Doris Dörrie Regis Dialogue with Klaus Phillips, 2000

Klaus Phillips: We're at the Walker Arts Center for a Regis Dialogue with German filmmaker and writer Doris Dörrie. Her films include Men, Am I Beautiful?, Nobody Loves Me, and Enlightenment Guaranteed, which we'll discuss with her this ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ evening.

Klaus Phillips: I'm Klaus Phillips, Chair of the German and Russian Department at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. I'll be your guide through this Regis Dialogue.

Doris Dörrie: Thank you.

Klaus Phillips: Well Doris, let's start at the beginning. Tell us a little something about what it was like growing up one of four girls in Hannover.

Doris Dörrie: Well for my sisters it was a nightmare, for myself it wasn't. What was it like? My parents, both of them are doctors, we grew up in a hospital, in their own little hospital. Very early on I started using my sisters as actresses and I would get really mad at them because they were not able to memorize lines and they would not do what I wanted them to do.

Klaus Phillips: Do you remember what movies you saw when you were little? Let's say 10-12, something like that.

Doris Dörrie: Very, very few. We didn't have a TV set. The entire family sat down after dinner to read and once every six months or so my father would take me to the movies. I saw all of the Winnetou films. Those were adaptations of novels by a German writer who wrote, I don't know, 125 novels about American Indians, but he had never once been in the United States. Those movies, after his novels, they were my first movie experiences.

Klaus Phillips: You're not making your daughter Carla read all of Karl May are you?

Doris Dörrie: Oh no, she would never. She reads Harry Potter, not Karl May.

Klaus Phillips: Of course. You attended the [German] Gymnasien, correct, and studied Latin and Greek. Do you remember the first ​ ​ Latin sentence you learned?

July 15, 2000 1 Doris Dörrie: [Latin], like everybody. ​ ​

Klaus Phillips: Oh, things are different in Hannover from the way they are in Bavaria then. I remember [Latin], and I almost became ​ ​ a writer because of that because I thought I have to grow up and then do something to show where these people were at, the farmer plows, the girl loves, yeah. Okay.

Klaus Phillips: You went to Stockton, California in 1973 to study at the University of the Pacific, what did you study there?

Doris Dörrie: Drama.

Klaus Phillips: Then you went to New York and took courses at the New School for Social Research.

Doris Dörrie: Yeah. That I did because I wanted to get into NYU film school but I just didn't have the money and was trying to find a job and make enough money to pay for a living and I could never save enough money to pay for a tuition fee. My mother kept sending the application forms for the film school in Munich, which is for free, and every month these application forms would arrive and I would just throw them out month after month, after month.

Doris Dörrie: Then about, well after about a year, I was ripe. I just realized that I could never make enough money to get into NYU film school and support myself in New York, so I filled out those forms and got accepted at the Munich Film School and went back, much to my chagrin. I really didn't want to go back at all.

Klaus Phillips: Before you returned to Munich and to the HFF, did you have any clear sense of what was happening in the so-called new German cinema?

Doris Dörrie: Fassbinder, had made a big impression on me in school. But it was mostly the French nouvelle vague films that I grew up with.

Klaus Phillips: I think also American films, right-

Doris Dörrie: They came later-

July 15, 2000 2 Klaus Phillips: The so-called-

Doris Dörrie: That came in-

Klaus Phillips: That came in Munich.

Doris Dörrie: ... the states when I came to California.

Klaus Phillips: Now you're teaching at the HFF at this point, so I gather it was a thoroughly good experience your three years there?

Doris Dörrie: Yeah. I didn't really go to school ever. We were completely left alone. We could do whatever we wanted to do. It was in the early 70s which was much more free flowing than it is now. What really horrifies me though is that the professors back then were old people and I realize they were 35 maybe. They were much younger than that. They're still there.

Klaus Phillips: One of the very first films you made was called Ob's stürmt oder schneit, is that a line from the [German] I think? ​ ​ ​ ​

Doris Dörrie: No, it's just a Bavarian saying.

Klaus Phillips: Uh-huh, okay.

Doris Dörrie: Whether rain or shine.

Klaus Phillips: [German]. One and a half hour documentary about a very interesting woman, can you tell us something about what ​ ​ it's about?

Doris Dörrie: It was during the time where movie theaters in the country had to close down because of TV. It was called the big dying of the movie theaters. We had found a movie theater in Weisenheim, 60 miles outside of Munich, which had 550 seats. It was run by a 75 year old lady who had to let her entire staff go because she couldn't pay for them anymore because nobody would come see the films. She would do everything herself. She would heat up the theater

July 15, 2000 3 with coal and she would sell ice cream, would run back to the projection booth to get the film going, go back to the entrance to sell tickets. She was a one woman show and she kept saying, "My movie theater is like the Titanic, it won't sink," which didn't make too much sense.

Klaus Phillips: That's a great line. Did she run the theater long enough to be able to show some of your films later on?

Doris Dörrie: Yes, she became quite famous partially because of this documentary because nobody in the art world had realized that there were people out there, movie theater owners, who really did love the cinema and were willing to put up with a very desperate situation, still kept the movie theater going. Then she got support from the Bavarian government and she became this icon of a movie theater owner.

Klaus Phillips: Is there anything which in retrospect you would have done differently during the years at the HFF because you made movies like crazy already during that time?

Doris Dörrie: I keep telling my students that they should not hurry up as much as I did. I was so eager to get out of school and I don't really know why. I was always in a hurry, have been in a hurry all my life, I don't know why. I missed out on the chance to really play around without any commercial pressure. For some reason I've put this commercial pressure on myself very early on.

Klaus Phillips: You made a series of documentaries, television features, one children's film, I believe, films with titles such as Hättest ​ was Gescheites gelernt, or what was the children's film called? I forget- ​

Doris Dörrie: [German]. ​ ​

Klaus Phillips: [German], of course. Was working for television, doing an assignment for television at the time in the early 70s totally ​ ​ different as an experience from what you're experiencing now?

Doris Dörrie: No, not really maybe because I'm so extremely stubborn, I have always done whatever I wanted and even back then at the documentary I did for TV they somehow let me do whatever I wanted to do. I made several films about juvenile delinquents in the suburb of Munich and they just let me go, they gave me a camera and crew, and let me do whatever I wanted to do. I don't know, maybe they were scared of me, I don't know what it was. But I was pretty much free to do whatever I wanted to do.

Klaus Phillips:

July 15, 2000 4 Well your narrative feature film debut came in 1983 with a film that was screened here last Saturday Straight Through ​ the Heart starring Beate Jensen and Josef Bierbichler, and we'll look at a clip from that film at this point. ​

Klaus Phillips: I just realized again looking at the film a few days ago that scene that we just saw when they're first in bed together, in terms of technique, reminds me so much of a similar sequence of The Marriage of Maria Braun, was that a ​ ​ conscious relationship or did it just happen that way?

Doris Dörrie: I wasn't aware of anything when I shot the film. It was my first feature. I was scared and didn't know what I was doing. I was just trying to get through it somehow and I could not think of any other films while I was doing it.

Klaus Phillips: Well what we have in this film, of course, is the narrative of two unlikely lovers, a middle-aged dentist and a mad cat blue-haired girl who writes letters to herself, is rooted in one of the short stories that you wrote, one from your first collection, Love, Pain, and the Whole Damn Thing. The issues that face these people seriously hamper their ​ ​ communication efforts. I'm wondering how at that point at that stage for a first feature you decided, or for a first story, you decided on that narrative, on that kind of subject?

Doris Dörrie: Well you want to hear the truth? It's really quite-

Klaus Phillips: Sure.

Doris Dörrie: ... embarrassing. I had a boyfriend who was a dentist, just like the guy in the film, was born under the same sign, just like the actor, looked very much like this actor, looked like his twin brother, and we had a very complicated relationship and I wanted to break up with him. I sat down and wrote the story about a girl who lives with a dentist and in the end kills the dentist, this guy, with a hairdryer.

Doris Dörrie: In my recollection, the story didn't have very much to do with my private life. I thought it was something completely different. The film came out, the dentist saw the film, I had meanwhile broken up with him while I was shooting this film, and he didn't think it had anything to do with him either. But everybody else, of course, knew that this was him because it looked exactly like the guy in the film, spoke and said exactly the same lines as the guy in the film. But as always, or a lot of times the case, he was very flattered. Although, the guy in the film is well, whatchamacallit, not so nice. He's a macho pig, to be quite blatant about it.

Klaus Phillips: Well even though it's a film about a serious subject it's at times a very, very funny film. One recent American critic tried to look at this particular film in line with the heritage of the American screwball comedy that really what we have here is two totally different people, especially a young woman who is quite unconventional. If we try to look at her

July 15, 2000 5 with images of Katherine Hepburn in mind in a movie such as Bringing up Baby, are we totally on the wrong track? Is ​ ​ that what went through your mind at the time?

Doris Dörrie: Well you're a scholar and you look at films from a very different angle than I do. I have seen all these films, are when I did the film I had seen many screwball comedies, but I wasn't really aware of film history when I started writing my own screenplays and shooting my own films. But what was really very important for me was having been in the state, in this country, and having picked up on a certain narrative style, which had not that much to do with the movies but with actual communication, or to phrase it in an easier way, a much, much simpler way, I had to learn to be fun in this country, and I think that really saved me. I'm very, very grateful for this unto this day I learned the most important lessons in my life to be able to laugh at yourself, self-irony, a certain sense of humor, and a certain lightness. That, I think, was very important for me in my private life, but also very, very important for my career as a storyteller, as a filmmaker, and writer.

Klaus Phillips: You're saying Germans don't have the same kind of sense of humor?

Doris Dörrie: I'm not saying that. They have a sense of humor, but they don't like to see things very lightly because somehow it's a flaw or I don't know, you can't be taken seriously if you take things too lightly. Just one tiny example to make it a little clearer, when I came to California people of course kept asking me, "How are you? How are you doing?" As a German I would think very hard and then say, "Well, this morning I woke up and I had a little headache. Then the weather was nice, but I was still a little depressed." I would just come up with these long answers, the way you'd answer these questions in Germany, very seriously, yes.

Klaus Phillips: Turkish people figure prominently into this film and of course several of your later films. The fact that Anna at the end with the kidnapped Turkish baby gets into a bus filled with Turkish people heading home to Turkey what, a solidarity with the Turks-

Doris Dörrie: Yeah.

Klaus Phillips: ...and the minority?

Doris Dörrie: I wanted them to be in my story because to me they were a very important part of Germany very early on, not just the Turks, but all foreigners, which is probably largely due to my very cosmopolitan family. We traveled as children a great deal, which other people then really didn't. They did not go on vacations yet through Italy and Spain. We went to Africa, we went all kinds of places. I was maybe much more aware than other children of the fact that, yes, there were not only Germans living in Germany, but many other ethnic groups. I think they keep reappearing, the different ethnic groups in all of my films. It's also a political statement because up to this day there's a policy of almost every

July 15, 2000 6 party to not really negotiate and accept the fact that yes we are an immigrant country, it's a big issue in Germany up to this day.

Klaus Phillips: Is there also a north/south element at play in this story with the casting of Bierbichler and Beate Jensen that clearly you do have a Bavarian element?

Doris Dörrie: Back then when I did Straight Through the Heart Bavaria was still a very exotic place to me and I had difficulties ​ understanding the dialect. To me, the Bavarians were much more exotic than, I don't know, people from Alaska or from Africa, or from Asia.

Doris Dörrie: Very special tribe.

Klaus Phillips: As a semi, quasi Bavarian I can say absolutely right. You look for literary inspiration for the name of Anna Blume though, that's where Kurt Schwitters comes in, right?

Doris Dörrie: Yeah. Kurt Schwitters is artist from my hometown, Hannover, and my grandfather tried to save some of his work during the Nazi times, not very successful. He was a Dada artist who wrote up Dada poems and put them up on big billboards in the city, and this one poem, which is quite famous, Anna Blume.

Klaus Phillips: Your next film, In the Belly of the Whale, which came out in 1984 could be a road movie of sorts, I suppose. It's ​ ​ based on the screenplay co-written with Michael Juncker and it continues in the vein of what German reviews have called a "Problem Film." Can you tell us in a nutshell what happens in that film?

Doris Dörrie: Can you?

Klaus Phillips: In a nutshell, I'm not sure. Basically I guess I can. We have a policeman who has a short fuse who is the head, I guess we could say, of a disintegrated family whose wife left him 10 years ago and whose 15 year old daughter, Carla, is trying to run away and find her mother. On the mother to do that she encounters a musician I think, Rick is, right? Her father lists her as having been kidnapped, the mother returns home and the father, more by mistake than anything else, doesn't mean to kill his wife but he kills her, he shoots her. The daughter returns and acts very protectively towards the formerly abusing father. I guess that's it in a large nutshell.

Doris Dörrie: Thank you. It's a difficult story.

July 15, 2000 7 Klaus Phillips: What makes her do that at the end?

Doris Dörrie: Oh because I think children are really the protectors of their parents or they want to be, and no matter how abusive and horrible parents treat them, children will always try to protect their parents, which I find very disturbing and very touching, but also a very difficult subject matter. The children will always try to take their parent's side. That was one thing.

Doris Dörrie: kiThe other thing was that I really wanted to make a movie with a whale in it because when I was about five years old a whale came to Hannover, to my hometown, a dead whale on a truck, and it was maybe the most exciting thing that I've ever seen in my entire life. For about a year I could not sleep because of the whale. I would wake up my parents for an entire year and ask questions about the whale, how does a whale have its little whales underwater and how does a whale eat underwater, and all these things that I could not imagine.

Doris Dörrie: When the whale was being exhibited I got a little flier and it said on the flier that, "The heart of the whale weighs as a Volkswagen beetle," and we had a Volkswagen beetle at that time and I remember so clearly sitting in this Volkswagen and trying to imagine this car that I'm sitting in right now is as heavy as the heart of a whale. Somehow, I could feel my head explode because I could not imagine it, the whale drove me crazy.

Doris Dörrie: For this movie, we tracked down the whale, it was really the same whale 20 years later, in Bayreuth, Wagner's city, Bayreuth, there was the whale, and we dragged the whale back up to Hamburg where there's a tunnel in the middle of the city. We made the truck go through this tunnel and produced the biggest traffic jam in the history of Hamburg because the whale got stuck. We were in every paper and it was a really good promotion thing.

Klaus Phillips: Now in the context of the film the whale it seems to me represents actually something very positive because it's depicted on a photograph that shows the family in better times when there was harmony, something irreparably lost perhaps.

Doris Dörrie: Yeah, yeah.

Klaus Phillips: An American reviewer recently wrote that in all of your films, including this one, there's a streak of something very dark and violent beneath the surface and that this mood of anilism sometimes commands the final word while at other times in other films it lurks repressed, giving an edge to the trench and humor.

Klaus Phillips:

July 15, 2000 8 What she means I guess is that in the case of Straight Through the Heart, the main character could have thrown ​ ​ instead of the hairdryer, herself into the bathtub with Josef Bierbichler and it might have been a completely different much more humorous situation so that the line, the thin line, maybe not, but the thin line between high comedy and utmost tragedy normally a very thin one, appears particularly thin in your films. That's not supposed to happen yet.

Doris Dörrie: Dark was the clue, the dark side.

Klaus Phillips: Well this film, which you'll have an opportunity to see this coming Thursday, became the most successful film in Germany in 1986. It beat Out of Africa, it beat Rocky IV. ​ ​ ​ ​

Doris Dörrie: And Rambo. ​ ​

Klaus Phillips: It beat Rambo? Yes. At the box office. That surprised you, didn't it? You weren't expecting that. ​ ​

Doris Dörrie: No, nobody was, no, nobody. It was pretty amazing.

Klaus Phillips: A lot of people went back a second, a third, a fifth time, how come?

Doris Dörrie: I don't know. It was probably the zeitgeist. More than 10% of the population went to see the film. It was a phenomena. It had nothing to do with success, it was more than success, it was a phenomena and had nothing to do really maybe with us, the makers of the film, me as director, or the film itself, there was the things that you can never really explain. It was difficult for me in particular, but also for the actors to deal with it because overnight all of us became stars, really from one day to the next.

Klaus Phillips: Well one of the things I would argue that happened very clearly is that German audiences encountered dialogues that they hadn't heard in a long time, especially with a pacing and with a sense of humor. One of things that my friends at the time told me, they went back a second time, a fourth time, because they missed the punchline because there were so many jokes, it was so funny. There were so many moments that they had to return to catch it all the second or the fourth time around.

Doris Dörrie: It was really fast.

Klaus Phillips:

July 15, 2000 9 In terms of pacing though, one thing I noticed when I looked at these clips the two that we just saw, the two sequences, which are followed by the scene in the laundromat, that all three of these sequences are approximately the same length, two and a half minutes. You're pacing throughout this film was something very, very conscious that's really ... no, it just happened?

Doris Dörrie: No, it just happened. The reason why the film doesn't have many cuts was because we didn't have very much time. It's always very frustrating to talk to filmmakers because all the theories usually fall flat and they're very binal reasons behind everything.

Klaus Phillips: Just happened.

Doris Dörrie: Sorry Klaus.

Klaus Phillips: Well you did shoot it in a hurry in the sense that you-

Doris Dörrie: But yeah, we only had 21 days, we had no money and we couldn't really afford many shots, time-wise and money-wise.

Klaus Phillips: Well when you Julius tells Stefan, as we saw in the clip, that he doesn't let problems both him, that he gets rid of them, it seems to me that he's really summarizing one of the film's central themes, instead of changing himself he turns his rival into a mirror image of himself and the changes that he experiences appear to be minor and maybe only temporary. Isn't the ending really quite open when you come right down to it when he returns home to his wife?

Doris Dörrie: No, and I think that was one of the reasons why this film became so successful, not only in Germany but really worldwide. But it hit the right moment, it was the moment of abandoning political ideas and becoming more adjusted to the way capitalism works in the end, and to going back to well the opportunist way, if I want to phrase it a little-

Klaus Phillips: So the generation of '68 selling out?

Doris Dörrie: Yeah, but those were the guys ... Well, most of the guys who were older than me, and the story I got from sharing a flat with them. Again, there was not a dentist, but a doctor, living in this flat who made more money than the rest of us and he owned a Mercedes, but he hid this Mercedes in a garage that he had rented just to hide his Mercedes because it was politically uncool to own a Mercedes, and I found out.

July 15, 2000 10 Doris Dörrie: I also found out that he bought silk shirts, which he also hid. So the poor guy had to hide all these things that he was enjoying because politically they were not okay, they were not correct. He had a credit card that nobody was allowed to see, all these little items. To me, it was very funny how these guys led all these heavy duty political discussions with each other and they were drifted off into a totally different direction at the same time. That's how these two characters were born. They were really written from observations, in my flat that I was living in at the time.

Klaus Phillips: I realize I'm setting myself up for getting shot down one more time but I'm going to try it anyway. The end credit sequence in this film, the one involving the Pater Naster, which is Mater Naster, contrasted against the spacial symbolism of Stefan's apartment, which as one reviewer recently pointed out, is really an erotic landscape of circles and holes. If we look at the apartment that way but we acknowledge that the Pater Noster has compartmentalized space, which in the instance of Stefan and Julius is almost completely filled by two men who at that point are almost undressed and where on the other hand we have a same sized compartment filled by the woman who doesn't fill the space anywhere nearly. This particular reviewer came up with a definitive analysis that this of course signifies that the woman really has no space, has no place. Was that planned that way?

Doris Dörrie: No, I was following the theory of a famous Russian structuralist Dmitri Dimitrievich. No, I'm just kidding.

Klaus Phillips: I got shot down, yep.

Klaus Phillips: Well of course, in the broadest sense Men is about human relationships first and gender relationships second. ​ Clearly the relationship between Stefan and Daniel is couched in a context reminiscent of marriage, it certainly seems that way many times. But if now somebody says there are very definitely homoerotic overtones, maybe even potentially homosexual overtones, is that just in the eye of the viewer or is that part of what you had intended?

Doris Dörrie: No, I think that's how male bonding works. That doesn't necessarily have anything to do with homoerotic tendencies. It's just the way men communicate. They have to beat each other up and then they become friends. To us women it's a strange concept. We buy shoes and then become friends.

Klaus Phillips: Well you do of course show quite clearly in this film that every guy is exploiting somebody else. We have Stefan dominating the relationship with Daniel at first when Daniel first moves in. He also dominates his housemate Lothar who warns Daniel shortly thereafter that Stefan sees himself as the lord of the manner, and Lothar dominates his girlfriend Angelika, clearly, so that's domination as an important aspect of relationships clearly is there.

Doris Dörrie:

July 15, 2000 11 What I wanted to describe was really the funny potential, the potential for a comedy and the differences between ideology and people's actual behavior, because that struck me as very funny. In those times, people were still very ideological all the time. It was very verbal, very ideological, very political, and at the same time, everyday life people would constantly contradict their big ideologies. I was just a film student watching these people being very important, very political and I just kept taking notes about their hidden silk shirts.

Klaus Phillips: After ranting about the evils of capitalism they go out and buy Porsches. That sort of thing.

Klaus Phillips: On November the 3rd, 1986 Spiegel ran a cover story on Doris Dörrie and called you "Germany's most successful ​ filmmaking woman." That had to have had an effect on you.

Doris Dörrie: Yeah. That's when it became scary. I was not prepared for that. The cover of Spiegel is like the cover of Time ​ ​ Magazine. After that, I knew that I had to either get out of the country real fast or make another film really fast, and ​ that's what I did, I made another movie very fast after Men, which did not fulfill any of the expectations that were put ​ ​ upon me.

Klaus Phillips: Everybody was expecting something like Men again- ​ ​

Doris Dörrie: Yeah, of course.

Klaus Phillips: ... and it's not.

Doris Dörrie: No.

Klaus Phillips: It has some similarities, it contains a triangular relationship. Like Men, it features a knife, but as we'll see in the ​ ​ upcoming clip, and I must warn the squeamish among you, you're going to squeam, let's go over the clip from Paradise. ​

Klaus Phillips: Wow.

Doris Dörrie: Yeah.

Klaus Phillips:

July 15, 2000 12 You had not worked with Katharina Thalbach nor Sunnyi Melles before I think.

Doris Dörrie: Oh yeah. Oh before-

Klaus Phillips: Before this-

Doris Dörrie: ... that, no, no, no.

Klaus Phillips: Before this film. How did you get them for those parts?

Doris Dörrie: I just asked them. They are still one of the most famous actresses in Germany, both of them, one in Berlin, the other one in Munich. I had really admired them a great deal for a long time and I just asked them.

Klaus Phillips: Well they're spectacular in this film. Since you haven't seen the film yet, a quick nutshell synopsis is that in this film we have basically an academic marriage that's become just that, academic. Angelika Ptitsa, an art historian, thinks that Viktor, a zoology professor, must be having an affair since the spark has left their boring marriage long ago. She had him shadowed, convinced that there's something going on by an all-female detective agency, I think. Finds nothing and decides that in order to have the spark reignited she'll introduce him to her old girlfriend Lotte, a country girl who runs a country store.

Klaus Phillips: She is plain, but intriguing, loves to play act, read sections from Heart of Darkness and other literary works aloud in ​ acting them up. They fall head over heels into passion. I guess the only other thing we really need to know that Ange, Angelika, has a real hangup about neatness and that probably explains why she behaves the way she does after Lotte stabs her. She appears to be more concerned with ridding herself of this sticky fly paper than trying to do something about the knife. All right?

Doris Dörrie: Yeah.

Klaus Phillips: That wasn't always the title of the story or the film either. It wasn't always-

Doris Dörrie: What was it called before? I can't remember.

Klaus Phillips:

July 15, 2000 13 Wasn't it called "Labyrinth"?

Doris Dörrie: Oh yeah, it was called "Labyrinth", yeah.

Klaus Phillips: Well I thought of that again because the dolly shots through Lotte's apartment at the end, really emphasized the fact, as of course does the shot of Viktor and the cockroach in his little cage that's very much a labyrinth.

Doris Dörrie: It's a bizarre movie.

Klaus Phillips: Yes it is. The names mean especially much in this film it sees to me. The fact that ptitsa is Russian for "bird". What's with Viktor and the birds?

Doris Dörrie: Well he's a guy who can't fly. He wants to be a bird but he can't fly. With this film we really took it to the extreme in every way. The story was very extreme, the way we shot it, the way the architect built the sets, in every way we went to an extreme. It was very liberating and we were very, very proud of this film. When it came out a lot of people were quite disappointed that it was not Men Part Two, but somehow we got our ground back, we knew where we were. ​ ​

Doris Dörrie: After Men everybody was just applauding this film and everybody, even people who I detested as critics, for instance, ​ loved Men, and after Paradise I knew where I was at again because it really divided the audience and also the critics ​ ​ ​ into people who hated it and people who loved it, and somehow that felt much more comfortable.

Klaus Phillips: It must have felt more comfortable too to have more time, more money because you did have a longer shooting schedule-

Doris Dörrie: Yeah, but that's-

Klaus Phillips: ... than you had before.

Doris Dörrie: Yeah, but the thing about more money and more time is that it doesn't really solve your problems because you always need even more.

Klaus Phillips: Sure.

July 15, 2000 14 Doris Dörrie: The more you get the more you need.

Klaus Phillips: At some point during that time in an interview you categorized film making as a legitimate form of tyranny, I remember that well. Are you a tyrannical filmmaker?

Doris Dörrie: Well as I said in the very beginning, I tyrannized, tyrannized, is that a word?

Klaus Phillips: Tyrannized, yeah.

Doris Dörrie: Tyrannized my sisters and it was just very logical to move from there into directing films.

Klaus Phillips: But many of the same people worked with you over and over, and over again, so you can't be beating them with a whip too many times.

Doris Dörrie: No, no I'm not, on the contrary, I believe in destructing hierarchies because I think it's really quite stupid to keep up hierarchies just for the sake of a hierarchy. I find it very easy to dissolve hierarchies and to invite everybody to participate in the development of a story in the way it's being told. Still, of course, the director has to the boss to a certain degree only because of the way things are organized, but not on any other level really. That's where I get the most fun when it becomes a collaborative thing and when everybody comes up with strange and weird, and wonderful ideas.

Klaus Phillips: Is there a lot of on the shoot improvising, as it were?

Doris Dörrie: Well it depends. On Paradise yes. I think there was a lot and on Men there was none because we didn't have the ​ ​ time and it varies from film to film.

Klaus Phillips: One scene I remember in Paradise that was written about a lot was in the aquarium when Lotte basically jumps ​ Viktor and supposedly that Katharina Thalbach's idea to do it that way to show that she's really crazy about him at this point.

Klaus Phillips: Well something very important happened at roughly time in your life, you married Helge.

July 15, 2000 15 Doris Dörrie: Well that came later. That was after my American experience. That was after the Hollywood movie.

Klaus Phillips: Oh it was after-

Doris Dörrie: Yes.

Klaus Phillips: See, my chronology is off even with that. Gee. Well let's talk about the Hollywood movie just a little bit.

Doris Dörrie: Oh yeah, we can talk about it.

Klaus Phillips: Me and Him. ​

Doris Dörrie: Me and Him. ​

Klaus Phillips: "Ich und er". The story is probably quite well known. It's about a man and his best friend who isn't a dog. It's a man and his talking penis, a penis that actually talks to him. What first attracted you to Alberto Moravia's novel?

Doris Dörrie: Well it's a very political fable, it really is. It's a very political story written by Alberto Moravia in the late 60s and it deals with anarchism and the urge to behave, anarchist and freely, and the social obligation to not do that or the pressure by society and by politics, and by all other regiments not to do that. I thought I was going to make a film about anarchy in Hollywood and also about a talking penis in Hollywood. I was pretty naïve I guess.

Doris Dörrie: The reason why I did it was because a European producer had become the head of a studio, Columbia Pictures, at that time, and he kept encouraging me. He kept saying, "Yeah, you can do the films you want to do and just like you do them in Germany. Yeah we'll make movies that matter," that was his tagline, small movies, not as expensive as everybody else's movies. We'll introduce the Euro style to Hollywood. I believed him.

Doris Dörrie: In the beginning everything was pretty okay, but then he got fired very quickly. After six months he was gone and I was stuck there with the normal Hollywood crowd, or the regular studio people, and they could not believe what I was doing. Well at that time, it got really very dramatic, melodramatic for me and I thought that I had to give up my movie

July 15, 2000 16 and I couldn't tell the story that I wanted to tell, all this melodramatic stuff that European film directors run into when they go to Hollywood.

Doris Dörrie: With a little distance it was all very, very funny really having to discuss the music that the penis would like to listen to and insisting on jazz would, I would and they tell me, "No, that would never be the case." It just got totally out of hand. But Europe and America is I guess still quite different from each other. In Europe this film became a big success. It was not my movie in the end because I did have to make many concessions and I had to re-edit it, and re-dub it, and do all sorts of things with the film. I don't like it very much. The producer loved it because it made a lot of money in Europe, but that was it.

Klaus Phillips: I understand though that in America on the video rental scene an on late night cable vision it did get shone and did all right.

Doris Dörrie: Yeah, also in video stores in Lebanon it's a big hit. A film student from Lebanon just told me that.

Klaus Phillips: One of the aspects that this film shares with most of your other certainly later films is a definite emphasis on music since you already brought music up, that at the end of a lot of your films we burst into songs. We have songs at the very end, the "Banana Boat" song at the end of Men, the Edith Piaf song later on in Nobody Loves Me, "No Woman, ​ ​ ​ ​ No Cry" and "Everything's Going To Be Alright" in this film. What particular significance do you ascribe to music and film?

Doris Dörrie: Well I find it difficult to coordinate music and dialogue but I always use a good song in the end because I like, myself, I like waltzing out of a movie theater, I like that, so that's why I keep doing it because I like to leave the theater with a song in my head.

Klaus Phillips: You finished a Hollywood movie, you married Helge I think in this country, right?

Doris Dörrie: Yeah.

Klaus Phillips: You went back to Germany and did a movie called Money. ​ ​

Doris Dörrie: I decided after ... Yeah, strange, I made a movie Money after my Hollywood experience. No, I had a six pictures deal ​ still with the studio, but this experience with me and him had showed me quite clearly that I was not cut out for

July 15, 2000 17 Hollywood, that I had to tell my own strange stories and do everything myself, and be in charge of everything, and I couldn't really adapt.

Doris Dörrie: I found it very exhausting to have to talk to my own agent, for instance. I would try to escape from my own agent all the time because I was not used to being busy all the time and up all the time, and ready for a whole bunch of different projects from other people. I find it very exhausting when I could not really do my own stuff.

Klaus Phillips: The movie has some funny moments, there's no question about it. The main character, Carmen Mueller-

Doris Dörrie: Oh Money. ​ ​

Klaus Phillips: ... robbing the bank ... I'm back on Money. I'm sorry ... and her habit of taking Polaroids she's just prepared to eat, ​ ​ what makes her do that?

Doris Dörrie: Oh because she's a frustrated housewife and nobody pays her any attention. She keeps preparing food and she puts up these wonderful meals every day, she puts them on the table and nobody acknowledges this, so she starts taking photos of the meals that she cooks because nobody else will ever even say, "Thank you."

Klaus Phillips: Another film that did not get shown as a part of this retrospective was the next one, Happy Birthday, Türke!, what ​ ​ attracted you to Jakob Arjouni's novel other than the fact that his stuff was very hot at the time? It was I think the third of three, wasn't it?

Doris Dörrie: Yeah.

Klaus Phillips: Yeah.

Doris Dörrie: Well the Turks, the Turkish population because in the very first film and in other films that I'd done, and I'd made a documentary about Turks in Germany as well, I found it important to investigate how the Turks were living in Germany, how they were being treated and this whole issue of racism which keeps popping up in other films of mine. That gave me the perfect storyline, this detective story of a Turkish detective who doesn't know Turkish anymore and has to investigate a case where he has to confront his own heritage in Germany.

Klaus Phillips: And he's really ostracized to some extent by both, by the Germans and the Turks.

July 15, 2000 18 Doris Dörrie: Yeah.

Klaus Phillips: Yeah. One of the most astonishing scenes for me was a very little scene where one of the characters who's Turkish is shown to be working in an Italian restaurant and the women who file through this cafeteria line who flirt with him obviously assume that he is an Italian working there, so-

Doris Dörrie: Yeah because Italians are being not as ... The racism against Italians is by far not as heavy as against Turks, so a lot of Turkish people pretend they're Italian.

Doris Dörrie: The film doesn't really translate very well because of national prejudices. When the film was shown sometimes in the States, for instance, I always have to explain who the Turks are and who the Germans are. The Turks are the guys with the black hair and mustaches, and the Germans are the ones who are a little lighter. But when you're not able to pick up on all the prejudices because they're not your own it doesn't translate, which was very interesting to me how ingrained the prejudices really are depending on where you are and where you grew up.

Klaus Phillips: Oh yeah. You mentioned Fassbinder earlier as a filmmaker who you admired and you picked Peer Raben to do the music for Happy Birthday, Türke!, what was that experience like? ​ ​

Doris Dörrie: It was very dry. I had hoped for more of a relationship with him, but he was very matter of factly and very dry, and very detached I think because he wasn't really doing very well physically, he didn't feel too good when he was going it. One of the reasons I wanted to have him was of course because I like his music, but also because of Fassbinder because I really think that he's one of the greatest German filmmakers because he consistently has tried to tell stories about Germany and again, and again, and again about every part of the last century and the very painful experiences, and was very accurate about it too.

Klaus Phillips: Speaking of painful experience, the scene that everybody seems to remember from this film is of course the toaster sequence. There's a scene late in the film when a guy who probably deserves it is tortured with a toaster, which first has his hand inserted into it, which then is pressed against his cheek and which then is pressed against a far more sensitive part of his anatomy. It's an unsettling sequence to say the least, one which during the premier of the film in New York I noticed caused a couple of people to walk out. They're just, "This is too much." Why doesn't the young woman who does this reach for a chainsaw as she would in an American film?

Doris Dörrie: Because I'm very wary of pain and death in the movies. At the same time, RoboCop was opening in Germany and I ​ was the one who was being attacked for brutality and not RoboCop not Paul Verhoeven. It really made sense ​

July 15, 2000 19 because that was what I was trying to get at that when you use violence in films I think it should be used in a way where it really hurts, that you as the spectator really feel the pain.

Doris Dörrie: What I'm very wary of is that we got so used to people dying and people getting slashed and killed in the most atrocious ways, but we don't feel it, it's very removed from us because it's not really anymore in the meantime, I think I've just decided to stay away from violence altogether because I don't really know how to handle it.

Doris Dörrie: In that story, in a detective story, I had to use it because it was part of the story. You can't really shoot a detective story or film noir without violence, that's a contradiction of terms almost. But if I had to use it I wanted to make it as painful as possible so it is clear that it is really a violent act and not something that happens and doesn't hurt anybody. But I find it a very difficult topic, very difficult to deal with.

Klaus Phillips: I have to confess, quite frankly, you had me worried before I really got to know you better because small kitchen appliances in your films don't do all that well.

Doris Dörrie: Right.

Klaus Phillips: Well you then came to my place, you came to Hollins to teach screenwriting for a semester and after that, still my favorite of your films came out Nobody Loves Me. We'll look at a clip from that. ​ ​

Doris Dörrie: Thank you.

Klaus Phillips: Wonderful. Who's the picture next to the main character as she puts the tape in? I just noticed that.

Doris Dörrie: A picture?

Klaus Phillips: Yeah, there's a photograph.

Doris Dörrie: Oh, I couldn't-

Klaus Phillips: That's not you?

July 15, 2000 20 Doris Dörrie: I can't remember.

Klaus Phillips: It looks like a baby picture.

Doris Dörrie: Oh of her.

Klaus Phillips: Oh it was?

Doris Dörrie: It's a picture of her, yeah.

Klaus Phillips: It is her.

Doris Dörrie: Of Maria.

Klaus Phillips: It's Maria Schrader?

Doris Dörrie: Yeah.

Klaus Phillips: Okay, all right.

Klaus Phillips: The film has become a regular at my institution for Valentine's Day. It's an interactive experience that is beyond the Rocky Horror Picture Show, I promise. ​

Doris Dörrie: Thank you so much. That's so nice.

Klaus Phillips: At the same time, it's again, an instance of the film which raises numerous serious themes of course. First and foremost, Germany's struggle with accepting the reality of a multi-cultural society once again. That apartment complex in which these characters dwell is a microcosm of that sort of thing. The characters that inhabit it are absolutely wonderful.

July 15, 2000 21 Klaus Phillips: One thing I thought about in mulling over the title is that Nobody Loves Me is the kind of statement that I don't think ​ anybody would be willing to make out loud for fear that somebody would say, "Yeah, you're absolutely right. Take a shower or something." But it's the sort of thing that many of us think about, I guess. We wonder about that privately.

Klaus Phillips: A little anecdote that I want to relate to you because I don't think you ever heard it is that one of your bumper stickers, remember that you had these little sticker made for Nobody Loves Me, I've had on the back of my car for five years ​ ​ now. It was parked at the Charlotte, North Carolina airport once while I went to Germany and when I came back I saw from afar there's a note and I thought, "Okay, one of my fenders is gone. Something happened while I was gone." No, there was a note in perfect German saying, "Do not despair, the Lord loves you."

Doris Dörrie: Oh, oh that's so nice.

Klaus Phillips: I'm totally convinced that this was the work of the traveling televangelist from [German], no question about it. ​ ​

Klaus Phillips: A question that also goes through my mind every time I watch this film is the focus on excretory function, if we can put it that way. Lots of people go to the bathroom in this movie.

Doris Dörrie: They do?

Klaus Phillips: They do. We have-

Doris Dörrie: See, my mother is right then.

Klaus Phillips: Uh-oh.

Doris Dörrie: My mother keeps complaining about German films. She says, "What is it that in every German film somebody goes to the bathroom?" That's what my mother says.

Klaus Phillips: She does?

Doris Dörrie:

July 15, 2000 22 She's right. I'm afraid she's right.

Klaus Phillips: She's right in this case, absolutely, because you show Fanny Fink at the beginning drawing her crosses while she's sitting there on the potty. You show Orfeo later on when they have this discussion and he ends the conversation with [German]. Then of course, there's this notion that you get rid of the memory of a former lover by eating pieces of his ​ ​ photograph and getting him quite literally out of your system.

Doris Dörrie: That's right. I confess, okay. You're right.

Klaus Phillips: It's fair. Well you don't mean to make a larger statement with this?

Doris Dörrie: No, again, I'm sorry but I can't offer you any theoretical explanation. I'm really sorry. I'm a total flop.

Klaus Phillips: Freud flew out the window completely. Well I thought it was something about anal retentive behavior, that all these people-

Doris Dörrie: I could make it up, but it's not true.

Klaus Phillips: Well. Let's talk about elevators for a second then because here we have this elevator again. It's not a Pater Noster but it's an elevator. As we already said, it's a microcosm, but it either brings people together or it reinforces their isolation. I see it ultimately as a very positive space because the elevator, it seems to me, represents progress, it's going somewhere. These people are doing something. They're not just passive, letting things happen to them. The fact that she, with the help of Orfeo's chant, puts things in motion shows something.

Klaus Phillips: Orfeo is a complex character because we have to wonder is he the ultimate con artist who just made off with an expensive Armani suit and with gold or is this really a science fiction movie? Has he really been abducted by aliens? It seems to me though ultimately the answer doesn't matter-

Doris Dörrie: No.

Klaus Phillips: ... because the movie really is about whether we still believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, isn't it?

Doris Dörrie:

July 15, 2000 23 Yeah, well what I was trying to do was to have a lot of fun material to play with like saying science fiction elements and of course comedy elements, and at the same time, write a story or make a film about death and to have that as the theme, but to disguise it with all these different elements so that I could drag you into the story without scaring you off and then getting to the core of things.

Klaus Phillips: Now there's already a lot of Zen Buddhist thought in this film.

Doris Dörrie: Yeah.

Klaus Phillips: You were already seriously into it by then.

Doris Dörrie: Yeah, but you don't need to know anything about Buddhism to watch this film. But what was a really interesting experience with Nobody Loves Me was when it was playing in Vietnam as one of the very first films of Germany and ​ the only code that the Vietnamese audience has to understand such a story was Buddhism because there are no women who live by themselves in Vietnam and a whole lot of story elements which were completely alien to them wouldn't have made any sense without this Buddhist code. They saw it completely as Buddhist tale, and it was interesting to me that they picked up on everything that I put in there but isn't really important to understand the story.

Klaus Phillips: I think less than a year after the film came out, Helge, your husband, who had also done the camera work on all your films starting with Men, I believe, was diagnosed with cancer and then passed away- ​ ​

Doris Dörrie: No, well he shot the movie undergoing chemotherapy, which made the shoot of this movie very light. He wasn't the only one. There was one person on the crew was HIV positive and other people who were suffering from illnesses. Because we were dealing with death the shoot was very, very light and very easy somehow. I guess that's true a lot of times that yeah when you get down to serious business things do become quite light in a different way. You know what I mean?

Klaus Phillips: Yeah. I remember you told me at one point in a conversation we had shortly after Helge passed away your thoughts as you were in a hospital looking out at the clouds from the window that quite automatically something that one of the characters-

Doris Dörrie: Orfeo.

Klaus Phillips: ... in a movie. Orfeo says, "Pass through my dear," do you remember what exactly what...?

July 15, 2000 24 Doris Dörrie: Well these lines by Orfeo was just popping out of my mouth and I was mumbling them to myself, which was really quite surprising to me that I was all of a sudden getting lines for my own film. Orfeo keeps telling Fanny that she shouldn't be sad because everything is changing and even grief and hardship cannot stay, can never stay the same, that everything is always changing, that everything is impermanent, even, he says, "The shit is impermanent." He has a very drastic way of expressing things.

Klaus Phillips: The next film we won't really need to talk about this evening, that's One Last Glimpse because you were here for the ​ screening and there was a discussion at that time. I'm wondering though whether you bought the Van Morrison CD Enlightenment when it first came out in 1990. ​

Doris Dörrie: Yeah, I guess because I have all of Van Morrison's CD, so I probably got it when it came out.

Klaus Phillips: Of course it really belongs into this, there's no question about it.

Doris Dörrie: I could never use his music for a feature film because his music is too expensive normally, but for a TV film I could just put it all in and the TV company has to pay for it.

Klaus Phillips: Well then we get to Am I Beautiful? and we'll look at a quick clip from Am I Beautiful?. ​ ​ ​ ​

Doris Dörrie: You really picked a gooey part, huh?

Klaus Phillips: Well I'm beginning to wonder also people are going to start thinking you specialize in slasher movies or some other type of slice and dice endeavor, but that's not the case.

Klaus Phillips: It's an amazing sequence though and that's why I picked it because one has to approach it with very mixed emotions. You laugh and at the same time you're horrified and you feel guilty for laughing at ... I mean, when she flops on the bed like that and when she starts with the body painting, it's funny while being horrible at the same time.

Doris Dörrie: I guess that's what really fascinates me, the ambivalence of things. That's what I try to depict in each story that I write I guess and also in every film, and to understand what it really is and how things can shift from one moment to the next, that something funny can end up being tragic and that something tragic can be very funny.

July 15, 2000 25 Klaus Phillips: I think probably for most viewers the German concept of Schadenfreude, the joy in the misfortune that befalls others, applies because most of us probably watched Herbert who's cheating on his wife after a 30 year marriage and we go, "Yep, he's getting his comeuppance. Serves him right." But at the same time, we really do hope that he gets the place cleaned up before [German] comes home, right? ​ ​

Doris Dörrie: Yeah, see that's the ambivalence even of the spectator.

Klaus Phillips: The Herbert in the short story, which serves as the model, is really a much nastier guy-

Doris Dörrie: Yeah.

Klaus Phillips: ... who this guy is played by Gottfried John, also thinks of himself first and foremost, he says, "How can you do this to me?" When he notices the blood on himself he starts wiping it off. But the guy in the shorter story when he takes her to the emergency room in the hospital immediately starts lusting after a nurse. He comments on her breasts. He's a totally despicable individual. But of course, he's one of many despicable or unfortunate, or lamentable, or sad, or happy individuals in this mosaic of the German landscape.

Klaus Phillips: The question that I'd like to pursue just a little bit is why in this movie does everybody leave Germany? They go to Spain. What are they hoping to find in Spain?

Doris Dörrie: It's the big German dream to go down south to Italy or Spain. France doesn't count, but Italy or Spain are the lands of our dreams. We continuously hope that when we go to those countries we will change and we will find the real life, "the vida verdadera". We'll stop wanting to be somebody else or some place else once we are in those countries and it does work for three weeks, four weeks, summer vacation, it works. We become much more open because we take off all our clothes, our winter clothes, our warm clothes, and we think that we're much nicer and maybe we are when we're in the south. Then we inevitably go home and become quite cold again and quite closed.

Doris Dörrie: It did happen to us when we were shooting the film and it was really quite remarkable that the German staff, the German crew became very different. We were different human beings. We were much more communicative, we were much more open with each other, and again, we were lighter. We were just 10 pounds lighter in spirit. The minute we came back to Germany, also at a very bad time in November when it gets dark and miserable, the weather, we could not keep that up with each other. We became very closed off again and we became very German again. But it is the very old German dream. Gutta went to Italy and became somebody else, everybody tries to.

July 15, 2000 26 Klaus Phillips: In a number of your films, including this one, there are carnivals or there is carnival like activity which obviously suggests something.

Doris Dörrie: Well the carnival was important for Nobody Loves Me because it signifies the beginning of the fasting period and it's ​ all about carne, flesh, carnival, and flesh and death have a lot to do with each other in Catholic rituals, or in carnival in particular. Since the whole theme of the film was death it made perfect sense to shoot it during Carnival in Cologne. Carnival in Cologne is a big deal. There are all these death images and metaphors in the actual carnival.

Doris Dörrie: In Nobody Loves Me the Semana Santa in Seville, which to you might look like the Ku Klux Klan and it's maybe a ​ little difficult to just forget all those associations and see the processions as medieval processors which they really are.

Doris Dörrie: It was important to me to use that because, again, it's something that we've lost in Germany as rituals where you open up your heart, which really happens in Spain during the Semana Santa, that you stand there with other people and you start weeping altogether. Then as I showed in Am I Beautiful? you start singing these songs which are ​ ​ basically rap songs. You sing about your own pain and your own individual experience, but everybody can listen to it and everybody will applaud you when it's really heartfelt, when I can feel your pain then I'll applaud you during the Semana Santa. That's very un-German too, but we all long for that, for this shared experience and to share our pain, I guess that's what I was trying to get at.

Klaus Phillips: I think the behavior of a lot of the characters in this film shows that's not where their priorities are, that their priorities are misplaced, that they worry all too much about things that ultimately don't matter. Of course, that's the question posed by the title Bin ich schön?, and it doesn't matter literally, right? ​ ​

Doris Dörrie: Yeah.

Klaus Phillips: In a literal sense it really doesn't matter. What matters is that we have a girl willing to prostitute herself for a pair of sunglasses, that's misplaced priorities when she should be doing something else.

Klaus Phillips: Your most recent film, an excerpt from which we'll skip because it was just shown last night, and because we do want to leave enough time for question and answer when we're done in just a little bit, is Enlightenment Guaranteed, your ​ ​ first feature film shot on digital video with a very interesting look done with a very small crew. You were quoted as saying you wanted this done by only as many people as could fit into a car, right?

July 15, 2000 27 Doris Dörrie: Mm-hmm.

Klaus Phillips: It was also a very special experience under the circumstances working with two of your regular actors again because they, in part at least, are themselves, they maintained their names. Well maybe you can tell us a little bit about what conditions were like during the shoot in Japan.

Doris Dörrie: I spoke a little bit about this yesterday, so I don't want to bore anybody, but it was a very liberating experience for all of us, also for the actors. Because they're so experienced they could be that private, probably, because they know exactly how much to show and not get hurt. It's very difficult to tell whether they're really still acting or whether they're just themselves. They were very aware of that risk, but they just went ahead and did it.

Doris Dörrie: They became more and more courageous and they realized, just like myself, that you are really always protected when it stays fiction because nobody will ever be able to say, "Oh that was the real Uwe and that was the actor Uwe." As long as you call something fiction you will be protected.

Doris Dörrie: It's just like writing fiction, I can use the first person and still you won't be able to really know and tell whether it's me or a fictitious character that I made up, so it made us very, very free to move into all directions and to also give up on concepts, which in itself, is a Buddhist concept. No, it's a Buddhist teaching not to have concepts.

Doris Dörrie: I had tried that in the documentary One Last Glimpse in a very radical manner, but then I tried to take that and use it ​ for a feature film and get away from all these concepts that I had done for so long, a screenplay that was very fixed, and every shot that I list up front, and everything was just so ... I don't know what to call it really.

Klaus Phillips: Regimented maybe.

Doris Dörrie: Yeah. I still had fun making those films and I didn't feel fenced in, but to just completely forget about all that was quite a challenge.

Klaus Phillips: An interesting thematic link that I see between this film and Men is that the two guys in this movie essentially, as far ​ as making a living is concerned, deal with selling a package, selling space or rearranging space. Of course, Julius Armbrust in Men was in packaging, so it's this emphasis, again, on the exterior on something which is a container ​ which in and of itself has little, if any value, certainly no more value, far less value than what it contains, what's inside. That seems to be a theme that really runs through all of your films.

July 15, 2000 28 Doris Dörrie: Also the original concept to, I don't know a concept again, a concept to Enlightenment Guaranteed was what would ​ the guys from Men do 15 years later. They would probably be completely stuck in their lives and go to a Japanese ​ monetary, and meditate, and try to start from scratch. In a way, we really did get back to the spirit of Men, of the ​ ​ making of the film Men. We got our innocence back. ​ ​

Doris Dörrie: Now that you're talking about it, I realize it myself. We got rid of all of the stuff that had accumulated throughout the years, also you had big budgets, money, but also a limiting experience where you just know how to do things and then you just keep doing the things you have done before because you know that they work. With Enlightenment ​ Guaranteed we didn't know whether any of that would work. We didn't even know whether the technique would work, to transfer the Mini-DV to 35 and still have a big commercial film, which it was in Germany.

Klaus Phillips: One of the ad posters for that film showing the Japanese moon with a light switch on the inside is already a classic, as of course is your poster for Men showing the very male banana poster that was not used in the United States for ​ some strange reason.

Doris Dörrie: An innocent banana, I wonder.

Klaus Phillips: How much input do you give yourself into that decision, the posters, the advertising?

Doris Dörrie: Well the banana was Helge's idea because nobody from the distribution company could come up with an idea for the poster. The light switch was my idea. I tried to really be there until the very end and I get very, very frustrated usually with the distribution people and the promotion people. That's the worse part about filmmaking usually.

Klaus Phillips: What about the website, the official website for Enlightenment Guaranteed? ​ ​

Doris Dörrie: The fortune cookies-

Klaus Phillips: That's-

Doris Dörrie: ... they were my idea.

Klaus Phillips:

July 15, 2000 29 The fortune cookies and the party for 10 for a catered sushi dinner?

Doris Dörrie: That was the distribution company.

Klaus Phillips: Wonderful stuff.

Klaus Phillips: Well very recently Die Zeit called Doris Dörrie one of the top German writers to date. The third one in your series of ​ illustrated children's books illustrated by Julia Kaergel just came out, Lotte und die Monster. Two of them are out ​ ​ already, one available in English translation Lotte [German], Lotte's Princess Dress and the second one, Lotte in New ​ ​ ​ York in New York. Of course, the Diogenes just published your latest book, a novel, entitled Was machen wir jetzt?, ​ ​ Now What? I guess, in English. Which brings us to the important question, now what? ​

Doris Dörrie: What.

Klaus Phillips: What is Doris Dörrie going to do next? Acting, for example, I understand.

Doris Dörrie: Acting?

Klaus Phillips: Yep, you just played a dentist-

Doris Dörrie: Oh that's right.

Klaus Phillips: Yeah in Pierre Sanoussi-Bliss' first film.

Doris Dörrie: I make cameo appearances, sometimes they are funny. What now? Well I'm writing and will make another film, and just keep going somewhere.

Klaus Phillips: All right.

Klaus Phillips: Well before we open the floor for questions and answers I would like to take the opportunity to thank all the wonderful folks here at the Walker, Cheryl, Lucas, also Mike and Anita Kunin of the Regis Foundation. I would like to thank all

July 15, 2000 30 of you for being such interested listeners. Of course, I want to thank Doris for spending this time with us. Please join me.

Doris Dörrie: Thank you so much. Thanks. I thank you. Thanks. Thank you.

Doris Dörrie: I can't say this often enough, what a wonderful experience this has been to come here and to have these really interesting talks with you, the fact that you all came to see the movies, and that you're here tonight. Thank you everybody, you and the people from the Walker.

Klaus Phillips: Now it will be difficult for us to see because of the lights, so raise your hands high please for any questions.

Klaus Phillips: Yes?

Question 1: Um-

Doris Dörrie: I can't see anybody.

Question 1: You said when you were in New York in the 70s you wanted to go back again and then you talked about some of the shortcomings of German mentality in general. I just wondered what you think not just this time, but what do you think of America when you come now in the director's eye, and also what do you like about Germany?

Doris Dörrie: Okay, in two minutes? Well I think it's really quite a privilege to be able to travel back and forth because it somehow sharpens my focus on my own country. America is such a diversified country, you can't really say something valid about this country in one sentence or anything I think when you're a foreigner. But that's part of the attraction that there is so many different things happening in this country and so many people living here. It's like getting an injection of energy every time I come here. It's a little bit like playing the [German], what's that in English? ​ ​

Klaus Phillips: Devil's advocate.

Doris Dörrie: Yeah, okay. When I go back to Germany or when I come here the line that I say the most to my students in Germany is just do it. I feel like a salesperson for Nike by this point. But it seems to be one of the major cultural differences and I don't understand why that is, but in Europe, altogether, it's not just Germany, we seem to have this attitude of saying, "Oh, I'd rather not. I better not, better not," instead of saying, "Yeah, just do it. Come on, let's try. If we make a

July 15, 2000 31 mistake we'll try again." It's something that I deeply admire about this country to just be willing to try out things and if they don't work you just try something else, and it's something that we have tremendous difficulties with in Europe. I don't know why that is, it's just a major difference. That didn't answer your question at all. Sorry.

Klaus Phillips: Yes.

Doris Dörrie: Did it, no?

Question 1: Yeah.

Doris Dörrie: Yeah?

Question 1: Yeah, I'm also wondering what you think of, like is an increasing amount of travel making things more interesting like on an aesthetic level? I know Minneapolis is much more international by the day. That's all to the good from what I see. I'm just wondering what you think of that, whether or not..you know, talk about global culture and whether or not that's going to be deadening or whether or not that's going to be liberating.

Doris Dörrie: Well I think right now it's just very, very difficult to make any statements because everything is happening so fast and different directions or different developments are taking place at the same time. I think that on one hand, becoming global is really a little too much for us at times. Because of it, we're becoming more tribal, which can be very interesting but it can also be very, very dangerous as we saw in Europe, the last war in Serbia was because of this.

Doris Dörrie: I think it's very difficult right now to balance these two things to become more international or more global, more interesting, versus this tendency, this urge to become more smaller and to stick to your people and your tradition, and your own thing, which can also be very interesting but can also be very dangerous, so everything can really tip to one side or the other right now. These are exciting times, but also very unbalanced times, so I don't know.

Doris Dörrie: When I'm here I really envy you for being able to live in this town with something like the Walker Institute. Today I drove down Lake Avenue and saw this wonderful photo project and all these different people living on this one street and I thought, "Oh God, Munich is so boring. I have to go back to Munich. Ugh." But at the same time, in Munich it's very easy to communicate because it's so small and you walk everywhere, and everything is around the corner. You can't really evaluate one thing against the other, it all has its advantages and disadvantages.

Klaus Phillips: There was a question down here.

July 15, 2000 32 Question 2: I met you once. And in the time you were extremely, well you were very young, you were extremely critical of American capitalism. I was having fun this evening hearing you speak about further changes and admire you liking to have fun. I have a love affair with Europe myself. But what do you think about global multinational corporations? I mean 10 years, 20 years ago I remember them predicting that would be the global governments of the world and I fear that is happening. I'm more on your side where we're in 1974 than I was then and it sounds like maybe you've come a different way from where you were then. You were very Marxist then?

Doris Dörrie: Yeah, everybody was, and-

Question 2: Well no, Americans weren't.

Doris Dörrie: Oh all right, okay, everybody in Europe was.

Question 2: Yeah, okay. But how do you feel now?

Doris Dörrie: About Marxism?

Question 2: No, about capitalism.

Doris Dörrie: About?

Question 2: Capitalism, especially-

Doris Dörrie: Capitalism.

Question 2: ... American-inspired capitalism?

Doris Dörrie: Again, it's such a difficult question. Capitalism brought down the wall, you know?

Question 2:

July 15, 2000 33 Yeah.

Doris Dörrie: Is that a good thing, is that a bad thing? First of all, I think it's a good thing. Then when I think about it a little more I'm not even sure whether it was capitalism which brought down the wall, I think it was American pop culture that brought down the wall because people were so hungry and thirsty for American pop culture. I think that was really what made things happen on a very subconscious level. That, in itself, is a very good thing. Things are ambivalent, they really are.

Doris Dörrie: Talking about globalism again, yes, everything is becoming more globalized. There was one word for it in the late 60s, it was [German], it was state monopolist capitalism, [German], I can't even pronounce the name anymore, back ​ ​ ​ ​ then I was very fluent in those terms.

Doris Dörrie: But at the same time, because of the internet, people in China are able to form a democratic movement only because of the internet, which might be a very capitalistic enterprise, in the beginning it was, and now it's becoming something else again. Everything can really change and one thing that is bad on one level may be really good for other people like the internet in China. That's really something very exciting and something very good and new.

Question 2: I need outside eyes to see into it because I see it from the inside and to me American capitalism is frightening.

Doris Dörrie: I don't really know what capitalism is anymore.

Question 2: Well I don't want to change Europe.

Doris Dörrie: No, no, no, I'm not for capitalism, but I don't really know what it is anymore because it's not rather easy anymore, it used to be much easier to be against it.

Doris Dörrie: It did change the way of the world, East and West, and we're battling with that, we really are in Germany because it's difficult, but I think it's better than the way it was before. What do you want to have, do you want to live in a suppressed society without capitalism? Yeah. Okay, you don't have the capitalism but you don't have the freedom either.

Doris Dörrie: It's an interesting question because when you ask the east German population this question a lot of them would say, "Yeah, capitalism is really a bad thing because it didn't do anything at all for us in the end and now we're really stuck

July 15, 2000 34 here, and we don't really know where to move to and what to do with our lives." But at the same time, they would say, "Yeah, but we don't really want the wall back either." So you know-

Doris Dörrie: Yeah.

Klaus Phillips: Question up there, mm-hmm.

Question 3: I'm a struggling film video maker here in Minneapolis. Of course, my work is much smaller in scale than yours. But I'm curious if you could talk about what the climate is, what you observe the climate [inaudible] for women filmmakers in German right now.

Doris Dörrie: Women filmmakers?

Question 3: Mm-hmm.

Doris Dörrie: That has never really been an issue, women filmmakers, because in my generation I don't think it ever made any difference really. I hope I'm not wrong about it but whoever I talked to who's my age pretty much agrees that for us it was never an issue. For the generation of filmmakers like Margarethe von Trotta, those women, it really did make a big difference because for them it was really very difficult to become filmmakers and to do this. But for us it wasn't anymore, and it's the difference of 15 years.

Question 3: How about the younger generation that's coming up now that you're sending out of school?

Doris Dörrie: Well in our film school it's exactly 50/50 and I don't think the women have any doubts about their career or they don't think it would be more difficult for them because they're women, not at all. What they are very aware of, and that's new to me, is that they allow a certain amount of time for their career and they're very aware of the fact that if they want to have a family they have to plan it way ahead. I was not aware of that at all. I didn't have a career plan, I didn't have a family plan. I didn't have very much of a plan altogether.

Klaus Phillips: Other questions? Yes, yes.

Question 4: I wanted to, along the lines of the last question, I'm interested in how do you see, well a number of things, but how you see German cinema developing? You've already positioned yourself generationally in an interesting way

July 15, 2000 35 because you're a transition figure, a transition generation between this older generation, new German cinema and also those women filmmaker pioneers and in a way your success with men you could almost say led or was the beginning of the boom of the comedies of the 90s, which of course is a very different type of cinema. I was wondering how do you see all that, where German cinema has gone and where it's going?

Doris Dörrie: Well it's always very difficult for filmmakers or artists in general to evaluate themselves among their peers and to see themselves outside of what they're doing themselves. An analysis of this is very difficult for me. What's happening right now in Germany is quite interesting I think because many different films are being made. I don't see anything like a movement, but a variety of films.

Doris Dörrie: What is happening in Europe that's maybe more interesting or more worrisome too, that the more European we get on an economical level the less interested we are in each other's culture. You won't find any European films playing in other European countries anymore like they used to. It's a very, very small percentage of French, Spanish, Italian films get to Germany and vice versa. This is true for every European country.

Doris Dörrie: Somehow we just don't have the energy, or curiosity, or I don't know what it is anymore to, besides from the economics, be interested in each other's culture anymore. That I find worrisome and that seems to be a trend. What a lot of filmmakers tried for the past 15 years was to invent the European film and by now we all know, no, it does not exist, the European film does not exist.

Doris Dörrie: But a film that translates to other European countries does not exist either anymore, it's everybody for himself, and that is fairly new. We will have the Euro in a year from now, but we don't have any transitions anymore between the different countries. Each country has more English literature and American movies, of course, from any other country within Europe, and that's the way things are right now. We don't seem to be interested in each other right now.

Klaus Phillips: Yes?

Question 4: Is the digital video movement in Germany taking off like it is here?

Doris Dörrie: Well that was part of the reason why I made Enlightenment Guaranteed on digital technique with a MiniDV which is, ​ again, something else, because I was trying to show my film students that you can make a feature film for very little money. But they're dreaming of 35 and they want to make The Gladiator Part Three or I don't know. I was hoping for ​ them to catch on and they didn't really. It's too small scale for them. They don't want their dreams to become video and small scale, which I understand.

Doris Dörrie:

July 15, 2000 36 I understand it on one hand, on the other hand, I don't understand it because it just liberates you enormously to be able to work that way. I am in a very luxurious position, I don't have to, on the contrary, for Enlightenment ​ Guaranteed I had to fight off money. I had to tell the producers, "No, I want to make it small. I want to keep it small. I don't want to make a big movie," because of course distributors always want to make a big movie because they think they can promote it big and it's going to be big because of all the bigness.

Klaus Phillips: Yes?

Question 5: Would you talk a little more about the process from story to film and why is it that some of your stories become films and others don't?

Doris Dörrie: I started writing prose because I couldn't write screenplays. I found screenplays very, very difficult to write because they force you to look at your characters from the outside, of course. You have to show what people do, and I found that very difficult. In order to understand my characters better I started writing short stories about them, sometimes in the first person. But I wrote them in order to get into their heads and into their souls.

Doris Dörrie: After I had written the short story I could write the screenplay because then I knew them so well that I could just show them from the outside, but I knew why they did certain things a certain way, so that's how I started writing prose. Then something really wonderful happened to me that I really hope happens to every artist at some point in his life or her life.

Doris Dörrie: A publisher from Switzerland, who owns a very famous publishing house, he found out about my short stories and he came to Munich, and convinced me to show him these stories. Ever since then he encouraged me to keep writing prose. One of these people who find you, and really believe in you and make you do things that you wouldn't do on your own, and that's what I did. I wrote seven volumes of short stories because of him.

Doris Dörrie: But then some people from some of these short stories wanted to be in a movie, they wanted to become film stars, and they wanted to do something else, so they stuck to me. Orfeo and Fanny, for instance, the characters from Nobody Loves Me, then also for Beautiful, I had divided my prose and my screenplays by that time to such a degree ​ ​ ​ that I would write all the things that I never wanted to shoot in the short stories because they were too complicated and too expensive, and too ... all these things that I didn't want to shoot. But then, again, I had the feeling that it would be after all these straight forward story lines it would be interesting to have many people try to achieve the same goal and meet in various ways, so I tried to adapt 15 short stories in Am I Beautiful? . ​ ​

Question 5: Are you saying that we get to know characters better and closer, more intimately in literature, in stories than in film where you get to see them?

July 15, 2000 37 Doris Dörrie: I do. It's my only way sometimes to get close to a character to write prose about him or her. Also, your film language is really quite a limited language and you have to really condense things a lot and make things simpler. I can only make them simpler when I know the whole picture. I can't really go the other way around somehow. But it just feeds off each other.

Doris Dörrie: I did Enlightenment, the film, and at the same time I wrote a novel about a father who has to go to a monastery with a ​ ​ 16 year old daughter because his 16 year old daughter has fallen in love with a lama, a Tibetan lama, and he accompanies her to this monastery to prevent her from running off with a lama. He hates everything at the monastery, he hates the people, he hates Buddhism, he hates everything, but he's forced to stay. In the end, of course, he picks up on it. He doesn't get enlightened, but he's beginning to understand that there's maybe something to it. Those two things have a lot to do with each other thematically.

Klaus Phillips: Yes?

Question 6: Can you talk a little bit about the way that the actors in these two movies, the movie, particularly thinking Maria Schrader in the bride scene in Am I Beautiful? How much does she bring to that? I know there's a lot that's in the ​ story because you wrote it, right?

Doris Dörrie: Yeah.

Question 6: But how does much she bring and what's your relationship to her?

Doris Dörrie: Well I have a very good relationship to all my actors because otherwise, I can't work. Somehow, I've been very lucky. I've never, ever cast an actor who I didn't like or who I didn't get along with, or actress. It's a little difficult for me to answer you because it's a process that just keeps happening, she says something, I say something, and we feed off each other, then it becomes a line or it becomes this, it becomes her necklace, just tiny things that they just keep evolving as we go along.

Doris Dörrie: I can't really separate these two things anymore. I can't say this is what she did and this is what I did. But I encourage all the actors to come up with not only ideas but also with very stupid ideas. A lot of times you have really stupid ideas and then you just have to turn this idea around a little bit and it becomes a brilliant idea. That's one of my tricks at the set, that I try to encourage everybody to make a fool of himself or herself, and I'm the first one to make a fool of myself because it's really about opening up and daring to show that you're not really all that great, not all that brilliant, not all that beautiful. I could go on and on, and on. Then things start happening.

July 15, 2000 38 Question 6: Is that how the stuff with the lift Nobody Loves Me- ​ ​

Doris Dörrie: Pardon me?

Question 6: Is that how the thing in the lift...?

Doris Dörrie: The lift.

Question 6: Did you plan that? Did that come-

Doris Dörrie: That's all written, but the nuances, of course, they start happening when everybody is together, the crew and the actors. With Enlightenment Guaranteed there were no lines almost throughout the entire film. Sometimes I wrote ​ some dialogue up in the movie and I just shoved it to the actors a minute before we started shooting. But a lot of it was really improved and I just gave them the general direction and a scene. We would improvise for about 10 minutes and tape it, it's cheap, video, you can tape it. Then I would just limit it or cut it down, the content, I would tell them to just do it again and use those lines, lines that they had invented, but drop other stuff and just make it shorter and shorter, and shorter until we had a two minute scene.

Question 6: What's the difference between that movie and [inaudible]? Are you going to go on and make big movies again or will you keep making things with a crew of five?

Doris Dörrie: My producer is really afraid that I might want to just do small movies from now on because it's such great fun. We were so completely free to do whatever we wanted to do. But I'm going to make a big movie next year, end of next year, but I also want to do the small ones. The big one is going to be very big because it's going to be a period piece in Vienna.

Klaus Phillips: One more question maybe. Yes?

Question 7: Could you talk about critics and your relationship with critics a little bit? That gives a unique opportunity to tell somebody that their interpretation of your movie was wrong. Normally you don't have that. How does that feel?

Doris Dörrie:

July 15, 2000 39 How does that feel? I'm a total hypocrite with critics. I hate them when they don't like my films and the next time when they write a good review I love the same man who I detested before, only because he's written a good review. I worked as a film critic during film school and I know how dependent reviews are on your mood, and especially at 10 o'clock in the morning the press screenings are usually at 10 in the morning and it's a beautiful day out, and you have to go into the dark movie theater, and it's still smelly from the popcorn from last night, and you don't really want to see this movie, and you just had a fight with your boyfriend, and yeah, it's going to be a bad review only because of that.

Doris Dörrie: Also, when you have very little time it also is quite likely that you write a bad review because it's much easier to write bad reviews. I try to remember all that and I try to see how relevant the circumstances are. At the same time, I get incredibly hurt and I get really mad, and I want to kill them all when they write a bad review. My daughter and my boyfriend, they sort out the reviews by now before they give them to me because they just don't want me to get that mad all the time. I don't really get very upset.

Klaus Phillips: I would like to add just one thing to that if I may, first of all, I do think that there is, in Doris' case clearly, a gender issue at work as far as the negative critics are concerned. You've gotten some real serious flak down the road, which I think a man would not have gotten.

Klaus Phillips: Secondly, I definitely believe that there is something about German film critics that's absent in American film critics, with only a couple of exceptions. The only one that really comes to my mind right off hand is Roger Ebert and his total inability to find any value with David Lynch, for example. He's not alone in this, I realize that, but there's such a nastiness at times that I see.

Klaus Phillips: For example, one review I stumbled upon for Enlightenment Guaranteed just dismissed the film as a travel poem ​ video and ultimately called the intention behind a [German], an outrage, which that's no longer criticism, that's just ​ ​ venting, right?

Doris Dörrie: Yeah, but on the other hand, I really can't complain. I also get really good reviews, but I can't remember them. I can only remember the bad ones. It's a defect that I think a lot of people have. Yeah you get 100 good reviews, but you only remember this one bad review and this one line that this guy wrote years back.

Klaus Phillips: Doris, thanks very much.

Doris Dörrie: Thank you very much. Thank you.

July 15, 2000 40