Barbara Wurm (BW): I actually picked up Jelinek's ‘Die Liebhaberinnen’ (Women As Lovers) from my shelf. How many thousand years ago exactly did your project begin?
Koxi (K): I've been reading Jelinek's books with great enthusiasm since my youth, but it really started about ten years ago. That was at the end of my studies, and then of course there were twists and turns. It was a crazy idea for a debut film, and everyone advised me against it. But the novel stayed with me, and the project accompanied me through all phases of my life. That's why I said, ‘Come on, let's do it now. Come what may.’ It was interesting for us to transfer the novel to the present day; we didn't want to stay in the 1970s. Even almost 50 years after the novel was written, we are convinced that there are still many parallels.
Antonio de Luca (AL): At the time, we wrote a letter to Elfriede Jelinek asking if she would be willing to transfer the rights to us. We wrote in the letter that we would adapt the novel to the present day. We wanted to take stock of this material.
K: Which was really not easy, because this script has survived all these crises, so to speak. We've been through the Covid crisis, all kinds of crises, and now there's another mega-crisis. It has survived so many different phases of our personal lives, but also of world events…
BW: Did the words ‘to take stock’ convince Jelinek that you were the right people for the job?
AL: She only responded through her agent, who gave us the thumbs up without reservation. There was an addendum that she was always allowed to read the drafts, but Elfriede Jelinek never once left us a negative or positive comment. She probably just thought, ‘I'll let it go.’ She is also a playwright, after all. That means she is used to people completely dissecting her texts. We often wondered what she might be thinking.
BW: Can you remember what the decisive factor was that defined this particular text as your project to pursue over the next few years?
K: Yes, of course. For me, it was always about these female characters with whom I could identify, back then and still do today in this adaptation. Each of us is a Brigitte. There is a Paula in each of us. I found it interesting that this caricature, which was actually intended as a ‘Heimatroman’ [a novel in the Romantic tradition contrasting city and countrylife], already had something for me back then, where I thought, this is the language that I might not be able to produce myself, but that I can adapt together with Antonio so that we can turn it into something contemporary.
For me, it was always about these female characters with whom I could identify.
But I was told time and again: ‘That's so difficult to adapt,’ because the narrative voice is that of a commentator who talks down to people and just hacks away at it. And it's really difficult to translate that into emotion. That's why it often failed in the financing process, because everyone always said: ‘These have to be characters you can follow emotionally. They have to be strong women, otherwise it won't work.‘ And we were like, ’Yes, okay, strong women. What are strong women?’
AL: My first experience with Jelinek was her film reviews on her website, which I found incredibly precise. For both of us, who always wanted to think in extremes, it was like a vehicle. In the German film industry, you quickly get ground down by people telling you what you can and can't do. The trick was that we latched onto such an ingeniously critical, extremely bold author and then got a free pass to be like that ourselves.
Christiane Büchner (CB): Can you tell us more about how you dealt with the novel? Because it's totally crazy how this fragmentary narrative style gives you the opportunity to do something amazingly different in every scene.
K: Oh, I'm glad to hear that. Thank you. That's difficult to answer. The characters are predetermined by the novel. Usually you work from the inside out, you have a character in your head and then you make them three-dimensional, so to speak. For us, it was the other way around, we had to work from the outside in. Does that still work? Are women really like that? What are women's dreams? What are the circumstances, the dependencies and the power structures? We didn't want to change the characters from the novel too much, we left them with the same struggles. But we had to keep adapting them to the present day. Paula is a teenager from the village and Brigitte is the city woman. In the novel, both work in a sewing factory. But this concept of sewing, that she is now suddenly a dressmaker and is working on her own sexuality and sewing her own underwear, didn't work. That was too 70s. So we thought, where is femininity literally sold today? And that's how we came up with the trade fair. Paula's prostitution takes place in the digital space.
AL: In Jelinek's novel, you can summarise the plot very briefly, and it's actually the commentary and observation that make up the literary substance. And it's okay to develop it further that way, as long as we express a similar criticism as Ms Jelinek. You have to make a big film that is so tragic and summarises all the problems of the world. And actually, the world is totally absurd. The moment we realised that there was humour in it, it was a liberating moment, because then you can do completely different things with the characters. When you don't want to tell a heavy story, but start to create grotesque connections and open up things that are heavy to bear.
K: For me, the film is a tragic film, a heterosexual nightmare, because you always recognise yourself somewhere in it and that doesn't necessarily feel good. These characters are all perpetrators and victims in some way.
BW: And does the tragedy also have to do with heterosexuality, or is it just coincidentally a heterosexual tragedy?
K: Oh, that's a good question. There really is a grotesque, distorted reality in this whole working environment, this pressure to be efficient and everything that goes with it. For me, the tragedy is related to the fact that Paula and Brigitte desperately want to fulfil their dreams on their way to the top under these adverse circumstances, and it doesn't work out. Also because the relationships with their mothers are so sad. These mother-daughter relationships, which are all so toxic, this lack of female solidarity is also a huge issue for me.
AL: The sexuality of the characters was always a symptom of the impossible circumstances in which they live their lives. We have seen that something is passed on to a generation – with spitting on it afterwards. This can now be seen everywhere on the world stage. Heterosexuality is clearly part of this legacy, which is simply passed on from generation to generation.
CB: You said that you worked on the film for a very long time. Koxi, how did you get these great actors excited about your film and keep them on board?
K: You really have to give credit to the actors for that. The actresses were the only people who were always on our side. They were really enthusiastic and encouraged us. And that kept us going. There was a kind of magic, this connection between the actors and this script and these roles.
AL: We sometimes sat in front of potential sponsors who told us that it was the absolute worst shit they had ever read. Our script really got people's blood boiling. Men were offended, women were insulted. In contrast, we gave the script to actresses we never hoped to work with. And then they gave us the exact opposite assessment. It was really absurd at times.
Our script really got people's blood boiling.
BW: Can you describe certain aspects of working with these great actresses, Johanna Wokalek and Hannah Schiller?
K: Johanna is an actress who questions a lot: ‘Koxi, are you sure this should be played up?’ And I always said, ‘Yes, if you play it so gently and normally, it will end up looking like a soap opera.’ ‘Koxi, are you really sure? What if no one believes it in the end?’ And I say, ‘It has to build up slowly. Someone will believe it. I believe it!’ Hannah Schiller and I have known each other since 2019, since the first casting. I fell completely in love with her during the audition because she brought exactly what I saw in Paula. We collected a lot of mobile phone video material with her in advance. We had this digital connection because she is also relatively young and used to working with mobile phones anyway.
CB: You two have been working together for a long time and you don't just make films together, but above all music. Can you say something about that and also how it influenced this film?
AL: We've had a band since 2011. We've toured half the world together. Koxi started out as a drummer, later as a saxophonist and singer. You have to communicate a lot, question each other and be able to put up with everything when you write together, because it's a super intimate process. I don't think there's any better place to learn to communicate than when you make music together. In music, we always said we'd close our eyes and do our thing. And I think that helped us to trust each other to do the same in the film. I'm the composer of the film soundtrack, but if you listen very closely, you can hear Koxi's voice quite often in the film music. There's a scene where Brigitte, after she can't sleep, goes outside and then you hear this ‘annoying’ saxophone that startles her, and that's Koxi standing next to Johanna, annoying her to death.
I don't think there's any better way to learn to communicate than by making music together.
BW: How did you come up with the idea of parallel editing – one sees the other's world?
AL: This form only came about when, shortly before filming began, we were told we were 100,000€ short. We had to cut back. Previously, there were two cinematic narrative strands in the script, Brigitte and Paula, and they were aesthetically interwoven. Should we cut Paula? Should we cut the trade fair? Should we cut the villa? I don't think I spoke for two weeks and just thought about it: ‘What's the best way to save 100,000€? And, ideally, improve the story. That's what you want, to take a limitation like that and turn it into something that actually helps the whole thing. And then this idea suddenly came to me when I said to one of the producers, ‘In the end, I don't care if Brigitte only talks on her mobile phone,’ and I thought, ‘Wait a minute, we could do it that way.’ Click, click, click in my head. I called Koxi straight away, and there wasn't a single idea that we passed on to the whole team so quickly – and everyone was immediately on board.
K: That's actually what happened. I couldn't believe it myself. This led to the parasocial relationship between Brigitte and Paula functioning in a completely different way, because they had no relationship before. There is no connection in the novel, and we had laboriously created a connection for the film. But because it's now told in a much more fragmentary way, even in Brigitte's urban loneliness, where she's always on her mobile phone and just looking at Paula. Now there's this entanglement, and it's like a puzzle piece that fits perfectly.
AL: We had this beautiful Cassavetes film OPENING NIGHT (1977) as a model. We thought Paula was like this ghost chasing Gena Rowlands. And somehow that suddenly solved a lot of problems. It also tied in well with new themes, but also with the fact that we never know what is real and what is staged with Paula's character. And we really liked the fact that this opened up a whole new level that even addressed the medium itself, and we thought, ‘Hey, let's go.’
CB: How did you shoot that mobile phone sequence with Paula? Did Hannah really shoot it herself?
K: Hannah is amazing! She really is a jack of all trades. She can draw, sing, she has so many talents. And yes, she filmed herself and couldn't even see herself properly while filming because we had to use the rear camera for quality reasons. Framing is an art in itself, and Hannah just filmed intuitively and did it so well. We were able to use most of what she filmed as it was. And then she was acting at the same time and everything... It was really impressive!
BW: The mobile phone videos also bring a dynamic to this film, which is constantly in motion, even though it gives you many moments of retreat or reflection. Can you talk again about the feminist aspect of the novel and also the film? About the updating and topicality of these questions of womanhood. Is it mainly about how a woman can have self-confidence in the world she lives in?
K: I've been dealing with that my whole life. When we interviewed women about their lives for a teaser, they said: ‘It's actually just like in the novel, because I'm 39 now and I still haven't achieved anything.’ Especially in the creative field, in all these film professions, where women simply live in very precarious conditions and are still dependent on others. At some point, that made me so suspicious, because you don't see that from the outside. You think, ‘They're drinking their matcha lattes and pushing their expensive prams around, and everything is so great.’ But under this glass ceiling of feminism, nothing is great at all, it's just irritating and contradictory.
Under this glass ceiling of feminism, nothing is great at all, it's just irritating and contradictory.
Why do these women, whether they are actresses, filmmakers, artists or even doctors, still fail in this system? The question Jelinek asks in the blurb of the novel: ‘What opportunities for development do women have today?’ I myself am constantly fighting against patriarchy in my own little inner structure. What shook me up again with the film was that we are not talking about a new way of thinking about feminism, but that it still has not been successfully implemented. That women often run into a wall and fight against themselves, both in their private and social lives. I wanted to make these injustices visible in a comedic way. And, of course, the lack of female solidarity, the fact that women don't support each other because they themselves are dependent on others, such as Brigitte's mother, who says: ‘No, I can't help you right now because I don't have anything myself and would have to ask my partner, who would then yell at me again.’ These dependencies have also been modelled for me to some extent. And it bothered me even as a child.
AL: Perhaps I can say something about the men, who, as the winners of the whole thing, end up just as empty and trapped. I have the feeling that we have already reached a point where every fetish, every desire a man has can somehow be satisfied. While writing, we also thought a lot about the Pelicot case. The opportunities for men to develop seem to lie between being a football fan and being a pervert. That's also a prison. We always saw Heinz as someone who actually wants to be rescued from this pipeline of emptiness to the alt-right. Heinz has to inject his body to be man enough. That's funny in the film, but it's also very, very widespread. If you look at all these ICE agents in the USA, they're all on testosterone. Men over 50 don't look like they have such big muscles. They sit there in the evening and have to find their veins, get abscesses and then can't get it up anymore, become aggressive. That's an absurd perversion of what masculinity could be.
K: It must also be said that Ben Münchow really threw himself into it and embraced everything. Because it wasn't actually that easy to find a Heinz, as many men didn't want to play this role. There was a lot of resistance. The fact that Ben, as a young man, said: ‘Okay, I'm willing to read up on Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, to educate myself about what exactly you want me to do.’ I worked very specifically on the role with him, more than the others, which was very helpful and great. That must have something to do with the fact that it was just totally clear to both Johanna and Hannah how this works for women, because patriarchy is so omnipresent for us.
