Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

Screening of Phoenix, with introduction by Haden Guest and Christian Petzold and post-screening discussion and Q&A with audience. Tuesday  December 4, 2018.

JOHN QUACKENBUSH  0:00  

December 4, 2018, the Harvard Film Archive screened Phoenix. This is the audio recording of the introduction and the Q&A that followed. Participating is director Christian Petzold and HFA director Haden Guest.

HADEN GUEST  0:16  

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Haden Guest. I'm Director of the Harvard Film Archive. I want to thank you all for being here tonight as we watch a film whose beauty, sadness, and quiet gravity place it far above the cluttered landscape of contemporary cinema and count it among that rarest of accomplishments, a period film that returns to the past, without cliché, without false sentimentality, but with a burning need to discover truth and meaning in a charged historical moment and in a traumas, regrets, fears, and promises born then that's still lingering deep, unresolved into the present. The film is called Phoenix and is directed by the incomparable Christian Petzold who will be joining us as he did last night for conversation after the screening. Mr. Petzold will not introduce the film tonight, since he just a few minutes ago finished a mesmerizing masterclass for doctoral students in the program in Film and Visual Studies here in VES. But he will be back afterwards and I encourage you to stay for what I know will be a rewarding conversation with myself, Mr. Petzold, and all of you.

Phoenix tells the story of a woman deeply scarred in the most terribly literal way by the atrocities unleashed by the Nazi Party during its dark and damaging reign. She was the victim and rare survivor of a concentration camp. Her suffering and fragile afterlife is offered here as a fable, a myth, and a questioning of how an individual and how a community can find the strength and fortitude to continue, and a questioning of whether happiness and self assurance can ever be regained. Christian Petzold’s films are often peopled by ghosts, by phantom figures whose identities are split between the past and the present, between illusionary reflections and the obdurate stony truths of the moment of a specific time and place. In Phoenix, Nelly, played by the extraordinary Nina Hoss, the star and emotional center of so many of Petzold’s greatest films is a ghost, a woman whose identity and inner self were almost erased by a disfiguring trauma and who now wanders through the rubble-strewn streets of a city, Berlin, that is itself equally scarred. Many of us today, myself included, have family members who survived the Second World War and others who perished in that mortal storm. For us, World War Two shaped our imagination of history and of the world and offered moreover a means to measure and describe the meaning and ethics of a people, of a nation, of a place. A means to describe good and evil. In Phoenix, Petzold offers a different and unsettling vision of the war and its aftermath, a vision that reveals a dark web of betrayal and callousness. But also a way to look this cold reality in the eyes and to find a way to move on. Phoenix offers the figure of this brave and strong woman's deep and disorienting fears as an emblem of a past that is still with us today and whose meanings have in recent years found even more powerful and disturbing resonance. As in all of Petzold’s films, the past in Phoenix is not just referenced, but is explored in bold new ways. And this past is also cinema’s past and cinema’s history, and therefore ghosts of film’s past, cinema’s past, linger in this deeply evocative film: from Delmer Daves’ 1944 Dark Passage to Franju’s Eyes without a Face to, of course, that touchstone of so many Petzold films, and so many films in general, Hitchcock's Vertigo. Petzold finds a way to embrace and yet also renew the magic of these films and of our memories of these films that linger, like the refrain of a cherished song.

I want to ask everybody to please turn off any cell phones, any electronic devices, please refrain from using them. I want to give special thanks to the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and the director of programming there, Dennis Lim. This is a collaboration with Lincoln Center and to make possible Christian Petzold’s visit. This is his first visit to Boston and one of his very few trips to the United States. So we're really lucky that he's here. He's a reluctant traveler but when he comes he's an extraordinary, extraordinary presence as those of you who stay will know. Those of you who were here last night already know that. I also want to thank the Goethe Institute, with whom we work whenever we present German cinema and it seems these days there's so much to present, so much to discover. And I want to thank the new director of the Goethe Institute to Boston, Marina May, who's here tonight. Let's give her a round of applause.

[APPLAUSE]

HADEN GUEST  5:27  

Please join me in welcoming back Christian Petzold.

[APPLAUSE]

HADEN GUEST  5:41

This film is so moving I must say I need to catch my breath. But at the center of the film is this relationship, this extraordinary relationship that unfolds. This is, kind of, this enigma that draws us in and asks us as we behold it, it pulls us into these questions about ethics, about morals, about love. And at each turn we don't know what the answer is. And I was wondering if we could talk about this. I mean, I feel like the sort of stages that they go through and they both are– Well, I'd like to know how the relationship emerged, how you defined the movements, if you will, because I feel like there's a kind of musical structure to the film, of this pair that are separated, united, perhaps not really together and...

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  6:50  

Yes, but before I talk about the Holocaust and things, we have to work together, Nina and the others and me, for more than one year after the movie we reflect, Nina Hoss and I reflect about our production and it was a little bit like this that this guy who is her husband, Johnny, he's like me a little bit in that he's creating a woman. And this Pygmalion...Pygmalion?, theme to create a woman…

HADEN GUEST  7:29

Pygmalion, right.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  7:30

...it's also a little bit behind my relationship to Nina. I create something and he creates there... that was a complicated situation. We reflect during the shooting. And it was also our last collaboration with Nina; we have decided afterward to make a break because it was a little bit too much, what happened there, I must say. I can say it here in Harvard, in Germany I never taught this, things from inside. The other thing is we are talking, the whole production we talk how the film will end. This was the only problem we have. Everything else we can discuss, but how the film end was a daily, daily discussion because in the script I've written down “Speak Low” and she's singing and here he recognized her voice and he will see her number, the tattoo from Auschwitz. And he realized everything. And he, as I had written down, he imploded, was the term I use [BELCHES SLIGHTLY] Sorry, I was in a restaurant, and it was fantastic this food, I must say. It was the first time I’ve eaten oyster because I'm from the radical left position, and I think oyster is for the upper class, but I must say now the upper class had caught me. And it was really good. [LAUGHS] And so we thought about what is happening in this last scene. And we are in Poland and we are shooting there and the last scenes in Poland because in Poland, some streets in Legnica and Wrocław looks like a little bit like Berlin 1945 filmed because you can't make the difference between what are the wounds of the Second World War of the Germans and what are the wounds of the post-Communism and the Communism. And so, the last day, I see that the cameraman, Hans Fromm—he’s a really good friend of mine—has taken out rails for the camera.

HADEN GUEST  9:50

Tracks, right.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  9:51

Tracks, right, tracks is the word. I don't know. Tracks, I think 25 meters the longest track, the [?Long John Silver?] track, I must say, and outside, Nina has some– We have taken her a loudspeaker, a very small one in the ear because the piano was made before and so she can hear the piano can make a decision by her own when she wants to stop singing and also Johnny has a loudspeaker in his ear. He can also make a decision when he stop to play because I needed that they do it out of their selves, out of the moment. We have two cameras, just do this final scene just one time not more...was the last day of shooting in Poland and the last day of shooting of the movie. And then we have this tracks, the camera, the DOP had built because Hans the cameraman wants to follow her. Because it's great. She's leaving. And we have a traveling behind her, outside, and we see her back. We never see her face, and there's a sun outside and there's a new life. And we are a little bit attracted by this idea. Also, Nina I said [UNKNOWN] because actors like when the camera is following them, but she was a little bit attracted by this idea. And I think something is really wrong. And so then they build up the lights, and we're talking about this. This is a complicated technical thing with the loudspeakers and everything. And I think something's wrong. And then we have a long discussion. And I said, it's not okay, that we the Germans with our German Arriflex camera are following her because we have to stay. This is the whole metaphor. And the whole metaphor of this movie is we have to stay. She's leaving, we have to stay. And this is the thing that the whole movie is about. So Hans had to destruct or deconstruct this 25 meters of tracks. And I saw his face, the mouth is– Because in the movies we make together, there is not so much camerawork because it's all very concentrated. And this 25 meters for him was a fantastic end of the day, is great. But I think from a point of morality, it's not possible because the Germans had to stay in their shit, and we too, and she could go, I don't know where to. That's her decision. And perhaps she could go to Palestine. Perhaps she goes in something with... perhaps it's suicide, I don't know. But it's her decision and not ours.

HADEN GUEST  12:59  

Also, the decision that you make not to have the reaction shot, you know, to have the shot of Johnny which is so... I mean, again it's from a moral standpoint like he no longer exists, that relationship is severed, you know, that image, his image... But we as an audience, that need that we have for that response, that kind of instinctual emotional satisfaction. Also, it makes us question, no? How we understood this relationship, what we assumed it to be. And also this whole question of his guilt because at times the film pivots or, you know, it keeps telling us again and again. But at times we doubt it, as she doubts it, or we question and so I feel like that is so key to this powerful ending.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  13:53  

Yeah, I think everybody's talking about Nina Hoss and her fantastic singing and the views from her and she's absolutely great in this moment, I must say, but you can't be great if the other side is not also fantastic, what Ronald Zehrfeld is doing there, to play an implosion. It's as if everything, every energy's falling out of him in the moment he recognized what has happened. I recognize guiltiness, recognize the betrayed love, everything. In this moment he's dying there. And so what we are seeing is his view, when she's leaving, we are inside of his position, and not from her. And this is the position of a dying person. And I remember when we start this, the rehearsals for Phoenix, the first movie we saw together, all the actors. Because we are always talking about the movies in the seminars with the actors—best time of shooting movies is in the rehearsals with the actors, is Jacques Demy, Les mademoiselles de Rochefort. This was our first movie we saw because Jacques Demy is Jewish, his parents died in the Holocaust and he makes a musical, he makes a musical with Gene Kelly. Gene Kelly came from Hollywood to France in the middle of the ‘60s and said this is real musical. This is dancing, Michel Legrand’s music is fantastic, the songs are great. Everything what we have seen two or three years ago with this Oscar musical, I forget the name now...

HADEN GUEST  15:48

La La Land.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  15:49

La La Land. Everything is copied from the Jacques Demy movie, the beginning, everything.

HADEN GUEST  15:55  

He was a student here and he saw the films here of Jacques Demy, in a retrospective.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  16:01  

It was a big mistake. [LAUGHS]

HADEN GUEST  16:05

Hey, don’t blame me!  [LAUGHS]

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  16:07  

No, I want to make a joke in English, therefore and I haven't seen that movie. Sorry, but it's just the beginning scene. But this Jacques Demy scene, music is great. It's fantastic. And you can see what Germany could have been, as I said to the actors, if there was no Nazi fascism. So we have a fantastic musical scene at the beginning of the ‘30s. We have Lilian Harvey, we have all these fantastic directors who had to leave Germany, and then from musical they came to Série noire, this is their reaction. And so we have lost something—we can see that in Jacques Demy—and this is what we have lost is the subject of our movie here. This was the first day of rehearsal.

HADEN GUEST  17:08  

Well, you speak about Jacques Demy and dance, and we talked about dance last night when we were speaking about trauma and I wanted to talk about, not dance, but movement in this film. I feel like movement is so expressive and so important. This end with with Johnny, it's paradoxically he's this implosion, if you will, he's learned to hear. He's learned to see what he couldn't see before. Whereas, you know, and the same way with her, this emerging out of the shell, and it's expressed through kind of movement, he is gone back to that traumatized state that she was in at the beginning of the film, they've switched places. Now he is the one who's shell-shocked, but again, this is expressed physically, and I wondered if you could talk about this because the film is so much about directing movement, and you know in fact when he's the director and he's telling her how to walk, how to move and and I feel like there's a kind of musicality to this, if you will.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  18:09  

Yeah, what is happening there in this pseudo-basement, little flat he has, is something where there were ten days of shooting there, and I hate every day we are there in this basement because I see myself a little bit there, and I don't like the atmosphere, and I don't like this period picture thing I have made with these old costumes, and I hate everything. Yeah, but the thing I hate most is this paradox situation, that he is constructing a woman and she wants to be constructed because she had lost herself. She wants to be reconstructed by a man who constructs someone who he [thinks] is dead. And this is a very, such a paradox situation that at the beginning of the shooting I was making jokes about, but at the second or third day in this basement in the morning I know when this alarm clock is ringing I don't want to stand up, and this is the first time my life I don't want to go to the set because I don't want to see that shit again, this [UNKNOWN] I don't want to see how she's smiling because he said... because the shoes, these are her old pair of shoes she's wearing. It was so hard, and during this shooting I make the decision, never. I want to never period picture again in my life. And nothing with Holocaust. I'm through with this shit. But on the other hand I know that during our working, I know this must hurt. So. It's not like her to go to school, this is another thing, but this really hurts.

HADEN GUEST  20:07  

When you say, you know, you were grappling with this idea that you saw yourself in these scenes, you mean then you're also saying you're worried about this kind of return to kind of central logic or tension in your films between sort of split identities, between past and present? Is that what you mean there?

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  20:28  

Yes. And also we have made five films before, Nina and me, and we are talking about and I was– We are companions a little, but on the other hand, it's always a power structure between director male, muse female, yeah? We can do everything, we fight against this, we talk against this, but it's a structure which is very strong and in this movie the structure was so obvious. So that I'm sitting there behind the camera, we are shooting this movie with 35 millimeter, with celluloid, and I'm sitting there behind the camera, and I think of what I'm doing here? I'm the same shit guy, this Johnny. So like this, it was a deep morality. So many questions of morality. For example, when we are looking for the shooting places in Poland, I [said] I think yesterday we talked about this. We are in fantastic Mercedes Benz cars, we are looking for ruins in Poland. As if the German army is coming a second time since 1939. They're coming to Poland and ruin this world. It was from the point of morality for me, I don't like it so much, and I'd prefer a clear bank robbery. A good murder I like more, yeah? 

HADEN GUEST  22:04  

Well, I mean, I love this idea. I'm fascinated by this idea of thinking about the film in a sense, as well as, obviously, it's about so many things, but also is partly this metaphor for the relationship between the director and the actor for this. And what's interesting there too, is this mutual dependency that you have in their relationship. She needs Johnny, in a sense, even though you know, she knows what he's done. And she's told us again and again and this is kind of—they have to be told again and again these things—but she needs him to become herself again, just as he thinks he needs her. He does need her but for reasons he doesn't understand, and I was wondering if we could say maybe that could be the relationship between filmmaker and actor.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  22:56  

Yeah, you're totally right. And I think when she's, at least when she's leaving, she's going outside. Nina and me make the decision to make a break for some years. It's something to do with this because you cannot always create yourself through the eyes of someone else. This the structure you have to break. And this was the psychological position in this movie. The other thing was that it's hard to make a period picture in Germany because you can find the places where you can shoot the time of ‘45 without any work, because this, and must say it like this, after ‘89 the German Democratic Republic was totally distracted, and so, but you can see that they they are so poor and this part of Germany, that nothing was all ruins out there and the new houses are between the ruins. In West Germany, the capitalism destroys a house but build a new one on this, the old houses have vanished. But in the linguistic there are two terms: metaphorical and metonymical. I studied German, Germanistik when I was younger. And metaphorical means one meaning over another; metonymical means one meaning beside another, and the German Democratic Republic is beside, a metonymical structure. So you can go by bicycle and you find a whole street or a building, which is from 1939,1942 without any wounds or signs of today and also, that you are diving in history. Because we made Barbara, this movie before at the same places and we have a fantastic happy production. Yeah, it was. Each day we have a really good mood and we have ideas. We make Phoenix one year later and we were depressed each day. Yes, this was really interesting because the forest and the old houses, the ruins, the weapons, everything that we found on the ground infected us. And the other thing was a mistake at the beginning of the movie was– Since I think the last five movies or six movies, I threw out the first one or two days of shooting. And this movie I make, I think I know so much. But I know that you never can place a camera in a gas chamber, for example. I think everybody who places a camera in a gas chamber, I think he has to leave the room. And also you can't show the shooting during the death march of Jewish prisoners through the German SS people. This is not experience I made. Some other people in other countries can do it but we Germans, I think we don't have this imagination to make this picture. But the first day of shooting I had shown this death march! So with Nina Hoss and other people with these pajamas you can find in every—what's the name in English where you can find the costumes?

HADEN GUEST  26:58

Oh right, in a…you mean like a thrift store, in a costume shop?

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  27:02

In a costume shop, yeah, you can find concentration camp things everywhere, because they like it for Halloween, I don’t know. And so we bought them and so we have a group of I think sixty, seventy women and men through a German forest, there are SS troops around and they start shooting this woman and Nina survived because the shoot is going through her cheeks. And so we start. It was a very expensive day of shooting because we have also planes and bombs in the background. And the producers are very proud that they make a big picture CinemaScope and everywhere are bombs and planes and so. And after ten minutes I know it's a very big mistake what I'm doing here and I run away and hide myself. There's these toilet rooms and I hide myself and the hard thing was nobody missed me because this kind of cinema it's okay.

HADEN GUEST  28:25

[LAUGHS] You don’t need a director.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  28:26  

They don’t need a director but if we need it everybody can do it. There's a plane, there's some Jews, there's a shooting place, there's a headshot, there's a little bit brain on the ground, everybody knows. And this toilet in the forest, the plastic that in Germany they called a Dixie… the Dixies?

HADEN GUEST  28:48

I think Dixie is like an outhouse.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  28:50  

There's a little little window here you can look through. Like when you want to confess in a Catholic Church. You can look out and I saw the plane, saw the fire, saw the shootings, saw the blood. So this happy team—because this is really cinema, we're not Berlin school anymore, we're making [real] cinema— and I said, "What I've done, my God!" Because this was totally shit and this was for me like what's the step before you go to hell? Pur…

HADEN GUEST  29:27

Purgatory.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  29:28

But it was my purgatory, and then like after hours I leave this Dixie and I came to this team and said we can throw everything away. This is total shit. The only thing we used was this little–

HADEN GUEST  29:43

Shot of her walking?

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  29:44

Yeah, this is the only thing we have–

HADEN GUEST  29:45

Flashback.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  29:46

Yeah, the flashback and all other things because I think sometimes you need to make a movie, the first stage you have to cut off because there is too much energy and too much. And also what's the word in English for, it's like an animal? I don't know. If you want too much then you think you are really...you have power, you can do everything. You have to cut this first day. And we start with the car denied. And this was the better decision.

HADEN GUEST  30:28  

You spoke about how, you know, in Germany it was too easy to make, you know, you have to find these locations. And I wanted to speak about, again talking about film history, because it seems like as you'd make your films, the moments when we recognize or there's a familiarity—it could be a pattern, an image—and it seems to me you're saying to us that cinema itself has a kind of memory, has a kind of history, has a… right? That you have to recognize, that you have to... I mean, you can't... So I would say it's a moral position to say that you, as a director, have such respect for history that you recognize that you're not creating everything anew, that there are roots. And so, to me,the way in which this film deals for example, with Vertigo, I think is really quite brilliant because we see a moment that turns, you know, where he's telling her to put on the clothing and just a little bit more and she knows the dangerous game that it's become but then you do something else, it becomes her story in a way that Vertigo doesn’t. And I was wondering if you could talk a bit about the relationship of the film to Vertigo and perhaps to film history as well.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  31:55  

Okay, in Vertigo, it's like...it was so that Marilyn Monroe was very expensive, and Marilyn Monroe also was a little bit crazy and sometimes she's not coming during shooting and two days later and it costs thousands of dollars for the studio. And they tried to make a Konkurrenz, another Marilyn Monroe, which is a little bit cheaper and loyal. And so they created Kim Novak. And the idea of Hitchcock was to take Kim Novak because she is a creation, she is a Vertigo creation and so she can play herself. And this is a hard idea but it's not a bad idea. So Vertigo is a creation of men and they create women. And so I never saw Vertigo again together with the actors during the rehearsal because I said to myself, we make the other way around. We don't in our movie, not men create women, we show the disaster of this creation. We have to be outside. We don't want to desire Kim Novak; we’re are not on the position of James Stewart. We are outside. This was very important for us. And soalso we want—Nina said that "I want to be a Kim Novak which looks back." This was her position. And so the whole movie is a development of Kim Novak who looks back, who looks back and said, “I'm not playing this part anymore.” You know this song “Speak Low” by Kurt Weill is part of a musical, The Arms of Venus or ...? 

HADEN GUEST  34:02

Robert Walker, right?

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  34:03

Yeah, Robert Walker. And it's a fantastic story and I read it later but during the shooting I read in the Wikipedia what this musical is about. The musical is like this really dumb man, primitive, dumb man wants to marry his… fiance, finance…?

HADEN GUEST  34:24

Fiancée.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  34:25

Fiancée. And had bought the two rings for him and her. And they have an appointment in the Museum for Modern Art for them, not for art, not for modern art. And he's waiting for her and he has these two rings and there's a statue of Venus. And he's very dumb and he wants to try how to, what what he can do with this ring and he put this ring on this finger of this sculpture of Venus. In this moment, the sculpture move–

HADEN GUEST  34:59

Comes to life.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  35:00

...comes to life because she was under a [spell], yeah? That she is so long stone as a man is coming and said, “I want to marry you.” And the [spell] now is lost, and she's coming and she's Ava Gardner then and she has to marry this dumb man... so and this man is looking at her, heh heh heh. And he's a total disaster. This whole marriage between Ava Gardner and this dumb man is a total disaster. And after six or seven weeks of this fantastic musical, she recognized that this guy is dumb and he will be dumb for his whole life and she can't stand him anymore and she went back into the museum on the stone and wants to be a stone again. And this is a fantastic story. During she is singing, she's [turning to] stone again, she's singing “Speak Low” because the moment when she's coming from stone to flesh was the best moment in her life. The dumb person later was a disaster, and so she remembered during [turning to] stone again she remembered this fantastic feeling of the first love. Why doesn't it? And so it's not so far away from the movie, this story, and Nina and all that had laughed very loud about the story because they had never seen the movie. I think Ava Gardner is not seeing it herself. She was dubbed by the singer but from...I liked this movie very much because the guy is really really dumb. Walk–?

HADEN GUEST  36:48

Robert Walker.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  36:49

Robert Walker, fantastic. To play dumb is very good for men.

HADEN GUEST  36:54  

I wanted to ask now about your relationship with Nina Hoss and this because I know it was really a kind of collaboration that's, I think, quite unusual between star and director, and I was wondering if you could talk about how it evolved and her role in this film in particular and defining her character.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  37:20  

Our collaboration was like this, sometimes when you tell [certain people] a story, you can tell the story better than to others. So sometimes there are people… they’re sitting in front of you and you tell the story and you know, during your telling the story, you don't tell the story in a good way because the reaction is bad. It's not a reaction by words, it's a reaction of atmosphere, of views, of looking. And with Nina, it's always like this, that everything is a premise. So I make the plans and Harun and I have written the script and I'm talking to her. And then she's a little bit like this, that she takes all these impressions and she goes away. And she came back with an interpretation. Sometimes the interpretation I don't like so much and I have to do something. But mostly it was very interesting. It was very strange for me and it is, I must say, it's a female point of view and I'm not part of this. And it was very interesting for me not to respect this. She was a little bit for me, she was in all these six movies a little bit like someone in exile. I was the country and she was in exile in my country. And this position I like very much. Sometimes I have wished myself a little bit more open atmosphere, but she need this exile. She's always like this, that during the shooting she is wearing headphones and going away and she's for herself. And you know that most actors, they like to talk with each other and play cards in front of the trailers and so. She never [does] this, never.

HADEN GUEST  39:23  

I wanted to ask—and then we'll take some questions from the audience—though about the friend Lene because I think she's such a mesmerizing presence on screen and also though just her death, the way in which she disappears from the film is so powerful and at that moment we realize how much she's meant to us but she's a character about whom we know so very little. Right? You just give us the smallest details but so much I think depends on—again talking about physicality—this kind of fixity and that look that she has. In a sense they are almost like a couple first that has to be broken up before she can go to Johnny.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  40:10  

For me when I make a movie, all characters must be so complex and so important and interesting that they could be the main character of the movie. This is the first thing, I’d say. Nobody is just someone who is a servant for... I don't like this. And for her, there [were] many experiences for Hannah Arendt in her biography because Hannah Arendt worked for this Jewish Agency in Paris and later also New York. She had made a visit to Germany after ‘45 and said to Germany this country is lost forever, for all times. And so this was the material. Nina Kunzendorf is the name of the actress. On the other hand I like that there is before ‘33, there is a love affair between... a lesbian love affair between her and Nina Hoss, Nelly and Lene, but it was never realized but there is a desire. I need that. That when there's a wish...when you fall in love when you were 18 years old in someone and you met him again 20 years later, it's hard. You feel the same emotions, the something which is never lost these 20 years and this was a little bit the situation between them. And on the other hand is this character who is working against the traumatizing, who is working, who said, "I am a subject, I know what to do, we go to Palestine. I have a plan, I'm working there. I want to hear the music by Kurt Weill from you when we are back in a fantastic better situation." These people who have plans are the first to commit suicide and the others who let them go, who are weak, they have perhaps the possibility to survive. This was the idea we have.

HADEN GUEST  42:34  

Let's take some questions or comments—actually questions, let’s do questions, not comments. Okay. This gentleman in the center, Andrew, we’ll just pass the microphone to.

AUDIENCE 42:50  

Yesterday you said something I thought was really beautiful. You said a movie can end. A movie ends when the character doesn’t need the audience anymore. I thought that was very beautiful, very nicely put. You talked about how the ending visually for this movie was found, but I’d like to hear maybe how on a story level, you come to your endings. Do you know your endings when you start writing or do you discover them? And do you go through different iterations? Und auf deutsch ich möchte auch fragen, welchen Bundesligaverein unterstützen Sie denn? [And I’d like to ask in German, which football league do you support?]

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  43:31  

[LAUGHS]  Den letzten Satz habe ich nicht verstanden. [I didn’t understand the last part.]

AUDIENCE  43:32

Welchen Bundesligaverein unterstützen Sie? Weil Sie auch gestern… [Which German soccer club do you support?  Because yesterday you…]

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  43:36 

Borussia Mönchengladbach

AUDIENCE  43:37  

Okay, okay.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  43:38

Sorry for this German. I like in German this word Borussia Mönchengladbach, it has a fantastic sound. What’s yours?

AUDIENCE  43:46  

Eintracht Frankfurt

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  43:50  

Oh, it was a bad weekend for both of us. [LAUGHS] Wolfsburg is a shit team, yeah? I must say, it's like this for me.

What I would have said at the beginning is when the main characters, when these main characters in a movie don't need us anymore, therefore themselves with their pain or with their relief they don't need us anymore, then the movie is finished. And I think the moment of the hardest pain to know I'm singing the song, I found back my voice, I'm back to be a human being but I've lost everything. This is the hard situation of Nelly who was singing. She had back herself, but it isn't worth anything. There's no love. There's no friends. There's nothing. She's the loneliest person in the world. But she knows this is perhaps the beginning or it’s the end but it's her. And so she's leaving. To stay in…we are, not she’s out of focus, we are out of focus. We are more...Johnny. We are imploded and we have to let her go. I think this is a little bit like this what you asked for what happened yesterday, what, yesterday was Transit?

HADEN GUEST  45:34 

Yeah.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  45:35

I'm a little bit confused about this not so good Mousquet from California we have... was not so good, really...

HADEN GUEST  45:44 

I would have warned you.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  45:45

...but we changed to a Galizien wine.

HADEN GUEST  45:49  

I just wanted to follow up on... you said earlier today, you spoke about loneliness and how the act, for you, of going to the cinema is about a kind of affirmation, in a sense of loneliness, and it seems to me that this final release that you described as an ending, right?, of the characters not needing us anymore is a kind of separation, a kind of allowing us to return to our loneliness, a reminder that that relationship that we had with the screen was an illusion.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  46:26  

Yes, but in cinema you can learn that loneliness could be a very good thing for some time. Sometimes loneliness is to hear a Frank Sinatra song alone at home for example but in cinema you are together with other people, and to be together lonely with other people is fantastic. When I'm in a football stadium and I went often in a football stadium, there are 50,000 people, and we drink German beer and we can smoke there. It's a great paradise of living and I embrace totally strange people after a goal or something like that. We go home without friends but this is for me also a place where you are...where it's not negative to be lonely. In cinema you can learn to be lonely and it's not so bad to be lonely.

HADEN GUEST  47:33  

Other questions for Christian Petzold? Yes, right here on the edge.

AUDIENCE  47:39  

I've only seen these two films of yours but what impressed me in both of them is actually a little bit different from what you just said and that is the sense of homelessness that the characters have. And ironically, yesterday I was thinking of Last Tango in Paris, which also starts out with a suicide and ends up with a very innocent lost person being killed, Marlon Brando's character, and I wonder if... So to formulate this into a question, is the title Phoenix which indicates rebirth, is that ironic? Is she reborn or…? Why do you call it Phoenix?

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  48:20  

The last question… the title of the movie is The Last Tango of Paris…?  No, no, this was an acoustic thing.

HADEN GUEST  48:28

She’s finding echoes of The Last Tango in Paris [INAUDIBLE].

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  48:34

Ah, okay. The Phoenix, so, the Germans, they think they are phoenix. There's ash, there are ashes around them but they rebuilt theirself and this is reality—out of the ashes, like a phoenix, stronger than before, fantastic diesel cars. And therefore in the movie it's a club with the name Phoenix; it's not her. The others are Phoenix; others think they can recreate and they can forget what they have done and they can, ten years later they can make holidays in the Côte d’Azur and Rimini, and they go 1956 to Cannes. And they said, "We don't want to see Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog because it's against Germany to see the concentration camps." This is Phoenix. It's not ironic. It's the reality of the ‘50s which you can feel in the beginning of this movie and the club scene. And for her, there is no there is no rebirth because she's a little bit more and like I’ve read that Jean Améry to survive in Auschwitz, because he was a prisoner of Auschwitz, he tried to bring himself into a tunnel and in this tunnel he was filled up with Marcel Proust, this research...

HADEN GUEST  50:16

Remembrance of Things Past.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  50:17

Yeah, because he had read it sometimes, often in his life and he wants to remember what is happening in the first chapters, a third chapter… to be in a bubble to survive, a survival bubble. And this was more, I think, what was happening with her. She said she wants to recreate, to refind the thing she's lost... the times. She wants to be the same woman again. She wants to have the time back from life where she was in love with Johnny and this is no phoenix. It's the other way around.

HADEN GUEST  50:58  

I love the way she refuses at the beginning, the doctor gives her these different identities or looks, you know, fashionable looks that she could have and she wants to be herself and in a sense this is the film. Right from the beginning, you're telling us there’s this paradoxical condition that she's being told she can't be herself, but she wants to be herself. It's impossible.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  51:19  

Yeah, and the doctor, he's cynical, ironical, he has humor—Zarah Leander, not so good, yeah, because she makes music with Joseph Goebbels, and so...

HADEN GUEST  51:32  

And then, it's also… there’s this beautiful moment that we see that actually Hedy Lamarr was, in fact, her muse in a sense.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  51:40  

Yeah, this was interesting because Hedy Lamarr, I think she's a feminist.

HADEN GUEST  51:46

Oh yeah, she was a war hero too.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  51:48

And she creates, she's an engineer for many things and I'm looking for... because the make-up woman from this movie, she asked me what we can do with the hair of Nina Hoss? And I said, “She must be a free person before 1933.” And then I've looked to many, many portraits of stars and musicians from the time 1927 to 1933—American, German, everybody has hair like stone. And because you have this long, this... Really the only person I found which have free hair was Hedy Lamarr because she don't want to be in these Hollywood pictures, for these portrait pictures you can find in the newspapers. She don't want to look as if her hair is stone hair. In her portrait, it was made outside of studio, with wind inside. There was also this scandal movie where she's naked and so on. And so she's reborn, a newborn. She's not a creation of man. And so when I saw I have to pay for this picture of Hedy Lamarr twenty thousand euros...

HADEN GUEST  53:16  

Oh really [UNKNOWN]

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  53:17  

Everything you use from the States is so expensive because they have lawyers here. And the lawyers, they want to send the children to Harvard and so [LAUGHTER], and this costs much money.

HADEN GUEST  53:30

A vicious cycle.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  53:31

And so, when you want to use as just a black-and-white picture on the table in the scene, twenty thousand. But I need it because when someone said at one... she loved this woman. They don’t tell her the name of a Hedy Lamarr. She loved this woman. You know what kind of woman she is. She's free. She's wants to be... Her life hasn't begun yet but she has an idea of this life. And then the Nazis are coming and then the betrayal of the husband is coming. And so she can't live this life and because she can't live the life she desired she wants to go back to the point, I haven't begun yet, I'm not ready yet. This was the energy. Therefore, it was not so much money, twenty thousand, for this idea, I think.

HADEN GUEST  54:24  

It was worth it. Let's just take a final question, if we have one. Do we have a final question? Let's take right there in the back. Okay, then let's take the question. The gentleman in the center then.

AUDIENCE  54:40  

I mean, I find myself constantly shifting in my understanding of her vantage point and her rationalizations and her trauma and so on. But I also find myself with, like, a constant, seething loathing for Johnny, the whole film like this just low-level loathing the entire film through, which is like an amazing thing to sustain and still be riveted by everything else that's happened. So, I'm curious, like, do you just... do you know in retrospect? You keep referencing like wanting to see certain things from his perspective, the end from his perspective, you identify with him in many ways. Is that something you knew going in? Or is that something you're, like, just sort of finding in hindsight, knowing that he is a character who can inspire such.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  55:28  

I must be honest because I don't talk like this also to the audience, not four years ago. It's for me because I talked about Jean Améry and his survivor [?tryings?] with Marcel Proust. And for me, it was the whole movie. It's a dream of someone in the camps. Her dream is not too far away from Yella. She's dreaming that she survives, that she comes back, that she met her boyfriend… her husband, that he doesn't, perhaps doesn't betray her. Because it's a colportage story. The novel by Monteilhet, it's bullshit, yeah? The surgeries in 1945... “you look a little bit like the woman…”—it's totally bullshit! And I love, I love bullshit. I love because cinema has something to do with this, had something to do with pulp and bullshit and surgery and monsters and so on. But to do this, to combine this with the Holocaust, it's risky. And so I need a story in my bag that said, for myself, this bullshit, pulp, colportage shit, it's something. It's a dream of someone who is at the margins so this was the idea, therefore so many things happened what you're you asking for.

HADEN GUEST  57:19  

But this dream idea though, you never thought about literalizing that? Now, okay...

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  57:25  

I don't want to talk about this. It's so... This was also the problem during shooting, all this surgery and this colportage things because it's so hard and it's so also overwhelming and sensible. On the other hand, when you read this you think, they’re crazy, yeah? In Germany it was for us, it was not a very good reaction when we understood them. They thought we are crazy and what kind of movie is this, and you can’t show this to pupils and... because everything in Germany which is part of the Holocaust, you have to show pupils, for it’s pedagogical. And to have something like this for them, you don't learn something from this and the Germans have to learn so much and the films have to be part of education. And so we have problems and when Nina and I, we came to Toronto, we were totally astonished that the people loved us there. We don't believe them. We think it was perhaps... they [drank] too much Chardonnay from California.

HADEN GUEST  58:49  

[LAUGHS] Because I’m so impatient to invite you back again, I want to know, I would love to know, in closing if you want to tell us a little bit about what you're working on next, or if you could...

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  59:02  

Yeah, we start shooting in June, a movie about a German myth. There's the German myth, the Undine, that's from... the 19th century, 1811 it was written by Fouqué. It's a story about water nymph, which is...

HADEN GUEST  59:23

Water nymph.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  59:25

Water nymph. And it's so when a man fell in love with a woman and the woman doesn't react to this love and the man is getting... he has fallen in the big crisis and wants to commit suicide. He has the possibility in this myth and this legend and this tale to go into a forest where’s a lake in the forest and in this lake the nymph Undine is living, and he can shout her name, Undine, and she would come out of the water—naked, beautiful, fantastic. And he embraced her, kissed her, and she said, “I will be yours for the whole of your life”, and he said, “Great, fantastic.” And she said, “But the only thing in our contract is when you will leave me, you have to die, I’ll kill you”, and he said, “No problem, you’re the beautifulest woman I ever saw in my life”... And so they go back into the city and they're living together and then he met the girl... who doesn't love him before. But now he looks fantastic because he's loved by a beautiful girl. He's light and he has charm and humor. And this girl falls in love the first time with him and says, “Hey, this guy is not so boring like I have thought” and says, “Let's go out for a beer and wine and ice cream” or something like that. And so she said, “My God, he's very sexy.” And she said, “I want to marry,” you know, and he's totally surprised and, “Yes, I want it too,” and so that they're married and in the honeymoon or wedding... in the wedding night when they're naked in the bed, Undine is coming in a bubble of water into this wedding room and take him into this bubble, and he drow… what’s that…?

HADEN GUEST  1:01:40

Drowned.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD  1:01:41

Drowned, until his death, and then the body is floating away, and she's naked and goes back into the lake and on the way to the lake, the servants and the passengers on the streets looked at her, she always said the same sentence, I teared him to death. And then she's vanishing. But this is the old story and I make a story about a modern Undine who's living nowadays in Berlin and working in a museum for Urbanistik and there's a guy who wants to leave her, and this guy, he has to die, but she doesn't want to kill anymore. This is the story.

HADEN GUEST  1:02:24  

Sounds amazing and we can't wait to see the film. Thank you, Christian Petzold.

[APPLAUSE]