Original-Cin Q&A: Christian Petzold on His Summery New Film: “All the Best Movies Have Neighbours”

By Liam Lacey

Celebrated at film festivals and by critics, the 62-year-old Christian Petzold is widely regarded as post-unification Germany’s leading director, who brings a mix of art-house rigour and genre cinema familiarity.

Though he’s passionate about the classic cinema of John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock, his work is often celebrated for complex perspectives on themes of labour, public spaces, mobility, globalization, terrorism and the refugee crisis.

His most recent film, Afire — which won a Silver Bear at last February’s Berlin International Film Festival — feels lighter, funnier, and more accessible than much of his previous work. Conceived while Petzold was recovering from a month-long bout of COVID, he drew inspiration from two sources: the films of Éric Rohmer (a French distributor had gifted him a box set of the director’s work), and the stories of Anton Chekhov, especially the short novella, The House with a Mezzanine.

Petzold has described Afire as his version of a “summer movie,” a coming-of-age story in the French or American tradition. The film follows two young men — the prickly young novelist Leon (Thomas Schubert) and aspiring photographer Felix (Langston Uibel) — who go to a cottage by the Baltic Sea, as an artistic retreat.

But Leon is distracted by another house guest, Nadja (Paula Beer), an attractive young woman who compels him to face his own shortcomings and arrogance. A handsome young lifeguard joins the group, complicating relationships. Meanwhile, an encroaching wildfire threaten their small society.

I spoke to Petzold by Zoom, where he appeared accompanied by a translator, whom he used sparingly. He began by expressing enthusiasm for Original-Cin’s “fabulous” name, which led to a free-wheeling riff about author Heinrich von Kleist’s 1810 essay, “On the Marionette Theatre,” in which a character expresses that puppets are more graceful actors than human beings, because they lack affectation, a byproduct of the Biblical fall.

Says Petzold: “It’s about the loss of innocence. We have to lose the paradise of bad arts or bad movies that try to come to paradise the same old ways. We have to work, to go around the whole world and find another back entrance. That means we have to reflect and work to find our innocence again. There are some directors that will think, ‘No work, no improvement, no rehearsals, just the original thing.’ This doesn’t work.”

Reviews for Afire have been overwhelmingly positive, though a couple of dissenting voices have raised the issue of the kind of character Leon represents: Another insufferably self-important young white guy, leaving the other characters — a woman, a gay man of colour, a bisexual pal — to serve as his emotional support humans.

Typically, Petzold’s protagonists are enigmatic, troubled women characters: Nina Hoss in Jericho, Paula Beer in Transit and Undine, and this is a shift. I begin by asking Petzold how he conceived of Leon and the constellation of more free, flexible, and open-minded young people around him.

“For me,” Petzold says, “the conception and the construction of Leon, the main character, is a little bit like a guy from the 19th century or someone who thinks that it’s the 19th century, and his conception of artists, male artists, to control the world. And this was, also, for me a little bit at something to do with my own biography.

“The other three young people, they're a little bit like the generation of my children. I can watch them, and they have no problems with people of colour, with sexual identities. They are bisexual, or they’re not that this is not a problem for them. I was astonished as a father to see that in their development, and from my own position, as an artist. I must say I sometimes I have the feeling when I'm making movies. I'm not part of the of the contemporary time. I'm an outsider. So, there’s a little bit also the director, of me, in Leon.”

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ORIGINAL-CIN: One thing that intrigues me in the film is the way that climate disaster, the raging wildfires that surround the cottage, both functions as a metaphor of Leon’s turmoil and part of this traditional story structure, but also about something that’s a part of the world we’re facing in this summer, the threat of incineration because of climate change.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD: When I think of all these stories — one summer, one girl, two boys or two girls and one boy… yeah, yeah, they've been taught since hundreds of years. That starts with Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream right until today. Summer night dream until today. Your magazine is the Original-Cin? So, we have an original scene. We have this scene, every century, every decade. It's always the same story, but it's completely different.

About six years ago, I was in Turkey, and I was a witness for a really big forest fire and I was really deeply shocked what happened to nature because of the forest fire. It was completely dead. I never have this feeling before that you are in something where there is no wind, no insects, no birds, a dystopian nihilism. And then I was in California, and they have the same forest fires in California. We have them in Portugal, Spain, France, and Germany too.

That thought that, for hundreds of years we are telling these original stories and then, perhaps, we can't tell them anymore because there is no environment anymore. We destroyed the stage of telling our stories. We can’t tell this story in a dead wood. So, it’s not what the movie is about but this was something was that was in my mind.

Christian Petzold

O-C: Yet it’s a lighter film than we’re used to from you, because of the humour, perhaps because of our associations of the summer genre. Did the different style cause you to change your way of working with the actors and your setups?

CP: Yeah, it was for me completely different. I have made my previous films as if in a laboratory. This time, I hadn’t got a theory, a theory about our cinema or society, about the relationship of male subjectivity and so on. So, I was doubtful if this was a good way for me to leave my feeling of control. But the actors and their rehearsals make the movie too, and in the end, it was a fantastic experience. But on the way, sometimes, I thought, this is too light a comedy, too warm. But now, when it’s finished. I’m relieved, I must say.

O-C: I’m intrigued by the intellectual approach you have to the analysis of the politics of the way people live, and the fact that you're very deeply indebted to genre directors who come from a different politics from your own. Can you talk a little bit about that balance?

CP: Western movies, for something, yeah, they’re something I really miss. You think they're simple, but they're as they're complex as ancient myths, legends, and dramas. The Western movies are a laboratory where a country like the United States tries to find itself, and we get so many courtyards and saloons, where they suddenly need a lawyer. Or, we have Wyatt Earp who was a killer and then he was a Marshall. It’s so interesting …

When I see a John Ford movie like Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, I understand so much that it's so important when you're living in a country like the United States. And when I see a movie by Claude Chabrol in France, you understand something about French society and the bourgeoisie and their desires and failures and sins. Genre is not a game. It’s not a retro joke. It's a very simple science but much tougher to tell a complex story.

When you have a film like Afire, you have a neighbourhood — the movies of Éric Rohmer, but also American horror stories. You’re part of a society. I can’t stand movies that want to be very original. I don’t want to see the Peggy Guggenheim Museum movie. That movie doesn’t need a neighbourhood, it wants to be alone by itself. But the best movies have neighbours, from Apocalypse Now to Night of the Hunter, they have a neighbourhood and it’s something to do with coming home. This is for me.

Afire is currently showing at TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto and in other theatres across Canada.