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| Ulrich Seidl: 'Those who say I despise people do not understand me' | Ulrich Seidl: 'Those who say I despise people do not understand me' |
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| Any old auteur can knock out a trilogy but it takes a special kind of genius to make one by accident. This is the position in which the 60-year-old Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl finds himself. He receives me on a rainy afternoon in the Vienna office of his production company. Finger snacks of psychedelic hues (bright purple cabbage, unidentified pistachio-green paste) are spread out before us. A chintzy lamp dangling above us melts the food until the toppings start creeping off the bread; a signed portrait of Erich Von Stroheim looks on magisterially from the wall. Seidl himself is dressed head to toe in black: black waistcoat over a black shirt, black trousers, black shoes. His spiky-fluffy brown hair and bristly beard are speckled with silver. He could be Peter Mullan playing Johnny Cash. | Any old auteur can knock out a trilogy but it takes a special kind of genius to make one by accident. This is the position in which the 60-year-old Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl finds himself. He receives me on a rainy afternoon in the Vienna office of his production company. Finger snacks of psychedelic hues (bright purple cabbage, unidentified pistachio-green paste) are spread out before us. A chintzy lamp dangling above us melts the food until the toppings start creeping off the bread; a signed portrait of Erich Von Stroheim looks on magisterially from the wall. Seidl himself is dressed head to toe in black: black waistcoat over a black shirt, black trousers, black shoes. His spiky-fluffy brown hair and bristly beard are speckled with silver. He could be Peter Mullan playing Johnny Cash. |
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| Go to Seidl's official website and you will find a selection of words associated with his name. Alongside the merely factual (director, writer, producer) are the subjective: voyeur, misanthrope, cynic, social pornographer, provocateur, pessimist. These, he tells me, are harvested from comments made about him over the years. He might also have included "smelly", which is how his work was described by his countryman Michael Haneke. Explaining the absence of Seidl from Cannes prior to 2007, Haneke likened those films to "smelly socks. And they don't want something like that on their nice Croisette." (He meant it as a compliment. Those zany Austrians.) | Go to Seidl's official website and you will find a selection of words associated with his name. Alongside the merely factual (director, writer, producer) are the subjective: voyeur, misanthrope, cynic, social pornographer, provocateur, pessimist. These, he tells me, are harvested from comments made about him over the years. He might also have included "smelly", which is how his work was described by his countryman Michael Haneke. Explaining the absence of Seidl from Cannes prior to 2007, Haneke likened those films to "smelly socks. And they don't want something like that on their nice Croisette." (He meant it as a compliment. Those zany Austrians.) |
| At the end of this roll-call is the most vital word in understanding Seidl's punishing but richly cathartic films: humanist. "Those who say I despise people do not understand me," he explains in his perfectly calm but forceful voice. I believe him. His camera is unsparing – it shows in unflinching close-up those considered undesirable or ugly by society (the elderly, the overweight, the poor, the disabled) – but it does not mock or denigrate. From his early documentaries (including Animal Love, about people with disturbing attachments to their pets) to the abrasive dramas that forged his international reputation (Dog Days, Import/Export), he has chronicled desperate lives with an anthropologist's rigour and a portraitist's eye. | At the end of this roll-call is the most vital word in understanding Seidl's punishing but richly cathartic films: humanist. "Those who say I despise people do not understand me," he explains in his perfectly calm but forceful voice. I believe him. His camera is unsparing – it shows in unflinching close-up those considered undesirable or ugly by society (the elderly, the overweight, the poor, the disabled) – but it does not mock or denigrate. From his early documentaries (including Animal Love, about people with disturbing attachments to their pets) to the abrasive dramas that forged his international reputation (Dog Days, Import/Export), he has chronicled desperate lives with an anthropologist's rigour and a portraitist's eye. |
| Nowhere is this truer than in the new Paradise films (co-written, like most of his work since 2001, with his wife Veronika Franz). Seidl had originally conceived of Paradise as a single picture about three Austrian women: Teresa goes to Kenya to look for love among the young African men selling sex and affection to white "sugar mamas"; her evangelical sister, Anna Maria, spends her holiday from work spreading the word of God around the impoverished suburbs of Vienna; and Teresa's daughter, Melody, falls in love at a diet camp for obese adolescents. The challenges of turning 90 hours of footage into a single film proved insurmountable, which is how we have arrived at the Paradise trilogy (Love, Faith, Hope) totalling five-and-a-half hours. | Nowhere is this truer than in the new Paradise films (co-written, like most of his work since 2001, with his wife Veronika Franz). Seidl had originally conceived of Paradise as a single picture about three Austrian women: Teresa goes to Kenya to look for love among the young African men selling sex and affection to white "sugar mamas"; her evangelical sister, Anna Maria, spends her holiday from work spreading the word of God around the impoverished suburbs of Vienna; and Teresa's daughter, Melody, falls in love at a diet camp for obese adolescents. The challenges of turning 90 hours of footage into a single film proved insurmountable, which is how we have arrived at the Paradise trilogy (Love, Faith, Hope) totalling five-and-a-half hours. |
| This raises the question: how does anyone end up with 90 hours of footage? "At the start there is a script I submit for funding," he says. "But when we start shooting it is not necessary to slavishly execute that script. Instead it evolves. I shoot chronologically and when I see what has been shot at the end of each day, this determines the direction of the rest of the film." There is so much room for manoeuvre that at one point he was shooting parallel scenes with two different male leads on Paradise: Love, knowing full well he would need at some point to drop the inferior performer from the film. "I do not rehearse. I don't want the actors to know what's coming. They mustn't prepare any dialogue; when they have to act together, I instruct them all separately, so none of them knows what I have told the other." | This raises the question: how does anyone end up with 90 hours of footage? "At the start there is a script I submit for funding," he says. "But when we start shooting it is not necessary to slavishly execute that script. Instead it evolves. I shoot chronologically and when I see what has been shot at the end of each day, this determines the direction of the rest of the film." There is so much room for manoeuvre that at one point he was shooting parallel scenes with two different male leads on Paradise: Love, knowing full well he would need at some point to drop the inferior performer from the film. "I do not rehearse. I don't want the actors to know what's coming. They mustn't prepare any dialogue; when they have to act together, I instruct them all separately, so none of them knows what I have told the other." |
| Surely he must warn them about the demanding nature of the material? Love and Hope feature intensely intimate scenes, even if they stop short of unsimulated sex – which Faith seemingly does not. "They know what to expect," he says, though he concedes that knowing about a scene and shooting it are different things. A protracted scene near the end of Love, in which a group of women maul a young Kenyan man before mocking him for his failure to become aroused, was especially difficult for the cast to perform. "The women were not open enough. The next night, I made them do it all over again." His tone is faintly headmasterly. | Surely he must warn them about the demanding nature of the material? Love and Hope feature intensely intimate scenes, even if they stop short of unsimulated sex – which Faith seemingly does not. "They know what to expect," he says, though he concedes that knowing about a scene and shooting it are different things. A protracted scene near the end of Love, in which a group of women maul a young Kenyan man before mocking him for his failure to become aroused, was especially difficult for the cast to perform. "The women were not open enough. The next night, I made them do it all over again." His tone is faintly headmasterly. |
| No wonder Margarethe Tiesel, who plays Teresa, observed that Seidl uses the stick with greater frequency than the carrot. "Actors need the stick," chuckles the director, pulling a bottle from the fridge behind me and splashing wine into our glasses. "If they have the slightest inhibition or censorship in their heads, it won't work." Tell me, I plead, that you allowed them a nice big wrap party at the end of shooting. "We had many parties. Three films, three international premieres, Austrian premieres too. We even suffered a kind of premiere fatigue." | No wonder Margarethe Tiesel, who plays Teresa, observed that Seidl uses the stick with greater frequency than the carrot. "Actors need the stick," chuckles the director, pulling a bottle from the fridge behind me and splashing wine into our glasses. "If they have the slightest inhibition or censorship in their heads, it won't work." Tell me, I plead, that you allowed them a nice big wrap party at the end of shooting. "We had many parties. Three films, three international premieres, Austrian premieres too. We even suffered a kind of premiere fatigue." |
| For all the differences between the worlds shown in the Paradise films, what connects them is their characters' mutual longing for the unattainable. Is this a common malaise in our society? "I believe so. It is always my intention for the viewers to see themselves. I do not judge, but I show how people behave in their longing for happiness. If the viewers have a problem with my films, it may be that they have a problem with themselves too." While the parts of the Paradise trilogy function as standalone works, Seidl would prefer them to be watched in one sittingut with a break in between." A break, eh? The big softie. | For all the differences between the worlds shown in the Paradise films, what connects them is their characters' mutual longing for the unattainable. Is this a common malaise in our society? "I believe so. It is always my intention for the viewers to see themselves. I do not judge, but I show how people behave in their longing for happiness. If the viewers have a problem with my films, it may be that they have a problem with themselves too." While the parts of the Paradise trilogy function as standalone works, Seidl would prefer them to be watched in one sittingut with a break in between." A break, eh? The big softie. |
| Ed Lachman, whose credits include Erin Brockovich and Far From Heaven, is one of two cinematographers (Wolfgang Thaler is the other) who shot Import/Export and the Paradise trilogy. Lachman remembers the first time he heard Seidl's name: "Werner Herzog saw Ken Park, which I co-directed with Larry Clark, at the Telluride festival. He came up to me afterwards and said, 'Good film, but that's kids' stuff to Ulrich Seidl.'" After catching up with Seidl's documentaries, Lachman met the director and the pair hit it off. "People question how he plays with reality and fiction, and whether he's exploiting his subjects," he says. "I always found Ulrich to be moral, without being moralistic. He's showing something without telling us how to feel. He has compassion toward his subjects; he's interested in the alienation of the individual in our time. Maybe we're afraid to look at the people in his films because we're scared we'll learn something about ourselves." | Ed Lachman, whose credits include Erin Brockovich and Far From Heaven, is one of two cinematographers (Wolfgang Thaler is the other) who shot Import/Export and the Paradise trilogy. Lachman remembers the first time he heard Seidl's name: "Werner Herzog saw Ken Park, which I co-directed with Larry Clark, at the Telluride festival. He came up to me afterwards and said, 'Good film, but that's kids' stuff to Ulrich Seidl.'" After catching up with Seidl's documentaries, Lachman met the director and the pair hit it off. "People question how he plays with reality and fiction, and whether he's exploiting his subjects," he says. "I always found Ulrich to be moral, without being moralistic. He's showing something without telling us how to feel. He has compassion toward his subjects; he's interested in the alienation of the individual in our time. Maybe we're afraid to look at the people in his films because we're scared we'll learn something about ourselves." |
| This has been the case with Seidl's work as far back as his 1982 short, Der Ball (The Prom), a satirical documentary about life in his home town of Horn. There was so much controversy surrounding its deadpan footage of townsfolk and debutantes at the town's graduation ball that it led directly to him leaving the Vienna Film Academy. "The mayor felt he had been made a laughing stock," he says. "But the local people knew how the dignitaries behaved." Seidl says he wasn't exactly expelled from the academy, but he left after receiving the lowest grade of the year. "The climate was poison. A film academy should help its students find their way, not force them to stick to the grid." We clink glasses at that. Hasn't he ever thought of returning to the academy, perhaps to show off his best director gong from Venice for Dog Days, or the same festival's special jury prize for Paradise: Faith? "I have no ambition to do that. However, there was a tender for a professorship, a chair at the academy, and the powers-that-be wanted me to accept. They came to me." Pause. Smile. "On bended knees." | This has been the case with Seidl's work as far back as his 1982 short, Der Ball (The Prom), a satirical documentary about life in his home town of Horn. There was so much controversy surrounding its deadpan footage of townsfolk and debutantes at the town's graduation ball that it led directly to him leaving the Vienna Film Academy. "The mayor felt he had been made a laughing stock," he says. "But the local people knew how the dignitaries behaved." Seidl says he wasn't exactly expelled from the academy, but he left after receiving the lowest grade of the year. "The climate was poison. A film academy should help its students find their way, not force them to stick to the grid." We clink glasses at that. Hasn't he ever thought of returning to the academy, perhaps to show off his best director gong from Venice for Dog Days, or the same festival's special jury prize for Paradise: Faith? "I have no ambition to do that. However, there was a tender for a professorship, a chair at the academy, and the powers-that-be wanted me to accept. They came to me." Pause. Smile. "On bended knees." |
| With his next film, Seidl returns to documentary: In the Basement will be a study of the relationship between Austrians and their cellars. "These are the places where Austrians spend their spare time. Especially men. They go there to drink, collect things, do handicrafts. Their living rooms remain virtually untouched." Josef Fritzl will not be mentioned, he says. "But viewers will be thinking about him." And what of Seidl's own basement? "Mine is a 300-year-old wine cellar." Of course. Why would he need one of those torture-chamber-type basements? What other people stow shamefully in their cellars, he puts in his films. | With his next film, Seidl returns to documentary: In the Basement will be a study of the relationship between Austrians and their cellars. "These are the places where Austrians spend their spare time. Especially men. They go there to drink, collect things, do handicrafts. Their living rooms remain virtually untouched." Josef Fritzl will not be mentioned, he says. "But viewers will be thinking about him." And what of Seidl's own basement? "Mine is a 300-year-old wine cellar." Of course. Why would he need one of those torture-chamber-type basements? What other people stow shamefully in their cellars, he puts in his films. |
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