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That’s the perspective that interests me about religion, this dealing with a higher power that apparently doesn’t intend to protect, help and make sure that everything turns out all right.

In a statement you claim that Lourdes is a cruel fairy tale, a daydream, a nightmare. In any case it’s a story far removed from everyday life. Was the world of the irrational, the belief in miracles a decisive aspect that inspired you to make your third full-length film?
Jessica Hausner: To be precise, I’d have to say that the theme of believing in miracles inspired me to make this film in part, but not so much the belief itself as the hope that something that completely reshuffles the cards can happen in your life. In difficult situations in particular people hope that everything will turn out all right. Miracles are just an extreme expression of this hope. As a setting Lourdes provides an excellent example of this, and the film is of course a parable. Although it’s set in Lourdes and deals with the sick and the crippled, who are hoping for a miracle, the film’s also about all of us, even if we’re not in a wheelchair. We all have an underlying hope inside which cannot really be explained. We live our life and try to find a meaning in it and happiness, ignoring the fact that it will come to an end.

The film also involves the basic question of meaning, the unshakeable hope that things will get better. Does Lourdes, as a destination for pilgrims, serve as metaphor for you where all these connotations are united in the most dense form?
Jessica Hausner: The thing about the place that interests me most is that people claim in all seriousness that miracles happen there and term them as such. There’s a doctor’s office there where cases are examined in order to create a scientific basis. Then there are criteria that people who are healed through miracles have to fulfill for the church to recognize them. I thought this contradiction was so interesting, the desire to explain an event that’s strange and irrational.

Did you also want to thematize religion or a certain interpretation of religion, specifically its irrational aspect?
Jessica Hausner: That’s an interesting way of putting it, because it makes me think of the aspect that, in the course of doing research, I read parables from the Bible and found many paradoxical, irrational stories. The main thing is not demonstrating that all you have to do to be healed is pray a lot. The Bible’s stories are often much stranger. Someone doesn’t want to be healed but is anyway, or Jesus does something unjust and illogical. On the contrary, the point is accepting the fact that there’s something ominous, paradoxical, that’s somewhat unjust, but in any case from a higher power, that you can’t escape and that has to be acknowledged. That’s the perspective that interests me about religion, this dealing with a higher power that apparently doesn’t intend to protect, help and make sure that everything turns out all right. That’s obviously not the point.

A great deal of Lourdes is set in interiors, inside closed rooms. The first time we go outside is after the miracle takes place, and even then it’s a threatening nature with steep drop-offs. How did you create the world of this pilgrimage?
Jessica Hausner: I went on three or four pilgrimages to Lourdes myself when I started thinking about setting the film there. At first I was shocked by meeting so many sick people in one place, and this initial impression changed my mind for the time being because I was afraid that the film could turn into a social drama. I had a feeling that I wouldn’t be able to find a way to visually get to the level of a parable. Then I went on another pilgrimage, one organized by the Knights of St. John, and that suddenly added a social aspect that interested me. And these original uniforms were incredibly helpful for finding an aesthetic and an ironic level.
The Knights of St. John is an order where people from a relatively high social class do charitable work out of an aristocratic Catholic mentality. This creates an interesting contrast, where elegant ladies wearing pearls push social outcasts in wheelchairs who live on welfare and lead lonely lives in poverty. Apart from the philosophical themes of happiness and hope, Lourdes also involves the social aspect, in the sense of “What role do I play in society? Where can I find my place and the recognition that goes with it? What do I have to do for that?” Christine, who’s in a wheelchair, is an in-between who doesn’t belong in either one place or the other.