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LOCARNO 2021 Piazza Grande

Stefan Ruzowitzky • Director of Hinterland

“My protagonist feels the world is twisted and distorted; German Expressionists wanted to communicate the same thing”

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- Selected for the Piazza Grande section of Locarno, the Austrian helmer’s new film shows the landscape after World War I

Stefan Ruzowitzky • Director of Hinterland
(© Heinz Zeggl)

After World War I, nothing is the same any more – certainly not the place Perg (Murathan Muslu) used to call home. But when a serial killer rears his head in a ravaged city, he needs to stop him, rather than deal with his sense of failure. We spoke to Stefan Ruzowitzky about his Locarno Film Festival Piazza Grande entry Hinterland [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Stefan Ruzowitzky
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]
.

Cineuropa: Your animated intro brought German Expressionism to mind. But you have embraced this aesthetic throughout the whole movie!
Stefan Ruzowitzky: The other day, I did an interview with an American publication and realised that for them, the First World War wasn’t such a big deal. But for us, Europeans, it changed everything: that’s when National Socialism arrived, many monarchies collapsed and new tendencies in art started emerging. Perg feels the world is twisted and distorted – nothing around him is straight or reliable any more. German Expressionists wanted to communicate the same thing. He goes from disappointment to acknowledging that, yes, he lost certain things, but he also achieved some. And this new world, and its new ideas, isn’t all bad.

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At one point, it turns into a whodunnit, and even though there is a lot of implied torture, this retro setting makes it easier to swallow, doesn’t it?
It’s all because of my co-writers [Robert Buchschwenter and Hanno Pinter] – that’s where all this violence comes from.

Sick, sick people.
Exactly [laughs]. I like to combine strong thriller elements with a sociocultural background. You can embrace Perg’s state of mind and the way Vienna is shown, but if you want to stay just for the suspenseful story, that’s perfectly fine. These gruesome murders were necessary because all of these veterans have experienced so much horror already. It needed to be equally horrible to make them react. There were so many mutilated people in the streets at that time, with all these doctors trying to reconstruct their destroyed bodies. It was often just with a piece of leather and glasses, so that you could buy some milk in a shop without shocking other people because half of your face was missing. Such horrible, horrible things.

There were some articles that claimed that the Vietnam War marked the first time when returning soldiers weren’t greeted as heroes. You show the same experience here.
This film is about what, today, we call “toxic masculinity”. These are all typically male virtues: going to war, fighting for your country, protecting women and children. And these men, they failed at that. They did not win the war, and they lost everything, coming back to this little thing in the middle of Europe that Austria is now, even though it used to be one of the biggest empires in the world. They felt humiliated, I think, and it was the same with Vietnam. Our society likes to think we go to war because it’s just. Then you learn that, well, it wasn’t, and we lost – for a good reason. But Perg eventually learns that it’s not just about loss; it’s about change.

Did you read a lot about the mindset of those who came back? And those who stayed?
One of my favourite books is Journey to the End of the Night by Céline, even though he became a fascist, which tainted his reputation. It’s about French soldiers in the First World War, and it shows that they hated their own aristocratic officers more than the Germans. They knew they didn’t value their lives. This sense of disappointment, that nothing works any more and the world is corrupt, I found that in the book, and maybe a bit is in the movie as well. It’s something all European countries felt at the time: that what we had before wasn’t enough any more.

In the film, the biggest conflict also happens inside, between people who were supposed to be on the same side.
Yes, it’s all about the enemy within. It has nothing to do with other countries. Also because in that war, there was no winner. Everybody was just completely exhausted. Here, in Austria and Germany, we have been obsessed with the Second World War, and for good reason, I guess – after all, the perpetrators were still alive. They were politicians, judges and famous actors. We had to deal with that part of our past, and the First World War, and the years in between, were forgotten, although that’s when the “modern world” was invented. Now, we are coming back to it a little.

We see series everywhere now, after we binged on them during the pandemic, and there seems to be potential to continue on with this character. You reveal his past, which makes us think about his future.
Our producers and one of the writers, Hanno, started to think about a possible sequel. My first directorial decision was to cast Murathan because I wanted to have a typical alpha male, someone who would suffer that much more from this humiliation. Perg is used to success, to being in charge, so finding out that his wife slept with another man and that he won’t get his job back – all these things add up to him being in complete and utter despair. He is an interesting character, that’s for sure.

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