Visitation, opening in the Premiere section of the 79th Cannes International Film Festival, is Volker Schlöndorff’s 22nd theatrical fiction feature since his 1966 debut, Young Törless, played the 19th edition of the same festival. Based on the acclaimed novel by Jenny Erpenbeck, spanning a decade of German history, covering World War II, the Cold War and the reunification, and shot in Albert Einstein’s old summer house, his latest film touches on many themes reoccurring in his vast body of work as well as in his personal history.

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Cineuropa: The start of Visitation, as the families have settled in their summer houses around the last days of the Weimar era, almost evokes a Bergman-like idyll. Could your work with Sven Nykvist, Bergman’s cinematographer, have something to do with this?
Volker Schlöndorff: I made three films with Sven, and this film profited from that. When he was preparing for Cries and Whispers, Sven told me he had been to the house where it was going to be shot and had taken pictures every hour of the rooms without actors, just to capture the changes in the light during the day. I applied this lesson here. Once we’d found this house and I saw how beautifully it was designed, how the light came down the staircase and how the light from the lake is reflected from the water into the room – not from above, but from below – we went with Sven’s methods. We didn’t use electric lights, but rather we reflected light with mirrors. It all comes from Sven.

The house itself comes from none other than Albert Einstein, it’s been said. Please tell us more.
The house is 13 kilometres from where I’ve been living for the last 20 years, totally unknown by most. It’s an architectural gem built with quite basic materials, but put together in a very intelligent way. The Bauhaus-inspired architect was a young man named Konrad Wachsmann, who, like Einstein, had to flee to the USA, after which the Nazis took over the house, and then the Red Army and so forth – very similar to the story here. I knew that if I was able to shoot there, I’d have half the movie already. I was very fortunate. These days, it belongs to the Einstein estate through the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where I did a seminar on filmmaking many years ago. I contacted them, and they said, “Just use it. Einstein never wanted it to become a museum.”

Despite this amazing coincidence, one assumes that Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel was the main draw for you to make this film. Did she by any chance know about Einstein’s house, or even grow up in similar surroundings?
She lived quite differently, actually, which she also describes in the book. I read it for my own pleasure, not looking for a movie – quite the opposite, as I now focus mainly on documentaries. Only after a while did I think, “Oh, wouldn’t this be a beautiful movie?” Granted, it’s complicated and told from the point of view of 15 different characters over a long period of events. But I didn’t give up. I told the author I couldn’t buy the rights at that time, but I would try to write a screenplay. Halfway through, I knew that I had something, and things just fell into place.

Looking back at your body of work through the decades, and there are films in several languages here, you are first and last a child of Germany, born at the start of World War II and growing up in post-war West Germany, amid its quite unique culture. In this regard, Visitation can be seen as a summation of Volker Schlöndorff the person as well as the filmmaker.
It can. I often became aware during shooting, “Hmm, I’ve done this scene before, haven’t I, in some other movie…?” Personally, I do have some memory of Germany slightly before the outbreak of the war because it took a little while to reach our region, and I remember the end of the war and how lost everybody was when, all of a sudden, this horrible Nazi world that had been so celebrated was gone. Then came West Germany, and we travelled everywhere – everywhere but East, of course – and we got the best period in filmmaking. We got 1968 and the politics, we got very permissive and we got the music. My second movie, which opened here at Cannes in 1967, was scored by Brian Jones from the Rolling Stones. That said, wherever or whatever language I’ve shot in, my movies are always German. When my family moved to France in the 1950s, I tried my best to be and to sound as French as possible. “You really do it fully and completely,” my French friends said, “and that’s what’s so very German about you!”