My own experiences did not always seem important to me, but the things I read were veritable revelations. I did not start to take my feelings seriously until I found them in literature. The heroes of the books were more important to me than family and friends. Perhaps I unconsciously felt that I could love them without danger, without the danger of loss, as with the death of my mother. I often also experienced things in reading that didn’t happen to me until years later. I was always interested to find out how other people did things. I soon developed an intuition for the magical moment when a book reveals its secret, the place where certain sentences suddenly come to life in such a way that one senses it is because of this particular sentence, because of this situation, that the author wrote the whole book.
The Amerika Haus offered me Hemingway, the difficult-to-read Faulkner, the latest magazines, and, above all, jazz—on records and in live shows. A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls were my favorite novels. They showed me that there were other ways of being a soldier, beyond what we knew from our uniformed men. If you’re fighting on the right side, you did not have to be cynical or heroic to the death. The level-headed way in which Gary Cooper portrayed this in the film adaptation of the latter outdid Hemingway’s prose, especially when Ingrid Bergman climbed into his sleeping bag.
And that’s how I came to film—even back then it was by way of literature. Ever since then, my work has stood under the mark of literature. I am still an avid reader. And although I have stories to tell and my own experiences to relate, these stories and experiences are often things that I’ve read. I admit that, to a certain extent, the printed page has moved me more than what has happened to me in my life.
I’ve often talked to the writers I’ve worked with and have conveyed to them that my real love and respect is for literature. I’ve also maintained that when you compare film to literature, film will always come out on the bottom. Max Frisch vehemently contradicted this idea: “Yes, but you have completely different resources at your disposal in film than we do! Take, for example, a close-up of Julie Delpy in Homo Faber and think about it: How many pages would I have to write in order to communicate what this one close-up expresses!”
Nevertheless, I still think that reading is a more noble and active way of relaying experiences than watching a movie. It invites you to dream more. If I went to a deserted island, I would not take any films. I would take a few books. And in this respect, it’s wonderful: film is my profession, literature is my love, and I can combine both to tell stories.
What’s the difference? I'm telling a story someone else has told better. I’m retelling it. I read a lot into it, and I also read some things out of it. Every viewer sees a film differently; it ultimately comes into existence in the mind of the audience, as Alexander Kluge says. So, watching and subsequently processing a film is basically an active endeavor.
In fact, all comparisons between the book and the film are actually impossible. I can compare Shakespeare’s Othello with King Lear or with dramas by Schiller and Goethe, but what does not work is to compare it with the Otello by Verdi, which could, in turn, be compared to his La Traviata. What I mean by this is that two completely different genres, namely drama and opera, or literature and film, basically cannot be compared.
As a filmmaker, you must repeatedly make this clear to yourself. After all, viewers do not necessarily compare my movie to the book they once read, but rather to a movie they saw last week or one they’ll soon see. With this line of reasoning, I have managed to free myself from my inferiority complex concerning literature.
Instead of worrying about that, the question that always comes to mind is which books do I film? It often happens that someone comes to me and says, “I read a book that you absolutely have to film. As you’re reading it, you can already imagine it as a movie!” But I tell them that exactly the opposite is true. Books that read like a screenplay can rarely be filmed. You can illustrate them, but that seems superfluous to me because this illustration is already contained in the book.
It’s really exciting, on the other hand, to film books that are considered unfilmable. This is also the only reason I don’t simply film popular literature, which essentially only needs to be illustrated. I don’t in any way disregard this genre. All I’m saying is that it’s not for me. I’m just too lazy. Only when I have something very difficult to do, like climbing the Himalayas, will I wake up and grapple with it. Then I’ll say to myself: Let’s see if it’s really unfilmable!
Sometimes it turns out, however, that the book really is unfilmable—Proust, for example. And sometimes a miracle happens—The Tin Drum, for example. For six months, I explained to the producer why the novel by Günter Grass was unfilmable. He did not let up, he absolutely wanted me to do it. Finally, I agreed out of pure rebelliousness.
My friend Billy Wilder, with whom I discussed such questions a lot, always said, “I don’t understand why you always film novels instead of plays. You see, a play begins when the curtain rises, then there’s a short exposition. A conflict builds up, has a climax, and then there’s a cliffhanger at the curtain after the second act so that the third act can be propelled forward to the end. Then the curtain falls, the evening is over, and the whole thing has taken a maximum of two hours. All my films have essentially been based on plays.”
I use a beautifully formulated line from Stendhal to justify why I prefer to film literature and novels rather than plays: “The novel is a mirror that travels along a high road.” Un roman est un miroir qui se promène sur une grande route. When I go to the movies, no matter how good or bad the movie is, somehow I’m always taken on a journey. I go somewhere with people, I arrive at places I’ve never been, and I experience stories that I will never experience in real life. In that sense, I think that the connection between novels and film is stronger than that between theater and film.
Once you have tracked down a novel you want to film, a period of pleasurable work begins. In the beginning, I search for something very special. I see every film as a small clockwork mechanism in which something rotates, in which the gears mesh. The question is: Where does the energy come from? A film that is successful and captivates the audience right from the start is simply a clockwork mechanism in which all the wheels mesh so that the engine runs smoothly and the energy is transmitted.
This applies to all films, but in an adaptation of literature there is, of course, the novel, from which a unique energy emerges. It moves you and me to turn the page—after all, we want to know what happens. I do not mean in the sense of Agatha Christie, as in a whodunnit, but rather, how is it that you continue to turn the pages of such big tomes as The Tin Drum or War and Peace? There is something very special, even in The Man Without Qualities and of course in Remembrance of Things Past, a secret energy that compels you to turn the page.
To make a good movie, you have to find exactly that energy and use it to get the wheels turning in the movie. Sometimes you think you’ve found this energy, and then it turns out that you’ve made a mistake. Or you don’t realize until after the work is finished what the real energy behind the story is. In any case, it’s good to look for it.
It’s best to do this together with the novelist. That’s the great privilege of making movies from literature: seeking out writers and talking to them, provided they are still living. Incidentally, I have had better experiences with living authors than with dead ones. I failed equally with Kleist and with Proust, although not with Musil—maybe we managed to establish a telepathic relationship.
I’ve discussed this question with vastly different authors, such as Böll, Grass, Frisch, Miller, and Atwood (it’s embarrassing to think of all the authors I’ve filmed). What can one learn from conversations with authors? Maybe nothing, because they’ve already written everything into their books, and what they say about it has to make you more suspicious.
One of the first questions is, of course, how they came to write the book. Exactly the question that just about any journalist would ask. And the authors always give very good reasons. Those are the ones that can be read in every interview, but they are not the actual reasons.
In the course of months of talking to Max Frisch, for example, he got closer and closer to the actual inner experience that drove him to write the book. It was the sentence: “We cannot get married again to our children.” This was, in some way or another, the experience he had when he fell in love with a young woman who could have been his daughter, not just because of her age, but also because her mother was once his fiancée. The energy that guided his pen—which we feel so strongly while reading the book that we keep turning the pages to discover the original source of its power—contributes hugely to writing the script and carrying out all the work on the film.
This is why I believe these discussions with the authors have at the very least kept me from making gross misinterpretations of their works. Clearly, there had been an inner motivation, some traumatic event, with Musil, for example, before he wrote The Confusions of Young Törless. This was true of Yourcenar, and also of Böll. With Grass, as we now know, there was the long-concealed fact that he had voluntarily served with the Waffen-SS. With Arthur Miller, it was the stories of his neighbors and family, and so on. Many writers became writers exactly because they had to deal with the things they had experienced. Henry James said there is no good novel without life lived. The amazing thing about the many films I’ve made is that the most successful ones have been those based on books in which personal, often traumatic, experiences have played a part.
The shooting of the film often confirms this as well. When you start working with actors on a scene, rehearsing them, something strange frequently happens. Suddenly there is more than just the back and forth of scripted dialogues. You notice a sudden tension, something in the room that transfers to everyone; it’s an almost magical moment. The scene comes quite close to the author’s key experience; often it’s the experience that made them write the book in the first place. And if you can track it down and you’re fortunate enough to have the right actors to relive that energy in the right atmosphere, then it also transfers to the viewer. It doesn’t matter if it’s a huge epic fresco like The Tin Drum or a very intimate story like Homo Faber.
The filming of a book is actually a (psycho)analysis of the book. It’s also a test of substance: Are these all just words, or is there really something to it?
