“With love, your Hilde” – Liv Lisa Fries: “The whole story was extreme for me”

Liv Lisa Fries, Andreas Dresen’s film in which you play the lead role, is dedicated to the Nazi resistance network Rote Kapelle and the resistance fighters Hilde and Hans Coppi. Were you aware of the Red Orchestra before the role was suggested to you?

Not at all. I may have noticed subconsciously that there is a Coppistraße in Berlin and a dormitory named after Hans and Hilde Coppi, but the Red Chapel was foreign to me. When reading the script I thought of “Breaking the Waves” and “Dancer in the Dark” by Lars von Trier or “Hunger” by Steve McQueen. These are films that don’t make it easy and confront you with deep abysses. Hilde Coppi was also an interesting character for me in terms of acting because she doesn’t verbalize much and is a completely different person than me.

In “In Love, Your Hilde” you usually only had a few words at your disposal to express what you were thinking and feeling, so you had to approach the role physically. Can you give an example of how you landed the role?

There is the scene in which Hilde dictates the farewell letter to her mother to the prison priest Harald Poelchau (Alexander Scheer). Andreas Dresen gave me a picture of an animal in a cage for the scene. He also said “feverish.” I had previously thought more about anxiety and then let these different emotions flow together. In the scene I am sitting opposite Poelchau. Actually, I should have sat facing him, but I sat on the side – Andreas said to me afterwards that he didn’t really understand what I was doing, but he would have just let me play. Fortunately, he was never interested in correcting me, but rather in working out the role together with me. By the way, it was also a good decision by Andreas Dresen to choose a female perspective on Hilde Coppi with Judith Kaufmann at the camera.

Laila Stieler, the screenwriter, characterized the characters through reduced, very strong dialogues. What did that mean for your work?

The script had a quality that you don’t get presented all the time. I still basically work on the texts or the character design myself, but that wasn’t necessary in this case. Hilde Coppi once turns to Hans Coppi (Johannes Hegemann) and says: “Don’t you trust me to have my own will?” And then she just leaves. In doing so, she also indirectly addresses the audience. I found myself sometimes not trusting her to have her own opinion. But it is important to understand that you can have a clear stance even if you don’t say so much.

In 2013 you played the resistance fighter Sophie Scholl in “Women who make history”. Hilde Coppi is quieter and less well-known, does that annoy you?

You can be angry about a lot of things in the world. I’m rather pleased that Andreas made such a quiet person the main character. For a long time I thought you had to be really cool and eloquent to be successful on stage and on social media. This is a fallacy. I once had a key experience at a concert by a musician friend, Agnes Obel, in Berlin’s Admiralspalast. Agnes is shy in private and I expected her to act up on stage, but she was the same as always. That touched me very much. Hilde Coppi is also an important representative of the silent voices.

Hans Coppi junior, the son of Hans and Hilde Coppi, has dealt with the Red Orchestra as a historian and even did his doctorate on a representative of the movement, Harro Schulze-Boysen. You met him. How was that for you?

I was very moved by the meeting with Hans Coppi Jr. I find it impressive how he has committed and continues to support his parents’ legacy throughout his life. Of course he also suffered from being an orphan. For me, the conversations with Hans Coppi Jr. were a bit like a science fiction film – in the role of the young mother, I got to know my son, who is older than me, so to speak, putting the cart before the horse.

Despite the heavy subject matter, the film feels summery and light thanks to the jumps in time. But they shot chronologically, so they ended up on hard ground…

Yes, that’s how it was. Andreas Dresen said in retrospect that it was a mistake to proceed chronologically because in the end we only shot tough scenes: the request for clemency was rejected, the child was given away, a farewell letter to the mother, execution. That’s just pretty intense. I also experienced this physically to a degree I had never known before. The film team felt the same way. I knew some people from other projects – they had been doing the job for many years – and they still cried on set. There are a lot of films about the Nazi era that are all about how evil the Nazis were. “With love, your Hilde,” on the other hand, does not abstract but deals with what resistance meant in concrete terms. For example, numerous executions. Only a radio message from Hilde and Hans Coppi and their friends to the Soviet Union arrived. It read: “A thousand greetings to friends.”

Did you try to stay with the character of Hilde Coppi the whole time?

That would have been unbearable, also because it was a real person. That’s why I didn’t visit the prison where Hilde Coppi was executed. Andreas Dresen didn’t film at the original location, but rather recreated the location. There are simply limits. I knew I would exceed my own while filming anyway. It was therefore important to know how to differentiate myself and get out of the character again. It helped me to consciously take off and put away the film clothes and put on my own clothes. I went swimming in the lake, ran through the park and did a little yoga. Shaking and breathing consciously also helped to literally shake off the role.

Hilde Coppi died at 34, you are 33. The similar age meant that you could identify well with the role?

That was one aspect of many. The whole story was extreme for me. I can’t always shoot something like that. Ten years ago I made “And tomorrow at noon I’ll be dead,” a film about euthanasia, after which I canceled projects of this existential kind. I think it’s important to also see and produce light films, but of course in our privileged society we shouldn’t just deal with the nice things. Explicitly in Germany we must continue to deal with the historical traumas. Currently, certain political ideas, attitudes and parties that threaten our fundamental values ​​are becoming increasingly widespread. A film like “With Love, Your Hilde” can help people to be more aware of such dangers.

“With love, your Hilde”, Germany 2024. Director: Andreas Dresen, book: Laila Stieler. With: Liv Lisa Fries, Johannes Hegemann, Lisa Wagner, Alexander Scheer. 125 min. In the cinema from October 17th.