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Interview: Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck on Never Look Away

The filmmaker discusses his relationship to art, the influence of Elia Kazan on his work, and consulting with Gerhard Richter.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck on the set of Never Look Away
Photo: Nadja Klier/Sony Pictures Classics

In 2010, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck followed up his Oscar-winning The Lives of Others, about Stasi officers monitoring the lives of East Berliners, with the big-budget Hollywood production The Tourist. The film, a light-hearted romantic thriller starring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp, did well at the box office but was ravaged by critics. As a jovial von Donnersmarck told me late last year: “If you’re a critic and you went to a restaurant and you were in the mood for steak and you got even the best tiramisu in the world, you’re probably going to say, ‘That’s not what I ordered.’ But I hadn’t been taking orders.”

Now, the German filmmaker has served up something a little closer in spirit to The Lives of Others. His latest, Never Look Away, is a three-hour epic that spans three decades of German history as it tracks the life of a young German artist—Kurt Barnert (played as an adult by Tom Schilling)—who grows up in Dresden under the Nazis, comes of age under the East German communist regime, and eventually finds his artistic voice in West German Düsseldorf.

When von Donnersmarck was in New York to promote Never Look Away last year ahead of its Oscar-qualifying run, we spoke about his relationship to art, the influence of filmmaker Elia Kazan on his work, and the connections between Kurt Bannert and the man’s real-life counterpart, celebrated German visual artist Gerhard Richter.

What is it about Gerhard Richter’s life that inspired you to make Never Look Away?

I was looking to make a movie about human creativity. I’m always struggling to find a positive way to look at life and all the terrible things that happen to all of us. I think that art can help us with that challenge. One of the reasons that we find art so enjoyable—be it a great movie or a great painting—is because it shows us that life is worth living. Those songs about pain and suffering and heartbreak—why is that still something we really like to hear? It’s because we see that someone has been able to take joy in the feelings associated with this somehow.

At first, I was looking for a way of telling this through opera. I had this idea of a composer whose whole life is terrible: full of heartbreak, rejection, financial hardship, and all that. And then he goes home and turns it all into these beautiful arias and you find everything transcended on the big stage and in that beautiful way that operas are done. I thought it would be very interesting to juxtapose that, but I didn’t find a story there.

Then I found one element from the life of Gerhard Richter. It was a really a very difficult life. There was the tragedy of his aunt being murdered by the Nazis, and he had done a beautiful painting of this woman holding him as a little child before she was killed. But what is now known—what the investigative journalist Jürgen Schreiber only uncovered in the early 2000s—is that the father of the woman Richter ended up marrying was one of the perpetrators of the Nazis’ so-called euthanasia program. I thought this was an interesting starting point for a movie: to tie together the tragedy of his youth and childhood—losing his aunt and experiencing the destruction of his home town—with his positive future, namely finding a woman he loves. Somehow it’s inextricably linked through the relationship with her father. I thought I could build a story that’s truthful and explore these issues.

You’ve said that you were influenced by something from director Elia Kazan.

I read his autobiography about five times, because I think it’s the best book about filmmaking. I even thought for a while about turning it into a film or series, because it’s so rich in terms of what he lived through. In the book, Kazan talks about his collaboration with artistic geniuses like Marlon Brando, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams. He says that he feels that their artistic talent is the scab that’s formed over the wounds that life has given them. I think it’s a beautiful analogy because you can stretch it pretty far. If the wound is still open you can’t create art. If the scab is over a big wound, you can create great art. And if the wound opens up again, due to some great trauma, you aren’t going to be able to create any more.

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I think that if we look at life in the right way we can, at any given moment, use everything that ever happened to us—both positive and negative—to be our best selves in that moment. And in art that becomes especially visible. So, I thought it was interesting to take on [as a subject] an artist who’d experienced the bombing of his home city and the death of countless friends and who transcended that trauma by doing beautiful paintings of bombers and and by having the aunt who was murdered gloriously memorialized in a beautiful picture of her holding him as a child. It’s fascinating. I think with every trauma that we experience we can decide to lay down and crumble, or we can decide to overcome it and make something of it.

Kurt is taken as a young boy to see the Nazi “Degenerate Art” exhibition by his aunt. Did you think it important to recreate the art works that were destroyed?

Those paintings only exist today as little black-and-white photos, so I thought that if we worked with the artists’ archives and put substantial effort and money into recreating those paintings exactly as they were, or as close to what we imagine they were, there would be a kind of triumph there—as if the Nazis hadn’t really destroyed them.

Is it true that your own interest in art was also sparked at an early age?

I remember my very first art exhibit in Berlin. I had lived in New York until I was eight. My father was an executive with Lufthansa Airlines; we were actually among the first people to live on Roosevelt Island after it was no longer called Welfare Island. So, when we moved to Berlin, my mother took my brother and me to this contemporary art exhibit called “Zeitgeist.” It was art from all over the world, but mainly from America and Germany. As I child, I hadn’t been really exposed to contemporary art, so it was kind of shocking to see, for instance, that Joseph Beuys had done this giant heap of clay in the entranceway. That was art. It was kind of wild. This was 1982, and the building where the exhibition was held still had substantial war damage, and the Berlin Wall was right next to it—and suddenly it was really interesting to see that the German artists were being shown next to American ones like Andy Warhol and Frank Stella. I wouldn’t say that I loved [all of] the art there, but I thought about it and was amazed by it. I think a lot of modern art is about shifting your perspective on something. In a way, I think that’s almost a definition of what a work of art today is. Does it change your way of seeing the world a little bit? That’s what this did for me.

Did you consciously choose to show how ordinary people’s lives get caught up in the polarizing ideologies of their times?

I thought an interesting way to explore that would be through art. The Nazis had a very clear idea as to what they wanted their art to look like. Then came the communists, whose goal was to have a completely different kind of art. But from today’s perspective, sometimes it’s hard to know what was communist art and what was Nazi art because it’s so similar. I think if any government has an idea of what art is supposed to be like, art is already lost. I thought it was interesting to show this artist who the Nazis and the communists tried to shape and who is now in the West and can do whatever he wants. But it’s hard to shake all that off. Then he comes to the realization that the only way [to find his own truth] is to look deep, deep within and work from the inside out. I always like stories where you have an intimate personal story in the foreground and the whole thing is mirrored on a political level in the background. I think Germany underwent something similar. It’s a country that created such unimaginable horrors and it had to somehow redefine itself—to truly and completely change.

Just as the Stasi perpetrators in The Lives of Others disappear into society after the Berlin Wall comes down, the former Nazi SS doctor in Never Look Away survives the succeeding political regimes unscathed.

Yes. Gerhard Richter’s father-in-law died in 1988 in his 90s. He was a very respected doctor who had never been brought to justice. Unfortunately, that’s the sad historical truth. A lot of people aren’t punished for their crimes. But if we focus on that we’d go crazy. If we focus on friendship and tolerance and love and truth, that’s its own reward. If our enemies focus on domination, wealth and power and all that, in a way their lives will be quite poor. It’s one of those things that we have to train ourselves toward: looking at the world so that we don’t get so incredibly disappointed and frustrated and upset with the injustice of it all.

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Did you consult with Richter on this film?

I wrote to him and said I had an idea for a film and I’d like to use elements from his life and that it would help me to get more details from him. He was game for that and we spent many weeks together. I talked to him a lot. He let me record countless hours of conversation and we went to places from his youth and childhood in Dresden. I don’t think he would have told me all the things he did if I had been writing a biography, or making a biopic. He knew that I was using his life as inspiration for my own story. That’s kind of how he works himself. He’d do a painting—like the one he did of Jackie Kennedy after her husband was murdered—and he would put his own thoughts and feelings into it. He won’t exactly do a translation of that photo. I read him the script just so he wouldn’t be surprised by anything, but he said he emotionally didn’t feel up to watching it. I understand that a little bit. I’d probably feel the same way if something was made about my life. Either it’s too far away from my life or it’s too close, and both would be painful. So maybe the film is made for everyone except him!

Gerard Raymond

Gerard Raymond is a travel and arts writer based in New York City. His writing has appeared in Broadway Direct, TDF Stages, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and other publications.

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