Christian Petzold: "The football fields of the cities are the new churches"

BarcelonaA leading German filmmaker of recent decades, Christian Petzold (Hilden, 1960) has visited Barcelona for the retrospective dedicated to him by the D'A Festival, a program that includes his latest film, which will be released in cinemas on April 10. In Espejos n. 3, a depressed piano student and the sole survivor of a fatal car accident recovers at the home of a woman she has just met. Tenderness and unexpected connections in a film that functions as a compendium of virtues and obsessions of one of the most in-form European directors of the moment.

It is one of the few European filmmakers today who practices melodrama and embraces the characters' emotions without remorse. What is it about melodrama that interests you so much?

— I am a child of the sixties and, therefore, of illustration. My teachers were rationalists. But when I went to the cinema I discovered Fassbinder, who was one of the few post-war German directors interested in melodrama. Through Fassbinder I discovered melodrama, just as he had discovered it through Douglas Sirk. For the children of rationalism, melodrama was kitsch, but in reality melodrama is a way of reaching the deepest layers. Cinema has more to do with ballads, kitsch and fairy tales than other disciplines.

He mentioned Fassbinder, but there is another great German filmmaker very important in his career and with whom he wrote screenplays: Harun Farocki. How did they meet?

— When I was a teenager, I lived in a city where there was no cinema, but I discovered it at the library, reading a magazine called Filmkritik, which awakened my desire for cinema. Farocki was one of its editors and wrote for it. When I was studying literature in Berlin, I learned that Farocki was giving a seminar and I went. The first film he showed us was a B-movie thriller, an apparently simple choice, especially for an intellectual filmmaker like Farocki. Afterwards, we went to the editing room to analyze the first 15 minutes and discuss every editing decision, every camera position and movement. When we finished, we returned to the cinema to watch those 15 minutes again. And although it is always said that if you analyze and interpret a work too much, you end up destroying it, the opposite happened to me: the experience was even richer. We had learned to watch a film.

And so they became friends?

— Not really. At first, Harun made comments about me in class that bothered me. “What does our literature expert think about this?”, he'd say, referring to me. But I went to talk to him after the seminar and told him to stop that crap. If he thought literature students were idiots and only filmmakers were worthwhile, the only ones who wanted to change things. He noticed I was carrying a ball and my clothes to play football because I had practice that evening. He really liked football, and when he found out I played, he invited me to his practice. And we played football together for thirty years. That's how our friendship began, in the shower, after playing football.

Speaking of football, a few days ago a match was held in New York that pitted a team led by you against a team led by the Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze. Upon reading the news, it was inevitable to think of the famous match that pitted Pasolini's team against Bertolucci's.

— Ah, it's interesting that you say that. Once, Harun gave me a photo of Pasolini playing football. And a couple of months ago I was talking about that with the film's distributor in the United States. Also about how I had met Koberidze a few months before and that we had been talking for hours about how football fields in cities are the new churches, the places where people meet. Even though many of these fields are ruined and nobody plays there anymore, and this reflects the crisis in our current social life. Be that as it may, the distributor had the idea of organizing a match in New York between a team from my film and another from his.

And who won?

— Koberidze, but only because he brought a team of players from Georgia. We lost 6 to 5, but we were the moral winners. And the match was a success, more than 200 people came to see us even though it was freezing cold. My distributor was enthusiastic and wants to have a match every year. I couldn't play because my knee is shot, but next year I'll have surgery and I'll be able to play. And then I'll show that I'm a better player than Koberidze. [Laughs]

I think he recommends to film students that, if they are invited to festivals, they should not go. Why? And why have you come to D’A?

— Because I only recommend it to young filmmakers. When you are a film student and make two or three shorts, many festivals invite you to present your films. You can travel around half the world for two years with a short, and live in four-star hotels, festival after festival, and sit in bars for hours with students from all over the world, every night in a different bar. It's a lot of fun, and you can fall in love with this lifestyle. But you can't work. It's impossible to work. My advice is: don't go to festivals; first, work. And when you're old, they'll do retrospectives for you in Barcelona like they do for me.

Is it true that he is working on a screenplay for a film that will bring him together with Nina Hoss and Paula Beer? For fans of Christian Petzold, it will be an event to see the two key actresses from his filmography together.

— The truth is that I am working on a script that might become a reality in three or four years. But it's just a story, nothing is confirmed. I mentioned the thing about Nina and Paula to a journalist and he put it in the headline. The next day I received a million messages. Everyone congratulated me on the great idea. But the only messages I didn't receive were from Paula and Nina. That means it was a big mistake to mention it. When I return to Berlin I will go talk to them and they will tell me: "But what the hell are you telling the press?" That's the situation right now.

Nina Hoss was the figure around whom he wrote his first films. Was it complicated to stop working with her to work with Paula Beer?

— No, by no means. I made six films with Nina and the next one was supposed to be En transit, but the script required it to be a young actress and it wasn't possible to work with Nina again. She accepted it without any problem. Paula was a complete novelty for me. I had never worked with anyone like her, because it's as if instead of an actress she were a dancer. She doesn't act, she dances. She doesn't come from any acting school, and I saw things in her that made me want to do different things. So we've shot four films together, but now she's become a mother and wants to take a two-year break, she's gone back to studying art and things are going well for her. So I'll be working with other actors.

A fun fact: in 2018 he was asked to choose 10 films from the last 10 years and on his list appeared Den of thieves [Thieves' game] in our home], a thriller about heists with Gerard Butler. Some of his most cinephile fans must have rubbed their eyes.

— It's a fantastic movie! We always talk about Michael Mann and Heat, but Den of thieves is like another version of Heat, a version made for the working class. I really like it, it's a brilliant movie. Recently I saw another movie in this vein that I really liked: I Am Your Woman, directed by Julia Hart. It's set in the 70s and is about a gangster's wife who is being pursued. If you don't know it, check it out.