08/08/2024 - The German director follows a gangster through Brussels in his new movie, a mixture of crime story and existentialist drama

(© Massimo Piccoli/Locarno Film Festival/Ti-Press)

Christoph Hochhäusler's new film Death Will Come [+see also:
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Cineuropa: Was there a particular image or scene that you used as a starting point?
Christoph Hochhäusler: It started with the question of what someone who has a lot of power does when it comes to their own death. It's a thought that has interested me for a long time. And I've always been surprised to see that it's often men who want death to be sudden – they want death not to involve weakness, and they want it to happen in a controlled manner, so to speak. That always seemed to me to be a lack of humility, which is typical of what is masculine today.

You contrast the male protagonist with a female contract killer.
We wanted to show a kind of “last gangster”. He embodies the model of the lone fighter that is tending to die out. A female viewer at a test screening put it like this: “The men are doing away with themselves.” I thought that was very apt. The women in the film form a triangle. That's not a socio-political analysis on my part – it's more of a feeling – but I see the women in the film taking a different approach. They are more realistic and more cooperative, and they will therefore survive.

Did you have a specific idea of what the actress should look like?
When I write a character, I try to leave him or her blurry to a certain extent. When casting, I want to have a further surprise. It sometimes happens that I have someone specifically in mind to play a role, but rarely. Ulrike Müller, who does the casting for my films, showed me a television interview where Sophie Verbeeck was talking about her role in A Paris Education [+see also:
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film profile] by Jean-Paul Civeyrac. That's how I came across her. She's played quite a few roles, but that interview made all the difference for me. I found her very suitable for the role in my film. She has an exciting mixture of extreme toughness and openness at the same time. There are contradictions in her face. It was important to develop the character's appearance with her. So how does she wear her hair? What shoes does she wear? What clothes does she wear? How often does she change them? For me, that's always an important part of “finding” a character.

Is that how you came up with the other roles around these two main characters?
Louis-Do de Lencquesaing as the ageing gangster and Sophie as the killer only have two scenes together, but they were the only two actors we cast together. I had the feeling they were the ones who had to carry the film. Because even if you don't see them much together, the two characters relate to each other. With Ulrich Peltzer, with whom I wrote the screenplay, I was trying to develop the film as a panorama. The movie is about many characters, about a cosmos, about a world. We felt that for this film, one main character alone would not have been enough. But it's also true that there have probably never been as many characters in my films as in this one.

Which were the most important aspects of the aesthetic concept of the film? How did Brussels inspire you as a setting?
Basically, the film started with Brussels. I visited the city; I loved it so much, and I thought something had to be done there. And the first thing that came to mind was: “Couldn't gangsters live here?” And that's not to say that you couldn't make completely different films in Brussels, too. But that was the first thing that inspired me. I find it easier to set fiction, like a gangster film, in a city that I don't know so well because it gives you that distance that you need when developing a cinema gangster. Brussels has this mixture of beautiful and brutal. There is a certain greyness, but there are also some very majestic things. I hope to make another film in Brussels. It's no coincidence that such a small country produces so many great films. It has a lot of great actors and professionals. It was a very pleasant experience filming there.

What fascinates you about the crime genre?
For me, the great thing about the genre is that you can deal with certain topics in a more direct way. It enables an exaggerated and allegorical form that contrasts with realism. I've always been fascinated by fairy tales and the like. I think I need abstraction in cinema. In this type of movie, the viewers become very important because they have to play along. And genre means nothing other than the fact that there are expectations that you can use and, of course, subvert.