Austrian director Jessica Hausner has been a fixture at the Cannes Film Festival, ever since her 2001 debut feature, “Lovely Rita” was selected for the Un Certain Regard section. And just a few months after her latest film, “Club Zero,” starring Mia Wasikowska, premiered in Cannes’ main competition, she was invited to the Sarajevo Film Festival as their 2023 Tribute recipient, where all six of her features screened and the director herself gave a thoughtfully in-depth masterclass.
Speaking in the Variety Lounge at Sarajevo, Hausner was clearly enjoying the opportunity to take stock of her career to date. “Yeah, it’s an interesting moment of reflection and of understanding what it is that I’ve done so far,” she said. “I am very curious to see the reactions of the audience to my older films.”
Refreshingly, given the divisive state of our current culture wars, her feeling is that her viewership has become more, not less, receptive to the ambiguities that are baked into her movies. “I have the feeling that nowadays, more people understand that media is very unreliable… and my films always had that notion of ‘don’t believe everything you see’.” Later, she returns to the theme: “In all my films, I try to shake a little bit our perspective on reality. Maybe, if seen from a different perspective, things have a totally different truth… Maybe we are wrong thinking certain truths are true?”
Hausner, who cites pioneering surrealist Maya Deren as a major inspiration, comes from an almost prescriptively artistic background. “In my childhood, we were discussing art a lot. We went to museums instead of going to the beach — which was a pity! But at least it gave me an intense insight into art.” That aesthetic sense is central to her career-spanning collaborations with her producing partner and cinematographer Martin Gschlacht and with her costume designer sister, Tanya Hausner., who is “the first person I talk to when the script is finished.” Together, they frequently settle on one key costuming motif — a uniform. “Be it school, or the lab, or the church, I always portray society in a small version, in an institution,” she says, “And an institution often characterises people through uniforms. The uniform says who you are in society.”
Coming out firmly in support of the striking writers and actors of Hollywood, Hausner went on to identify the threat posed by AI: “In my opinion, the danger about artificial intelligence is that at some point, we get lazy. We think ‘artificial intelligence is better than my brain’, so let it do it’…and we get addicted, and forget how to make decisions.”
It’s a laziness that does not seem to be infecting Hausner, who is already at work on her next project. It has what she calls “a positive idea” while also admitting that “what is good for me might be bad for you! But it’s about someone who is trying to really improve a specific situation. And in the end, she succeeds… Unusually for me,” she says, smiling, “It will have a happy end.”
