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Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck,
director of Oscar-winning The Lives of Others
“Even someone who doesn’t know that much about the Vietnam War could still enjoy `Platoon,’” explains writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck as to how his filmmaking debut, “The Lives of Others,” has played so well around the world despite being such a distinctly German story about pre-glasnost Berlin.
It helps, of course, that the movie also happens to be terrific - an absorbing, surprising story about an officer for the German secret police assigned to spy on a pair of artists suspected of subversion. Although it is often described as a suspense tale, von Donnersmarck, 33, says he doesn’t necessarily agree with that description.
“It’s hard to find a label for it, although it’s been called everything from a thriller to a drama to a love story,” the German filmmaker said during a recent publicity stop in Miami. “I find it a little unfortunate that in films, there is almost a necessity to fit things into a specific genre. People aren’t so keen to do that with literature. What’s `Anna Karenina’? What’s `Doctor Zhivago’?
“If something tries to represent life, then it should have more than one genre, because life doesn’t have one genre, either. It has tragic elements and comic elements. So I’m not all that happy with any single classification, either.”
Von Donnersmarck, who had to overcome investors’ concerns that his script was “too serious” while raising the film’s modest budget, is understandably protective of his movie. But “The Lives of Others” became one of Germany’s biggest box office hits when it was released there last year and stole the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar from “Pan’s Labyrinth” on Sunday.
The success of the movie on its home turf was logical. But von Donnersmarck believes audiences around the world have responded so strongly because it’s not really a story about German history.
“When I began to write the script, I was more interested in the psychological side than the political side of the story,” says the filmmaker, who counts Sigmund Freud among his biggest influences. “I wanted to see how a person could change from an ideologue to someone who loses that ideology, like a crab who loses its shell. It’s really a story about a man who loses his faith, but in the process finds out there’s so much more to life than just faith.”
And even though the Berlin Wall has long been a pile of rubble, von Donnersmarck says the situation confronting the characters in “The Lives of Others” still exists in countries around the world.
“When people tell me, `Isn’t it great this is all over?’ I always say, “Well, it’s not over.’ Look at Cuba, for example. This very same ideology is still being fought for and is still suppressing freedom there. Some people who go there as tourists have somehow come to accept Fidel Castro as this original, idiosyncratic figure. They find him almost endearing. Well, if you look at his political legacy, it’s hard to think of him as endearing. We don’t really know yet the full toll of his reign.”
But like his movie, von Donnersmarck remains guardedly optimistic about people’s ability to bounce back.
“People who built something once,” he says, “can always build it again.”
