You are accustomed to working closely with your actors and actresses, who are often friends. Auslandsreise centers on Leonie. How did this project come about and how did you collaborate? Was she the one who sparked your interest in Anna Maria Ortese’s work? What are you exploring in this blurring of the line between the character and the person?
I met Leonie through a mutual friend in 2016 during my first trip to Berlin, and our conversations in the following years largely focused on books and writing. Giovanna Giuliani, who folks will remember from Straub’s final 35mm film Le streghe, told me about Ortese’s books in 2015 in Paris. I went straight to Gibert Joseph and bought a copy of La douleur du chardonneret then read the few English translations that were available.
When I decided to make a film centered around people reading and discussing books, Leonie was the first person I thought of. Around the same time, I saw that a German translation of Ortese’s magnum opus Il porto di Toledo had just been published and I dived back into her world. I soon gave Leonie a German translation of Il cardillo addolorato (The Lament of the Linnet) to test the waters. She was enthusiastic, and I gave her Il porto di Toledo which she took to like a pro.
Films financed by the state or via private equity cast recognisable faces in hopes these faces will draw an audience and turn a profit for the investors. Since I did not make this film within that financing system, I was not obliged to adhere to its logic. I could inscribe the film within the long-standing tradition of working with non-professional actors. As this tradition shows, a person does not need to pursue acting professionally in order to turn in a great screen performance.
In what ways do Anna Maria Ortese’s explorations of realism and fantasy intersect with your filmmaking? How did her work inform Auslandsreise? Does the film reflect your own discovery of the work—the journey of that discovery?
I included passages that spoke to me and impressed me and also because they struck me as passages with a strong, self-reflexive authorial voice considering fiction/reality within her own work and in literature of her time, but without it becoming too postmodern. It is more like a 19th century self-reflexivity (she did evidently read Leopardi and Unamuno after all !). I wanted to share these passages with people who may not have read Ortese’s books yet. The excerpt from Iguana is a dialog scene, to mix things up.
The entire film was shot in Berlin, even within a single neighborhood, yet Anna Maria Ortese’s work serves, through the conversations, as a point of departure toward other languages and countries. How did you conceptualise this relationship to space—between the local and the elsewhere?
Practical, budgetary reasons. My neighborhood, my apartment, people from the neighborhood or nearby, the camera owned by my neighbor. These were the starting points because I did not have the resources to drive the equipment and crew anywhere else each month. The fictional apartments of the translator and Alejo (seen during the book club scene in March) as well as the excursion to Potsdam were our only shooting days outside of my neighborhood. These days were only made possible due the heroic energy of Hans Broich and my reliable, valiant crew.
Can you discuss your approach to constructing the film and the dialogues in the film ? There’s always a mystery surrounding the script when we discover your movies…
I spend days taking notes and procrastinating, and then sit down at the computer and write. In this case, usually within the two weeks prior to the next shooting day. I would usually write a first draft and Leonie would correct and improve upon that. The other cast members could modify their lines as well if they felt a sentence would sound better.
The rhythm of Auslandsreise follows the seasons. Editing does not seem to play a significant role in the film’s structure, which appears to be determined by the shooting process. What was your shooting process, and what is your relationship to editing?
Out of economic reasons, I chose to film one to two days each month with as little film stock as possible. This is an adaptation of the system I used in the U.S. to make films. When we began there were only the first two scenes, then the third, and soon after I could see the trajectory of the whole film. But we still wrote it sequence by sequence, month by month. I chose the takes and joined them together as we went along. Still, it took a while to find the appropriate length for the shots as well as which frame to begin and end on. I appreciate rough, jagged, unpolished editing: early 30s Renoir, early 30s Ford, the Thirties in general as well as that cut from reel 1 to reel 2 in Dreyer’s Gertrud, every single very palpable cut in Straub-Huillet’s Workers, Peasants, the work of cinema’s greatest editor Frederik Wiseman, especially the final 45 minutes of Juvenile Court…
Can you tell us about the scene that sets up the encounter between Leonie and Sigrid Vagt? At what point in the film’s writing process did it come about? How did you conceive it ?
When I learned that the German translator of Iguana lives outside Berlin in Potsdam - this was probably around November 2024 -, I thought that even if we don’t film in her real apartment - which I felt would have been a bit intrusive -, we should at least show the trajectory. By withholding until the end the information about where she is going, I figured this would allow you to experience the shots cinematographically, that is, just as pure documentary blocks of space and time. At the same time, it also emphasises the journey and adds some weight to whatever is about to happen. This is how I watch that part of the movie in any case.
Interviewed by Claire Lasolle
