An interview with Christoph Schuler, noted down by Susan Noll.

What was your initial impulse to make this film? Was there a special topic you wanted to address?

It was the graduate thesis film of my studies in media design for Professor Schopper at the technical college in Nuremberg. Actually everything happened pretty fast. I was accepted at the film school in Munich and had only two and a half months to do my graduate thesis film. I wrote the script within six or seven days. It was loosely based on a similar situation I had with my family at this time, but I dramatised it and made it much more threatening. But the characters are real.

Was the story bound to be a short film? Or did you think about enlarging it a bit?

At this time I had never dared to approach a feature film. I also think that this topic would be too unnerving for 90 minutes. The film has held up pretty good over the last years, but of course it is a very demanding subject, and I wouldn’t want to watch something like this for 90 minutes. I think 11 minutes are just the right length.

The film tells a long story in a few and compressed episodes. The things left out seem almost more important than what the audience actually gets to see. What is the value of omissions in your work?

I’ve often times heard that elliptic narration is my signature style. But in those days I was still navigating by instinct. In the meantime I have evolved as a director and screenwriter, and I’m surprised myself at how I left things out to enhance their charme. These omissions have the advantage of pointing towards something bigger beyond themselves, which the eleven minute film cannot fully express. The ellipses make the audience think. Dramaturgically it might be disadvantageous to lose the energy, but on the other hand you can create a little mystery, which is vital for telling the story.

There are subjective shots from the mother’s point of view (when she’s lying in bed) as well as from the father’s (shortly after the accident). Why aren’t there any subjective shots from the child’s point of view on his parents?

I chose the parents to be my protagonists very early on. The character of the little boy did grow richer as the script evolved, but the parents were my focused from the beginning. The little boy only acted as a catalyst for me. I totally relied on our little star Sebastian Schaaf who did a brilliant job. His acting got much better during the rehearsals, and we even gave him more screen time than we had anticipated beforehand. Looking back I think that his perspective might indeed be lacking from the film. But in the end the emphasis is evenly balanced between all three characters. All their inner workings are being shown, their motivations, fears and dreams.

How did you find your grown-up actors? They are both theatre actors, did you specifically search for experience on the stage?

Primarily it was important to me to work with people older and more experienced than myself. I wanted to learn from them how to talk to actors and how to work with them. It’s a common problem for directors to have inhibitions when instructing their actors, so I intended to get some old hands. They were both five or six years my senior and came from fine film schools. Their theatre background was never something that bothered me. Of course I knew that playing for the stage is something completely different from playing for the camera, but a really great stage actor can overcome that by just working hard on it. I had seen their showreels and I had seen that they could act for the camera.

The characters are changing during the film’s action, and they are drawn ambivalently. The young woman later buckles, after she refused her ex-boyfriend at the door in the beginning; the man wins her trust just to then kidnap the son. What was the intention behind that?

A multifaceted and always changing character often times is the best reason to watch a film. It’s just exciting to watch this evolution, especially with the father. He came with the plan to kidnap his son already in his head, but the audience doesn’t know that of course. We think he’s here to talk to the woman and take his boy for a stroll in the park. When this doesn’t work he manipulates her, giving her exactly what she needs right then. Of course that’s despicable on the one hand, but on the other you can understand why he would do it. Of the two grown-ups he is the smarter one. With her I wanted to feel the absolute despair. She takes refuge in a world of alcohol and medication, handles the boy almost like a paranoid person and is unable to reflect what is happening between her and her son. So she is utterly shocked when he finally runs away with the boy. She runs after them setting in motion a chain of events. And in the end she realises that she has a problem. I didn’t want to articulate that too broadly, that would have destroyed the film’s complexity. But that and the high level of emotionality is what make the film work in the end.

The film’s title VON ANFANG UND ENDE translates to „The end and the beginning“. How does this reversal of the words’ usual order feature in your film?

To me it feels like the story had a happy ending. Other people tell me that the woman will now kill herself because she is going into the light. This is another possibility, but for me the end feels optimistic, because she accepts that their son is better off with his father. That this is healthy for the father, too, as the closing image shows. The pirate hat is there, he knows, that she had been here, and now he is with his son and they both have survived the accident. The separation has been carried out, but it was a cleansing separation, and the scare they both had triggered their acceptance that the relationship is now over. Of course she is a very unstable and arduous character, so it’s better that she’s going her separate way on her own.

In the end the mother goes into the glistening light at the end of the tunnel. It is an open ending, but can also be interpreted as a metaphor for redemption. Why this sudden turn to the symbolic?

For me, everything is possible at that point. It was a conscious decision to let her go into the bright light. First of all it’s a beautiful image, but that alone wouldn’t amount to very much. The thought behind it was ambivalence, because I didn’t want to present the audience with a complete happy ending. So I needed an end which left open the possibility that something bad might hapen to her, without spelling it out. On the other hand I didn’t want to end it on a down note. So I consciously decided for the positive atmosphere with the score. This is combined with the father’s smile and the mother’s walk into the light. So both ways of interpretation are possible – that she might do herself harm or that everything will turn out alright in the end, whatever she might do with her life.

If you could make this film again today, what would you do different?

I would focus more on the image on the bridge and explain more precisely what’s going on inside of her. I also find the cut from her standing on the bridge to her standing in the hospital too harsh. This is one of the much vaunted ellipses, but I wish I would have had some kind of clue or scene for inbetween in this place, showing that there still is hope. She’s standing there so desperately without anything happening, that’s rather abrupt. Of course it has a certain surprise effect, but suspense would have been much better than surprise. There are other details which I would approach completely differently today, but all in all I’m actually still pretty proud of that film.

Links

• VON ENDE UND ANFANG (D 2009. Christoph Schuler)
• The End Is the Beginning Is the End – Susan Noll about VON ENDE UND ANFANG
• The Boom Is On – Cornelis Hähnel about the German film market