Transit introduction and post-screening discussion by Haden Guest and Christian Petzold.
Transcript
For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.
Screening of Transit, with introduction by Haden Guest and Christian Petzold and post-screening discussion and Q&A with audience. Monday December 3, 2018.
JOHN QUACKENBUSH 0:00
December 3 2018, the Harvard Film Archive screened Transit. 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 0:18
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Haden Guest and I'm director of the Harvard Film Archive. And it really is a true honor and a great thrill to welcome tonight one of the great filmmakers of his generation, one of the great filmmakers of today, Christian Petzold. Christian Petzold is today a revered name to those of us who do not simply love cinema, but have chosen cinema as our vocation and who see the screen as a window to another world that can teach and transform us, if only we learn to watch and to listen. Transformational lessons are indeed to be learned from the films of Christian Petzold and especially the two works we will screen tonight and tomorrow night, Transit and Phoenix. While these two very recent works engage and expand many of the larger themes and ideas that echo across Petzold’s oeuvre, they are also quite closely intertwined, I think, in really fascinating ways to form a diptych of sorts about identity, memory, and the ghosts of the Second World War. Transit is a quite brilliant adaptation of a singular and moving novel of the same name from the 1940s by Anna Seghers, an autobiographically inspired tale of a German man in his late 20s who escapes from a work camp and from occupied Paris and finds himself in Marseilles as the Nazi forces steadily approach that port city. In Marseilles, he is caught in a strange limbo of mistaken identity and bureaucratic machinations as he simultaneously tries, but also strangely resists, obtaining the necessary visas and paperwork to secure a passage far from the flames of war fanning Europe. In the midst of it all, he falls in love. Petzold’s screen adaptation of Transit deepens meanings and mysteries of Seghers’ celebrated novel through a truly radical gesture, a destabilizing of the film's exact time and setting, which seems at times quite magically, to be both the 1940s and the 21st century present day, both times overlaid in the same city of Marseilles where the dingy hotels often seem to be in the past, but the streets and cars are recognizably of today. Transit asks us to question what it means exactly for cinema to evoke the past and how that evocation’s always colored by our own place and experience in the present. In this case, Transit’s story of forced exile and displacement, of rising fascism and police states and controlled borders has clear and urgent resonances with today. Petzold’s films are often haunted, animated by phantom forces, by dark memories and regrets that shape the present, by alternate identities from the past, from fantasies. Figures from the dead even appear as apparitions or illusions. In Transit, a haunting of the present by the past here is also a meditation upon cinematic memory. For in Transit’s story, we also hear echoes of films gone past but always present, such as Casablanca, to name just one very obvious example. Or we could turn to a far lesser-known film from the year before, Hold Back the Dawn, and the list goes on. Classical cinema with its mythological and fabulous qualities is the kind of secret scaffolding that makes possible the intricate and gossamer structures of Petzold’s films. I’m really so thrilled that Christian Petzold is here tonight, and he'll also be here tomorrow night, but he's here tonight to discush, discuss Transit. I’m developing a lisp. There’s gonna be a conversation afterwards, and I encourage you to all stay for that. I'd like to ask everybody please turn off any cell phones, any electronic devices that you have, please refrain from using them. I just need to give very special thanks to Dennis Lim, who is the director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, where there's a major Christian Petzold taking place right now and talk of the town. Dennis Lim is also a visiting professor here at Harvard, here in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. I want to thank him for being here with us this academic year, this semester and for these continual, continuous and wonderful collaborations. So let's have a round of applause.
[APPLAUSE]
And now with no further ado, please join me in welcoming Christian Petzold.
[APPLAUSE]
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 5:01
And it's not just some words because later there are good two things: we have a Q&A and that before I have two glasses of wine and then my English is getting better. Someone is sitting here beside me, he's an interpreter. He's sitting there and in case the wine doesn't work he can help me. Casablanca, the thing you told, it was not a coincidence, it was so that Anna Seghers had written a novel, The Seventh Cross, and Fred Zinnemann makes a movie with Spencer Tracy and it was famous and therefore Anna Seghers had the possibility to came to the USA because she received a visa, but she wanted to go to Mexico because she's Communist, and the McCarthy time is not far away. And she sent this script from Transit to the Hollywood studios. And they answered her: we are working on a film a little bit similar to your script. And I think—and some people said this to me—I think the end of Casablanca is made out of the novel by Anna Seghers here in Transit. The distributor, the American distributor, I saw that his poster he made—poster’s the right word?—advertisement poster. He said Casablanca is... Kafkaesque, something like that was a quotation on it. It's not so bad. We can talk about it in the Q&A and my alcoholic tongue later…. Okay, and thank you very much. And now we are leaving for a place where there is alcohol and let you here in a place where it's no alcohol. Okay, thank you very much and enjoy the screening.
[APPLAUSE]
HADEN GUEST 7:32
Okay, also joining us for spontaneous translation is Roy Grundmann. As always, thank you, Roy, for being here.
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 7:40
I think the wine experience was not so good.
HADEN GUEST 7:43
Oh... [THEY LAUGH]
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 7:44
My English has gone totally German.
HADEN GUEST 7:46
You're just acting shy and nervous. But we're going to dispel that immediately, right now, because I'm going to ask you something very straightforward, which is just to talk about how you came to this novel, Transit, and how you came to this particular mode of adaptation where past and present remain intermingled so richly and lyrically.
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 8:14
Harun Farocki and I, we played together in the same soccer—football—team more than 20 years. He was a left defender and I'm the right, the right wing offender. And he was not such a good football player that... you know, but nobody wants to play the left defender, therefore he can play each Saturday. And we have a play outside of Berlin, one hour by car. He was a BMW driver. Very fast, fantastic car. And I was beside him each Saturday, sitting, and we're talking about many things. And some Saturday I said to him, "Anna Seghers, this Communistic, boring literature..." and he stopped the car immediately like in a movie. And I thought he wants to give me a hit in the face and he said, “You don't know what you're talking about and you have to read Transit.” And I haven't read Anna Seghers’ book before; it's just a sentence I take from someone else. And then I read... at Sunday we lost the game and we were totally depressed, and I was really depressed because my soccer quality was not so good. On this Saturday, I stay in bed and read Transit the whole Sunday. And it was one of the really big literature experiences in my life. There are 20-25 books in my life who changed my life; started with Robinson Crusoe and finished with Chekhov, and Anna Seghers was one of the books. And from this moment on we talk often about Anna Seghers. And I think this book Transit, was a reference for all our projects, all our movies we made about people in transit, for example, when you lost your employment or your love, you--for moments, sometimes for a longer time--you were in a transit room, in an exile without any connection to the world and, and so this was a very important book for us. And then we never wanted to do a movie out of it. Because it was our reference, our book; we read it together once a year. And then one year before he died, we start to think about [how] to realize it. And then he died and then I can't do it again. I can't work on with this because there are so many things we... memories on this project and I can't do it. For two years, I put it away. The other thing was I [had made] Phoenix and Barbara—these are period pictures, and I don't want to do a period picture again. There was some experience I've made, for example, for Phoenix we have to go to Poland to find streets which looked like Berlin 1945. And so we are in a fantastic Mercedes Benz limousine, the cameraman and I and the set designer, and we go through poor parts of Poland, and we go out of a fantastic luxury car with our photograph, and the people in these old destroyed ruined houses are full of fear that gentrification will start and so they think, 1939 we, the Germans, destroyed Poland and now we come back with fantastic German cars and I don't like from a moral point of view, I don't like the situation, I don't want to do that again. And also the problem with the German actors is when they are in period pictures and they get old costumes they start to play like in a play and not in a movie. Because it's so important and so I don't want to do that again. And then I saw your office in the office of…
HADEN GUEST 12:41
Brittany's!
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 12:42
...Brittany’s office, there is a photo, is but one hour ago, before I have this wines in my brain. I saw a photo. It's a... Standfoto, what's…
HADEN GUEST 12:57
Still.
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 12:58
… a still, thanks. A still from Robert Altman's movie The Long Goodbye and this was, I think, one of the moments I take this project Transit out again, because in this Robert Altman movie, you see a detective from 1942 in Hollywood nowadays. And this was a fantastic structure that Robert Altman created because you have both things: you have the dreams and the fears of 1942 in our contemporary world, and we think we are better than 1942, we have more experience, we have no wars. And in this moment we criticize also, we are not better than ‘42... something happened. There is a transit room in the times in this movie, and I think this was an idea to take this Anna Seghers novel in our time. [LAUGHS] Now I feel the wine totally. I don't know why.
HADEN GUEST 14:04
Come on, you only had a glass.
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 14:07
It's great for me, because Jack Nicholson is also there with Maria Schneider from the Professione: reporter.
HADEN GUEST 14:14
[LAUGH] Back in Brittany's office.
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 14:16
Brittany’s office is a fantastic office. And for me, for me the best pose... pose? Is that right, pose? A man who doesn't have any… have lost control over himself is in Shining when Jack Nicholson is lying like this at the table, and the eyes... this is great, really great. And sometimes I think when I do this in front of an audience, this is the end.
HADEN GUEST 14:44
Here's Johnny.
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 14:45
I want to do.
HADEN GUEST 14:47
That's actually tomorrow night, right. But, I wanted to ask, then you talked about the relationship or this idea that Transit then is creating a kind of distance from the two films that come before, from Barbara and from Phoenix, these two period films that are also your most commercially successful films and some might say among your more accessible films, right? And there are moments where you feel like your Transit is directly referencing those earlier films. So one of them is the casting of Paula Beer who bears uncanny resemblance to the actress, your previous star, of course, Nina Hoss, and I was wondering if that's something you could talk about how...
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 15:38
Yes, this came later. It was so that I always make movies... I’d made movies about women. It was there, three years ago in Switzerland, on a walk in a little town at the border to Germany, Basel. And there is a small cinema. Very well, fantastic [curation] and they have a Claude Chabrol retrospective there. Retrospective?
HADEN GUEST 16:08
Yeah, retrospective.
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 16:09
Retrospective. And there was an interview outside of the cinema with Chabrol and in this interview he's asked why he's always using... the main character is a female character and he said because women [don't] live, they survive… a woman doesn't live, she survives and this is a fantastic answer. And I always made movies with Nina Hoss and Julia Hummer before. And because I don't want to be so autobiographical. When I have a young man or now an older man in the center of the movie, it's something to do with me, but I don't want to make a movie about me. So Transit was the first where a male subject is in the center. So therefore I haven't got any… that never compare it with the movies for example, that Paula Beer and Nina Hoss are some… They’re different. But during the shooting in Marseilles we have this day when the press is coming to the set, and I hate these days. Ya know, they come there and I know they're talking about Nina Hoss and Paula Beer sitting beside me and I don't like that. And then they asked me, “Is Paula Beer the new Nina Hoss?” So does Libération and the daily magazine... daily newspaper. And I said “No, Franz Rogowski is the new Nina Hoss.” So this was very clever at this moment, but... and so it was okay. But my wife, she's more clever than me, and she said, I'm sorry, but we are planning now a new movie and Paula Beer’s… we’re shooting in June. And she has blonde hair, and we have photos from the first makeup two weeks ago. I think she is Nina Hoss. And so it's a little bit like this, I must say. But I don't like the idea that the director changed his muse against a younger one. This is not my...desire. So, it works.
HADEN GUEST 18:35
I mean, in thinking about the adaptation of this novel and one thing that you do, that's an innovation both as an adaptation but also for you, it's a first, which is the use of the voiceover. And I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about that because this voiceover adds another level of meaning to the film and adds another tense if you will. Suddenly, the voiceover is the present moment and what we see is the past so there's another... but then there's also the sense that this is a story being told a second time and could be told slightly different. So it brings it close to kind of, this narrator as a kind of novelist himself, perhaps inventing, embellishing, and I was wondering if you could talk about how you came to the voiceover narration and what possibilities you saw it giving you.
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 19:28
Three answers. One answer is that during the preparation of Transit—because I'm a big soccer fan—I was in the stadium in Marseilles to see a soccer game between Nice and Marseilles because the coach from Nice is one of these really intellectual coaches I like very much, and I've received a fantastic ticket in the first row. And I was very proud like a child and went there—26,000 people there—I went there in the stadium and this was also a VIP for very poor persons. And so all these women who are wives of the players, they look a little bit like prostitutes. So they are around me with champagne and so... And I was really, really nervous, and then I said to myself, if in this moment a voiceover... I have a voiceover my head, and this voiceover said, And then he goes down the stairs to the soccer field and saw the coach he always loved. And in this moment, this moment of presence… this moment was a sentimental journey, is getting into the past. It was a transit room between present and past, and this... and the other thing is when, during our work on Phoenix that Nina and I, we heard so many oral history things from the Frankfurter Holocaust Auschwitz trials. And this is always oral history, and all the survivors of the camps, most of them, they're not talking about themselves, they're talking about things they have seen, because it's better for them. They can't talk about their own survival, but they can talk about what they have seen in the camps, and this also has something from... They are in this moment, they are here in the trials, but they are back in the camp. And this paradox room I like very much. I don't like voiceover in movies like, in the Série noire. "This was a hard day and he was sitting in his office when this blonde long-legged girl..." Like this, I don't like this. But I like when the voiceover is on one side like music and on the other side it makes a passage from the west… from the past to the present. Mm hmm?
HADEN GUEST 22:31
Yeah, no, no, that's okay.
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 22:32
Make sense?
HADEN GUEST 22:33
Yeah. No it… again it brings...
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 22:36
I need a new wine now. [LAUGHS]
HADEN GUEST 22:39
Oh come on… Now we're enjoying the wine of life, if you will. [LAUGHS] I wanted to ask you though, you know, you were so generous to talk about Casablanca before and to reveal, in fact, these connections that I had sort of intuited or… But I wanted to talk about the role of cinephilia in your cinema, in your creative act, because you are someone who's so deeply steeped in the history of cinema, in a love of cinema, and your films—again, this has been spoken of by many—but I wanted to talk, to hear more exactly about how this enters into the imagination of your films, into perhaps the making of your films.
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 23:27
Some hours ago, we had a seminar in the class of Dennis. And the students asked me I think the question. It's something to do with, I think... I don't want to make quotations of the films I'd seen in my life. But when I make a movie, I know I make this movie in the neighborhood of other movies I've seen. I don't like people who said, I'm not writing, writers who said I'm not reading, or painters, … I’m not interested in the paintings of other people or musicians who say, never hear music, it’s just my own music. And I start to make movies because there are movies before. I saw many, many thousands of movies before I made a movie by my own. And I saw movies because they opened me something to the world, not themes or subjects, but looks, and so I'm working in a stream. And the other thing is, to know that there are other movies it gives you the impression that you are living in a city, and you are not alone. And to be not alone is a fantastic feeling. And so when I make the rehearsals with the actors, we have one week, each evening during Transit, we have cinema on the roof of the hotel, open-air cinema because in June, we have to wait until I think half past 10 in the evening to see the beamer light on the screen, and we have there movies, and that the actors can see movies and know that they're in a room of movies and that there were other movies before that… We saw also Barbara Stanwyck, we saw her as 19-year old. Also in the same office as the pictures are deep in my mind now. I like offices with them from other people when they take.
HADEN GUEST 25:38
So, but in these screenings, in these seminars, as you call them, where you're watching films together with your team, I mean, then this is a collective experience where you are learning from these films? How is this? I mean...
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 25:55
Yeah, you know, actors are narcissistic. They have their character, "This is my character, don't take words away or lines away from my character." I don't like this. But when we are looking together, when watching together movies, for example, I said it to you during our… wine orgy.
HADEN GUEST 26:17
This is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. [LAUGHTER]
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 26:23
...that we have, for example, we have watched movies because Paula Beer, she's 21 years old here, she's playing here. She wants to know how it is to go to look for a man, and feeling guilty. It's hard to know, with 21 to make this experience and so I show her some... show all, but especially movies about women walking through the night, was my theme. And we saw Phantom Lady. We saw a movie by Louis Malle, Escalator to...
HADEN GUEST 27:02
Elevator to the Gallows.
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 27:04
...to the Gallows. And this was very interesting because we all, as a collective of all members of our working, we saw women walking through the night. And the theme of women walking through the night, I would go to a festival where the retrospective subject was walking through the night, women walking through the night. It must be great.
HADEN GUEST 27:30
What were some of the other films that were key to this collective experience of viewing films during this during the making of Transit?
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 27:39
One of the first ones was What's Up, Doc? by Peter Bogdanovich because one is one of my favorites. Because it's a physical screwball comedy. And because, you know, Franz Rogowski, for example, and Paula Beer, they never were part of an actors’ school. They're dancers. And they're physical actors. And I want to show them that it’s good to be physical actor, especially in Germany where everything is coming from the mouth and the body is dead, and you must see when German actors are driving cars in front of cameras, this has nothing to do with car driving. This is face is working the whole time. And car driving, you’re a car driver because you want to be alone. And you want to be somnambul, somnambul, is that the word…?
HADEN GUEST 28:37
Somnambulistic.
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 28:38
Yes, somnambulistic. But the German actors who are from theater, actors’ schools, they make things and [UNKNOWN], so and I want to give them the feeling that when you see this Bogdanovich movie, this is one of the best movies of my life, I must say, because it's great. It's a really great movie and the thing with the San Francisco street and the glass is one of the best things. So we have the feeling that Transit is also a movie about dancing. And bodies, and not dialogue. We are talking about voiceover, but the voiceover is not literature, ya know, and I think all our rehearsals are rehearsals from dancers, when they are in their hotel room, how they are in the room, how is it distant when they come nearer, closer to each other, when… Everything's a choreography. And you can learn this from watching a movie by Peter Bogdanovich, who was in this time one of the greatest directors.
HADEN GUEST 29:48
Yeah, no, he had an incredible run. No and there are these moments of almost ballet, if you will, that wonderful moment when you have George and Marie, and she's against his back and like they’re at the threshold…
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 30:04
This is great. This was a fantastic day because we don't know how we can do this. And my thing was… it was the first time… yeah, ‘cause she's very, very tired and exhausted, and he wants to give her shelter. And I don't want a man and a woman who's coming in the night in a hotel is always sexualities, always erotic. They have to fuck with each other. But this scene was not a scene about sexual desire. It must be a scene to comfort each other, to get relief, to find a place for the night, for something warm. So we talked together, the actors and me, and then I remember the cover of a Simon and Garfunkel record, Bridge Over Troubled Water. And on the back side as you see Art Garfunkel, I think he's six feet tall, the really big one? And Paul Simon, he's three feet tall?
[LAUGHTER]
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 31:14
Yeah, like this? And they're going I think to Los Angeles there... Venice… at the beach, and Art Garfunkel is in the front and Paul Simon is in the same pose, he took his head in the back of Art Garfunkel. And for me when I was 13 I liked this record—Paul Simon’s a great songwriter—and for me, this was a picture of friendship and trust and loyalty. Then I go out and take it from Google, from the record and showed this to the actors, and they like it immediately and they make it. This was not in the script, it was something happened on this day.
HADEN GUEST 32:10
So is this something that, this idea of having these reference images, these iconic, these talismanic images, is this something that guides a certain part of your creative process?
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 32:22
Yeah, I don't like that actors have to go up in the morning at four o'clock or so. Four o'clock AM. So eight o'clock, it's enough. And then they have their costumes and we met at the set and we are alone—me, my personal assistant Iris Jung, and the actors with their costumes. Not makeup, no other, no lights, craft men, not main subjectivity behind the lights. You know, the light people tattooed and, they don't like...This artist is [UNKNOWN]. Yeah, like this. And so it was a very fantastic, quiet, silence atmosphere. And then we start our rehearsals for two or three hours. We try everything, the posing, the choreography. We're talking too much sometimes, I talk too much, I must say, but sometimes it's important to talk too much. And then we found something and we try it and then we know this is fantastic. And then I give a call to Hans Fromm, the cameraman, and the sound man. And they're coming and looking at this rehearsal. And then the actors are leaving the set and they go to the makeup and I then I start to write down a storyboard with Hans Fromm the cameraman, because first we have to have the performance and then we have to have a storyboard and the shooting list. Because we... all these things like Simon and Garfunkel, is born in a rehearsal, in an organic rehearsal now, and the producers always give a phone call at 11 AM, They start shooting? No, okay, we commit suicide. But... because it's very hard not to shoot until 11. But then when the actors come back from the makeup, and we have discussed everything then we are ready three hours later because we just need one take for this, one take for this. We know what we have to do, we have no discussions. These narcissistic discussions, artists often get like, Who am I? I don't feel this now. This is because we have the time.
HADEN GUEST 35:03
So we've talked about dance, I'd like to talk about song. And one of the moments that just moves me to tears whenever I see this film is when the radio is fixed. And this childhood song comes and then George sings it for the boy, and then he sings it a second time for the mother. And it's like, this moment, which echoes a moment in Phoenix, which maybe we can talk about tomorrow too, but this, the power of the song, this... Again, you talked about breaking free from dialogue, here you have this kind of, this poem, this free speech that's, again, reaching a kind of emotional depth that regular language can’t reach. I was wondering if you could talk about this moment and about song in your films.
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 35:46
Yeah, this song here in the radio, the song, this depends on the song from Phoenix, which we will see tomorrow. It's something to do with that during we make the rehearsals for Phoenix for the last scene with Nina Hoss and the song by Kurt Weill, it was so that in this moment I understand that when you find back your voice then you can leave the land of the death. It was like Orpheus and Eurydice, when you can sing... you have your soul back, your soul’s come back. And for this guy here, George, in Transit, we don't know anything from him, he has no identity, he has a wrong identity. He has no real friends, just someone in the bistro at the beginning but this is not a friend. He has no desire. He has no responsibility for someone. But in this moment when he starts to read the script of the dead author, he starts to reflect, and to reflect, this costs you pain. And everything's coming... he's getting adult in this movie. And in this moment when he repairs the radio—and this actor had to repair the radio in reality, it was really broken. And he had to learn to work with a candle and a knife to repair a radio. And so he was really glad, Franz Rogowski was glad that it works because it was after three hours there.
[LAUGHTER]
And also the little kid, and you need the kid too because the kid understands everything. The kid knows when he can sing, he could be my father. He has a feeling, I can trust him. And then in the second scene when the mother is coming—and she’s a fantastic actress from Germany and she wants to play a deaf because it's a fantastic experience not to have dialogue just to look. And she can look fantastic, really, really good. She knows... she can't hear how he sings, she can't hear his voice, but she can hear if he's true. Because this you can see. And this is a fantastic situation. And so in this moment, I think in this moment he's born... for this movie. In this moment he has something to lose, he has to feel the responsibility. He knows that he can't go on like Jean-Paul Belmondo or like a guy in the South, I want to fuck and then I'll take the money here and this girl there. So in this moment he's also guilty. And he has to do something, and he has fear of [being] guilty and irresponsible.
HADEN GUEST 39:01
We talked about the importance of the past in this film at this moment. There’s this kind of flashback, this connection to this umbilical cord of his childhood as well which is coming up which connects him with the little boy which is also so moving.
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 39:17
Yes. My mother died one year ago, she had an accident, and that's not so bad. It's okay. No, it's not okay. But it's so that after half a year you can work with this. We can work with that the parents are dead. And so here this is okay, they live on, they have stories, but sometimes... and it's always music, then you get a flashback. For example, you hear a song. The music my mother heard was not the best music in the world, I must say. It was very bad. But there was one song she loved. It's a song by Leonard Cohen, “Who by Fire.” Yeah, and I know this song she loved because she [got] her driver license [at] 51, because my father wants to drive. "And I don't want [you to] have a driver license." And so she [gets] the driver license [on] her own when she was 51 or 55. And then she received some presents at Christmas and I give her a tape with songs. One of the songs was Leonard Cohen, “Who by Fire”. This was her favorite song. And it was two months ago and I hear the radio and “Who by Fire” comes on. This is a hard moment, this moment. This is like for this guy who's sitting in front of a radio, what he... He's in a situation that he has a son in this moment. And then a song from the time when he was so young like this boy is in the radio. And he finds the words, they come back into his mind. And so he starts to have a biography and in the moment when you have a biography as a refugee, it's not good for you. A refugee [has] to lose his baggage; he has to lose his memories to be flexible, to be on the run. Because everything's ballast. So the ballast is coming back. And the ballast is something human.
HADEN GUEST 41:34
I mean, this moment, with the child, with the radio, with the song, this is not in the novel. This is something that you… and I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the novel. I just read it recently, and I've got to recommend highly to everybody. There's a new English translation out, a recent English translation that's available, but I was wondering if we could talk a bit about the novel and some of the decisions you made in adapting this. I mean there are many things I could ask about, but just in general, if you made certain decisions: I wouldn't do this, I wouldn't do that. And I was wondering if we could talk through that a little bit.
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 42:14
Yeah, in the novel I think they reached Marseilles on page 180 or so. And I was not so interested in this reality of the escape and the other scenes she had seen there. Very cinematographic. There's one hard scene, I think, a mother and a baby also on the run, a really hard scene...
HADEN GUEST 42:40
That the baby is dead?
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 42:42
The baby is dead, but she's still taking her baby on her back because she [doesn't] want to recognize that everything's gone, and the baby is dead. That’s a really hard scene and I think many Hollywood producers would say "I want this scene in the movie." And I'm not so interested in this thing. I'm interested in this thing that you are sitting in a harbor, in a port, and the port [has] two meanings, a port means also door. It's a door to the world but on the other side the door is totally closed. It's a prison, and this balance between... there’s the sea, the open space, the world is free, no borders, you can go everywhere. Also the port is a place, people are mixed there together, and on the other side you have the Nazis who hate mixing. Mixing of people, mixing of men and women, mixing homosexual, mixing... they hate everything. So I was interested in this port situation and not in a period picture about people on the run. This is not my part.
HADEN GUEST 44:03
I mean, one of the things in the novel that I think is quite astonishing is, gradually we become uncertain whether Weidel is actually dead or not, right? Because there's a question, people keep saying, Oh, they saw him again, they saw him again. And here early on, you show that bathroom full of blood, right? And it's like you want to clearly, like, that's one ghost that you can allow to linger but differently then and I was wondering if you could talk about that decision to show right away, to mark that Weidel was clearly… not dead.
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 44:40
Yeah. There was one thing, which I like very much in this bathroom scene is that he has no feelings, George. You see that? And because it's everyday and what happened, I mean, he killed himself, and so suicide is everyday. It's a personal thing. So everybody is looking for his own port, and suicide is a port for some people. The other thing is that I want to [make] the Paris part in the movie very short. Because George has no history. So I don't want to tell a story about a man without history. I want totell a story about a man who creates history in himself. And the other thing is, we tried to shoot at the beginning in Paris, and it was forbidden for us to make the scenes with the police and the razzia. Is it the same word in English, razzia? With the razzia, because of the two terrorist attacks in Paris it was forbidden. And the fantastic thing in France is when you came into the south, everything's allowed because it's a corrupt part. You have to pay some people and you can do everything you want, and I like this. And I prefer corrupt systems because you have a chance to survive. And because when you have money you can survive. And so we can do everything what we want in Marseilles, and Marseilles is also a city, which is… the best city I ever was in my life, I must say. And because we are shooting and nobody was interested in it… the city has self-consciousness is the... what is the self-?
HADEN GUEST 46:34
Self-consciousness?
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 46:35
Self-? Self-confidence. Yeah, there are one million tourists, you never see them, nobody. When you as a tourist, when they stole your money, you can go three hours later to a market for thieves. And you say, “They stole my one iPhone and the passport” and so, Okay, wait here half an hour, then the little boy’s coming, "$200. "And they get it back. I like this... It's a system... and I forgot the question, I’m sorry.
I told the story to Dennis, four days ago, I think, but it's a fantastic story. Franz Rogowski who's playing Georg here, he's a fantastic guy, and because the days are so long in May and June and July, after shooting, I think it was 5 PM or so, he went down to the sea. Because it's fantastic. There's an old wall and this old fort, and there you can sit down and see the sinking sun, and many tourists are sitting there smoking marijuana, and so it's very good there, and he is sitting there on the wall directly to the sea beside other tourists, and then they saw that there's a pit bull dog in the water. Pit bull, and he was heisst ertrunken?... He is drowned, the pit bull, and three little kids are swimming to the pit bull and take him out of the water and try to reanimate him, with a heart massage. And also with the mouth-to-mouth. Yes they try it, and you can see that the breast of the pit bull when they put the oxygen inside him [WHOOSHING SOUND] but you can see also that his legs and... are all... it's a dead body, it was a dead body so... but everybody looks at ten minutes to this reanimation of this pit bull, and then when they look behind them, their whole baggage, baggage was stolen. [LAUGHTER] Everybody's. And it was a performance. So Franz came back into the hotel where we went to see The Graduate. Yes, it was part of our...
HADEN GUEST 49:20
The Graduate?
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 49:21
The Graduate by Mike Nichols because New Hollywood was our seminar. So at the end—and it started with Bogdanovich therefore and William Friedkin— and he said, "I can't be a member…"
HADEN GUEST 49:35
And William Freidkin.
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 49:36
"...I have to go to the counselor; everything was stolen." And he was the first guy—they stole everything from him: all money, iPhone, everything. But it was a great performance. This I liked very much, but we have to work 24 hours, and because at this time, once a week he has to go back to Munich because he's playing theater there, the dance company, but he has no passport anymore and so we have to do many things. And he said this is research for my character. I’m in a transit, I’m in exile. This was really great. This I like in a town like Marseilles, and this is also something I like, when you can feel it, that when you lost the control in a movie, behind the loss of control there is a reality which is dramatic, it’s dramatic. This I like very much.
HADEN GUEST 50:41
I feel like the face is so important in your films. I mean, really, and I wanted to talk just before taking questions from the audience about Franz Rogowski, the actor. I mean, he has this look of vulnerability, of innocence. You brought up young Dustin Hoffman, The Graduate, and so I’ve been realizing, Okay, maybe this, there's something there too...
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 51:01
[INAUDIBLE] What’s the idea?
HADEN GUEST 51:03
I'm wondering if you could talk about your decision, I mean, you've probably seen him maybe in Michael Haneke’s Happy Ending or... But he's not that well known in the States, I must say, so I was wondering if you could tell us something about this actor and how... again because I feel like his face is so meaningful and soulful in this film.
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 51:24
Yeah, for me when we started this movie, he had made one or two other movies before. We can see this movie by Terrence Malick. I think it's coming out, where he's playing, and so now I think now he's a star in Germany. After these two or three movies, not just only for Transit, there's In the Gängen was the other movie, which was very popular. But I think it's something to do that he's 33 years old, and he was not playing. He was never on a, what I said, on a theater school because they don't want him because his speech, because of this, I don't know what the word in English when you have the scar here after the...
HADEN GUEST 52:12
Cleft palate?
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 52:14
Harelip? Harelip. Because he has this harelip they decide, no it is not possible. So, you know, these are the guys who can't drive a car, but they say... And so he was a little bit on the outside, he saw the world but he's not part of it. And when you are 33 years old and you're looking at the world and you're looking at other people, you have another look to the world. And so, he’s not so young and innocent. He's old, and he has seen many, many things. And so he's also very curious and relaxed, and he's not like these 18-year-old young actors you forget two years later. And so this is very interesting. And he can read lips because a long time after the operations, he was deaf, and so he had to learn reading lips and so he has also another look into the eyes of people and into the face of other people. He's very close to them. And I think these are reasons, and on the other side, he's a very intelligent guy, really intelligent, sometimes too intelligent.
HADEN GUEST 53:46
Well we have a very intelligent audience here and they have some questions, starting with Mariano Siskind, and if we can pass a microphone right here, Brittany, right here in the middle, to the gentleman the turtleneck. There you go.
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 53:57
When the audience had to ask, they go away.
HADEN GUEST 54:01
No, just some of them, just some of them.
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 54:02
It’s like me!
AUDIENCE 54:07
Thank you very much. This was a truly remarkable movie. And I'm tempted to ask you more about your relationship with football. And maybe when you're going to make your football movie and your thoughts about Marcelo Bielsa. But I'm not going to ask that question.
HADEN GUEST 54:28
This is a professor who has taught a class on soccer, by the way. So you should know.
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 54:33
We have to talk about soccer, because it's not possible to make a good movie about soccer. Because soccer is TV. The camera positions for soccer are from TV, but then we have this wide picture and we have the Steadicam... It's like, I think, American football or European soccer, you can’t, this is all the positions on TV. And when you want to make a movie, you have to use the same positions. I've seen a soccer movie, Germany…? I don't remember the name, but they use a Steadicam on the field. And I said, What's this? I don't want to see this, it’s like… it’s peinlich. It’s embarrassing.
AUDIENCE 55:31
But Marcelo would be a good actor for your movies because Marcelo Bielsa, the coach of Nice that you are talking about would be like a melancholic character that would fit well in your....
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 55:45
Yeah, I think that coaches and football players are very good actors. Yes, they could be very good actors. But the other way around is not possible.
HADEN GUEST 55:57
That was a preface to his question. So...
AUDIENCE 56:00
I wanted to ask you about the Talking Heads. And I wanted to ask you because of the wonderful performance that you explain about Georg as this melancholic character for whom Marseilles is a place he can't leave. Everyone or some of the people he gets in touch with find ways out of Marseilles. But for him he’s stuck there and it seems if the movie had continued, he would probably always run into an opportunity to leave and would find a way to stay. And then so that's how it ends him turning back and looking to see if Marie has just passed behind him. And then you finish with Talking Heads “Road to Nowhere,” which is this very optimistic perspective on not knowing where you're going, but daring to go anyway. And so the contrast between the melancholic Georg in Marseilles that relates very much with this experience of the end of the world and nowhere to go, that we relate to the contemporary moment with this ending on a very high note, with David Byrne saying, “Come on down, and we're young and you have to trust us. We don't know where we're going, but we'll take you there.” So, is that you? Is that your optimism kind of taking the voice like... embodying the voice of David Byrne, or... so how do you think about the contrast between the two?
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 58:11
Because [I'm always thinking,] how can I finish a movie? And there's one thing I always want to realize and this depends on my own experience as part of the audience. This is mostly my life, to be part of the audience. To sit here, it's not normal, on this side, and for me, it's always a fantastic... The only way for a movie to end is when the characters in the movie don't need the audience anymore. This is when John Wayne is riding away, when Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times is going away, and the... I don't know the word... the lens is, the circle, the iris closes. It's so that he don't need us anymore. This means also we are free, the audience, because we can go now. It's better. If the actor at the end, the characters need us, we are in television, they need us every second. In the cinema we can go. And then I thought that the cinema room had something to do with a church. And in [earlier] times with my parents, I had to go to church. Now I am not a member of a church anymore. But in this time, what I can remember what I liked very much was at the end of the Mass. At the end of the Mass the doors from the church are opened—I’m Protestant—and they play music by Johann Sebastian Bach. And you can go. And this was a fantastic moment, not only to leave the church, to go with music. That gives you a connection between the closed room in the church to the open world. Then the third thing was that I was a big fan of The Sopranos. Not I was, I am! It's great what they have done there, and for the whole world. At the end of The Sopranos, it's… I copy it a little bit at the end in Transit. It's that the Sopranos are sitting in the diner. And they're waiting for their daughter and in the last 20 minutes, it was a massacre what happened there. Many people died, blood everywhere. And now this family is sitting like an exhausted family in the diner and they're waiting for their daughter and it could be that the daughter is dead or that some of the other rivals or enemies have killed her, but the daughter arrived in a taxi and goes into this diner, and you see Tony Soprano, you hear the door opened by the daughter, you know, and he's turning direction to the door, and then: black. And you have the feeling perhaps it's not the daughter which is coming there. Perhaps it’s the murderer, perhaps it’s the death, perhaps if everything's okay, he don't need us anymore, the story don't need us anymore, they can go by their selves and we can go by ourselves. This was one of the best, for me, endings of a serial with I think eighty-two... eight seasons or seven seasons. And so this is for me a morality question of making movies... to say also, Nina Hoss in the Phoenix movie, at least she's going. So we want to go with her because she's pretty and we are guilty and don't let us alone in Germany and so... But this is also I think respect for the audience, to the audience, to give the characters their own life. This I was thinking about, therefore I make the end and the song by Talking Heads. I think they have this Paradoxon a little bit. We don't know where we can go to, but we are... because we are... we don't know, perhaps we have a chance. Because you all know so much. You have academies and money and books. You have ruined the world. So this is, I think it's a little bit in the song.
HADEN GUEST 1:02:49
A few other questions right here on the left, just behind you is a microphone, behind you. Right. There's a microphone right there.
AUDIENCE 1:02:59
I just wanted to ask you, you made that connection to Casablanca and it's a real question: Where did you find that Anna Seghers offered or wanted to have Transit made into film? Where did you find that?
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 1:03:14
Yes, this starts with... there was a movie made at the end of the seventies by Gerhard Theuring and Ingemo Engström, Fluchtweg nach Marseilles, based on the novel Transit for Marseilles... Transit for Anna Seghers. It's half-fiction, half-documentary. It's a fantastic movie. And there's material around this movie, of letters and something like that in a magazine, and I read it there that someone said she had sent it there. Could be that this is a story, but for me, sometimes what... like in this John Ford movie.
HADEN GUEST 1:03:57
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance?
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 1:03:59
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, it's a good story.
HADEN GUEST 1:04:04
Well, actually, we could figure that out. But, so, Mr. Petzold actually one reason why he's a little tired is he was caught on a train in transit for a few hours this afternoon so we're gonna just take one more question ‘cause we'll also be back tomorrow night with Phoenix so who has the last question or comment, Christian Petzold? Oh right there, good.
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 1:04:28
Hey, hey, I want, I want to go to your office again. [LAUGHTER]
BRITTANY GRAVELY 1:04:32
The question’s about my office. No... I probably could come up with my own answer, but I'm curious as to what you'll say. So the narrator a few times in the film says that someone's crying when they're not. Or it doesn't seem like they're crying. And I just...
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 1:04:58
For me voiceover I don't like so much because the voiceover is the position of someone who knows everything. Who is godlike. It's like the author is Pirandello. I don't like this. But this is not this kind of author, this voiceover, it's a barkeeper and he's a liar. He's a bad witness like when two have held their hands... tenderly? He said they kissed each other because you want to see a kiss. I like this. Witnesses have said, "I know this guy, he wears a yellow T-shirt," and it was red. So this makes him human and not... he's not an author, and he's not a big novelist. He's just a barkeeper, and oh, it was for me the first experience in the USA when I was the first time here in [UNKNOWN] place in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles and I was a student at this time. Because I'm a big fan of Raymond Chandler and I went to a bar—Raymond Chandler was also near Santa Barbara—and I went there inside and drank a Manhattan, and there was a football match and the barkeeper was so great to me and so kind and, I don't know the rules of football, I don't know that, I just don't understand what they're [saying]—I’m a soccer man. And so we have two-hour discussion about soccer and football and Europe and Italy and the Mexicans bring now the soccer to California, this is a tragedy and so, he talks. And next day, I take a motel room in Santa Barbara because I've felt as if this could be my second home... this barkeeper’s my best friend and the next day he didn't recognize me.
[LAUGHTER]
So, I take my rental car and drive away, and I was a very lonely guy. And I said we had talked... Yeah, it could be but he doesn't remember the feelings I had. And so for me, this is a little bit reminiscent to this bartender.
HADEN GUEST 1:07:45
Well, we all know who you are. You are Christian Petzold. We're so glad you're here tonight and that you'll be here again tomorrow with Phoenix.
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD 1:07:54
And you’ll remember me tomorrow and recognize me tomorrow?
HADEN GUEST 1:08:13
I will, I will. Absolutely.
[APPLAUSE]
©Harvard Film Archive
