by Paul Cronin
Is casting something you always do yourself?
It has always been an essential part of my work. When you have a good screenplay and a good cast, you barely need a director. Whoever said that casting was 90 per cent of the director’s job was right. I am extremely careful when casting even minor roles; whoever steps in front of my camera is royalty. You can’t throw actors together and expect a film to coalesce; they have to complement each other and create a certain chemistry and – at times – friction. One lousy performance can contaminate the entire film.
Sometimes there are difficulties in persuading others that your choice is the right one. My efforts to cast Bruno S. in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser are a good example. I first encountered him in Bruno the Black, a film by a young student called Lutz Eisholz about marginal figures – street performers and singers – in Berlin. It was a lucky coincidence for me, because after writing the screenplay I had no idea who I might find to play Kaspar. When I saw Bruno on screen I was immediately fascinated by him, and literally found myself getting up out of bed and standing in front of the television set, staring intensely. The next day I asked Eisholz to put me in touch with Bruno, and the following week we both went to his apartment. He was mistrustful of everyone he met, and when he opened the door wouldn’t even look me in the eye. It took about half an hour before he would even make eye contact with me and start to confide certain things, but once we had established a rapport we maintained it throughout the production. Our conversations were always complex and invigorating, and on several occasions I put into the film things I heard him say, like the line, “The people are like wolves to me.”
Everyone doubted whether Bruno would be able to play the lead character in a feature film. They all told me it was impossible to direct a man like that, so I did something I had never done before and have never done since: I assembled a full crew and a 35mm camera to shoot a screen test, on a lake near Berlin, with Bruno in full costume alongside another actor. Immediately things were uncomfortable, and I had a feeling it would all end up in embarrassment because Bruno was so stiff and nervous. But when I looked at the footage I only saw my mistakes, not Bruno’s, and realised exactly how to handle him in the future. When I showed the screen test to ZDF [Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen], the television network that was putting up much of the budget for the film, I sank deeper and deeper into my chair. The lights went up in the screening room and there was a nasty silence hanging in the air. The network executive stood up and said, “I’m against Bruno for the part. Who is with me?” The hands of everyone – all thirty people – shot up into the air. I sensed there was a hand not raised next to me. It was Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, my cameraman. “Jörg,” I asked, “are you for Bruno?” He grinned and nodded. His inner fire had somehow prevailed.
I’m not in favour of numerical democracy in voting, so I looked at these people against Bruno, then turned to Schmidt-Reitwein and said, “We have won the ballot.” It was like in mediaeval times, when, if a group of monks were against some innovation or a reform of monastic life because of indifference, and only a couple of them had the feverish knowledge that these changes had to be made to advance the cause of faith, then out of the enormity of their wish these two would declare themselves the melior pars – the “better part” – and win the ballot. Intensity wins the battle, not strength in numbers. “Bruno is going to be the one,” I announced to everyone in the room, and asked the ZDF executive to declare himself either with me or against me. He looked into my face for a long while, then said, “I’m still on board.” His name is Willi Segler, and I love him for his loyalty. It was a great moment for me. In situations like this, dig in your heels and budge not a single inch. We went into production almost immediately.
Why did you choose to keep Bruno’s identity secret?
He asked us to, and he was right to do so. When he was four years old, his mother, a prostitute, beat him so hard he lost his speech and used this as a pretext to put him into an asylum for retarded and insane children. Bruno told me about his time in an institution during the Nazi era, something he talks about in Stroszek, the second film we made together. If he wet his bed at night, he had to stand with his arms stretched out holding the sheet in front of the other children, until it was dry. If he lowered his arms, he was beaten. Eventually, at the age of nine, he escaped and spent the next twenty-three years of his life in and out of institutions and prisons. He also picked up a number of minor criminal convictions for things like vagrancy and public indecency.
Bruno was aware that the film we made together was as much about how society had destroyed him as it was about how society had killed Kaspar Hauser. Maybe for this reason he wanted to remain anonymous, and for many years I called him the “Unknown Soldier of Cinema.” The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is his monument; I even considered calling the film The Story of Bruno Hauser. I felt he shouldn’t be removed from his environment for long, nor should he be exposed to the press or regaled as a film star, but he was excited when he heard about the Cannes Film Festival and said, “Der Bruno wants to transmit [durchgeben] his accordion by playing to those people.” He referred to himself in the third person, and never said “act” or “do,” always “transmit.” I was wary about taking him to the meat market out there, but he really wanted to go. “My whole life I was excluded,” he said. “I could never involve myself in anything. Now we have done something beautiful, I want to be a part of it.” The press is so intrusive at Cannes, but he was extraordinarily grounded when confronted by them, pulling out his bugle and giving a signal. One time he stood up in front of an audience with his accordion and said, “I will now play all the nuances of the colour red.” He drew so much attention, yet remained completely untouched by it and wasn’t the least bit concerned by the hordes of photographers. At the press conference for the film Bruno impressed everyone. He said he had come to look at the sea for the first time, and marvelled at how clean it was. Someone told him that, in fact, it wasn’t. “When the world is emptied of human beings,” he said, “it will become so again.” If you watch him in certain scenes in Stroszek, you can hear the extraordinary sweetness in his voice. Although he had been systemically trampled upon throughout his life, Bruno was a genuinely warm-hearted man.
How did he acclimatise to being on a film set?
Without the mutual trust quickly established between the two of us, I wouldn’t have stood a chance. With Bruno there was always physical contact. He liked it when I held his wrist; not his hand, just his wrist, as if I had my fingers on his pulse. But he could also be unruly, and whenever he would talk about the injustices of the world I tried to give him the space to say whatever he wanted. I got angry with a soundman who, after a few minutes of ranting, opened a magazine and started to read. “You’re being paid to listen,” I told him. Eventually Bruno would see that everyone was looking at him, and say, “Der Bruno has talked too much. Let’s do some good work now.” I repeatedly said to him, “Bruno, when you need to talk and speak about yourself, do it. It’s not an interruption for us. It’s very much a part of what we’re doing here. Not everything needs to be recorded on film.”
Bruno liked the character of Kaspar so much that he refused to take his costume off. One day he overslept for breakfast, so I knocked on his door. There was no answer. I pushed it open and it immediately banged into something. It was Bruno, sleeping on the floor, right next to the door, fully clothed, with a pillow and blanket. In a split second he stood upright in front of me, wide awake, and said, “Yes, Werner, what is it?” It really broke my heart when I saw this. “Bruno, you’ve overslept,” I said. “Did you really sleep here on the floor?” “Yes,” he said, “Der Bruno is always sleeping next to the escape.” That’s where he felt safe. In the past, whenever Bruno would break out of a correctional institution he would go into hiding, and because of this was always on high alert, ready to be recaptured.
Shooting the film was tiring for him, and whenever Bruno was exhausted he would say, “Der Bruno is going t
o take that one,” before having a nap for a couple of minutes between takes. It was his way of removing himself for short periods of time. At the end of each shot we would record a minute of ambient sound. Every interior and exterior has its own atmosphere and tone of silence, and for continuity in editing it’s always useful to get a recording. But with Bruno around this wasn’t always possible because five seconds after calling “cut” he would be snoring. Sometimes I had to cut in the middle of a scene because he was farting so loudly. Much of the dialogue was written while I was sitting on set, literally as the lights were being positioned, because at that point the actors needed something to say. Giving them their dialogue at the last minute obviously meant they weren’t able to learn anything by heart, which I came to realise was important when it came to working with Bruno. About a week before we were due to shoot Kaspar’s death scene, I talked him through the moment when he is mortally stabbed, and he immediately started making notes to himself. A few days later he said, “Werner, finally I know what to transmit.” He stood there and said, very seriously, “I will transmit the cry of death!” before screaming wildly like a bad theatre actor, then thrashing about and falling to the ground. Bruno envisioned himself playing the scene that way, so twenty minutes before shooting I did a rewrite. It would have been too difficult to persuade him otherwise, and in the film you see Kaspar stumbling into the garden having already been stabbed. From then on I went out of my way to make sure that Bruno wasn’t able to mull over the script in advance.
Something else to deal with was the fact that Bruno didn’t speak pure German, or even grammatically correct German, rather a dialect from the Berlin suburbs. In the end we were able to take advantage of this because his slow and careful recitation of dialogue somehow elevates the acting to a level of stylisation. It adds to the power of Bruno’s performance because his speaking voice and articulation produced a beautiful effect, as if he is discovering language for the first time.
Did Bruno become more confident as the shoot progressed?
He was an intelligent and streetwise man, not at all defenceless, even if the character he played was fundamentally unable to protect himself from the world. I made it clear to him before we started work that on the most primitive level this was to be an exchange of services. “You act in the film and I’ll pay you,” I explained. “But there’s more to it than that, because you’ll be able to fill this character with more convincing life than anyone else in the world. There is a considerable responsibility on your shoulders.” It was a challenge he accepted without hesitation. He quickly became used to how we did things on set and worked hard, which included refusing to eat lunch because he said it disturbed his concentration. For the scene where Kaspar learns to walk, it was Bruno’s idea to put a stick in the hollow of his knees, then sit for two hours and numb his legs, after which he was unable to stand.
Bruno also had moments of real distrust of us all, especially me. He was always going into bars, throwing his money around and getting drunk, so I suggested we open a bank account for him, which would be a hurdle to him spending money so easily. He was immediately convinced there was a conspiracy to steal his wages. No one – not even the bank manager – could persuade him it was impossible for me to take money from his account unless I had his personal authorisation in writing. He even accused me of hiring a stooge to play the manager. But the times when he did trust what we were doing were important and quite moving. He would talk incessantly about death and wrote a will. “Where shall I put it?” he asked me. “My brother will kill me, or I will kill him if I see him. I can’t trust my family. My mother the whore is dead, my sister the whore is dead.” I told him to put it in a safe in the bank or to give it to a lawyer. “No, I don’t trust them,” he said. Two days later he handed me the will and asked me to take care of it.
We found an old-fashioned, genuine autopsy table made of solid marble for the death scene. Bruno was so fascinated with death and this table that once shooting was over he desperately wanted to have it. “The name of this table is Justice,” he would say in a strange tone of voice. “This is where the rich and poor end up.” He wanted to take the table, but I explained that we had rented it as a prop from an antique shop. I think I even suggested it probably wasn’t the kind of thing he wanted to own. “No, Der Bruno must have it!” he said. “When I saw myself lying on this table, I knew that the cause of death was Heimweh [homesickness].” I took his request seriously only when he gave me some paintings he had done of the table, which were basically self-portraits of him lying on this thing. A speech bubble from his mouth had the words “Cause of death: Heimweh.” A few months later I asked him if he wanted any stills from the film or photographs taken on the set. “The only one I want,” he said, “is a photo of the scene of the autopsy. The table is Justice.” After that I felt he should have the table after all. I bought it from the shop and gave it to him.
Our work together gave Bruno a certain confidence, and helped him within his own social milieu. People who lived in his Berlin neighbourhood would drag him into the pastry shop and buy him a treat, and the local barber would give him a free haircut and shave. I was careful to ensure that he held onto his job as a forklift driver in a steel factory; we filmed during his vacation, and because he got only three weeks off every year I asked for additional unpaid holiday time for him. He had been treated like a freak there, but after the film was released I called the factory and asked to speak to Bruno. The secretary would say, “Sorry, our Bruno isn’t on the factory floor at the moment.” Before they would never have used the word “our,” but now they were genuinely proud of him. Apparently every employee of the factory went to see the film. People took him seriously and he was given real responsibilities.
I was aware that none of this could solve the fundamental problems Bruno’s catastrophic life had showered on him. During shooting he would sometimes express utter despair about his life and what had happened to him. I told him what he already knew, that working together for five weeks could never repair the damage so many years of imprisonment and catastrophe had caused. I know that in the long term his involvement with the film helped Bruno come to terms with his experiences. It was a unique opportunity for him to reflect on his own life, though there were things he still didn’t understand. Why, when he walked down the street, dirty and neglected, did the girls have no time for him? He would grab one of them and cry, “Why don’t you kiss me!” Bruno earned a good sum of money for his work, which we helped him put to good use, so on the primitive level of economics Bruno benefited from the experience. When I first met him, his apartment was a single room piled high with rubbish. By the time we made Stroszek, he was living in a bigger place, which he proceeded to fill with things he pulled out of the garbage.
I had the feeling that The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser was some kind of summing up after so many years of work, and several characters from earlier films appear in various scenes: Hombre the dwarf sitting on a throne; Walter Steiner as a drunken peasant; composer Florian Fricke as a piano player, the same role he plays in Signs of Life; and Hombrecito from Aguirre, played by Kidlat Tahimik, a Filipino director, speaking in Tagalog. There’s also a young Mozart, the remnant of a project I never got off the ground. It was as if I were drawing a line with the scene, summarising my work up until that moment, seeing where I should go from there. I felt as if I were exploring new directions without constraints, which I continued to do with Heart of Glass.
For which you hypnotised the actors.
Cinema per se has a hypnotic quality to it. I often find myself in an almost unconscious state on the film set, having to ask the person doing continuity what scenes have already been done and what work remains. What a shock to be told it’s already the third week of filming. “How is this possible?” I ask myself. “Where has all the time gone? What have I actually achieved here?” It’s as if I were at a drunken party and somehow arrived home without being aware of it. The next morning three policemen are standing at my bedsid
e, accusing me of having killed someone the night before.
The story of Heart of Glass was loosely adapted from a chapter of a novel called Die Stunde des Todes [The Hour of Death] by Herbert Achternbusch, who played the chicken hypnotiser in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. The book was based on an old folk legend about a peasant prophet in Lower Bavaria who – like Nostradamus – made predictions about the cataclysmic end of the world. The story is about an inventor of a special kind of ruby glass who has died, taking his secret with him to the grave. No details can be found in his home, and after a smelter tries in vain to recreate the formula, the local factory owner sends for the herdsman Hias, known for his prophetic gifts. Hias proves to be of little help, and the factory owner eventually comes to believe that the blood of a young virgin must be added to the glass mixture, so he stabs his housemaid to death. When he announces he now has the knowledge to formulate ruby glass, a euphoric, crazed celebration breaks out in town. Hias has apocalyptic visions because he is able to see further into the future than anyone around him. In his trances he imagines a new world; he foresees the people around him becoming insane and the destruction by fire of the town’s glassworks. The owner burns his own factory down, as prophesised, and the glassblowers search for a culprit. They mistake the prediction of evil for its origin, and Hias is blamed for the fire.
Although at the time I knew very little about hypnosis and it had never crossed my mind to use it in a film, I started to think about the story I had before me, this tale of collective madness, of people aware of an approaching catastrophe yet who do nothing. After all, the idea of people walking into a foreseeable disaster is an unfortunately familiar situation in German history. I wondered how I could stylise the actors, creating sleepwalkers with open eyes, as if in a trance. I wanted performers with fluid, floating movements, which meant the film would depart from commonplace behaviour and gestures. I wanted it to have an atmosphere of hallucination, prophecy and collective delirium that intensified towards the climax. The identities of the actors would remain intact under hypnosis, but they would be stylised. Maybe the title Heart of Glass makes more sense in this light; for me, it refers to a sensitive and fragile inner state, one that has a kind of transparent glacial quality. I wondered if a hypnotised person could open their eyes without waking up, and if people under hypnosis would be able to communicate with each other. Both turned out to be possible. In fact, if you put two hypnotised people in a crowded room, they are intuitively drawn to each other, and learning dialogue is easier because in many cases memory functions better while under hypnosis.
