“Bad Director” by Oskar Roehler in the cinema: Oskar Roehler: “Films are no longer celebrated”

The film is based on your novel “Self-fucking”. Why did you implement it now?

I’ve actually wanted to make a kind of film within a film for a long time because I wanted to find out what the job has meant to me in the last few years. For example, I noticed that I was suddenly afraid of other people because their narcissism inflates their sensitivities beyond belief. It’s gotten to the point where people want to have their shoes tied. It’s limitless how much privilege some people enjoy and how little privilege others ultimately have. You can hardly speak of political correctness on set anymore.

What happens to director Gregor Samsa’s character on set?

You can see from his example how someone completely despairs, as if in a nightmare. No matter what Gregor Samsa does, he hits a wall. That made me kind of sad when I saw the film for the second time with an audience that found the film incredibly funny. But that was also the beauty of the film.

Interview

IMAGO/Future Image

Oskar Roehler was born in Starnberg in 1959. He is the son of Klaus Roehler and Gisela Elsner and became known as a writer, screenwriter and director in the early 1990s. His film “The Untouchable” (2000), about his mother’s final years, won the German Film Prize, among other awards. In 2020, his work “Enfant Terrible” about the filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder was included in the competition at the Cannes Film Festival; However, the festival was canceled due to the corona pandemic.

The guy comes across as quite unpleasant. Couldn’t he have been drawn nicer?

I am clearly of the opinion that a novel or film hero is simply a character and can say what is inside him. If this is a decadent, morbid or destructive character, then he has certain lines ready, and if you don’t say them, then the quality of the narrative is poor. Then you can’t invent a character like that if she’s not allowed to say what she says. You have to invent another character. To talk about Gregor Samsa again: He’s not an unpleasant person, that’s just the first step in thinking like that. He is desperate. It’s actually a film about failure.

What did you draw inspiration from?

One of my favorite films is “Eight and a Half” by Fellini with a director in creative crisis. The director doesn’t want to do it anymore and can’t work anymore because he can’t think of anything anymore. He fails and yet in the end the film machine is set in motion and he is completely lost in the crowd. “Eight and a Half” is a manifesto for the love of cinema, images and beauty, and then I thought: Today it is actually exactly the opposite. Films are no longer celebrated; it’s more about processes. People are often very pragmatic and focus on practicality because they don’t have the time to cultivate a sense of beauty and really think about content. They are assembly line workers. The industry and television are to blame for this. You have to shoot a TV movie in 20 days. In the past, people worked longer and more for less money.

“Bad Director” takes an anti-attitude. Why are you more interested in the abysses in the sense of art than politics?

For me, the subculture of the 80s in Berlin, in which I grew up, was essentially a culture deeply influenced by nihilism. I was a snob, I was a dandy, I liked the finer things in life and also the forbidden ones. I also celebrated this when I had little or no money in Berlin. I bought a suit or the most amazing shirt at the flea market for two euros and stole the finest books from the library. I didn’t have an apartment for a year. I stayed overnight in friends’ backyard apartments or studios. But the crazy thing was that I didn’t think for a second about the fact that I was essentially homeless. Then at some point a friend got me an apartment through the social welfare office and I started working as a scaffolder and returned to writing in my early 20s.

What has the film society you describe forgotten?

People who do mediocre stuff don’t know the extremes. Sometimes I sit at the Kottbusser Tor with completely broken friends of mine because they happen to see me and call me down in the U8, in the part where nobody goes in. I have no fear of contact. As long as I have the feeling that I am dealing with a person who has something to say, then I can exchange ideas with people anywhere. I don’t have a driver’s license and have been a stroller most of my life. I see a lot that other people don’t see.

Gregor Samsa described the “SZ” as “a fictitiously sublimated vermin version” of itself. How much of you is in the “Bad Director” and his fears?

At one point I was really afraid of the first day of filming. You might see it as an exaggerated form of stage fright over something you’ve been preparing for for months. I couldn’t sleep at all for two days and then thank God I had the tablets. I finished the thing, but was pretty exhausted. Like Gregor Samsa, I no longer feel like going to industry meetings where people have nothing to say to each other. I wanted to express all of these aversions. But this is not an autobiography in that sense.

Is it more of a film about love because Samsa falls in love with a sex worker?

You can call it a cliché that he falls in love with a prostitute. A young, beautiful woman who is paid to play a game and gets into all the dirt, endures sexual obsessions and even confirms to Gregor Samsa that what he thinks and what he says is absurd- crazy way is actually quite cool. The whole game is based on money, but then it dissolves like an air bubble. It’s a beautiful but also sad game. Some people are privileged when it comes to love, others are somehow not. (Oskar Roehler’s eyes glaze over)

Why does this affect you so much?

I have a lot of respect for prostitution. In my long life I have often met sisters of mercy. Basically it always had something to do with mutual sympathy and empathy. I believe that this kind of discourse can only take place at this level. You can also see this in other areas like SM and so on. This puts respect first.

»Bad Director«, Germany 2023. Director and screenplay: Oskar Roehler. With: Oliver Masucci, Bella Dayne, Elie Kaempfen, Anne Ratte-Polle. 131 min. Now in cinemas.

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