Director Christoph Hochhäusler arrived on the international scene in the early aughts, as the film world began discovering a plethora of unique, formally inventive movies being made in Germany. As critics often do, they gave these new films a label, calling it the “Berlin School.” Not all of the directors were Berliners, and Hochhäusler himself hails from Munich. (In 2007, scholar Marco Abel interviewed the filmmaker about the first phase of his career. It provides useful background.)
Twenty years later, it’s much easier to see how these filmmakers differ than to identify any meaningful commonalities. Hochhäusler’s seventh feature film, Death Will Come, expands on his specific interest in genre, particularly the classic crime film. The story of a dying gangster trying to put his affairs in order, Death Will Come delves into mysteries both external – who is the murderer, who’s double-crossing whom – and situated in the dark recesses of the human mind.
Death Will Come had its world premiere in the competition at Locarno. I spoke with Christoph a few days later, on August 12, 2024.
Michael Sicinski: I don’t want to overstate the case, but it seems as if maybe Death Will Come, Till the End of the Night, and The Lies of the Victors form an informal trilogy. In all three, you’re working within the crime genre, but you seem to be trying to subvert that genre, or at least turn it into something else.
Christoph Hochhäusler: I’ve never thought of it as a trilogy, but it’s true. A this point I’m more and more interested in this strange thing we call “genre.” First and foremost, I’d say I think genre is interesting because it means people have expectations. I think cinema should be about active viewers. I want people to engage and debate. So I want them to have expectations and be surprised, or frustrated. There should be a dynamic that is around some set of rules that everybody knows. That’s what I really appreciate about genre, that everyone has this reservoir of tropes and expectations of certain pleasures. Then you can play with them.
Then again, genre has always been an incubator for innovation. And I think that’s exactly because certain things are set and known. You can make shortcuts. Or you can subvert the form, or maybe frustrate some expectations, because you know the expectations are there. It’s kind of a pre-developed property that you can build on. And you can build on the fantasies of your spectators. That’s what I’m drawn to.
At the same time, me and Ulrich Peltzer, who co-wrote Lies of the Victors and Death Will Come, we don’t want to just fulfill those genre forms. We are easily bored. [Laughs.] When we were in discussion [about the script], the question was how to leave the basic housing of this genre intact, and then concentrate on things that you know the average Hollywood film would not. Which is not to say that I don’t like the average Hollywood film. But I think that it isn’t an option for me to do the same kind of thing.
MS: What prompted you to make a film in Belgium?
CH: For me, the film started with Brussels. I didn’t know Brussels before, and six or seven years ago I came to the city and I was so enthusiastic about the contrasts there, how visually present certain developments were. You can see the colonialism, the blood money that came into the town, when the Congo was Leopold’s private property. Some of the buildings where we shot, like the Palais de Justice, are a prime example. It’s one of the biggest buildings in the world, and it’s kind of an albatross. These buildings are so out of proportion, so inhumane. You can see the same thing in Madrid in the architecture. So this was one of the things I was interested in. How does history form spaces in a city?
That sounds negative. Brussels is a city of great beauty but also visual conflict. So I thought I had to make a film there. At the time, Cristina Nord was at the Goethe Institute in Brussels, and she invited me to show films there. That was the starting point.
MS: How would you describe the challenges of working in French?
CH: Well, first of all, my French is far from perfect. It’s so-so. I can direct someone in French, I can say what I want, roughly. But all the subtleties of my German are lost. That’s one obstacle. But then I found that you tend to say only the really important things. All the ornament in language that I would use in German, I had to do away with. That was actually kind of helpful because I learned that it’s not necessary. I can just build on the trust of the actor and give him or her very basic direction, and they’re fine with it. So that was one thing.
The other thing is, I had help. I had a friend of mine as an assistant who is a French director, Aurélia Georges. She is perfectly bilingual, also speaks German very well. It was incredibly helpful to ask her about language issues. Obviously I can understand what’s being said. But I don’t know if the line is being said in, say, a bourgeois manner, or streetwise. These layers of language, I needed someone to ask.
And these questions of language continued into mixing, because some of the team were Belgian, and there were scenes where they were like, “well, the way she says this isn’t quite…” And so we did more ADR than I usually do. Which is also to say that there might be scenes or words spoken that I would keep in German, but I had to “obey” [the native speakers] so to speak, because I couldn’t tell, “is this good strange or bad strange?” That sort of thing.
So, of course, it’s an issue, making a film in a language you’re not entirely at home in. But it turned out not to be as big an obstacle as I’d feared. And, of course, there are differences in team organization. But that was small stuff, nothing that would darken my skies.
MS: And I presume you and Ulrich wrote the script in German.
CH: Yes, we did. And the translation was done by a novelist friend of mine, Alban Lefranc. He’s written very interesting books. He wrote a novel about Fassbinder, and about Pialat. Very interesting guy. Check him out if you can. So he translated the script and then minor additions were made by Aurélia, my friend and artistic collaborator.
MS: One of the things that’s most striking about Death Will Come — and I phrase this to avoid spoilers… — is that it seems to be hinging on a mystery, a kind of investigation. You expect that it will be linear, but it turns out to be circular. Everything comes back to the point of origin. Was that formal shape something you set out to do from the start, or did the two of you discover it in the writing process?
CH: We started with a very different story, actually. But we abandoned that initial story because we thought that it was too… It was just a plot idea. And then we settled on this circular structure, that seemed to come out of the genre itself, like a conspiracy theory that feeds itself. For me, even though the main character, Tez [Sophie Verbeeck], is a killer, the film’s core is about a man lost in a maze of his own design. The question is, as a powerful man, to what degree can you write your own ending, or makes ends meet, in this circular scenario?
We thought that there’s a ridiculousness about it, that powerful men always want to write their own ends, that they want to be the author of their full life story, which is too immodest in the face of death. Personally, I know a lot of people who dream of shooting themselves, because they fear the weakness of the end, of sickness or losing your mind. I always thought this was a very masculine weakness, to fear the weakness.
MS: That makes sense. In the case of Mahr [Louis-Do de Lencquesaing], his death is bound up with the onset of dementia. So there is the masculine desire to determine the end, but there’s also the loss of self, which perhaps complicates matters.
CH: Absolutely.
MS: Right out of the gate, in that meeting between Mahr and de Boer [Marc Limpach], he and his attorney/girlfriend Julie [Hilde Van Mieghem] are proposing this virtual-reality brothel. And Mahr rejects this straightaway. It seems like one of the things that Death Will Come is about is encroaching obsolescence. The kind of gangster that Mahr is, his ideal self as a criminal, is a thing of the past.
CH: We talked about his character as “the last gangster.” In a way, I think it’s impossible to continue this way of being, what we now call toxic masculinity, machismo, etc. There is some beauty in the character of Charles Mahr, I think. But he’s definitely the last of his kind, at least in the realm of this fiction. It can’t go on like this. So that was a strong feeling during the writing. Actually, when Louis-Do came onboard to play Mahr, that became even more pertinent, I think, because he’s also the last of his kind, “the last Parisian.” A very strange, beautiful mixture of arrogance and sexiness and melancholy. And also violence! As an actor, not as a person. He’s a great fit for this character.
MS: He carries himself, consciously or not, as part of that lineage of French tough guys like Gabin, Delon, Constantine — rugged yet existentially troubled. As for Mahr, that seems to be his undoing.
CH: In an earlier version of the script, in that scene that you mentioned, this problem of the replacement of bodies through technology was more prominent. I thought it was interesting that the sex industry, and organized crime in general, has for centuries relied on the bodies of people they could exploit. Now there might be this shift toward plastic dolls and technology, which are much easier to handle. So it was interesting for us to write and think about a kind of goodbye to the human body.
MS: The way that plays out is very intriguing, because as we see with Dédé [Luc Feit], the brothel manager, he’s unreliable, and very inefficient. He is tasked with overseeing actual women for Mahr, and he’s not good at it. So Mahr is attached to this old way of doing business, but it’s not working out for him.
CH: Indeed. [The human sex industry] is certainly something you want to get rid of if you can. If it just wasn’t so profitable!
MS: In Capital, Marx argued that mechanization was ultimately incapable of producing surplus value. You need live, exploited workers whose wages you can undercut, in order to generate profit. With mechanization, you can break even, but you can’t get ahead. But then, I’m not sure if this is true any longer.
CH: That’s one of the questions. There is, in fact, already a mechanical brothel in Berlin. They have these dolls, and they’re preheated, and they can do whatever you want. Of course, they’re not actually robots (yet), they’re basically just puppets. To me, what’s interesting is how they tie to storytelling. They have operators of these dolls behind the screen, so to speak. And they’re essentially telling stories. It’s apparently very expensive to go there. You’re really buying a story. The doll is just the hardware.
MS: I suspect part of the fear or anxiety of this mechanical replacement is that, if you’re dealing with an actual human being in sex work, that implies (one hopes) a limit on your darkest desires. There was an Austrian film a couple of years ago about a man who has a VR robot of his young daughter that he uses to molest.
CH: Sandra Wollner’s The Trouble With Being Born?
MS: Yes, that’s it.
CH: I think that’s one of the boundaries we’ll have to confront in the coming years, because there is an ethics of machines. There has to be. Yes, it’s good if there aren’t real people who suffer for one’s fantasies. But it might also unleash things. It’s an interesting question.
MS: If we’re going to consider it ethical, we’ll have to subscribe to the idea of catharsis, and that may not be an accurate theory of human nature.
When I mentioned that I perceived this unofficial trilogy, it was because the more I thought about Death Will Come it seemed like all the films have a subtext, that criminality doesn’t exist in the way we once thought it did. Because now it’s indistinguishable from neo-liberal capitalism. How can organized crime be distinguished from the official system of global finance?
You seem to suggest this in different ways in the three films. In Lies of the Victors, you have crusading maverick journalists who discover that their investigation is already subsumed within the system they’re trying to fight. In Till the End of the Night, the distinction between cop and criminal is completely blurred. And then with Death Will Come, Mahr is attempting to be a master of his world, but he’s being outpaced by technology and capital.
CH: I’m not sure it was ever different. But it did seem different. And now it is becoming more and more blurred, I feel. When Ulrich and I did research for Lies of the Victors, we found out that the people working for the “bad guys” — the lobbyists, the executives — they’re much more modern than the “good guys,” the journalists. They do yoga, they eat vegan, and they travel by bike. It was ironic that the journalists at Der Spiegel, where we researched, they were real red-meat kind of guys, very macho.
MS: That is interesting. I wonder, if you’re embracing the dark side of capital, that means that on some level you’re more at home in the world. You don’t feel so continually oppositional, and that affords you a certain kind of peace.
To expand on that idea of replacement and obsolescence, another theme that seems to be operating in Death Will Come is that the men who are ostensibly in charge of things are arguably fronting for stronger women, who are mostly out of scene. There’s Julie for De Boer, Mahr’s ex Louise [Laura Sépul], Mela [Delphine Bibet], who seems to be working as a benefactor, and then Tez, who operates as the primary protagonist. Is part of this obsolescence of men that where crime is concerned, the future is female?
CH: Yes and no. First of all, I’d say that the kind of masculinity [we see in the film] has to die. And so, in a way, these gangsters are doing away with themselves. And in the film, women are taking over. But I think you could also say that these are allegorical women. It could be anyone who adapts to a more modern standard. I’m not suggesting that men are inherently bad. As some have suggested. [Laughs.]
MS: One of the things I noticed structurally about Death Will Come is that well into the 30-minute mark, we’re still meeting new characters. Some of them don’t end up being especially important. But I wondered if there was an attempt to bombard the viewer with these crime-film mechanics.
CH: Two things. One, we broke up the structure in editing, quite completely. We found out that the script structure wasn’t very satisfying as a film for some reason. That’s something that’s never happened to me before, at least not to this degree. So maybe some of the feeling of being disoriented has to do with that. But I don’t regret that breaking up because I think it feeds into this labyrinthine feeling. The viewer can never be sure.
The main question in narrative fiction is how to make sure that people are not over- and not underwhelmed with information, that people are comfortable with greeting new characters, for example. And you try to find a balance. It’s a tricky thing. There are films I really enjoy where not knowing is not a problem, and I was hoping to be able to tell the story in a way that you wouldn’t mind meeting new people and have open questions.
But if you mind . . .
MS: No! It was more a sense of being thrown into the deep end and having to sort out a lot of information, all of which became not only clear but almost ironically clear, in the sense that it all came back to the beginning. It was like a funnel. Everything came together.
CH: My idea was that you could maybe feel like Tez. Not knowing how the dots are connected. To be in this jungle, this thicket. Many of the scenes where Tez investigates lead nowhere, and many of the more important steps of the investigation we don’t see. So what comes to the fore is a smokescreen of actions that are basically futile. A lot of important things happen offscreen, something I like to do in films because it’s my feeling that life is like that, you know? You never know who is going to be a character in your life story. You meet people and you try to please this one, or try to convince that one, and when you look back you see, “oh, it was never about this one storyline.” Your story was being written in another moment.
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