“Funding constraints force you to be creative – what started as a limitation became a strength”
– The director talks about his German-Swiss co-production, and about its cast and production conditions
(© Thomas Heinser)
Swiss director Nicolas Steiner‘s new feature film Do You Believe in Angels, Mr. Drowak? [+see also:
interview: Nicolas Steiner
film profile], which opened this year’s Max Ophüls Prize, was presented at the Solothurn Film Festival and will soon be released in cinemas, first in Germany, Austria and Lichtenstein on 19 February via X Verleih. We talked to the director of this German-Swiss coproduction about his cast and production conditions.
Cineuropa: Your film is a satire on the welfare state and the measures imposed on unemployed or job-seeking people. How did this idea originate? Was there a personal trigger?
Nicolas Steiner: The core story was already in the draft of the script, by German novel writer Bettina Gundermann. Her novels are often quite radical, both in language and subject matter. She is not afraid to address social wounds directly, whether it’s about motherhood, dependency, or structural violence. The social critique and the satirical elements were present from the very beginning. I assume that Bettina herself has had encounters with bureaucracy. On a personal level, the topic resonated with me as well. I live in Switzerland, where things are structured differently, but I had similar experiences in my family. The question is not whether such measures exist, but how they are implemented. In the film, we deliberately exaggerated everything. From the very first image, with the oversized megaphone, it’s clear that we are stepping away from social realism into satire.
You’ve never shied away from provocation in your earlier films either. This novel must have struck a chord with you.
I think Drowak continues the trajectory of my earlier work quite naturally. Especially in Above and Below, I was interested in people who are invisible, what I sometimes call the “ghosts of the city.” Drowak fits into that line. I also believe that there is a recognisable continuity in my films, partly because I work with the same team. I’m not afraid of films that provoke discussion, whether about form, perception, or society. At the same time, it was important to me not to drift into science fiction. Despite the exaggeration, the film needed to stay close enough to realism so that, emotionally, the audience could still relate, especially through the love story.
How did you approach the characters, especially Hugo Drowak and Lena? How much freedom did you have compared to the original text?
Hugo Drowak was immediately accessible to me. I knew this type of character. I had met people like that before and enjoyed working with such contradictions. The basic structure of the characters already existed, but Bettina and the producers gave me a lot of freedom to shape my vision for it. It was a close continuation and collaboration on the script between producer, writer and director, of course also through budget restraints or funding restrictions. While Hugo was clear to me from the start, Lena wasn’t. She’s deliberately ambiguous, difficult to categorise. I had to work my way toward her. She truly came alive for me through the collaboration with the puppeteer and through casting Luna Wedler. I like characters who hover, who resist clear definition.
That must have been challenging to perform. How did you work with Luna Wedler?
Luna commits fully to projects she believes in. She chooses very carefully and prepares extremely thoroughly. She’s incredibly talented. We worked in great detail, training specific eye movements with a specialist, collaborating closely with a puppeteer. These details helped her physically embody the character. That kind of precision excites her, and I actively support it as a director. We also worked intensively on the dialogue. She absorbed the script completely. Of course, there were emotionally demanding moments on set. This was not an easy role, neither for her nor for Karl Markovics as Drowak. With him, it was important that he could show his full range, from warmth to brutality.
The film is clearly a European co-production on different levels. Was that complicated?
Co-productions are always complicated. They’re wonderful because of the cultural exchange, but also exhausting. Different systems, languages, and working conditions mean a lot of energy spent off-screen. Drowak was originally planned as a German-French co-production, but the financing in France never came together. Still, I was able to keep Dominique Pinon in the cast. His accent and presence were perfect for the role. Looking back, I’m very proud of the cast: Luna Wedler (Switzerland), Karl Markovics (Austria), Dominique Pinon (France), Lars Eidinger (Germany), Saga Sarkola (Finland) and more. That’s European cinema for me.
Architecture and locations play a major role in the film.
I treat locations like actors. I cast them carefully. All the buildings exist, but they’re reassembled into a new geography: brutalist structures in France mixed with German “Plattenbau”, the Wuppertal suspension railway mixed with the industrial area in Basel. Funding constraints force you to be creative. What started as a limitation became a strength. In Basel, moreover, we used virtual production. Everything seen through the windows was created in the Basel Filmstudio.
