14/02/2008

"It's a bit like coming back to my roots," says film and TV director Ute Wieland about the fact that she is developing a couple of film projects where she would again be penning the screenplays herself.

Directing from her own screenplays was how the graduate of the Munich Academy of Television & Film began with her graduation film Tango im Bauch and the award-winning second feature The Year of the Turtle.

In the following years when she worked as a director on series and TV movies for German television, Ute Wieland was always working from scripts delivered by other authors. "There were often very good scripts and I just wanted to direct and have some continuity," she recalls. "That's something television gave me whereas with film projects it takes so much longer."

"When I read a script I have to fall in love with it immediately," she adds, citing David Lean, Billy Wilder and the Coen brothers as filmmakers who inspire her. "The great thing about working for television is that it allowed me to work in many kinds of genres and to further develop my craft as a filmmaker – so that I can now say today: the story is the decisive thing for me because I can then express myself cinematically in many genres and serve the story. The work for television enabled me to do this. I don't like tying myself down to a particular genre because the story is always very important to me."

However, Ute Wieland made her return to cinema in 2005 with the "instant remake" FC Venus [+see also:
trailer
film profile] which was produced by Hamburg-based Wueste Filmproduktion. "I have been a part of the Wueste 'family' and have known them for ten years," she notes. "It was really overdue that we should work together and of course it helped that we are all football fans!"

Clearly, thanks to this production which was released by NFP/20th Century Fox in German cinemas in spring 2006, Ute Wieland came back on to the radar for many German film producers. One of them – Uli Limmer of Munich-based Collina Film – had already been looking for some time for the right project to offer her.

When he suggested an adaptation of Bianka Minta Koenig's bestselling book series Freche Maedchen with a screenplay by writer-director Maggie Peren, Wieland didn't hesitate for a second "because I am great fan of Maggie’s and love her sense of humor."

She explains that this teenage film about the first kiss and first love affair among 14-year-old girls draws elements from the three Freche Maedchen books, but admits that "casting the girls was much harder than I imagined it would be. These changes from child to teenage girl happen so quickly that we literally had hundreds of girls to see. They were either too young or too old." The finished film is scheduled to be released by Constantin Film in mid-July.

At the same time, one couldn't get any further from Freche Maedchen with one of her next projects where she is writing the screenplay herself: the historical drama Alma which is based on the love story of her mother on the shores of the Black Sea over two generations. "I see it as a kind of European Gone with the Wind and could imagine it being structured either as a German or a European co-production. It will be a new genre for me because The Year of the Turtle was a drama and a chamber piece, whereas this one will have epic proportions," she says.