Volker Schlondorff

UNESCO Courier, July-August, 1995

* What was the first film you ever saw?

- A kind of German spaghetti western called The Children of Mara Mara. I've never come across it again, but it made a very strong impression on me - it showed some children hung up on meal hooks, like in a butcher's. That was in 1953, when I was thirteen.

* Had you never been to the cinema before that?

- No, never. We mainly listened to the radio. I remember that two or three years later I saw Jean Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet, and another highlight of that period was Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window.

* Was that when you first wanted to make a film?

- What I wanted, when I was about fourteen, was to do something different; I didn't want to be a doctor or a lawyer, for example. Like a lot of teenagers I wrote poetry and short stories, but what I was looking for, even more than a means of self-expression, was a way of exploring the world. I remember being fascinated by an article in a magazine I found in the cellar, with pictures of a film crew on location somewhere in Africa - men in caps, camels, a camera on a tripod. I said to myself, that's what I want to do. I was also taking a lot of photographs at that time, but most of all I read. I was an avid reader, which explains the passion I still have for adapting literary works for the screen.

* What did you read?

- A bit of everything, or perhaps I should say a lot of everything. As often happens in such cases I read everything too soon. I was fond of Faulkner, Hemingway and Balzac - I remember La Peau de chagrin and Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes very vividly - not forgetting Dostoevski. I must have been twelve when I read Schopenhauer: "It's not at all the sort of thing for you," my father said.

* Why did you come to France?

- To learn French. When I was about fifteen or sixteen I went to a school in Vannes. A Jesuit there had a great influence on me; we saw eye to eye in matters of theology, philosophy and the cinema. It was at the school film club that I developed my knowledge of, and love for, the cinema. I saw what we used to call the "classics", from Buster Keaton to Carl Dreyer, and discovered the great pre-war German directors, Fritz Lang in particular. A little later I got to know the work of Friedrich Murnau, Ewald Andre Dupont - I'm thinking of his film Variety - and Lupu-Pick.

* What about the films that were coming out then?

- I was impressed by many of them, especially Ella Kazan's On the Waterfront, with Marion Brando, which opened my eyes to the fact that the cinema was capable of doing something about injustice. There was also Alain Resnais' Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) with its powerful revelation of the death camps, and, in a very different register, Henri Verneuil's Please, Mr. Balzac, with Brigitte Bardot and Darry Cowl, and Federico Fellini's II Bidone (The Swindlers).

* In what way could they affect you?

- I gradually realized that making films is a proper job that has to be learned. After getting my school-leaving certificate in France l enrolled at IDHEC, the French school of cinematography, but I didn't take the course. . . . In fact, owing to a series of coincidences I was taken on as a trainee by Louis Malle. He was making Zazie dans le metro at the time. That was my real introduction to directing. I've been in films ever since. . . .

* How could your career develop?

- It began in France, where l worked under Jean-Pierre Melville and Louis Malle, and then I decided I wanted to be a German director and went back to Germany. The first film I made, in 1965, was Der Junge Torless ("Young Torless"), based on the novel by the Austrian writer Robert Musil. It went down well. I then made two more pictures with the actor and film director Margarethe von Trotta. In 1978, my adaptation of the Gunter Grass novel Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) won awards at Cannes and in Hollywood. I was deeply involved in the German film movement of the 1960s and 1970s alongside Alexander Kluge, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Peter Fleischmann, Werner Herzog and others. When that movement broke up, I left for the United States, where I worked mainly for television. I also made Swann in Love, based on Proust's novel.

* What are your recollections of the United States?

- The working conditions were excellent, and I made films with such Hollywood legends as Dustin Hoffman and Richard Widmark. But l find it hard to accept that films are ordinary commercial products. I believe that film-making, whether it is an art as some people claim or just a means of expression, deserves better. The absolute power enjoyed by producers and distributors in the United States gets in the way of such expression - at least as far as I'm concerned! Directors have to wage a hard, endless struggle that in the long run wears out even the most resilient.

All the same, I would be happy to go back to the United States to make a film. I have some good friends there, especially Billy Wilder, who made Some Like it Hot, an amusing, astute man. I go along with his idea that film directors are showmen. . . .