I have to leave!
Take me with you! My life's at stake!
Down!
- My life's at stake! - This is a freight train.
It's not a passenger train!
Wait!
A FILM BY SANDRA PRECHTEL
A bit more contrast.
Maybe a little more color, too.
No.
- Too much? - Yes.
- It is, isn't it? - Yes.
It's that white heat, you know? It really is white.
And it has a certain irrationality
due to the white desert.
A little brighter.
- It's too yellow. - That's better.
The question is whether we're trying to recapture the old look from back then,
or if we're going for something more modern, more up-to-date.
Listen, there is nothing more modern than classic.
Classic is eternal, that's why we call it that.
That's why I find it so beautiful,
because the classical form is the form that is evoked
by the situation, by the story itself.
You aren't inventing it or deciding this or that way.
The story does it.
So if someone's scared, you see their eyes bulge.
That's classic. You can't do it differently in ten years.
If someone gets suddenly scared, there is a logic behind it.
Yes, I get it. Makes sense.
Here, Mascha...
I'd like to neutralize the image a bit.
- Do you like it? - Nice. Yes.
Film is a declaration of love
to the things you depict in front of the camera.
The eye falls in love, and if it doesn't I wouldn't film it.
Only when I get the feeling "That's it!" do I turn the camera on.
And if we all had this attitude towards the world,
we wouldn't have all the pollution and the development along the Elbe.
We found a few inches where you can still see it.
The banks of the Elbe River used to be just the river.
You could go for a walk. Now it's built up with total crap.
That's why I hope it all rots.
No, no, film was the right thing for me.
I would have been a loser in any other job.
Way too lazy
to run to an office or wherever every morning.
Every film is a big adventure, involves working with people,
with all of the arts you have inside of you.
Honestly,
if I hadn't made films, I'd just be lost
On the inside.
I just said something that I'd like to repeat.
You enjoy a privileged situation here at school.
You can film, you have cameras, equipment, etc.
That doesn't mean you can say, "I can just make mediocre films"
That you can have no expectations
because you just need a few people to nod in approval.
I made my first films under far more difficult conditions.
Far more difficult.
There was no film school, no free cameras. It was all...
- But there was more money.
None at all.
I financed all of my films out of my own pocket
and gave guitar lessons on the side.
When you start working professionally, every film is life or death.
So every film has to be the best it can possibly be.
Saying, "Scrap it, I want to try something else,"
that only works here, not in real life.
Every film decides if you can continue or not.
My name is Roland Klick.
I am the director of this film.
This is the second film I ever made,
and also one of my most beautiful, maybe even my best.
It is actually a genre piece about this boy, Ludwig,
and about the unbelievable
loneliness, harshness and heat that prevails in this village.
I grew up in this Franconian village
that I then visited again years later.
And I met an old school mate of mine.
He had never gotten out of the village.
I had hitchhiked across half the globe
and he still lived there and only knew the next biggest town.
That's when I had the idea that should be my first short film.
I met Otto Sander while casting
the role of the village idiot.
A friend of mine said, "Go take a look at Otto.
at the Falckenberg acting school in Munich."
I secretly waited by the door, Otto came out
and I knew he was my Ludwig.
He looked like an old man even at the age of 20.
Otto Sander, Scene Two, Take Two.
No, first scene, take two.
I know him as a man crazy for film,
but not in the sense of being career driven,
it was the medium of film that so excited and interested him.
He wanted to tell stories.
It was the only medium that allowed him to tell those stories.
It wasn't telling them through writing but through making a film.
That interested and captivated me.
Like an inquiring boy
searching for answers through film.
That was it.
He didn't act like some slave driver.
He tried to search for something
along with the actors and the team.
This joint quest was the decisive part for me.
What l brought to the role of Ludwig
is what he coaxed out of me.
And I let it happen because he was good at it.
Ludwig has a strange impulse to admire the pretty stone he found.
And I have this tendency, too.
Finding the stone. The grail. The unique stone.
Basically, I also found myself through making this film.
I found my filmmaking style.
Fuck off!
In the beginning I only knew
about that odd emptiness one feels on Saturday afternoons.
They gather in the village square,
where life is full of bizarre desires, which are senseless at the same time
and which extend to the village limits only.
Afterwards, I suddenly realized what I had done.
I brought details of the village to life, the speechless people.
There's a face. There are the stones.
Suddenly, you can embrace the essence of that existence.
You won't grasp it when it's just proclaimed somewhere.
Cinema is exactly that, making things speak.
At 14 I started telling everyone I was going to be a director.
To my parents' chagrin, who wanted me to get a decent degree first.
I couldn't bare that, took off, transported cars.
I ran myself ragged and got tuberculosis.
I had to stay in a sanatorium in Davos for a year and a half.
That's when I started writing.
I was absolutely sure I wanted to be a director.
Cinema was an escape
from a world where road signs ordered everything.
There are no traffic signs in cinema.
You can really run free.
It's self-fulfillment, adventure, poetry,
it is everything my soul was longing for.
I moved to Munich and enrolled in theatre studies.
There were no film schools, so I studied theatre.
At that time Munich was the swinging city.
MUNICH DIARY OF A STUDENT
Filmmaking happened there. Film people were based in Munich.
Young German filmmakers lived in Munich, Bavaria Studios.
It was the obvious choice.
I have a few "film schools."
One is "La Notte" by Antonioni.
I saw it twelve times, did a presentation on it at university.
I went to see it over and over They even let me in for free.
After the third, fourth time I went I told them I was a film student.
It was at the Theatiner in Munich. I could call it my film school.
Antonioni did something that I did as well.
That is, in using the intimacy of the camera,
affection for the characters
mutual gazes,
you can create an unbelievable atmosphere and tension.
Something up?
I'm not Antonioni.
Antonioni is a much more forlorn person, in his Milanese intellectual solitude.
But how he was able to visualize that,
to visualize the inherent tragedy,
that is what I learned from him and transferred to my films.
Henry Fonda comes to my mind.
A kind of tall, lanky fellow
with a friendly face.
But with a kind of "noli me tangere," a don't touch me attitude.
There was something modern and heroic about him.
Like Gary Cooper.
That kind of...
It's like...
I picture him on Leopoldstrasse somehow.
He had a kind of cultivated wildness to him.
Not as scruffy as Fassbinder, for example.
He had...
a kind of Foreign Legion type look.
And then you suddenly see him..
The camera will be higher. He'll grab his gun.
So he puts his hand in his pocket, you see he has a gun.
You're startled, you look at the gun, down there, and you want to escape.
But at the same time you realize that escaping endangers you even more.
So you can only cry for help,
you scream very loudly and he shoots at that moment.
Do you know Mr. Borowski?
For how long?
Four months.
Have you been intimate with him?
For how long?
Also for four months.
She had never acted before yet Renate Roland from "Bübchen"
won the Golden German Film Award for it.
Fassbinder worked with her after that and she acted awfully poorly then,
because he didn't love her.
Her!
He loved his characters. She just recited and simply vanished.
For me, actors aren't there to serve the characters,
what I am looking for instead is what can be projected from their soul.
An actor, I can't remember who, said,
"It's strange this is in the script. It's how I always talk."
I said, "That's why it's in the script."
I picked it up somehow, and used that
to approach the actor, to get to his real inner truth.
And sometimes I modified the lines too, inasmuch as I could within the plot,
And if someone is in front of my camera
then it is my goal for that person to experience their entire identity.
Then it's convincing.
That is what is conveyed. That's charisma.
That person's melody.
He has something...
reminiscent of Sisyphus.
He was able to get impossible things rolling.
As far as...
I don't know, did he ever write a script along with someone else?
He was really the epitomy of an auteur filmmaker.
Scriptwriter, director, producer, composer and editor.
I am impressed.
Congratulations.
It's a very intense film, very subtly staged.
I even started tearing up. Wow!
The tears passed thanks to the idiotically long credits.
You've got to be crazy!
Camera, director, a few people.
150 names, thanks to him and her, and your teachers, what poppycock!
Honestly.
I mean it when I say I want to leave the theater crying.
I want to take the emotions home.
I don't want to be neutralized by such long shitty credits.
For such a short film.
I asked myself why I wanted to film something so sentimental.
- I remembered that basically... - That I am sentimental!
That too.
The film is not sentimental at all. The film is emotional.
You calling it sentimental is your flaw.
Sorry, I like it too.
But we're all a bit preconditioned towards that.
But just cut it out.
Those are real emotions, you found beautiful images for them.
You can feel your intimate way of working
and that is the essence of cinema, the essence of life itself.
Somehow I came across that story in a newspaper article.
That a child had murdered a child back then.
That kept gnawing at me.
It reminded me of my own childhood.
The strange feelings one had towards the world.
In a small town, in suburbia.
It's a typical suburb film.
I had those Italian neorealist films in my head back then.
Suburbs where nothing would be happening.
This film has a similar feeling to it from the get-go.
The boy is somehow innocent.
To him, murdering the child is more like
a product of this sterile world where nothing happens,
some kind of research venture,
experience, dream-event.
He's not aware of what he's done.
I shot this film at my parent's house.
My parents weren't thrilled, but I kept picturing that house.
I also always kind of saw myself in the boy's character.
- There you are. - Evening.
- Where's the little one? - Don't know.
Achim!
- Where have you been? - The junkyard.
- What for? - I got my seat.
- And where's Kathrin? - No idea.
- I thought you had her with you. - I said no. I was playing soccer.
- You said at the junkyard! - Soccer first, then junkyard.
Quite honestly, it has something to do with my upbringing.
My dad was a doctor, but not one of those dapper doctors.
His dad was a train engineer, his grandfather a lumberjack.
A real lumberjack!
He studied for his diploma in a one bedroom apartment
with only a kitchen, an open kitchen with a stove,
where my grandmother made food with her shoulders all tensed up.
At the table in the corner sat my grandfather,
a Stalin-type, you know.
My dad had to do his homework at the wooden table.
When he made a mistake, he'd get a smack.
Grandpa sat there. He was a train engineer.
He had had a bad accident. He retired early.
He had nothing else to do but beat his son into getting a diploma.
Once a day he got up and wound up the cuckoo clock.
That was his day's work.
That's the background that shaped my dad.
I recognize that man in "Bübchen," it's the father.
I like it when characters on the screen
have more than one identity.
The boy's father is not just a father,
who works and then sits in front of the idiot box drinking beer.
He possesses his identity, containing the wishes he once aspired to:
wanting to travel the world
and ride a motorbike in a leather jacket.
You can feel the sadness of what he didn't achieve in life.
This creates a world.
Who actually lives up to one's own expectations?
What I experienced at my parent's home was always simply superficiality.
No going deeper than that, everything had to be okay on the surface.
Underneath, all kinds of emotions seethed,
but they were all hidden under a smoothed out surface.
Those were the 1950s and 1960s.
Unbearable, formal superficiality that does not allow any depth.
It was fine if the facade was right.
Use your napkin.
At the time, the film was rejected by nearly everyone,
with a few exceptions.
And it was due to the things I hold to be the film's biggest strengths.
They said, "It's unclear why the boy did it."
"what about social background and psychology?" Etc.
That was trendy back then.
Marcuse had to be in it, who I love a lot by the way.
But if you present his words on screen, the film is over.
That didn't happen, unlike in a lot of films from that time.
They really attacked me for that.
In Mannheim the film was very nearly a total flop.
The press people booed me afterwards.
And just one man came out of the cinema and said,
"I thought it was a great film." One!
I was a pretty naive child.
I just made films, met people in Munich on Leopoldstrasse,
or at some festival, and I thought, "Hey, I belong."
I have celluloid in my camera too, and it makes that sound.
Then I noticed I had been strangely ostracized.
It was the first time I heard my films are different.
I didn't know!
This film has very personal facets...
My wife had died in a car accident,
shortly after our son was born.
Suddenly, I was alone with the child.
I had a moment in my life when I had to figure out how to go on.
Not only with my films, but in general.
In the face of that whole situation,
I took a trip to Israel.
I rented an old Jeep
and drove deep into the desert.
I slept there in my sleeping bag for three days, walked around.
I knew it had to be the set for the film.
My vision of the film came from my experience in the desert.
Deadlock was an impossible adventure.
The Six-Day War had just ended
they still had their guns pointed at each other.
Jordan was on one side, Israel on the other.
Gun barrels in position over the mountain skyline.
This no-man's-land in the middle was our set.
There was a guy who would have I've funding for the film
but he said, "Not a cent! They'll shoot you to pieces."
The Israelis said they would make sure nothing happened to us.
And they did that.
We would sometimes see their machine gun armed Jeeps.
They came because they were afraid the other side would open fire.
They would scream, "Lights out!" And we turned off all the lights.
We were basically shooting the film between two fronts.
Nonetheless, the entire project, even with the meager funding we had,
was an amazing adventure.
The making of the film itself.
I think that power fed the adventure depicted in the film.
You have to show me you're a real man, eh Sunshine?
You're getting old!
I remember "Deadlock" very well because my brother is in it.
Roland is one of the directors
who was or would have been able to turn people into stars.
The way Roland cast and directed my brother back then,
I was sure for a moment my brother would be a European star.
The sensuality and his sex appeal in his stage presence
was on a par with Alain Delon,
Belmondo and all the others.
That type of film didn't exist in Germany.
We were navigating
a strange place in time back then.
We had The Beatles, Haight-Ashbury, the hippie movement and the drug culture.
There were acid dreams,
psychedelic culture and Spaghetti Westerns.
There was also a political dimension,
but somehow they didn't get it together.
I mean Baader was playing Bonnie Clyde in a way.
Where's your Sunshine?
He's coming.
I was awarded 300,000 deutschmark in funding for the script, nothing more.
The entire film cost 1.5 million.
When we finished shooting all the money was gone.
It was just enough to pay the hotel bill. I had to borrow just to process the film.
It was as if the production process mirrored the story in the film.
It was about surviving and not coming out a loser in the end.
And that's what truly happened.
New German Cinema movement clearly didn't accept me.
When I was invited to Cannes
to represent Germany in the competition
a few of my peers went there to fight that.
Everything New German Cinema had achieved would be ruined
if "Deadlock" were to represent Germany in Cannes.
I went to Cannes
and the entire Croisette was plastered full of "Deadlock" posters.
I felt as if I had reached my goal in some way
having "Deadlock" as Germany's film in Cannes.
Then Favre Le Brais got talked into throwing it out of the festival.
Then the German ministry that was responsible for Cannes
funded a special screening with a cold buffet.
But then there was a huge downpour and no one came to see the film.
That was a crushing setback for me.
How do you see yourself within German film?
Are you an exception? Do you feel like a maverick?
Well, the word maverick is for the most part used
when certain incongruities exist.
Being a maverick is not a choice.
I simply took on a filmic style,
a cinematic consciousness
at a time when such an approach was uncommon.
It went against the trend. That wasn't my choice.
It was simply my view of it all. I had very little formal film education.
I made films the way I wanted to,
and that included a conception of audience.
"Deadlock" was received with very ambivalent reactions
when we... I almost said church community...
When it was presented to the film community.
Very ambivalent reactions.
Many people, like me, admired
the virtuosity of his filmmaking artistry.
Or, as I said before, the way
he could, in a certain sense, play "Goldberg Variations."
Others, I believe, felt it was
an imitation.
It was... You can look at it like this.
What me and many of my friends
saw as virtuosity,
others saw as an attempt
to pander to cinematic tastes.
I think that is nonsense.
Utter nonsense.
I didn't feel like an outsider at all.
I felt like an insider and felt the others were the outsiders.
Outside of reality, of intimacy and outside of reciprocity and of love.
But I have always felt a deep connection.
Back then it was fashionable
to show an interest in the lower classes.
Baader-Meinhof called for people to run away from juvenile homes.
And I took in just such a boy.
I was somewhere in Munich in the Narcotics Division.
I met him there and bantered cleverly at him.
One evening the doorbell rang, that scene is in the film too,
and there he stood, soaking wet.
The first thing I did was take him out to dinner, etc.
I just couldn't let him go, inwardly either.
In that sense, I lived the "Supermarkt" story myself.
Money! Money!
Hey! Have you gone crazy?
Give it back!
Beat it!
I'll tell my Dad!
The song was composed for the film. I wrote the lyrics.
In his homelessness he doesn't know where to turn,
yet he still has this desire to celebrate his own life.
And that's what drives him.
He wants to get out of the gutter somehow and to celebrate life.
Who could that be? Where's my shampoo?
Go to the bedroom!
Nice you came, but...
Hi.
My girlfriend's walking around naked. Just a moment.
Professionally I've reached a point where something has to happen.
Today at the police station I realized I constantly write
about things I know nothing about.
- Frank, congrats on your new series! - Did you read it?
It's great! Great that you're involved. Well done.
Thanks so much.
When we make films using other people's fates,
when we use that to make cinema,
then we have to give it back to those whom we took it from.
We can't be like Alexander Kluge
and make films for the elite in their ivory tower.
When we decide to make films about a subculture we don't belong to
we have to make sure they belong to that subculture when they're done.
So you can say, "Hey, I've helped you gain consciousness,
power and a sense of self-worth with this film."
To me, that is the only legitimate reason to make films at all.
So who is Jane?
A girl from a night club.
I'll take off with her later.
Charly from "Supermarkt" had never seen a camera before.
He was in jail, he's a street kid.
It'll pan out.
His story is that of his character, so he could totally identify with it.
That's why he's a star on screen.
Don't pull any funny stuff!
Come on, let's go! Out of there!
To the front, I said!
- Move! - Please!
Stay there! Do you want to kill me?
No, I won't let them...
To this day I still wish for someone like Roland Klick.
That is something many actors long for,
a director who can lead them to the truth.
- Hey, a mustache! - Got my reasons.
- Looks good! - I got to run.
Why?
- Would you take off with me? - What happened?
There was a love scene.
ln it, Charly and I are in the bar where I work
somewhere lying on a couch in a backroom.
Roland just sat behind the camera and played his guitar.
He didn't say anything. He just sat there and played.
And that was such a...
such a tender accompaniment to the scene.
I had never experienced that before, and haven't since.
Roland was always so close to us and so involved.
Final curtain.
There is a scene in the bar where I am dancing with Charly.
I take off my wig and my hair falls out.
And I think I say, "That would be nice."
Or "That'd sure be nice."
That'd sure be nice.
What?
Oh, in general.
Then Charly leaves and I watch as he goes.
So I looked at him,
and then Roland said, "Eva, that's not your look."
Then I said, "What do you mean by that?"
And he just kept saying, "That's not your look."
"You have to look the way you look."
That's when I realized I was probably performing,
that I was probably performing how someone looks.
I stopped doing that and just looked at Charly.
Then it was fine.
We know he wants to scram with you!
- You have to meet up for that, right? - What do I know? What do I care?
Come, Monika, he told me so.
He said you were his friend. Now you're pressing charges against him!
- Yes, to avoid endangering more lives. - We'll call you back in.
He's lying!
Willy's the only one who thought of my boy.
Then you think of your boy now, too.
Think about what'll happen to him when you're behind bars.
Just like Willy.
Yes, Willy?
That's good.
Yes.
Yes, I'll be there.
At the Portuguese restaurant.
Till soon.
I believe that film is an exercise in dealing with your personal problems.
And that's my basic issue.
Being here with all the anger, constriction, fight and yearning.
Those are my inner dialectics
between a man battling in the real world
and an aura that really wants to embrace the world.
Good Lord!
Old pal!
Dear me.
So many years!
20, 22, 23. Something like that.
It was after "Das Boot" that we last saw each other.
I believe at the German Film Awards.
Yes, exactly 20 years.
Then you went to Hollywood.
I was exported, so to speak.
I was always right behind you.
We had grown attached, like Siamese twins.
Sometimes you let yourself fall on me.
You had to get down for a shot and said, "Roland, catch me."
I knelt down and caught you.
And I don't use a clapperboard.
Just, "Scene 387, Take 9!" Smack!
That's when most actors keel over.
The clapperboard comes when the scene has been shot.
At first we stand around and no one knows we want to film.
Then I hand signal Jost that it's nearly time.
Then I say to him, "Okay, turn it on."
And we start acting.
No one notices that we're shooting.
That's why it's so intimate. The actors slowly slip into character.
I also get the feeling that your film
was almost too modern for its era.
And no one produced it. Just as with "Deadlock."
People saw my films and said, "Great! But that won't work."
Making a feature that tackled that social reality so intimately
was considered corrupt.
Oh, that was action again. We have to make art instead.
At the time that Roland and I were making films together
I assumed he was the one director who would have an international career.
I was sure Roland would be that director.
In my feeble memory
two giants appear
who start beating one another.
Bernd Eichinger is...
He is a man who...
He suffered from the same traumas Roland talks of as well.
Both were accused of being too commercial.
On the other hand he was
one of the only, if not the only, true producer.
He approached me after I had made "Supermarkt."
He knew my films.
I still remember him walking in for our appointment
dressed up in a shirt and tie and holding a portfolio.
That was the original Bernd.
We sat down and realized that we were made for each other.
2,500 kids answered our ad for "We Children from Bahnhof Zoo."
And we met with 1,500 of those 2,500 kids.
I worked unbelievably hard with those kids.
I spent nights in a sleeping bag at Zoo Station with the addicts
to feel what was going on there.
The work was intense. The cameraman was always there.
Those kids completely surrendered to the camera.
Out of those 2,500 kids we chose 20 to be my kids from Bahnhof Zoo.
One day the door opened and it was Bernd's production manager.
He was disgusted to see some kids rolling on the floor.
He had never seen people rolling on the floor at casting meetings.
He closed the door and a little later we got a note.
It forbade the kids from going to the toilets in our production office
and told them to go to the one at the bar across the street.
One of them had peed on the toilet seat.
It was ridiculous. The film was about those kids.
So you have to make the film with the kids who are actually there!
You can't find them in casting lists. That's how the film was eventually made.
Obviously someone told Bernd,
"Roland can't control his kids. They're beating each other up, and him."
It was all true.
but it was all part of the process of getting these kids
to bear their souls to the camera
and to glimpse into the depths of their souls.
I can still hear Bernd telling me to "Kill it! Kill it!"
I said, Bernd, I don't want to "kill it."
I want a film that breathes life into these characters.
And I'll do that in such a way
that it is powerfully conveyed to the audience.
You can count on that. But he didn't.
A director must make it possible for others to trust,
so people can surrender themselves completely.
That's why Bahnhof Zoo failed.
The kids trusted me, but those around us couldn't bear that.
Roland Klick and Bernd Eichinger, German cinema's dream couple.
We were, and would've been.
Together we could've eliminated
the seeming contradiction of creativity vs. sales.
After the disaster with Bernd
I knew I had to make a film right away or I'd never make one again.
And I wanted it to be a film to top "We Children from Bahnhof Zoo."
It's the story of a music promoter
and the boy he wants to make a star at any cost.
The music is...
It's a lustrous and divine music full of grandeur.
"White Star."
It's an allegory for clarity, for hope, for the future,
whatever it may be.
And to force through an idea for such a film... such music...
To bring that to the world
he uses means of the complete opposite sort.
Not clean, not clear at all.
Promotion.
And promotion is really always
a form of lie and deception in the end.
"White Star" was a mortal battle, because Hopper was the junkie of death.
He couldn't live without cocaine, which I didn't know beforehand.
He couldn't shoot more than two hours a day
then he'd flip out.
He beat up hotel staff and smashed windows.
He beat up his girlfriend, who arrived later.
Of course, his behavior had an effect on me.
I simply had to bear it. I worked day and night.
At night I would talk to his agent for hours.
In some way the entire film had a death wish dimension to it.
Stanislawski said that everybody has a golden box,
You see it is almost impossible to do things over and over.
He is an very interesting guy, the man I am playing.
I can identify, sort of, with him.
Of course there's a bit of Ken Barlow in me.
Of course I am Ken Barlow, too.
He has to produce that music at any cost, then things all fall apart.
He goes through this battle with the false hope
that something good will come of it in the end.
That's how I made many of my films. That's life!
Someone once said of this film
that it was the most brilliant flop that he had ever seen.
There is some truth in that.
The film ran at the Hof Film Festival at midnight.
People brought beers in.
A bad vibe arose
because the curtain kept opening and closing automatically.
The sound couldn't be turned down. It was a chaotic screening.
The film really flopped.
I had three distributors who were interested in the film.
The next day they acted as if I didn't exist.
They went to the other side of the street.
So, inside, I gave up on the film.
I said, "Fine. I accept my defeat. That's how it shook out."
And I didn't expect anything else to come of it.
One day I walk into my office and hit the answering machine.
"Roland Klick, we congratulate you on the German Film Award."
I was pretty down in the dumps at that time.
And I asked myself if I even wanted it anymore.
It's true.
And I concluded that I didn't want to go on with it anymore.
I asked myself why I always got myself in situations like that.
Then I realized I ended up in such situations because I'm a junkie.
Junkies end up in those situations.
I was addicted to film. Addicted to directing.
A junkie wants something with all of their might.
That's what a junkie is.
It's not about dope, it's about your dope.
If your dope is film, then you become a film addict.
When you're an addict
you let circumstances carry you up shit creek.
You start losing control of things.
And I sensed that my sheer passion, you could say my obsession with film,
got me into loads of situations that I can't and don't want to bear.
Situations that could ruin me.
I got the feeling that I needed to redefine myself.
"What am I doing here anyway?"
"I don't want to go on like this."
But now I feel pretty at ease about it.
I can feel inside that that's slowly settling.
I think I might have an answer to that question soon.
Thank you.
I don't know if you know what an alchemist is.
- A kind of chemist, right? - Well, not really. Let me tell you.
Alchemists were actually spiritual and esoteric people.
They wanted to awaken the all-encompassing,
all-embracing divine human ideal
within themselves.
Then they decided this all-encompassing indestructible thing is gold.
And they developed the idea
that if they were able to turn their own souls to gold
that then their soul would be able to produce gold.
That they could turn lead into gold if they could do it within themselves.
The same applies to films.
That's why I'm trying to give you that courage.
To say, "What's inside here.."
And that is a beautiful path
that you take in filmmaking.
You don't just deliver a product.
I have rarely committed myself to things that don't have to do with me.
I had offers from Hollywood.
If I had found anything that had to do with me, I'd have done it.
But you can't turn your camera on something that doesn't concern you.
These are all...
Well, I'm writing. Of course I'm writing.
I teach at film schools.
And over the years I've collected all these folders you see here.
I am currently writing a novel.
But I won't tell you the title.
It's sort of a game for me. I am constantly writing.
There is a story that could work as a novel.
If it goes well, I could imagine turning it into a movie.
It definitely has the potential.
I don't think I have any of my scripts anymore.
I gave away all the awards,
I think I gave the German Film Awards to my son.
I have nothing.
It would be nonsense for you to point the camera at some object.
My time is anytime.
It's ahead, but it is actually anytime.
Because that's how life works.
That's why both a professor and a builder can enjoy my films.
They hit them here.
And that's why people came to see my films.
It is as it is.