Original subtitles

The total comes to 478,000.60 schillings.

I can't include interest due to the five-year waiting period.

It doesn't matter.

May I ask why you need the money so urgently?

Perhaps you'd be better off with a loan.

You could borrow against the business.

We're emigrating to Australia.

I knew Michael Haneke's name

from newspaper articles about his TV movies.

I was somewhat familiar with his name.

But growing up, I had never watched his TV movies

from the '70s or '80s.

The first time I saw one of his films is when he became a feature film director.

That was in 1989, The Seventh Continent, in Cannes.

I was in Cannes as a journalist.

They were showing three Austrian films that year,

and The Seventh Continent was by far the most outstanding of them.

It was one of the two or three best films that year in Cannes, period.

As a young critic, I was writing for the newspaper Der Standard,

and I dared to go up to him and introduce myself

at the booth of the Austrian Film Commission.

He had already read my first reports from the festival,

in which I had written about his film in a somewhat exaggerated

but sincerely enthusiastic way.

That was, of course, a good starting point for a meeting

and then a closer friendship, which still lasts today.

I did a big interview with him in 1989.

The film debuted in theaters in the fall of 1989,

and it was not long after that we...

that I approached him about writing a book.

And people agreed that

the screenplay of his feature film debut should be published,

as the movie had made a big impression in the Austrian film scene,

and not only in Austria but internationally.

From Vincent Can by at the New York Times to Le Monde,

the film was considered a spectacular debut,

when it was shown at the Director's Fortnight in Cannes.

The reaction in Austria was of course particularly strong.

Hence the idea of writing a book

about his work up to that date,

together with the screenplay for The Seventh Continent.

That book was published exactly two years later, in fall 1991 :

The Seventh Continent.. Michael Haneke and His films.

Since then, we have been involved in an ongoing dialogue about his work,

sometimes with a bit of time in between.

And I really enjoy the talks with him

and his thoughts about the world,

and to experience it in parallel to his cinematographic expression,

to sometimes sense contradictions between the two,

to sometimes feel the close unity

between the person and their films.

So all of that started when I was 24 and he was already 47.

Look at me.

Tell me. Did you pretend to be blind?

Come on. Tell me.

I just want to know the truth.

Come on.

Don't be afraid. I won't hurt you.

Is it true?

Did you pretend to be blind?

Yes.

It may seem paradoxical

to write a book about someone who just made his feature film debut,

but it's really not when you realize

that this so-called debut was preceded by a more than 20-year career

as a script editor and especially as a director in other media.

Meaning that someone makes a late debut in feature films

20 years after he already ventured into this field of work.

He had already directed eight TV movies,

including adaptations of other writers and some based on his own screenplays.

And this occurrence of a certain shift, of a certain delay,

was fascinating to me.

Then I realized that Haneke is part of a generation -

and that's something that may be clearer now, after some time has passed -

Haneke is part of a generation of European art-house directors,

auteurs, filmmakers that we associate with names like -

a generation three, four years older, three, four years younger than him.

If we want to name that generation,

then we don't only have Werner Herzog,

who was actually born the same year,

but we also have Bertolucci,

Fassbinder, Bellocchio,

Jean Eustache, Wim Wenders.

All those names belong to his generation.

All these filmmakers debuted

with their first feature films between 1966 and 1969.

Feature films for theater release.

For Haneke, this doesn't happen until 20 or more than 20 years later.

Because he -

He chose a different career path, went a different way.

But maybe also because he wasn't the typical child

of a cinephile environment, an environment fueled by popular culture,

he wasn't from this kind of milieu

or this kind of social stratum,

contrary to some of the others.

Meaning he does not come genuinely, originally, from the love for film,

the enthusiasm for the cinema, the cinema fetishism.

He comes from a bourgeois culture, a bourgeois family,

a family of theater people, actors, directors, etc.

And he has a very strong background in literature and music.

These are his primary art forms or his strongest drivers

when it comes to artistic endeavors.

He has an education in film,

but contrary to what we know about Fassbinder, Wenders and others,

or those who were film critics themselves,

he never dove that deep into film fetishism,

into a complete cinema fetishism.

And coming from Austria,

where there was no real film sector in 1966, 1967,

let alone a proper film industry,

there was a very strong, very influential

avant-garde, experimental film scene,

but there wouldn't have been anything for him

in terms of regular film making.

The Austrian broadcasting company ORF couldn't accommodate him,

so he went to Germany and worked for a German broadcasting company.

He established himself in the field

adapting literature for TV,

and he knew that to become a director, which is what he wanted,

he first had to learn working with actors, so he switched to theater,

risked his secure job,

to become a theater director.

He practiced there, and when the broadcasting company saw

that he was doing well, his first successes in the theater in the early '70s

led to him making his first TV movie, which came out in 1974.

And for 12 years, from 1974 to 1986,

he kept moving forward, step by step, with each work.

Maybe not immediately towards the cinema,

but he refined his range, his skills and his possibilities

with regard to his artistic tools, so to speak.

His first cinematic TV movie in his eyes

is Ingeborg Bachmann's Three Paths To the Lake, which I respect very much.

It is still very much in the context

of the dignified, precious Austrian or Austrian-German TV movie,

but it shows how many creative ideas were already there

that go beyond the convention of television,

how much of that was already there.

Then he did the two-parter Lemmings, an autobiographic piece,

which also shows him to be a diagnostic for his own generation,

and of the fatal aspects or disappointments

or the illness or pain of his generation,

maybe a certain suicidal tendency,

which he attributes to his generation.

And he proves himself in that role,

even though those were controversial issues.

There were already critics back then who said he has a determinist worldview,

something that accompanies him still today.

Then he made a light, almost comedic TV film in Berlin,

which he sees himself to be close to Cassavetes, Variation,

with Hilmar Thate, Elfriede Irrall, Monica Bleibtreu.

It ends with a scene where Hilmar Thate goes to the movies

and watches Annie Hall, by Woody Allen.

Maybe that was the direction he was trying to take.

The following year, he made Who Was Edgar Allan?

That's a film where he clearly shows, contrary to what was said later,

that he was not all about reduction, minimalism, absolute simplicity,

but that he was just as interested in the fantastic, the phantasmagoric,

and thus also the more indulgent possibilities

that the cinema had to offer.

Once you see The White Ribbon and other films of his, you can feel it.

Who Was Edgar Allan?, shot in Venice,

is a film on very unsafe grounds.

What is real, what is not real?

What is the identity or the identities of the main characters? Who are they?

A film that,

in the broadest sense, already offers a postmodern access

to image and identity.

So again, a new field, a new area.

And, lastly, there was the film Fraulein,

for the Saarland Broadcasting Company,

which was for him sort of an answer to Fassbinder,

to Fassbinder's films about women in postwar Germany.

It's a topic that I like to argue with him about.

He thinks he made the anti-Fassbinder, which is what he wanted.

He was against him,

saying Fassbinder mythologized the postwar German woman,

and he, Haneke, had to take an opposing standpoint and show the truth.

I always thought it was more logical to see the film

in the tradition of Fassbinder's great films

about women from around 1980

and that they have more in common than even Haneke sees.

That Fassbinder, on the other hand, was not mythologizing

but rather deconstructing these types of female characters

and also types of male characters.

So we don't agree.

On the other hand, Fraulein is a very convincing film,

shot in black-and-white, which already shows how he handles this medium,

and also a film that went in terms of budget and production

much further than the films he made previously.

So you could see all these steps, all these TV movies,

in a kind of genealogy, in a line,

that is continuously moving towards the cinema.

You can see it that way, but you don't have to.

Of course, he proved step by step -

and he proved to himself what he is capable of doing -

and that he...

that he can meet his own standards with regard to a feature film.

At the same time,

he fulfilled the needs of the broadcasting companies,

at least on the minimal level where they had to be met.

But always in some kind of conflict or dispute.

And The Seventh Continent is the case of a work

where he was originally planning to also make a TV movie.

He had read a story in the Stern about a family that annihilated itself.

He wanted to adapt it for TV,

but the dramatization and narration styles available

were no longer satisfying for him.

In the correspondence with the broadcasting company,

he also saw that the way

that they would have allowed or facilitated it

wasn't the way he wanted to tell the story.

Because at this time, the Austrian film subsidy program had been launched,

and multiple people suggested

he try his hand in feature films,

he finally took that step at the end of the '80s

and used this material to create his first cinematic release.

And then, without any compromise,

he told the story exclusively in his extremely reduced way,

following the chronological order of the events

using an anti-psychological character treatment.

"And then there's our little Eva.

We thought long and hard about whether to take her with us

or leave her behind with you.

As you can imagine, Mom,

and certainly you too, dear Father,

making this decision has caused us many sleep less nights.

Because while we're certain we're doing the right thing for ourselves,

it's an entirely different matter to decide the fate of someone else,

someone you love more than anything in the world."

The film was accepted at the Cannes Film Festival.

It was a pretty quick breakthrough.

And as I said, he was already older.

That's how a form of film making

that had developed for more than 20 years in his head -

a way of thinking about cinema and film making,

an idea of what it could be, of what it should be

if I, Michael Haneke, become a feature film director -

It was basically brewing for a long time.

And this kind of film making,

which is fed by his experiences with directors

like Bergman, Tarkovsky, Bresson, Antonioni, Godard, etcetera -

Straub-Huillet, whose films he loved -

which was basically the art-house cinema of the '60s and '70s.

This kind of cinema comes back with him in another form

in the late 1980s, early '90s,

which is why I always counted him -

And I don't mean that negatively or...

or as a restriction of his films' quality.

But for me, it is the classic example for a delayed artist

who enters into another era

with things, with thoughts, with ideas, with aesthetics,

with convictions,

and also with a certain knowledge of social analysis,

or in terms of...

in terms of the examination of different circumstances around the world,

which you would usually attribute to an earlier generation.

And around 1990,

we already had people like, for instance, Quentin Tarantino,

who in a certain way is a lifelong counterpart of his.

The young people back then, like myself, were already searching

for filmmakers who were working differently

or who had a different relationship with the world.

And Haneke burst into the middle of it like a foreign object,

but a foreign object that was very much needed or that was very productive.

So that someone who is making films

really knows what kind of responsibility goes hand in hand with it.

In order to take yourself seriously

and be able to look yourself in the mirror,

you need this seriousness.

That set him apart from most of his peers in that era

and today as well, I think.

To realize that you can't just say,

"There's this generation,

then this one is done, then there's the next one,"

but that history and also art history and film history develop in way

that a lot is only expressed later on, even though it stems from earlier.

Or that something is recognized only much later for what it was and is

and wasn't even perceived when it was new.

That there are these accelerations and decelerations,

and that they are so exciting in film history.

I think you can really see that in Michael Haneke.

And back then, I just had a feeling about it.

It is still one of the main access points to his work.

No!

His feature film debut, The Seventh Continent, in 1989

was spectacular,

and not in a small way.

In Austria, anyway, but also internationally.

Nonetheless, it is important to think about the fact

that while it was sold to many countries and ran in theaters there,

it did not become a commercial success in Austria,

nor in Germany or anywhere else.

Just based on this alone,

you would think that such a continuous and expanding career

like the one of Michael Haneke, the way we know it today,

did not actually seem that logical.

It has a lot to do with the film subsidy system,

especially in Austria,

because, since the reaction of the critics

was so very clear, so very strong,

he was granted regularly the possibility to keep going

with his particular vision of film and cinema

and to drive it forward.

Meaning, despite the lack of a broad audience response,

he was able to make what is often called The Glaciation Trilogy,

his first three films, on a fairly regular basis.

And in between, even a few more late TV movies.

He shot an adaptation of Joseph Roth's Rebellion.

He made a very experimental work for ORF:

Obituary for a Murderer,

which was also about a fait divers, a soldier running amok.

And he focused entirely on TV material for this work,

what was broadcast in these 24 hours, when this incident occurred.

So even though it is not yet the main focus in Seventh Continent,

the relationship between our Western reality

and the mass media, especially television,

became very quickly one of the main topics of his later work.

And even though I don't think that when he shot The Seventh Continent

he was already planning a trilogy

when he was developing the next film, Benny's Video,

which is also based on a real incident,

from which he takes something that he can generalize,

in which he recognizes something.

In a one-column or three-column report on a crime,

he recognizes something

that he deems generally significant for the society in which he lives

and in which his audience lives,

and based on this isolated case, this so-called isolated case,

he creates something that goes far beyond.

I think that when he was working on the second film, Benny's Video,

he was already thinking about

possibly making this a trilogy,

that this could become a three-piece vessel

with a related approach,

that the third film would fit into 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance.

Even though he knew that he would tell it differently,

that he would tell it via many characters, like a choir.

Not via one case, like the family committing suicide in Seventh Continent,

or the case of young Benny and his crime and his family,

even though there is one crime that is the focus of the third film,

but based on it or going back from it, he opens up a much larger space

and really does work in fragments.

The title is very true, because that is how the film is structured.

I think he realized

that with regard to the similarity...

of the three approaches

as well as the relative difference in artistic access,

that he has something here which -

I don't want to say it is a good sell, because he doesn't care about selling.

But in order to create a kind of signature as auteur in the world,

as a film auteur,

this was an extremely suitable format.

I don't want to accuse him

of making this a strategic career consideration

or allege anything like that,

but he is someone who wants to expand his playing field.

Meaning that he does things in a way

that will make it foreseeable or expected

or at least creates the hope

of having a bigger playing field next time.

So I do think that he was aware of setting the scene with this trilogy -

all three films were shown in Cannes -

so he would make a name for himself in Europe, allowing him to go further.

Or maybe it was a consideration of the production, the budget,

partnerships with companies

that have public funding in other countries,

so he could broaden his opportunities and create a greater potential.

And this trilogy, this trilogy statement,

was clearly the right approach to do that.

And I think it defined him in terms of content as an artist

for those who were skeptics regarding his work,

who accused him of holding on to an outdated point of view

in his social critique or his existential philosophy

or in his media critique,

a perspective that was believed

to have already been overcome.

It was already the early '90s,

and people thought Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers,

based on a screenplay by Quentin Tarantino,

offered a much more contemporary access to the issue

of a media-generated dissolution of society.

And if you judge by the success with the public

or the first reception,

then it is of course true that movies like Natural Born Killers

or Pulp Fiction or Tarantino's early films

were much more talked about all over the world,

and that a lot more people saw them.

But I'm wondering if now,

20, 25 years later,

when we look back at the early '90s and this entire era,

whether we wouldn't conclude

if the approach of Natural Born Killers, for instance,

which seemed very modern

and which used the stylistic tools of MTV and music television

and current aesthetic forms,

so-called current aesthetic forms,

if that film didn't get old faster, became dated faster

than those films that were not as contemporary

or were more aligned with the European art films from the '50s to the '80s,

like the artistic access that Haneke was offering -

if the latter didn't age better

or have proven more durable

or sustainable or resilient

than some of those, back then, much more popular films

addressing similar issues.