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BERLINALE 2022 Forum

Max Linz • Director of L'état et moi

“I wanted a character that would leave me room for fiction”

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- BERLINALE 2022: German actress Sophie Rois stars in a double role in her fellow countryman’s intriguing new feature

Max Linz • Director of L'état et moi
(© Christian Werner)

After presenting Music and Apocalypse [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile
]
at the Berlinale in 2019, German director Max Linz comes back to the Forum section of the festival with his new feature, L'état et moi [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Max Linz
film profile
]
, starring Sophie Rois. In it, he orchestrates a fictitious court case with some curious twists. We talked to the director about his characters and the development of the concept of the film.

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Cineuropa: What were your sources of inspiration for the film?
Max Linz:
For the writing itself, Jerry Lewis was an important figure. The Errand Boy was a kind of starting point for the movie. Like the character there, you were supposed to walk through the departments and experience something different behind every door you open in the courthouse. Another source was the great spate of courtroom movies that came up during the time we were writing the film. Those showed what kinds of stereotypes we were trying to avoid at all costs.

How did you come up with the character of Hans List?
For the construction of the case, I was looking for a protagonist that would make it possible to show this distribution of roles that exist in the administration of justice. The accused had to be a character that couldn’t be identified as belonging to a realistic group. I wanted to avoid there being any associations in relation to the sociology of crime. I wanted a character that would leave me room for fiction. The name Hans List is a reference to composer Franz Liszt.

So many mix-ups happen in the film. A particularly popular one is the one between composer and communist.
These miscommunications that run throughout the film, this constant misspeaking, is a comedy motif. But I was also particularly fascinated – and I observed this myself through my visits to court – by what happens when, for example, something is misunderstood by the judges. It creates an incredible amount of tension. There is something locked up in these misunderstandings, something unconscious that then materialises. Purely phonetically, moreover, “composer-communist” forms an interesting pair of words. It encompasses the somewhat unstable connection between art and politics.

How did you do your research for the film?
I've increasingly had the experience that research in itself is useless. Basically, the interesting objective when observing the proceedings in a courtroom is not to find material for a fiction, but rather to draw parallels with our own methodology or cinematic practice. The point was to analyse the way negotiations are conducted.

The character of the trainee lawyer is naïve and clumsy. How did you develop him?
He has no authority at all yet. Everywhere he is, or wherever he sits, he is superfluous, like a useless intern. This opens up a dramaturgical scope within him. He resembles a comic figure whose actions remain consequence-free. He can die and, in the next scene, reappear as if nothing had happened. There is something indecisive and value-free about the character. It allows you to treat all of the spaces that are crossed by him and all of the ritualised proceedings that take place as quotations. So when he courts the cellist, it's like a quote of gallantry. He doesn't feel anything very strongly about it himself. He walks through the world like a quotation. Moreover, he looks at everything like an alien would, or like a time traveller. Therefore, he becomes something akin to a guide for the audience to unlock the plot.

How did you go about building the set?
We created studio conditions, but outside the studio. The historical part is an outdoor backdrop from the studio in Babelsberg. The rest is largely shot in the State Opera Unter den Linden in Berlin. We set up the courtroom, the offices, the conservatory and other locations there, and incorporated the existing architectural features. We fictionalised the existing spaces for our own purposes. Focusing on the opera as the main location allowed us to make the film with a very small budget and a tiny team.

What was important for the visual concept?
Besides Robin Metzer’s set design and Nina Kroschinske’s costumes, it had a lot to do with the gaze of the cinematographer, Markus Koob. There were a lot of one-shots that had to be produced and have something consistent about them. It was about a continuous production process, with each shot dissolving into individual moments, but altogether, they were meant to form a tight narrative.

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