in the GDR, we completely omitted blue. There was also more orange than red, so we eliminated red. We consistently used certain shades of brown, beige, orange, green and grey to try and be as authentic as possible to what life under the GDR looked like. Emptiness is an aesthetically neutral condition. The streets of East Berlin are filmed almost empty, exactly as they were during those years. The local Kneipe, or pub, is almost empty; the canteen for the Stasi employees is Spartan. Wiesler’s apartment, a “plattenbau” (or high-rise apartment the Communists built during the 70s) is devoid of any sense of being a home. Wiesler’s world actually starts to open when he begins spying on the actors who live in a charming Altbau, a typical old Berlin apartment with big rooms, high ceilings and creaky wooden floors. When he is perched above their apartment, using the attic as his listening post, I wanted to convey that his worldview was challenged. We did not want an overload of “GDR props.” For me, the set design has to deliver the perfect background for the emotions of the actors – no more, but also no less. I don’t want the viewer to start thinking about individual props instead of emotionally connecting with the characters.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s (yep, that is really his name)  feature film debut “Das Leben der Anderen” (“The Lives of Others”) won an Oscar as “Best Foreign Language Film” at the 79th Academy Awards.

The film came about because of  two things. First were many childhood memories of his visits to East Berlin and the GDR. As a boy of eight, nine or ten, FHvD has explained that he found it interesting and exciting to feel the fear of adults. His parents were afraid when they crossed the border: they were both born in the East and thus were more closely controlled by the police. Their friends from East Germany were afraid when other people saw that they were speaking with them, Germans from the West. Without these early experiences FHvD has said that he would have had trouble finding the right approach.

FHvD goes on to explain – “There was an image I saw in film school that I was never able to forget: the close-medium shot of a man sitting in a bleak room, wearing headphones and listening to beautiful music even though he did not want to hear it. This man pursued me in my dreams and evolved over the years into Captain Gerd Wiesler.”