While German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck was in Toronto on a recent, chilly day to talk about his debut feature The Lives of Others, his mind was probably down in sunny L.A.
Not due to inviting weather but the fact that, at that very moment, somewhere in the land of glitz and glamour, Oscar ballots were being printed, and his film could have been on one of them. As we sat down, he still didn’t know.
Mere days before the official announcement of the Academy Awards nominations, Donnermarck was visibly anxious. The Lives of Others was rumoured to be a real contender in the Best Foreign Film category.
“It’s especially vicious now that the list was already cooked down from 61 to nine contenders,” said von Donnersmarck about the Academy’s unprecedented early announcement of a shortlist, which pitted him against eight other hopefuls for the top five spots. “It means that more than likely you’ll be selected, but it is all the more terrible if you’re not.”
It’s hard to imagine a man like von Donnersmarck cowering at the whims of the Academy. At six foot nine inches, the ex-Soviet-East-German director is built like a line backer.
Donnersmarck’s film, The Lives of Others, is a shadowy political thriller set in East Germany, five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall-a personal subject. Echoing the voyeuristic themes of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, von Donnersmarck tells the stories of residents who suffered through the iron-fisted rule of a government that crushed their privacy and freedom.
The plot centres on Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) a calculating officer of the Stasi, an elite secret police force. When Gerd is assigned to spy on playwright Georg Dreymann (Sebastian Koch) and his lover Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), empathy begins to penetrate his stern manner. A friendship blossoms between him and the couple, and Gerd risks his position to protect them.
According to von Donnersmarck, the film was inspired by a famous quote from Vladimir Lenin telling Maxim Gorky that he couldn’t listen to his favourite piece of music, Beethoven’s Appassionata, without wanting to “stroke people’s heads, and tell them nice, sweet, stupid things,” and how he instead wished to “smash in those heads without mercy.”
“I thought, what if I could somehow force Lenin to listen to the Appassionata,” von Donnersmarck explained, “just as he was getting ready to smash in somebody’s head. Lenin turned into this character of Wiesler, the person wanting to hear words of hatred against the ideology, which to him means everything, and actually hearing beautiful music that opens the door to feeling that actually makes him abandon exactly that ideology.”
Though von Donnersmarck lived in West Germany as a child, his family originated in the East and he had several friends and relatives on the Soviet side of the Berlin Wall. During family visits to these folks, von Donnersmarck began to understand what the Stasi was really like.
“I remember one incident when my mother was called out of the car to go into one of those little border patrol houses,” the director recalled. “[She] disappeared there with these Stasi guys for hours. We were waiting in the car. Then she came back all shaky, and told us that she had been strip-searched in there, and humiliated in all possible ways, and interrogated, and just held there for hours so they could terrify her.”
“Here a government had the power to undress my all-powerful mother. It just showed me that, when confronted with the power of an absolute state, even an adult, who is normally in control, became like a child.”
But to craft his vivid retelling of this East Germany, von Donnersmarck relied on more than his childhood memories. He did extensive research in old German Democratic Republic files and interviewed a variety of figures, from Stasi prisoners to ex-Stasi officers. The latter particularly unsettled the director.
“They were willing to tell me these stories with a weird kind of pride.…It was sometimes quite hard to listen to all of that, without showing them any judgment. I just imagined myself as a journalist trying to find out something about them, and saying to myself, ‘OK, I won’t show them my judgment now, but I’ll have the last word because I’ll be making the film.'”
The Lives of Others is as evocative as it is intense, and it has been winning everything from Lolas (Germany’s Oscar equivilent) to European Film Awards.
“The great thing was I got that kind of support from, really, all the great writers and intellectuals,” von Donnersmarck commented. “They came out and wrote really beautiful pieces or made public statements about the film, saying how much it reflected their own experiences of the East.”
The film’s closing leaves the viewer apprehensive. Its final freeze-frame is difficult to reconcile with the rest of a film so superbly bleak, devastating, and claustrophobic. For this, von Donnersmarck offers an explanation as ambivalent and deceptively direct as the rest of the film: “I do believe we have reason to hope.”
For von Donnersmarck, a positive attitude seems justified: on Jan. 23, he learned that The Lives of Others made the list of nominees for Best Foreign Film at the 79th Academy Awards. Tune in on Feb. to see if he’s the winner.
Rating: VVVV
The Lives of Others opens in theatres this Friday.
