Fatih Akin’s 13th fiction feature, Ghost Song, tells a forthright, sincere story of two Hamburg teens in love – or as in love as they can be when one of them has just died and is visiting the other in his dreams. The film opened the 74th San Sebastián International Film Festival and is also competing for the Golden Shell.

Cineuropa: You integrate the story of Faris and Farasha very closely with the urban landscape of Hamburg itself. At moments, dream Farasha rides away on different types of public transportation. Could you share a bit about the reasoning behind this choice?
Fatih Akin: In the beginning, at the start of ten years of development, I thought this was kind of an archaic story and that it could take place anywhere. I could have set this story in Rome, Berlin or Aachen. I thought the environment was not that important. But two years ago, it was the anniversary of Hitchcock’s first film – 100 years of Hitchcock – and there’s one cinema I always go to, the Metropolis. They showed a generous selection of restored features, so it was an opportunity for me to watch all of the Hitchcocks I hadn’t seen before on the big screen. Seeing Psycho for the first time there was amazing. But what really affected me was Vertigo. When I saw it, I was like, “This is my film.” It’s very much my movie because it’s a love story about someone who’s in love with a dead person – a ghost.

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The other thing is the way Hitchcock deals with San Francisco as an environment. It showed the romantic side of San Francisco: cemeteries, the Golden Gate Bridge, which the character jumps off to kill herself, the car chases through the streets, the tower she fell from... All of that was an eye-opener. I had to treat Hamburg like Hitchcock treated San Francisco – I had to make it such that this film could only take place in this city.

You reuse a memorable leitmotif in different forms – whistling, a phone ringtone, the non-diegetic soundtrack... How did you work with your composer to create this?
When we first met, the composer, Malakoff [Kowalski], and I started by day drinking, and we ended up taking acid and going to my music library, which is in my office. On acid, we were listening to all of the soundtrack collections I had. We took Dracula, with the [Anton] Coppola soundtrack, and we were listening to that. We took Frantic, with the soundtrack by Ennio Morricone, which was very important. Then it was Bernard Herrmann and Philip Glass. We went to all of the great composers, like Jerry Goldsmith, who wrote Chinatown. We were circling in closer and closer to where we wanted to go. Then Malakoff said, “It has to be a tune that the audience can whistle right after hearing it.” I was like, “Okay, good luck.” But a couple of days later, he sent me a WhatsApp message where he had whistled the melody of the film in the Rosenthaler Platz metro station [in Berlin] because he has a studio there, and it was late in the day. It was empty, so it had these [amazing] acoustics. The first time I listen to a soundtrack, often I will not like it; that’s the attitude you start with. But here, I immediately knew he had found it right away. “Don’t change a note,” I said. Later on, some pop musicians, JUGGLERZ, made the song, and they are big in Jamaican dancehall. I asked them if they could do a version of it. In the beginning, they said it was too many chord changes for a pop song, but then it worked out.

Ghost Song features several sequences with different stunts and effects. What are your thoughts on the scale of the film?
It got very complicated very quickly. And then, what comes next? A higher budget, a bigger film, a more complicated movie? It’s not really an art form any more; it’s something else, then. I want to believe that filmmaking is art. But I think that when the studios were destroyed and the neo-realist guys took their cameras to the streets, and they made wonderful films like Paisan or Shoeshine – those were honest and true films. When John Cassavetes took his fees from acting in Rosemary’s Baby or The Dirty Dozen, and he made those movies with his wife, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara, those were honest films. This is why I make films, because I’m looking for the truth – whatever that means.

Are you thus drawn towards making something that’s the complete opposite of this film, even something more guerrilla-like?
I cannot make a movie with two people sitting and talking, like My Dinner with Andre. But there must be another way to make films compared to how I’ve done it. It starts with the screenplay; it starts with the material, of course. I don’t want to go for something where the end is Inception, as I don’t see myself in such a career. I want to go back to working with actors and improvising. I want to go back to saying, “I don’t like the light today; let’s shoot it tomorrow.” I want to have that freedom. If you make a feature like Ghost Song, you don’t have freedom; you have to take the light how it comes.