26/05/2025 - CANNES 2025: In light of his first time on the Croisette, the German director discusses the merits of making simpler films with strong emotional resonance

(© Marco Krueger/Schramm Film)

Mirrors No. 3 [+see also:
film review
interview: Christian Petzold
film profile] marks the fourth collaboration between Christian Petzold and actress Paula Beer, and in it, she plays Laura, a piano student who ends up living in the countryside after a tragic car accident. In the caring hands of a local woman (Barbara Auer) and her handymen husband and son, Laura is nursed back to normality, in a newfound family that she gladly accepts. Mirrors No. 3 is a quiet film, indebted to Hitchcock and Petzold’s earlier work, but what comes to the fore more than anything is the German director’s affection for human relationships. Cineuropa spoke to him after the premiere of his latest film in the Directors’ Fortnight selection of Cannes.

Cineuropa: Why is Mirrors No. 3 set in late summer/early autumn?
Christian Petzold: I like that your first question is about the seasons! We wanted to film in September or October because of the autumn. I didn’t want it to have an atmosphere of springtime or summer. I wanted the beauty and the brilliance of the last days of summer, when you already know you have to find a house and a friend or some companions for the wintertime.

You’re returning to a family for the first time since The State I Am In, but in your new film, there is a new “algebra” of human relations. If Afire [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Christian Petzold
film profile] was about two people and then a third, in Mirrors No. 3, the numbers are growing: a family of three welcomes a fourth. What does it tell us about the social dimensions of your filmmaking now?
I admit, nobody’s asked me this before! So, first of all, I love musicals. Music is very important for me, but musicals I love deeply. Secondly, I’m always thinking about the structure of the film as a whole, and I’m bringing in musicals here in terms of choreography. You have one [person], and there's another [person], and as they dance, a second pair [of dancers] is coming in, affecting how the other two are dancing as well.

How does that translate in your work with the actors, since they are all your regulars?
The actors like to speak about a story like this in choreographic terms. They hate it when I'm talking to them about psychological things because it makes one stay within oneself. But when you are a dancer, you are observing the other, the room, the distance between you, and the space. In both of my last two films, we have a house that functions as a stage for dancers, and when they start dancing, life begins coming back to them. Also, when the husband and son join the two women, the choreography changes; when one is away and only three are left, it changes again.

How did you build these characters without a background? Their metaphorical dance works, even though neither they nor us know anything about their pasts.
In fact, I had written a biography for every one of those characters, so the actors could have something to go on. For example, the mother was a teacher in a big city, in Munich. There, she had a tragic love affair, so she decided to leave the complexity of the city behind and become a teacher in a small town. On her first day there, her car breaks down, and luckily, a guy is there to fix it. She falls in love because of his hands and his ability to fix everything. So that’s why in their house in the film, you can see the big bookshelves: books for the mind and repair tools for the hands.

There's something that interests you, I guess, about a situation where men are handymen, paired with a woman of the mind. I’m reminded of Franz Rogowski's character in Undine [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Christian Petzold
film profile].
Yes, that's right! In the era of early cinema, in the 1920s, when the films were silent, you could see hands a lot: the expression of the hands, how they touch each other and how nervous they can appear. And since the birth of talkies, the hands have lost their expression; it’s because we have faces and lips, and we have eyes. Franz Rogowski never went to acting school: he was a dancer and a clown, so he is used to doing many, many things with his hands. I remember saying to my cameraman [Hans Fromm], “I want to see his hands.” I think these are the things I want to see in a movie – I want to feel, not to rely on words. I want to see the expression of hands, the expression of bodies.