30/08/2021 - Named Best Director at Karlovy Vary for his new film, the Munich-born helmer wants you to read The Comic Toolbox. Now

Dietrich Brüggemann with his Best Director Award at Karlovy Vary (© Film Servis Festival Karlovy Vary)

Stefan Arsenijević might have picked up this year’s Crystal Globe (see the news), but before that, he got a mention in Nö [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Dietrich Brüggemann
film profile]. “I love casting fellow directors in small parts,” Best Director Award winner Dietrich Brüggemann tells Cineuropa when we talk about his film, admitting they were on holiday when the verdict came in. “They called us both, so we jumped on a plane back to Karlovy Vary and took all kinds of funny photos with our statuettes.”

Cineuropa: The description of Nö made it sound like a romantic comedy – people in their thirties and their problems. Why did you even want to talk about that time in life?
Dietrich Brüggemann: Cinema and art, and literature, and everything, always focus on existential issues. Birth and death are obviously interesting, but the one vital decision you make in your life is about who you are going to start a family with. Cinema has done thousands of dances around that subject, and many people before me have pointed out that the real story starts after the happy ending. Hollywood is all about getting people together, but what happens later? Ingmar Bergman asked that question, so my film is just one more entry in that little subgenre.

These characters say what other people only think. You can be in a good relationship and still think about breaking up every once in a while.
That’s when cinema becomes really interesting: when it’s revealing our dirty secrets. Maybe your partner is only your second choice because you didn’t get the one you wanted? Even in the most horrible, Cannes-winning, feel-bad movie, they don’t go to these places where you question the very core of your relationship. I mean, let’s get real! People get into relationships for various reasons, and even when you really love somebody for one aspect of their personality, you despise them for another. I like that kind of sociologically founded comedy that you can find in the films of Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, and Woody Allen – seeing people as people, but also as animals.

Someone mentions here that whatever we do, we keep thinking about the “invisible people”, constantly judging our choices. Is this something you have experienced as well?
This is, on a very basic level, the way human society works. Everything you know about the world and everything you think you should do, or want, is connected to this group of invisible people expecting something of you. It’s your ancestors, your family, what they say in the media and what your friends post on Instagram. There is always a hidden element in there, telling you: “You should do the same.” It depends on your individual constitution to what extent you perceive these expectations. But they are there. This is what frames the whole film, so the answer is maybe yes.

Many scenes are intimate and realistic, others just crazy – like when the father-to-be freaks out, seeing something monstrous during an ultrasound.
There is an actual monster there. This surreal stuff happens throughout the film – we have an actual war scene, which shouldn’t be there, a strange interaction with a patient in the operating room, who shouldn’t be awake, and we have kids rapidly ageing. I think it should be done more in cinema. Because realism, what is it? When you make a film, it’s an elaborate fake. We hire costume designers and block the street with our trucks, and for what? To make sure everything resembles some perceived reality? Why don’t we show the hidden psychological reality instead? When this man sees the monster, that’s his fear – that this kid will “eat” his entire life, which is what children do. Cinema was created to show dreams and nightmares. We’ve lost that, and I don’t know why. It’s so beautiful.

Film festivals certainly seem to favour social dramas these days.
I am a bit critical of the way festivals have gone in the last 20 years or so. Cinema has gone in the direction of stupid entertainment, and festivals feel they need to reward these very sincere, strict, the-world-is-full-of-problems kinds of films. It’s like with kids – first you do your homework, and then you go out to play.

These scenes we just mentioned, you can understand what they mean, even despite the craziness. Was it hard being playful yet making sure that no one would just get confused?
Whatever the audience is thinking should be reflected in at least one of the characters – that’s your obligation as a director. She is scared for her child, so to her, leaving the hospital means dealing with a full-blown war. But her husband doesn’t notice it, and this discrepancy is insanely funny. There is a deeper emotional truth about two people who have different perceptions of the world around them, which is something we all know. But true and funny – it’s not a contradiction. A good joke is a way of telling the truth: that’s even in the handbooks! My favourite screenwriting handbook – this goes out to all the film students out there – is called The Comic Toolbox: How to Be Funny Even if You’re Not by John Vorhaus. He gives a perfect definition of what comedy is: comedy is truth and pain.