Few directors boast the consistent excellence of German auteur Christian Petzold. (We previously analyzed the tricks of his trade here, on the occasion of the release of his “Undine.”) The puckish filmmaker got on Zoom from New York to unwind some of the surprises in Berlin’s Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize winner “Afire,” his tenth feature and third to star Paula Beer.
It started out being called “The Lucky Ones.” “I love this title,” he told IndieWire during a recent interview. “But it was forbidden, because there was a wave of copyright problems.” When he came up with “The Red Sky,” referring to the film’s wildfire encroaching on his trio of Baltic Sea vacationers (Beer, Thomas Schubert, and Langston Uibel), “This was also forbidden for use. They said the word ‘afire’ and I said, ‘it sounds good.’”
Petzold was working on adapting a dystopian novel during the pandemic, but when he contracted COVID, he put it aside. “To erase-delete, to delete it out of my mind, this was the hard work on ‘Afire,’ he said. “I’m a Protestant and to throw something away is a sin. It’s a waste, and this waste script is always shouting from the corner of my office like a child which wants to be adopted. ‘Realize me! Realize me!’”
But he was enjoying inventing “Afire.” “It was such a happy time, to write it,” said Petzold. “It was like a refreshment each day. I like the atmosphere that is a little bit like Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ There is a forest glade in the night where there are nymphs. It’s so affirmative. And the bad dystopian novel is always shouting like a black shadow: ‘You are not this guy! You are not this type of director who wants to create a light hedonist thing. You’re a dystopia guy.’ And so this was a hard time.”
Along with exploring primal impulses by the Baltic Sea, the movie is also a comedy of manners, much like Jean Renoir’s “Rules of the Game,” as three combustible characters confront each other. “This story of two boys and one girl and then a third boy,” said Petzold, “There are fairytales there. There’s music. There’s summer. There are nights. These stories have been told for hundreds of years. And I’m a big fan of Eric Rohmer. And many critics said that Eric Rohmer is always making the same movie. Always. Fifty times in his life, always the same movie. But for me it’s not boring. He’s making the same movie like we are, making always the same story but the difference is the thing. And the difference is studying our time, where we are living, how the people are accusing each other, how the people are touching each other, how they are dancing. This is completely different between 1980 and 1985. So this difference is, for me, cinema.”
The script started out to be “racy and sexy,” said Petzold. But while there’s plenty of sex in the movie, it all takes place behind closed doors. “I don’t want to show naked bodies of actors,” he said. “Do they make sex? I don’t like this. I never believed this. There are one or two examples in the history of cinema. Like ‘Don’t Look Back.’ But I don’t want to see actors naked making sex. Mostly, the woman is now sitting on the men, because then they could have dialogue during sex. And they can can make shot-counter-shot action-reaction. And this is everything I don’t like.”
That’s why Petzold placed a microphone in the room where his actors simulate sex as the crew leaves the house. “For me, the most intense way to have sex in the movies is the sound,” he said. It all goes back to hearing his parents having sex as a child, of course. “It was traumatic for me. So to hear something is more cinema than to show it.”
He told his actors, “You’ll never be naked in this movie. You don’t have to create a sexual desire in a bed in front of a camera. But someone can hear you. No problem.”
But it was a problem for the actors, said Petzold. “Because it’s very hard to lie. When you are a child, you can hear the the adults and the parents that are lying to you. And so also the audience is like little children. They can hear if someone is lying. So the actors had to play their sexual desire and their enthusiasm and everything with their voice and so they’re exhausted after this three minutes of when the microphone is working.”
Shooting the movie was a pleasure for Petzold because he learned from his actors, who added an unexpected perspective. “These young actors bring something into this movie,” he said, “which is not in the script. They bring their bodies, their experiences, their laughing, that kind of humor, which has something to do with, they said to me later, ‘we are here in the summer in a summer movie and we have the feeling there are hundreds of summer stories before but this could be one of the last because we are destroying the environment.”
As three of the characters romp and play during this idyll, paying no heed to the wildfire that is getting closer, narcissistic writer Leon (Schubert) is caught up in polishing his book before his publisher arrives to read it, and takes his anxiety out on everyone around him. Schubert pulls in the audience as we root for Leon to become aware of the possibilities for listening to others around him who are experiencing pleasures that he’s letting go by.
Petzold was afraid that everyone would react badly to Leon, but found the right dynamic at rehearsals three weeks before shooting, when he set Schubert up to arrive at the outdoor supper table as everyone is having a fine time. (“All these assholes, they don’t like me,” he said.) “From this moment on, all the other actors want to embrace him as if he’s the victim,” said Petzold. “And so in this moment, I know that we will not hate him. It’s a portrait of an asshole who doesn’t want to be an asshole. So he is fighting against himself. And this is a comedy structure.”
The actors also clued Petzold into the fact that he had been writing about himself all along. “At the beginning, when I start to write the script, I’m always laughing about the character Leon,” he said. “And I never thought that Leon has something to do with me. Never. It was this completely different guy. But during the rehearsals and during the shooting the actors asked me, ‘Do you have the same problems on the second movie?’ I said, ‘Yes, I have problems like this because the first [TV] movie [1995’s “Pilot”] was a success.’ I received directly money for the next one. And I was infected by the success.”
As he was directing the 1996 TV movie “Cuba Libre,” based on Edgar Ulmer’s “Detour,” his girlfriend (soon to be wife) visited him on the set. “She came to me and said, ‘Do you know what you are doing? You are playing director.’ And she was totally right. I’m playing director,” he said. “I’m playing a cineaste who knows many, many movies. And all of this crew, they loved me, because I’m always talking 24 hours a day. And so, everything was not right.”
After the “disaster of the second movie,” Petzold changed. He spent a month in Berkeley with his best friend and collaborator Harun Farocki talking about the future of cinema. When Petzold and his wife had a baby, he stowed his “self-searching in the fridge,” he said. From then on, he wrote his own independent scripts, stayed in Germany, hewed to authentic stories.
Six of them starred Nina Hoss, and the last three, Paula Beer. Petzold rejects the notion that either Hoss or Beer has ever functioned as his “muse.” It’s a meme he can’t shake, “but it doesn’t bother me,” he said.
As for Beer and Petzold, “You have a friendship level and the work level, and you have to sort it out,” she told IndieWire. “Even though we’re friends, it doesn’t mean I will play your next character, and I don’t expect you to let me be part of your next movie. As soon as that happens, you get hurt, and it gets mixed up, and then it’s chaos.”
The yin to Leon’s Yang is Beer’s character Nadja, who Petzold wrote as an independent spirit who is not defined by the men around her. “Paula and I had long discussions about young women in movies, actress and director, male, 60 years old,” said Petzold. “Nadja is always working, setting ice cream on the bicycle, or washing dishes. She’s always doing something for herself, not for the camera, and not for the other guys. She’s so modern. And all of our decisions: she has no silk underwear, no naked breasts. She is not dancing the night half naked through the garden. She’s not working for the eyes of men.”
In Petzold’s sunny fairy tale, though, the fire does arrive, inevitably, tragically. There is dystopia in the movie. The shadow from the office, the darkness crying out from the corner gets its way — after all.
A Janus Films and Sideshow release, “Afire” is in theaters now.
