Interview: Christian Petzold

’Yella‘ is the third feature from Berlin-based director Christian Petzold, one of the leading lights of the New German cinema. Though his films tend to adopt the structure of a conventional thriller, they often probe deeper, raising questions of national identity and the knock-on effect of twentieth century German history. Here he explains how he forged his film around the German landscape and how he came to find his perfect lead in Nina Hoss, who picked up a prize for her work on the film at this year‘s Berlin Festival

How long had the idea for ‘Yella’ been in your mind?
It’s a long process, as I always write little short stories and try to flesh out smaller ideas. I wrote a script which I ended up throwing away because I knew it wouldn’t work. The idea for ‘Yella’ came to me about five years ago and it kept returning to me like a phantom. Bizarrely, it was the financial side of things which was really, really fast. We shot the film just six months after we had started writing the script.

Can you describe the process of shooting the film?
It was not a very long shoot as I am a Protestant and logistics are something that I am very interested in, possibly more than technique. When the logistics of a film shoot are really good and tight, you have more freedom as an artist. My favourite moment is when I leave the office after the first draft of the script and go into the outside world to do some research with a camera and a microphone. I not only want to know how a scene will look, but how it will sound. When we start the rehearsals, I take the cast to the shooting locations and we have walks and talks as I want the actors to get a natural impression of the film.

Location seems to be an important element in ‘Yella’.
When I visit towns outside of Germany, I am always astonished that you can’t see the legacy of the war in any of the buildings. When you go to a German city, you have the scars of the war and the scars of modern capitalism. Wittenburge is a town that was destroyed by the Nazis because it was where the Jewish Singer sewing factory was. When the Nazis finally surrendered, the GDR gave the factory a new name: Veritas. They had 10,000 employees, but when the wall came down in 1989, these employees wanted to change their GDR money at a rate of one-to-one with the West because they wanted to drive BMWs and drink Budweiser. Within two weeks, the factory was closed. It’s like war: war with money. So, in Germany now, you have these ghost towns full of empty factories.

You’ve worked with Nina Hoss on two occasions before you cast her in ‘Yella’.
I met her 2001. I always saw her in magazines and photos but dismissed her as a populist actor. I started to make a movie called ‘Something to Remind Me’ and it required a blond, very beautiful young woman who seduces a man. When I pitched the film, I was sat with the producers and they asked me, ‘who plays the main character?’ I knew Nina was very famous, and even though I’d never seen her in a film before, I said Nina Hoss. Straight away I got the funding. We started the rehearsals and I worked really closely with all the male actors who I had originally chosen, and there was this blond girl who was very silent, working very hard on her own, always writing things down and thinking to herself. After two days of shooting, she was so great that I felt totally ashamed of myself. I now know that she can achieve something that many other actors can’t: she can make herself empty.

German cinema seems to be in fine fettle at the moment.
I’d say that German cinema has got better over the last ten years. I like the fact that you can really see the city of Berlin in the movies; it’s not just a backdrop, it’s a like a neorealistic place that looks lived-in. This is a fantastic situation, to live in a culture which is actually working and not just reproducing features from the UK, USA or France. There is a new breed of filmmakers who are investigating and comparing, and you can see this curiosity in the work of the actors. However, in Germany, they don’t really like the whole 'New' cinema. These New German movies aren’t big box office hits, because there are trusts and TV stations who are the government of Movieland. They don’t see the movies as a product and they don’t like they way they often criticize the country.

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