Frédéric Hambalek’s sophomore feature, What Marielle Knows (Was Marielle weiß), reviewed here, was screened in this year’s Berlinale competition as one of two German films. I was able to interview the director a few days after the premiere.

I’ve read that you don’t think about genres. When did you realize that this story was a comedy?

Frédéric Hambalek: I’m still surprised how much people think this is a comedy. I was extremely surprised at the premiere that people were laughing out loud. I knew that the idea had some funny aspects, and I also think that it had some awkward and dark, cringy, dramatic aspects to it. So yes, I probably think it leans a bit more comical, but I never thought this would be read as much as a comedy as they’re doing it right here in Berlinale.

I’m interested in casting because I think the characters have such good chemistry on screen, which is very important, and they perhaps bring the comedy and the openness of it. Can you talk about that?

FH: Casting is a bit miraculous; it has so much to do with who is available and who wants to do this. We arrived with Julia Jentsch, who plays the mother first, and I thought she would be very good in this role because she [typically] portrays very likeable characters, and this character is maybe not all that likeable. Then, I could look at people who would fit her, and Felix Kramer was interesting because he would typically play very physical characters. I don’t know if you’ve seen his film [Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything], but two years ago at Berlinale, he played this very sexual, male, hands-on guy.

The DIsapproving Swede: After the screening, I talked to German critics who said this story is very German. I know that Germans are very wary of giving their data away and are worried about their privacy. Lots of things are analogue. Do you think that this is a typical German topic?

FH. I don’t think so at all. I think it translates well to every Western society where we face issues of how open we want to be with our lives. Isn’t it in Norway where you have to show all your taxes, and everybody can see?

TDS: It’s like that in Sweden as well. You can see anything. People check on each other before dates. I saw an ad from a company selling extra information with the headline, “Check your date before Valentine’s Day”.

FH: That is incredibly interesting to me. I could not imagine that happening in Germany at all. It sounds a bit funny, though. I could imagine people sweating when they introduced themselves and thinking. Oh, now everybody knows I’m not that person in my presentation.

The interview with Frédéric Hambalek goes Nordic

TDS: So if the film felt very German to those German friends I talked to, it felt pretty Nordic to me—for instance, the environment with those minimalistic interiors. I’m wondering if you can talk about the contrast between the home and the office. As far as I’ve read, the publishing office was the only set in the film.

FH: it was an actual office space, but we transformed it a lot. We were going for very modern places because they are open. You can see everything, they have glass walls and so on. Still, I didn’t want to push too hard on this metaphor. For example, we don’t observe through the glass in the office building, as you would do in a surveillance video. I would always say, “Let’s come up with the camera close and frame them with the camera. Use long lenses, go into a very intimate space and single them out under a very intimidatingly close lens to give the feeling of somebody observing them all the time”.

TDS: Which camera did you use?

We used the Alexa 35. And the more we shot, the more we used longer and longer lenses. In the end, it was like 70 or 100-millimeter lenses.

TDS: Thinking about the music, why the Razumovsky Quartets? Obviously, they are great pieces of music, but was there a specific reason for that choice?

FH: I went about it very intuitively. I knew that the music should be there to give you some sense of something that is not completely real, a bit out of this world. I quickly found the first Beethoven piece, which was used in the scene with the slap in slow-mo. It was intuitive that I thought this was the right tone. It has something ironic to me, but also serious.

TDS: So, the question that every director dreads: Do you have any influences from other directors? Maybe something that takes place in this kind of modern environment.

The film that made me want to be a director was 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I saw on TV when I was 13. didn’t get it, of course, and I turned it off after an hour because I was so bored. But I could not stop thinking about it. All these Kubrick films really taught me early on that the art form is very free.

TDS: Nothing specific for this film?

When pressed on that question, I always thought about Force Majeure by Ruben Östlund just because of how they are acting. You will write this now, but I say it anyway. And I thought, “Look at this film”. I still thought that my film would get away from it in a way. I looked at that film as a way of checking out someone who does something you might think is in the right vein. At the same time, I knew that my film would be formally different.