Earlier, you said that you wouldn’t be interested in making a biopic—why not?
I never make biopics, because I don’t think they work. They reduce some kind of very complicated life, like every life is, to a narrative with fake cause and effect. This led to this, and this led to that, and the reason he or she did that is because in childhood… it’s super reductive, and that’s most biopics. I just wanted to focus on this. I wasn’t terribly interested in telling the story of Thomas Mann either—I was just interested in that moment and situation with the love triangle, as it were, with Thomas, Klaus, and Erika, who are all fantastically, interestingly entwined together and all fractured inside.
Was the process of writing a screenplay in German different from your typical process?
Not really. Some of the dialogue I wrote in English and put into Google Translate and then customized it. But I can look at dialogue musically, as well. Plus, I speak it freely. I did my A-levels in Germany. I lived there for five years, so I have a good feel for it. But also, I like working with the actors and listening to how they say it, and tweaking it. I had really great actors with a great sense of language. Especially Hanns Zischler. He has a real literary ear, and he’s very close in tone, as a person, to Thomas Mann. But he’s also very elegant in his phrasing and his sense of humor.
Weirdly, August Diehl, who plays Klaus—he’s superb, an amazing actor who I didn’t know. I didn’t know how brilliant he was. Interestingly, he’d read all the Klaus Mann novels, irrespective of the film. He just liked them. In fact, he brought me an old copy of one of his novels, Meeting Point in Infinity—but nobody knows Klaus Mann novels outside of Mephisto. He was good to play with, because that monologue at the beginning was tricky. To make six minutes of a lot of heavy material sound accidental and musical and random.
Do you want to keep making films in black and white in an academy ratio, or do the films just keep calling for it?
No, the films just call for it. I’m more interested in the story, the subject matter, the world. Because it’s set in the ’40s, and the previous films are also set in the past, in a period which I imagine in black and white and remember in black and white. But I do like black and white, the way it makes things abstract, and what you can do with light. But I don’t want to be a prisoner of my film language. Some filmmakers become prisoners of their language, and they have to keep making this thing. I hope not, but also it depends on the story I have to tell.
So it still feels fresh to you?
It just felt totally right. I did some research with my DP and looked at archival materials from that period, and also found photographs from the original journey in 1949, so there was quite a lot of inspiration from that. But let’s hope I can break out of this prison of black and white.
I mean, if it keeps calling for it, it keeps calling for it.
Absolutely. The main thing is to have something to say. A story that has layers that you can shape into something rich. That’s the main thing. In whatever form it calls for. But I don’t imagine I’ll be making handheld technicolor films anytime soon [laughs].