What interests me most is telling a thriller at an extremely slow pace. I don’t want viewers to just forget time for ninety minutes. I want them to become conscious of it.
The title Revanche clearly reflects the theme of your new film. Should we expect a classic story of revenge?
Götz Spielmann: Possibly classic, but not in the sense of genre cinema. That doesn’t interest me so much, I work intuitively rather than according to a concept. While the story definitely contains some elements of suspense, I’ve tended to disguise them in this production through my directing rather than elaborate on them. The suspense doesn’t occupy the foreground for me.
So is the theme of guilt more important?
Götz Spielmann: The question of guilt was certainly the main theme at the beginning, the initial intellectual impetus, though that shifted gradually. What the film explores more deeply now, and that doesn’t sound like it conforms with the Zeitgeist, is the secret behind life. That’s where my focus turned, to the secret, the riddle that life represents to me. Life, and I believe in its beauty. To put it in banal terms, I believe that despite all the terrible things that happen, despite all the problems and misunderstandings, despite all the loneliness and conflicts, life is the way it should be. Exploring that more deeply is what I’m doing right now. This focus was probably a part of the story from the beginning, but concealed, and now I’m starting to discover it by working with it.
There’s an uppermost level, a story of revenge which is told in an extremely clear and relatively stringent way, with a story of guilt and an obvious main character, a “hero.” That’s the surface. Deeper down, I hope, the film tells us about a kind of stillness behind things. It’s difficult to express that in words, because it refers to a realization, knowledge or experience which begins beyond conscious thought and language.
The story’s constructed in such a way that the question of guilt can be interpreted in an extremely relative and subjective way.
Götz Spielmann: That’s right. In that sense the film’s obviously a sequel to Antares. It should be clear that the characters see, and are able to see, nothing more than portions of reality. In addition it involves a search for identity and the fact that an inner feeling is connected to an external reality?in a truly tense situation or positive harmony, so that the inside and outside are not in grotesque contradiction to one another.
Two worlds meet, that of prostitutes and pimps and the conventionality of rural life. You once said something about the former, the setting of your last play, Imperium, that it’s in a sense a condensed outline of society as a whole. In what way?
Götz Spielmann: For two reasons: Firstly because when you look behind the scenes, it’s all about making money, some amount of profit, and an incredible number of things are subordinate to that. That’s also what makes up today’s society, and it’s also one of our fundamental problems. Secondly people constantly try to conceal the banality of this, give it more false significance, and hide the primitive greed driving it, the need that creates it. I see in this a more intense, simpler and therefore extremely obvious analogy to the current state our society.
You directed two stage plays between Antares and Revanche - one by Schnitzler and one of your own, Imperium. Is Revanche a further development of the material from Imperium?
Götz Spielmann: No, these two projects were in fact created completely parallel to one another. The idea behind Revanche is older than the play. The play revolves around a medium-size brothel owner who’s ruined by his plan for life, which is too narrow and too superficial. In the case of Revanche the brothel owner is a secondary figure whose main function is to represent the milieu which I’m now quite familiar with from research.
Did these last two works cast a new light on your films and alter your approach?
Götz Spielmann: No, not really. My theatrical work enriches my other work through different experiences, stimulates my thinking through working closely with great plays. But my film work isn’t really influenced by it. At the same time however, everything has some kind of influence, so that’s true, I suppose. But I’m not aware of precisely how, I don’t notice it.
