On a recent IndieWire Zoom from his book-filled office apartment in Berlin, where Petzold completed two pandemic scripts and went on a movie-watching spree as he recovered from COVID-19, he shared some views about how to make entertaining and provocative movies without being boring. “Undine” certainly qualifies.
As Petzold manipulates mystery and tension, withholding information from the audience until the right time, he is always thinking about the master of suspense. “All movies have something to do with Hitchcock,” he said. “My movies have something to do, always, with each camera position. I am thinking like Hitchcock: there is the look of someone — who’s looking here? — or a look like God, this is objective. He’s so close to cinema as a dream. That’s what cinema always has to be.” For the post-World War II Berlin drama “Phoenix” (2015), Petzold built upon his co-writer Harun Forocki’s essay “about men who create women like muses,” Petzold said. “We are talking together about Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo,’ and ‘Pygmalion,’ about all the men who create women. I said to him, ‘Let’s tell the same story from the perspective of the created women.’ For example, in ‘Vertigo’ the whole time you can see Kim Novak through the eyes of James Stewart; when he’s going with her to the Catholic church with the tower, in one moment you see the world out of the car, running through the forest, from her perspective. Why did he change the perspective? Because she has to die now, so she is the subject for a moment. ‘Phoenix’ is about a man [Zehrfeld] who created a woman [Hoss], and the woman knows she is created; she is looking at the man who creates her. This is a perspective we like.” Universal Pictures 3. Keep things fresh. For years, Petzold talked with Farocki about adapting “Transit” (2018) from the Anna Seghers Marseilles classic. “For us, this was the cinematographic novel of our life,” said Petzold. “A man with no identity [Rogowski] takes the identity of someone else. This is, for me, cinema, to try and live in another identity, to pretend to be a good man, or a family, or a father, or a lover.” After Farocki’s death in 2014, Petzold went on without him. “Transit” also marked the year Petzold broke away from Hoss after six films together. He bristled when a journalist asked him if Paula Beer was his new and younger muse. “Had I exchanged my muse as one is getting to be 45 years old with a fresh new one?” said Petzold. “I never talked about Nina that she is a muse. She is too intelligent. We are in production and have many reflections about our work together.” His answer to the journalist: “No, Franz is the new Nina Hoss.” And so “Undine” was born. The characters Hoss played were “lonely,” he said. “She was alone in this world and has to fight for herself. For me, Paula and Franz, they are a couple. Not like a collaborator. I’m thinking of Paula and Franz together as a couple I have to find my relation to. This is interesting to me.” Hoss understands, said Petzold: “I met Nina some time ago and we were talking together; she liked this switch too.” “We’re still a good match,” Hoss told IndieWire a few months ago before the release of the Swiss Oscar entry “My Little Sister.” “We’re making a pause after ‘Phoenix.’ We needed to let some air in. It made sense to give it a little break. It was such a big long stretch of six films, one after the other, and it felt like a conclusion. It doesn’t mean we’ll never work again.”
