“We are talking together about Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo,’ and ‘Pygmalion,’ about all the men who create women. That’s what cinema always has to be.”įor the post-World War II Berlin drama “Phoenix” (2015), Petzold built upon his co-writer Harun Forocki’s essay “about men who create women like muses,” Petzold said. I am thinking like Hitchcock: there is the look of someone - who’s looking here? - or a look like God, this is objective. “My movies have something to do, always, with each camera position. “All movies have something to do with Hitchcock,” he said. Nina Hoss in “Phoenix” The Criterion CollectionĪs Petzold manipulates mystery and tension, withholding information from the audience until the right time, he is always thinking about the master of suspense. My mother told me that in her youth, working in a chemical laboratory as a young woman, it was filled with color and she has a life of her own.

It was in color: water, people have skin, it was not black and white. “All the pictures we can see in West Germany,” said Petzold, “are black, white, and grey, like Communism it’s all like Richard Burton in ‘The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.’ Each year we have to do holidays. Growing up in Berlin, Petzold’s parents would return to the Eastern German Democratic Republic (GDR) to visit their relatives. But she cares for her patients that bonds her with her charismatic fellow doctor (Ronald Zehrfeld) who she trusts despite an overwhelming atmosphere of fear, suspicion, and paranoia. Like everyone around her, she lies to survive she sneaks around in the night to meet her West German lover in the woods. In Petzold’s fifth collaboration with luminous actress Nina Hoss, she plays an intrepid East Berlin doctor sent to the boonies in 1980 as punishment for wanting to leave the country. Take “Barbara,” Petzold’s haunting 2012 Berlin Silver Bear-winner and German Oscar entry. I want to make German stories like Rainer Werner Fassbinder. I could get $1 million from France, $2 million from Germany, $1 million from Norway. I must say I was not the first one they sent the script to - so bad! A bad script from Hollywood has a period European story they need European money, therefore they’re calling a European author like me.

Petzold has no trouble resisting Hollywood’s inevitable siren call because he rejects what they have to offer. ‘Undine’ Trailer: Paula Beer Leads Christian Petzold’s Berlin-Set Romance

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