As well as bagging four Oscars and nine BAFTAs, Edward Berger’s WW1 drama All Quiet on the Western Front cemented its place in pop-culture history by becoming an internet meme. Under ‘how it started’, the meme shows the film’s protagonist, Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), as a laughing, idealistic new recruit. But then, under ‘how it’s going’, we see the same young soldier, now hollowed out, filthy, and traumatized by the carnage he’s seen.
For Berger, however, everything’s going just fine. Hours after celebrating his BAFTA win at London’s Royal Festival Hall, the director was on a flight to Italy to resume work on his follow-up, Conclave. Adapted by screenwriter Peter Straughan and based on the 2016 novel by Robert Harris, it stars Ralph Fiennes in a modern-day thriller about the power struggle that ensues after the death of a fictional pope. Filming inside the 15th-century Vatican is forbidden, but Berger found a place that’s just as holy: the legendary Cinecittà Studios in Rome, where Stage 15 has become a full-scale replica of the interior of the Sistine Chapel.
The ceiling will be added in post, but the attention to detail is extraordinary, especially when the extras arrive. The day we meet, Berger is directing the vote for a new pope, and the set is awash with men in white cassocks and scarlet zucchettos. It’s a simple scene, but Berger has it all storyboarded, and his perfectionism starts to show when one of the featured background artists fails to hit his mark (“Find me someone who can walk normally,” he whispers to his First A.D.). Oscar night is less than three weeks away, but Berger isn’t stressing about that either, as the room is given a top-up spray of “atmos”.
In person, he is a cheerful, unassuming chap in his early 50s, but this easygoing exterior is deceptive: Edward Berger is not afraid to say no. And the first thing he said no to was what life seemed to have in store for him. “I come from Wolfsburg, a fairly small city in Germany,” he says. “They build Volkswagen cars there, and that’s all they do. Everyone works for Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, so, usually, in that city, you become an engineer, a teacher, a doctor, or a lawyer. You get a proper job.” The third of four children — three boys and a girl — Berger thought he’d do that too; his father was an engineer (at Volkswagen), as were his older brothers. Still, they were an arts-leaning family, and they encouraged Berger in his love of theater. “I always loved movies, too, but I didn’t have a clue how they were made. I thought the actors made them.”
Edward Berger on the set of his new film Conclave.
Philippe Antonello
He was 14 when the scales fell from his eyes after a trip to the art school in nearby Braunschweig. “They had a film course,” he recalls, “and people were walking around with cameras. It was the first time I realized how you make a movie.”
His teenage awakening, however, wasn’t like The Fabelmans. “I started slowly, not like Spielberg re-enacting movies. I had a Super-8 camera and a video camera. It was all awfully terrible and not full-time.” He also started writing, and the play he wrote at 15 offers some clues to his later decision to adapt Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel All Quiet. “It was terribly pretentious,” he admits. “It was called Carthage. I had the idea from [playwright] Bertolt Brecht, who said that the great state of Carthage fought three wars: after the first war, it crumbled; after the second war, it was barely existent; and in the third war, it was destroyed. It was obviously a metaphor for Germany.”
At 18, Berger surprised his father by enrolling in an engineering degree in Berlin (“He was like, ‘Really? Engineering?’”). His father’s instincts proved right. “I went for the first day, which was a prep course in math. I sat and listened to it and thought, ‘That’s not for me.’ So, I left and went to that art school in Braunschweig.”
After Braunschweig, Berger moved to New York in the early ’90s to study film at the Tisch School, but after graduating in ’94, he was at a loose end. “I’d watched a lot of independent movies in school, and New York was the independent hub. A lot of the movies I loved came from one company in particular, Good Machine, and so I knocked on their door.” Anthony Bregman, now an acclaimed producer, opened it. It was a tiny company that employed just eight people. “I started as an unpaid intern,” says Berger. “I did photocopies and errands for three months, and that turned into my first job.”
He stayed there for a year and a half, earning $400 a week, and the crunch came when he was offered a job as a production supervisor on Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm. “It was, like, $2,400 a week or some insane amount of money. I started stuttering, and I said, ‘I can’t do it.’” Why not? “If I’d taken it, I wouldn’t be a director today.”
Berger, quite correctly, knew it was time to go. “It was the best time,” he says. “But you also felt you were at the end of it. I had an apartment on the Bowery, and the Angelika Film Center was around the corner. There was a film market there every year or so. I saw all these independent filmmakers, with their flyers, running by my apartment, and I could see their desperation, like wet soap was slipping from their fingers. Most of them ended up with a massive credit card bill and an unsold movie.”
Like Fritz Lang before him, Berger decided to go home. “I went back one summer and thought, ‘Wow, life is happening here, and it’s cheap.’ I also thought, ‘I’m not American; what am I doing in New York? I don’t have a story to tell there.’” A summer in Berlin inspired him to write a film called Gomez: Heads or Tails, that took place there and got it funded very quickly. “It was about a kid growing up in Berlin who ends up in a knife fight in the subway. I forget what happens in the end.” He shrugs. “I think he dies.”
Berger, orange cap, on the set of All Quiet on the Western Front.
Reiner Bajo/Netflix
Immediately, he hit a rock. “I realized I didn’t have anything to say afterward.” And though his next film, a romantic comedy, cost 10 times as much (“I had four million Deutschmarks back then, which was a lot”), he still wasn’t satisfied. “It was shallow,” he sighs. “It did OK, but it was just mediocre. It wasn’t the movie I’d hoped I was making, and I also realized that I didn’t quite know yet how to use storytelling tools.”
Television was a good place for him to learn that, but a dangerously seductive one. “The German system sucks you up,” he says, “because television is so powerful, and there’s hardly any movies made. You get opportunities with actors that you’ve grown up with, which is amazing. But you don’t realize how, bit by bit, you’re drifting away from your ideals, like the ones I had at Good Machine. You get excited, and then when it’s finished, you realize, ‘Oh, it’s just a television movie. Let’s do the next one, and it’ll be better.’ So, you put all your heart and soul into it — and you make another television movie. Now, I learned a lot about directing in that time. But after 10 years, I realized if I continued doing that, I’d just be a television director.”
The biggest lesson he’d learned was that the movie has to come from inside you, and inspiration finally struck when he gave up on the next script he was writing. “I had a crisis,” he says. “I couldn’t finish it, so I played soccer with my son in the garden instead. And one Sunday afternoon, I saw a kid walking by with a backpack. My kid said, ‘Oh, that’s Jack. He’s in my class. On Friday nights, he goes to stay with his mom, and on Sunday nights, he goes back to the children’s home.’ I was so moved by this kid — he was smiling and waving and walking towards the sunset — I thought, ‘Look at him. Stop complaining about your stupid script and write another one.’”
Jonas Nay in Deutschland 83.
Laura Deschner/Sundance Channel/Everett Collection
The new script, Jack, told the story of a 10-year-old boy struggling to hold his single-parent family together and premiered in Competition at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival, giving Berger his first taste of legitimacy. It also set the director on a new course when he read the script for a mini-series called Deutschland ’83, about a young East German sent to the West as a spy by the Stasi. “It was the first script I’d read in Germany that felt international,” he says. “All the other offers felt kind of smaller, but this one was more irreverent toward history, more fun, and that’s what attracted me.”
Read the digital edition of Deadline’s Disruptors/Cannes magazine here.
Ironically, although Berger thought he was trying to leave TV behind, the success of Deutschland ’83 coincided with the rise of a new, upmarket kind of TV and actually led to more. He followed it in 2018 with AMC’s The Terror and, the series closest to his heart, Showtime’s Patrick Melrose, based on Edward St Aubyn’s semi-autobiographical novels about a privileged man from a broken home. “I’d read those books when I was at Good Machine, rollerblading home from work, and I just became such a fan.”
Berger soon learned to trust his instincts, and when producer Malte Grunert came to him in 2020 with All Quiet he jumped at the chance. It was “an urge”, he says. “We wanted to tell that story and share it. We wanted to speak of our youth and the feelings we’d grown up with. The guilt and the shame. The responsibility. It all went into that movie.”
Looking back, does he see a pattern? “Different projects pull me in different directions,” he says. “That’s my compass. I’m not catering to an audience. After All Quiet I thought, you know what? Next time, I want to make something entertaining. At the end of All Quiet it’s just silence. There’s no music. I really had the urge to make a movie where I could put a pop song on and have people get up and say, ‘That was fun. Let’s go have a drink.’” And after Conclave? “I’ll probably want to do something different again.”
