“Storytelling is always dealing with the aftermath”: An Interview with Christoph Hochhäusler on Death Will Come

Christoph Hochhäusler’s densely layered seventh feature, La mort viendra (Death Will Come, 2024), is a French-language neo-noir unfolding primarily in Brussels – the capital of Belgium and location of the European Union’s parliament. Toward its seaside-set end, the terminally ill kingpin Charles Mahr (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), confronted by Tez (Sophie Verbeeck), the hitwoman he hired – allegedly to avenge the murder of a trusted courier whom the police, tipped off by one of Mahr’s competitors, caught smuggling a large sum of Mahr’s money across the border – tells the assassin: “That’s the question, after all: How should stories end?” To which Tez replies, “Yes, that’s the question, but everyone has to answer it for themselves,” as she shoves back to her employer an envelope containing the second half of the payment for the hitjob for which the aging crime boss had hired her. Knowing from Carlo (Nassim Rachi), whom Mahr – to the dismay of one of Mahr’s other men, Zinédine (Mourade Zeguendi) – appears to have been grooming as his successor, that the latter whispered something in Tez’s ear after she mortally wounded him at the end of an explosion of violence, Mahr wants to know what Tez might have learned from his man – but she demurs and simply walks away. 

Without wanting to spoil the ending of what is a remarkable, though (thus far) underrated, crime film that has largely been misjudged by the initial critical reception following its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival in August 2024, we offer this partial description of Hochhäusler’s first non-German-language film’s penultimate scene as an aperçu to whet readers’ appetite for more. For this brief interaction at Mahr’s seaside home – the cinematically beautifully rendered grey-blue of the evening sky and ocean evokes (the also underrated) Un flic (A Cop, 1972), the final film by the undisputed master of the genre, Jean-Pierre Melville – encapsulates the director’s narrative strategy that ever since his feature debut, Milchwald (This Very Moment, 2003), he has been finetuning into a veritable auteurist signature. It is this signature, however, that might be causing viewers, including many critics, the kind of heartburn (or is it a stomach ulcer?) for which Carlo gives his mentor some medical relief after leaving in disgust a business meeting in an early scene. A different crime organisation – led by Patric de Boer (Marc Limpach), a fur-coat-wearing, squash-racket smashing sleazebag who ultimately may be little more than a submissive boytoy of his older lover, the shrewd lawyer Julie Despontes (Hilde van Mieghem) – tries to persuade Mahr to invest in a new business enterprise: a virtual reality eros centre. The advantage of this “dis-embodied” seedy venture in the age of Covid-19 is that this version of the sex industry no longer depends on the physical health of the women who earn a living as sex workers – which in the world of these criminals counts as progress relative to the unreliable nature of the kind of traditional bordellos managed by drugged-up losers whose incompetence forces Mahr to demonstrate by deploying vicious force that he does not tolerate any excuses from his underlings for failing to deliver the share of profit that Mahr believes is his due.

Mahr (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) deploying vicious force

Not coincidentally, in a film about the relationship between opaqueness and transparency, seeing and being seen, sight and blindness – a theme almost comically introduced in the very scene in which de Boer fails to persuade Mahr to invest in his VR-sex idea and echoed by the painting used to smuggle money, Giuseppe Maria Crespi’s “Hecuba Blinding Polymnestor,” not to mention the intriguing yet difficult-to-parse role the visually impaired Mela (Delphine Bibet), Mahr’s ex-lover who runs a high-end escort service that not only gives her access to influential men in the European Parliament but also allows her to infiltrate de Boer’s inner circle – viewers are bound to struggle with making sense of the labyrinthine plot that is infused with a host of relationships the nature of which is often obscure even to the protagonists themselves. What we do know, however, is that Mahr does not want to have anything to do with this newfangled way of doing business – with, if you will, this neoliberalisation of crime – just as in Hochhäusler’s previous film, Bis ans Ende der Nacht (Till the End of the Night, 2023), one group of criminals prefers their crime to take place in embodied fashion, face-to-face in “dirty back alleys,” rather than in the dis-embodied virtual realm of criminal platform capitalism that the film’s “odd couple,” an undercover queer cop and a transwoman, who used to be lovers when she was still a man, try to infiltrate.¹ This concern with the “fate of the body” under conditions of the neoliberal platformisation of capitalism and the attendant increasing virtualisation of social life is arguably a topic that runs like a red thread through Hochhäusler’s work. We can find it, for example, in his third feature, Unter dir die Stadt (The City Below, 2010), in which the banker-protagonist Roland Cordes (Robert Hinger-Bühler) gets his kicks by merely watching a junkie shoot up in front of him: whereas the latter needs the physical infusion of dope into his body to feel, however abjectly, his body, the captain-of-neoliberal-industry just needs to look, without touching, to get the kind of high his pristine capitalist lifestyle no longer affords him. Or consider Falscher Bekenner (I Am Guilty, 2005), Hochhäusler’s second feature, in which the role of the body is foregrounded in the person of Armin (Constantin von Jascheroff), who fantasises about and falsely confesses to having caused a car accident – a fantasy with consequences in the real physical world that are further inflected by the uncertain ontological status of the film’s homoerotic sex scenes: the degree of their embodiment is, at the very least, in doubt. The film memorably ends with Armin, yearning for physical connection, slyly smiling into the camera. Throughout the film, his desire is driven by his effort to become visible, to be touched by someone, anyone; ironically, it is at the very moment when he is arrested – when, in other words, he is touched by the body of the State and thus, as Hochhäusler argues in an interview with me, “by everyone” – that he is afforded the sensation of becoming-visible. But this becoming-visible is notoriously challenging for viewers to read – a hermeneutic difficulty encapsulated in Armin’s indiscernible smile that the reflecting car window mediates as he is looking at the camera and thus us. ²

Armin (Constantin von Jascheroff) smiling at the end of I Am Guilty

Charles Mahr, whose own body is breaking down and who eschews the VR eros centre idea, is, then, holding on to an old-school, traditional sense of doing business and, indeed, of being in the world. His steadfast refusal to “go with the times” repeats a well-worn crime genre trope, perhaps most famously instantiated by Marlon Brando’s Godfather’s refusal to invest in the drug business. But in a way, Mahr is also like those viewers critical of Hochhäusler’s films: just like Mahr, who does not want anything to do with the kind of modern crime methods impatient upstarts like de Boer embrace, so these critics are traditionalists who prefer their genre films straightforward or “pure.” Which is to say that such viewers might be uncomfortable precisely with the fact that Hochhäusler’s auteurist cinematic strategy is neither to simply fulfill or cater to the fullest to (old school) genre expectations and their attendant spectatorial pleasures nor simply to reject them. After all, Hochhäusler is no Angela Schanelec, to point to the one Berlin School filmmaker who is arguably the most hostile to the conventions of narrative – and thus also genre – cinema, nor is he Christian Petzold, who constructs his films by deliberately extracting from the history of cinema genre plots as the basis for his own variations thereof.³ 

Neither unreflectively affirmative of nor intellectually antagonistic towards such expectations and their attendant spectatorial pleasures, Hochhäusler instead approaches the genres he engages agonistically – whether the crime film in form of its hitman subgenre and the policier, as is the case with his two most recent efforts, the newspaper film in the case of Die Lügen der Sieger (The Lies of the Victors, 2014), the horror film in the case of his contribution to the Dreileben experiment, Eine Minute Dunkel (One Minute of Darkness, 2011), the science fiction film (see his 2009 short film Séance), the corporate thriller (The City Below), the coming-of-age drama (I Am Guilty), or his debut feature (This Very Moment), a hybrid of marital drama and children’s fairy tale. ⁴ We say agonistically rather than “antagonistically” precisely because we want to appeal to a sense of agon that, as Samuel A. Chambers, drawing on Bonnnie Honig’s founding work in Political Theory on agonism, explains,

implies a deep respect and concern for the other; indeed, the Greek agon refers most directly to an athletic contest oriented not merely toward victory or defeat, but emphasizing the importance of the struggle itself – a struggle that cannot exist without the opponent. Victory through forfeit or default, or over an unworthy opponent, comes up short compared to a defeat at the hands of a worthy opponent – a defeat that still brings honour. An agonistic discourse will therefore be one marked not merely by conflict but, just as important, by mutual admiration. (emphasis ours) ⁵

Admiring the “classical” constructions of the crime genre – whether Fritz Lang’s noirs or Melville’s (certainly post-classical) performances of classical noir narrative codes – Hochhäusler attempted to make with Death Will Come a genre film that is, as he says in the interview below, “this time around […] not too much of a hybrid, as was the case with some of my previous efforts,” adding, however, that the very idea of making “‘real’ genre films […] is based on a rather problematic purist idea of what a genre film is.”

Which is, perhaps, to say: the only way of making “real” genre films – especially today – is precisely by “emphasizing the importance of the struggle itself” that is involved in trying to succeed in making a “pure” genre film, that is, in ultimately defeating the internal resistance of genre to the very notion of generic purity itself. In a way, it is the agonistic encounter with the impossibility of succeeding in the task of making a pure genre film, of defeating genre cinema’s “tenacious resistance” to the idealist notion of purity itself, that seems to define Hochhäusler’s approach. ⁶ And this leads to films, such as The City Below, The Lies of the Victors, Till the End of the Night, or Death Will Come, that – inevitably, even necessarily – resist viewers’ (however understandable) desire for easy legibility (and the viewerly pleasures that come with it) in ways that are not too far removed from, say, a film such as Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1944). 

We are not suggesting that Hochhäusler is Hawks-like or that Death Will Come is as perfect of a film as The Big Sleep certainly is. But, just like this noir masterpiece, so Death Will Come – intentionally or not – stiff-arms any attempt to be concisely, and thus reductively, summarised. Which is to say: it sutures the viewer into the very struggle itself to do the virtually impossible and give a coherent account of it. 

So, here is another try: At the most basic level, Death Will Come, which Hochhäusler thinks of – quite rightly, in our view – as his most classically constructed film to date, tells a well-worn story of an aging crime boss, who, we realise, knows that death will come for him. In his effort to exercise tight control over his succession, he finds himself fending off younger challengers who have managed to infiltrate his organisation, whether in order to get him to agree to invest in a VR-Sex-Centre – precisely the kind of crime-related business that, as experienced crime genre viewers know, traditionalists such as Mahr despise – or, if all else fails, to take his organisation over by violent means. Genre-typically, of course, betrayal from inside the organisation requires revenge, for the purposes of which Mahr hires from outside his organisation a “neutral” assassin: in this case, the hitwoman Tez. Equally genre-typically, Tez quickly discovers not only that the job for which she was hired is considerably less straightforward than she was told but also that her own role in what becomes increasingly a hall-of-mirrors-like scenario (evoking Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai [1947], as well as one of Hochhäusler’s favourite films, Melville’s L’armées des ombres [Army of Shadows, 1969]) prevents her from clearly seeing who is double-crossing whom. She therefore must rely for guidance on, ironically, the older and blind Mela, who is playing her own shady games. By the end, death has come for an increasing number of characters, yet this fulfillment of the genre’s typical teleology does not lead to epistemological certainty: the film’s ending essentially poses at least as many questions as it answers and, in so doing, annoys – judging by much of the reception – those bloggers and seasoned film critics alike who prefer their crime-film packages to be neatly tied up with pretty ribbons (though most of them would neither put it in those terms nor admit to harbouring such a desire).

Mela (Delphine Bibet) guiding Tez (Sophie Veerbeck)

Along the way, Hochhäusler consistently pursues his long-held hope to activate viewers into collaborating in the telling of the story, rather than merely consuming it. In other words, a viewer might derive pleasure from watching Hochhäusler’s films – not least Death Will Come, which, to be sure, does feature a series of well-executed scenes that, to our minds at least, very much cater towards spectatorial desires for genre-typical pleasures – not primarily from the staging of variations of genre-typical set pieces; nor from the deconstruction (let alone destruction) of the logic of, in this case, the “gun for hire” subgenre. Rather, the location of pleasure in Hochhäusler’s films is in the agonistic struggle with the genre itself. Death Will Come performatively stages this very struggle by dint of its obvious admiration for the very genre rules that it nevertheless does not allow to atrophy into clichés precisely because (no matter how pleasurable they may be) doing so would undo the demand for viewers to experientially participate in the agonistic struggle of telling the story – indeed, in addressing the question of how the story should end that, according to Tez, “everyone has to answer for themselves.” Which is also to say: any answer that someone offers to this question partakes in a “contest [that is] oriented not merely toward victory or defeat, but [that emphasises] the importance of the struggle itself.”

It is thus logically consistent that it is Tez who derails Mahr’s attempt to succeed in his desire to direct the path of the story he has been (more or less successfully) engineering all along to its teleologically predetermined end. Whereas Mahr, the traditionalist, ultimately operates according to an ethos of destructive antagonism – as he tells Tez when hiring her, “The man responsible for [his courier’s] death must pay […] with his life,” even if it is he himself, as Hochhäusler’s camera, helmed once again by Reinhold Vorschneider, suggests by showing us Mahr looking at his own reflection at that very moment – Tez embodies an agonistic disposition (which does not prevent her from killing, when necessary). Indeed, it is arguably Sophie Verbeeck’s fierce, cat-like performance as the contract killer that embodies in remarkably vital ways the agonistic mode of relationality that the director seems to embrace and deploy as the fuel for his own struggle with the (im)possibility of making (German) genre films.

Mahr looking at his own reflection while affirming that the man responsible must pay with his own life

The script wisely keeps Tez’s backstory entirely opaque. Unlike many, if not most, films featuring female assassins – such as The Long Kiss Goodnight (Renny Harlin, 1996), Colombiana (Olivier Megaton, 2011), Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) and Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004), or David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) – Death Will Come neither reduces Tez to a traumatic experience that caused her to pursue such an “unwomanly” profession nor makes her the playball of governmental (or parental) – either way, usually patriarchal – forces, as do classics of the genre such as Luc Besson’s La femme Nikita (1990) and John Badham’s Point of No Return (1993) but also the more recent Cate Blanchet-vehicle Hanna (Joe Wright, 2011); nor does Hochhäusler’s film give Tez “superwoman”-like skills as numerous fantasy action films as well as spy films do, such as Doug Liman’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005) and David Leitch’s Atomic Blond (2017). Instead, the one actor Verbeeck’s performance brings to mind the most is Alain Delon because of both his acting style – which has often been described as cat-like due to his graceful, feline-like movements, including in Melville’s “ground zero” films of the genre, Le samouraï (Le Samouraï, 1967) and Le cercle rouge (The Red Circle, 1970) – and his high cheekbones, a physical trait Verbeeck shares with him. That this is neither merely our entirely subjective impression nor sheer coincidence becomes apparent if one knows not only of Hochhäusler’s deep admiration for Melville but also that he and Ulrich Peltzer had originally co-written the script for Delon. ⁷ Hochhäusler, who met Delon at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010, recounts in his commemorative social media post on the day of Delon’s passing that he experienced the legendary actor as “charming” and that the then already 75-year-old actor was waiting for the right script to return from retirement. Though, as Hochhäusler acknowledges, this may very well have been Delon’s standard answer when approached by enterprising directors hoping to cast him, he nevertheless tried to hurry up and develop a script with him in mind. Yet it was already too late by the time he was able to get funding going for his idea (the challenges of financing the film, especially a French-language film by a German director, are discussed at length in the following interview). 

Death Will Come

Alain Delon as Jef Costello in Le samouraï

While this is certainly a shame – how amazing would it have been if we now had a Berlin School film starring Delon? – the struggle to secure funding for his projects is one that has been only all-too-present throughout Hochhäusler’s career, on which the filmmaker elaborates below. Despite these challenges and the deferrals they created, it must be said that Verbeeck’s brilliant performance, though one she made entirely her own, may well be the most Delon-like performance by any actor to date. This is, we think, the case precisely because Hochhäusler directed her performance in an a-psychological manner, thereby drawing out her predator, cat-like movements expressive of a carefully measured virility that renders her interiority not only opaque but also other-to the clichés to which female characters are all-too-often reduced in male-directed films. From the moment she is introduced in the film’s second act, Tez remains not only unknowable but also self-determined. And we think it is her irreducible self-determination that is at the core of what may be the film’s most astonishing scene – one that is perhaps paradoxically not overly important to the film’s plot, not least as it appears to open up a door within the film onto an entirely different one whose story it would be our job to tell. In these five minutes taking place at a nightclub, which are cinematically more expressionistic, even dream-like, than the rest of the film, the film essentially allegorises spectatorial desire and posits that such desire is more intense precisely when it is not desire “for” an object or another person but for the desire of the other. 

Sitting on a couch, Mela asks Tez, in return for information, to describe the women present – but only those who interest Tez. As Tez describes first a guest, then a bartender whom she shortly thereafter approaches – Hochhäusler ends the scene without ever revealing whether the obvious frisson between the two women has led to more – we sense the director’s admiration for the potential inhering in genre filmmaking, not least the possibility to temporarily suspend any spectatorial desire for genre-typical plot developments and their more or less innovative realisations and instead to intensify desire itself precisely not as desire for resolution or legibility but for desire itself: what Mela, to return to the allegory we are trying to tease out here, desires is neither Tez nor the women Tez expresses interest in, but Tez’s desire – its affective intensity. This desire is an intransitive desire in that it is not “for” anything tangible. And this, it seems to us, is the key to the kind of agonistic aesthetic politics that defines Hochhäusler’s cinema, as it is a cinema in which struggling itself – conceived intransitively – is the point, rather than any victory or defeat that, perhaps inevitably, eventually results from the struggle.

Mela and Tez on a couch in a club

The question, then, may be which kind of viewing bodies have the capacity to work with this body of genre cinema and, moreover, what it takes to develop capacities that afford those bodies to embrace the struggle itself, not its outcome, as the location of spectatorial pleasure. In any case, it is no small irony that the very agonistic ethos permeating his oeuvre may be what antagonises viewers, critics, and film-funding bodies enough for that very antagonism towards his insistence on an aesthetics of agonism – that is also expressive of both an ethical and political disposition – to be on the verge of defeating him.

Death will Come premiered at the Locarno Film Festival on August 8, 2024. It has since also played at the International Film Festival Mannheim-Heidelberg, the Tallin Black Nights Film Festival, the São Paulo International Film Festival, the Around the World in 14 Films Festival Berlin, and the Shanghai International Film Festival. We spoke with the director about his latest film via Zoom on December 6, 2024. ⁸

Christoph Hochhäusler

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MA: Where did you get the idea for La mort viendra (Death Will Come, 2024)? How long did it take you to develop it? Did the idea for the film change during development? 

This film is based on my impression of Brussels. Christina Nord, who used to work at the Goethe Institute there, had invited me to curate a series of films at the Cinémathèque. I was really impressed by the cityscape, the contrasts between its beauty and ugliness. I immediately felt at home. Yet I thought it was strange that while I knew about Manneken Pis and the Atomium, and given how often Brussels is in the news because of the European Union’s importance in our lives in Europe, I didn’t have a clear picture in mind of what the city looks like.

So, I thought it’d be fascinating to make a film there. While I was walking the streets of Brussels, I thought about what kind of film it could be. The first idea that came to mind was that of a gangster film, because of both the shadiness and beauty of Brussels, but also because I think that if you set a film in a place you don’t really know you should not pretend that you are capable of making a realistic drama or something along those lines in such an environment. I therefore thought it would be appropriate to make a “movie-land” film, a film that’s basically set within the cinema itself.

The development of the script was impacted by many aspects, including a health diagnosis I received that fortunately turned out to be incorrect: doctors thought I might have lung cancer, a possibility that hung like a cloud over my life for about four months. This experience entered the character of Charles Mahr (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing).

The original plan for the script was quite different, however. We had originally applied for funding to create a modern adaptation of Friedrich Schiller’s poem Die Bürgschaft (The Pledge, 1799). We eventually abandoned this idea and asked for permission to pursue another one. That was around 2016. Eventually we received German funding, but then came COVID, and we couldn’t find the money in Belgium and France. At the last minute, my producer, Bettina Brokemper, found a co-production partner in Luxembourg, Amour Fou, and they brought in a producer from Belgium, Tarantula. After it took us a long time to put the funding together, we had to make the film very quickly because the deadline for spending the funds from Germany was approaching. We basically went into production while we were still in post-production for my previous film, Bis ans Ende der Nacht (Till the End of the Night, 2023). ⁹ I started shooting only two days after the premiere of that film at the Berlinale in February 2023.

JF: Do you usually draw inspiration for your films from locations, as you did with Brussels in this case?

It often happens that I see a place and have the feeling that I want to make a film there. It inspires me to have to imagine a story in a place with which I’m not so familiar. While my films usually don’t start with a place, places become an important factor when crafting the story and can affect how a scene is written. But Death Will Come really started with my impression of Brussels.

JF: Two questions about Brussels. First, how do you think it functions in your imagination and in the German imagination as a place? Second, does Brussels have any kind of cinematic past for you, considering that films, especially crime films, are often tied to certain cities.

I really didn’t have an image of Brussels, which is why I was so surprised, and I think most Germans don’t have a clear picture of what Brussels is like either. Of course, we know some buildings from the European Union, such as the Parliament Building. But it’s not a city that had a shape in my imagination.

European Union’s Paul-Henri Spaak building

There are, of course, important films made in Brussels, especially by Chantal Ackermann. And there’s one film that has become dear to me, but only quite recently: Jerzy Skolimowski’s Le départ (The Departure, 1967). Although Death Will Come shares some of the locations with it, I didn’t know The Departure when shooting my film. But I’m not an expert on Brussels in cinema. I cannot say that I had an imaginary Brussels as I have an imaginary London, Paris, Rome, New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles. For example, when I went to Los Angeles the first time, I was really surprised because the image of the city I had in mind based on the many films I’d seen set in LA was quite different from my experience being there. Nevertheless, there was this image of a city, whereas in the case of Brussels I really didn’t have an image to start with. I thought this was interesting and a strange coincidence, because maybe that’s part of why the European Union is not in as good of a shape as it should be – because it’s this abstract thing: “Brussels” is code for corruption and for a politics that is over the heads of the EU’s citizens.

MA: The plot of Death Will Come could be said to reflect this, in that it is quite complex and convoluted and can be challenging to disentangle, especially at first viewing. So, this lack of transparency people associate with Brussels seems to be baked into the film’s plot.

This is your seventh feature, and while most of your films include some genre aspects – e.g., the different inflections of the thriller film in Falscher Bekenner (I’m Guilty, 2005), Unter dir die Stadt (The City Below, 2010), and Eine Minute Dunkel (One Minute of Darkness, 2011), of the newspaper film in Die Lügen der Sieger (The Lies of the Victors, 2014), or of the policier in Till the End of the Night – Death Will Come seems to be your most unabashedly “pure” genre film to date. It’s almost classical in its construction and mise-en-scène, yet it does offer modern twists, not least the fact that the film centres a hitwoman rather than the well-established figure of a hitman that we know from films such as Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le samouraï (Le Samouraï, 1967), Fred Zinnemann’s The Day of the Jackal (1973), Luc Besson’s Léon (Léon: The professional, 1994), Wong Kar-Wai’s Do lok tin si (Fallen Angels, 1995), or Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004). How did you approach the genre of the crime film and, in particular, of the assassin film? What attracted you to this genre in particular? What do you think is the greatest potential of this genre? 

Tez (Sophie Verbeeck) as hitwoman in Death Will Come

The genre gives me great pleasure, including some of the films you named. A big part of French crime cinema appeals to me, but also New Hollywood crime cinema such as Ulu Grosbard’s Straight Time (1976). I also really love Michael Mann, Peter Yates, and so on. I think one of the main reasons I really enjoy some of these films is that they can do away with certain kinds of realism that seem to be suffocating contemporary cinema. For a long time now, I’ve been striving to make a more allegorical cinema, one that’s closer to fairy tales: films with a code that the audience must decipher, films that are playing with certain expectations. Part of the joy of genre cinema is really that it’s an invitation to play with expectations and established patterns that you can nuance or undermine, knowing that people will notice this because they know the conventions. I’m attracted to this aspect of an active audience that knows what to expect and that can appreciate deviation, so to speak. Genre was always about innovation precisely because there are many well-established elements that you can put together in one way or another. You have a measure of freedom to experiment and play around with those elements. That’s something I really like.

As for Death Will Come, I really tried to make a genre film this time around that is not too much of a hybrid, as was the case with some of my previous efforts. One reason might be that they received a lot of criticism from genre-loving audiences, claiming that they are not “real” genre films. This criticism is based on a rather problematic purist idea of what a genre film is. For some reason I never fully tapped into this territory, so I tried to do it this time around. I aimed to remain within the limits of this genre and then to innovate within this established framework. Because there are so many films about killers, assassins, and dying gangsters, I figured I could emphasise other aspects. So, yes, the plot is labyrinthine. But my hope is that the audience is willing to give up this desire for being clearly led from point A to point B and instead embrace the many detours this film takes.

MA: As a German filmmaker, were you also thinking that German cinema has barely any entries in the genre of the hitman film. Of course, there are crime films by, say, Fritz Lang, but I can’t think of many films with hitmen (let alone hitwomen).

 This is one of the main reasons why I wanted to make a film in the francophone sphere. In Germany, the genre of the gangster film is not well established, though there are some exceptions: Rolf Olsen’s Blutiger Freitag (Bloody Friday, 1972), Roland Klick’s Supermarkt (Supermarket, 1974), Dominik Graf’s beautiful Die Katze (The Cat, 1988), Thomas Arslan’s Im Schatten (In the Shadows, 2010) and its sequel, Verbrannte Erde (Scorched Earth, 2024), and a few others. But it never became a kind of go-to genre in German cinema. It has never been widely popular, notwithstanding exceptions such as The Cat, which was somewhat of a box office hit mostly due to its stars, Götz George and Gudrun Landgrebe. In Germany, the crime film genre, let alone the subgenre of the hitman film, was never well-established and thus never benefited from having a built-in audience. I think this has also to do with German culture. Germans are very uneasy about embracing the seedy underbelly of society and its bad effects. They enjoy when far-away Hollywood does it, but they have an almost Protestant aversion to embracing crime at home, let alone the affective, irrational allure of violence. So, there might be a cultural reason for this lack of enthusiasm in Germany for making films in this genre.

JF: It’s interesting that the longstanding TV police series Tatort (Crime Scene, 1970 – present) and Polizeiruf 110 (Police Call 110, 1971 – present) are so important in German culture, much more so than gangster films. I would suspect that this has indeed to do with the deeper cultural issues you hint at. 

I love the idea of genre audiences being active audiences. The typical critique of genre cinema is that it’s repetitive and pacifies viewers. But I think you’re exactly right: the audience shares a kind of language, a shorthand, with the filmmakers and thus can actively look for variations. One of the great things about crime films and film noirs is their ability to more abstractly make points about society, not least also social decay. 

But I want to return to a phrase you just used to express some misgivings about where cinema is today: “suffocating realism.” I think this is especially interesting given that the first iteration of scholarship about the Berlin School, with which you are associated, really emphasised these films’ realism.¹⁰ I’d be curious to hear you talk more about this.

I think it was always a misunderstanding to call the Berlin School realist. If you look at Angela Schanelec’s films: they are certainly not realistic at all. Thomas Arslan’s films, too, are far from examples of realism. The same goes for Christian Petzold’s. I’m certainly also far from practicing realism. Granted, Valeska Grisebach might be somewhat attracted to realism, as is Henner Winckler. ¹¹

To be sure, realism is a very tricky notion. What I meant with “suffocating realism” is that today we frequently see such literal representations of life – representations that often verge on the banal – that take up a large amount of screen time because there is a sense that in order to honour the time you need to cook a meal or to drive a car you have to have very long sequences about these mundane actions, but not to transcend them but to basically replicate or affirm the mundane. Some of these films I really find annoying because the audience, in my view, doesn’t have an active role to play in them. While this might be a sociological realism, so to speak, in that it accurately records certain things we do, it often does not even do this in a documentary fashion, where one would be exposed to the unruliness of reality. That’s what attracts me to documentaries: that reality is not so easy to tame. It’s a beast, whereas the kind of realism I’m talking about now is the opposite of a beast: it’s predictable, and it limits the involvement of the audience, preventing it from actively playing along, inventing meaning, and taking what it experiences into their own lives, and so on.

I might be very influenced by my father, who would often try to find applications for the Biblical stories with which he was most impressed. He would often say something like: isn’t this like Peter in the garden Gethsemane? And this kind of transfer I always enjoyed, even as a non-believer. Consider, for example, Biblical parables such as the one about the workers in the vineyard, about everyone getting the same reward, even those who start late. As a boy, I really did not understand this, but this question of whether it’s fair that someone who basically joins the cause in the last hour of his life gets the same reward as the guy who is there from the start stayed with me. The most powerful of these stories are full of contradictions and cannot very easily be transferred into life. I mean: how should I understand this parable? And that’s an activity I really enjoy with film, too. I think genre cinema is very often about things like this. For example, Batman is about this rich guy who is drawn to the dark but tries to do good. Is this even possible? It seems to be a very modern metaphor for a contradiction that you can’t resolve. And the same is true for vampires: on the one hand, we sympathise with vampires, but at the same time we discover something in them that has to do with capitalism. I enjoy these transfers, this kind of poetic reworking, of something you have seen or heard into your own life.

JF: Death Will Come is a French-language film. Had you been planning to do a French-language film for a long time? Was directing it different – harder – from your other films, which are all in German?

I had French projects from very early on in my career, because it happens that the French liked my films, and I was always drawn to French culture’s cinephilia. For a long time, I’ve been thinking that making films in French could be a natural fit for me. I came very close to doing a period film with Isabelle Huppert in 2014, but it didn’t work out. So, the idea of making a film in French is not new to me, but this is the first time it happened. 

My French is serviceable but not at the level of a native speaker. Yet I found directing the film surprisingly easy, because I learned that directing isn’t so much about saying things. As you know, I like to talk, and in German I sometimes think I can give very poetic advice to my actors. But on this shoot, I discovered that this might not be necessary and that the more important thing for me to do may be to communicate trust and be really attentive to an actor’s performance. I think judging a performance is something that’s more or less universal: you can do this even if you don’t speak the actor’s language.

Of course, there were aspects I wasn’t able to judge. For example, I could not assess whether the pronunciation of a given word was too streetwise or too bourgeois. But I had a close friend on the set – the French director Aurélia Georges – who helped me with such linguistic as well as cultural questions. She was present throughout the shoot.

JF: So, in terms of how shooting in a language other than your native German changed your approach to directing, can we say that it simplified the direction you’d give actors?

Yes. After a while, I understood that all this verbal communication is not actually the level on which most actors operate anyway. I’m not saying that my German direction is all about words, but I understood that it can be a blessing to not be able to say the most subtle of things.

JF: The performances, especially of Louis-Do de Lencquesaing and Sophie Verbeeck, who plays the hitwoman Tez, are excellent. They’re expertly physical. But beyond your work with the actors, did you find that the film culture in the French-speaking world is different than in Germany? Do you think these differences affected the final film?

Charles Mahr (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) in Death Will Come

It’s difficult to say. The Belgian film scene is very mature, very cinephilic. They know a lot of things. They have worked on fantastic films before. I really enjoyed working with the Belgian crew. That’s slightly different in Luxembourg. I really enjoyed working with them, too, but it’s a small country, and they don’t have the same depth of experience. But I was lucky to find very young up-and-coming talents, such as Nigji Sanges, who did the music, and Michèle Tonteling, the costume designer. It was a good experience. There are differences in organisational and communication style. There were also some conflicts, because each of these countries work a little differently. Of course, there are some cultural issues that manifest themselves in terms of how to manage a set, for example. In Belgium, it’s customary for the production team to always be on or in proximity of the set, whereas in Germany the production team stays in its office. So, they are this traveling circus, which has pros and cons. Obviously, the pros are that they’re really close to the problems that occur; the cons are that it’s a bit more unstable. It seems a bit less efficient sometimes. 

MA: I remember that the project you had hoped to do with Isabelle Huppert was set during the Nazi occupation of France and had to do with the vexed issue of the French collaboration, which ultimately seemed to make your potential partners in France uneasy.¹² I imagine the same is true for the Belgians, who might not exactly be keen on Germans, let alone on Germans being in charge. Did you feel any manifestations of this larger history between these two countries?

I was surprised by how present this history is. For example, for insurance purposes, I had to undergo a medical examination. The doctor who examined me and whom I’d never met before mentioned the war three times. Obviously, Belgium is a small country that was attacked by Germany in two world wars. A lot of pain and bad memories linger from this traumatic experience. Thus, the question of why a German would even want to make a film in Belgium was raised from all sides. What does it mean, and why do I think I can do this? 

Indeed, to a certain degree, this film doesn’t have the proper parents. Usually, when you make a German-language film, people say it’s a German film. Now, however, the Germans don’t say it’s a German film, and the Belgians say it’s not a Belgian film. The film has a kind of orphaned existence. I was surprised by this: after all, Germany and Belgium are neighbouring countries whose living conditions are quite similar, and there’s so much daily collaboration and cooperation in the European Union. But it’s still a complicated story, also for the Germans. I had to write many texts justifying my desire to do a French-language film in Belgium. The whole funding structure in Europe continues to be very national, which is a shame. It’s very complicated to make a film with German money that is not set in Germany.

JF: One of the things that I find very intriguing about your film’s production environment – and these are questions begged by its Locarno world premiere, too – is precisely the cross-border co-production work that you have undertaken with this project. But this is a media environment in which such cross-border productions still struggle – at the same time that streamers have become quite transnational. Could you say a few words about how you, as a filmmaker, think about the streaming services and how you think that is changing the cinema landscape in Europe and in Germany?

 I’m in favour of a transnational EU film policy. Because so far, they have left intact the territory system due to fierce resistance to change. Filmmaking in Europe is still very much a national or even regional affair. Most of the producers argue they need this system to raise money and survive. So, we don’t have a fully integrated European market for audiovisual media, and this is problematic, I think, especially because the big streaming companies already do have that. I mean Netflix is everywhere: they are transnational and don’t have the limits we have. 

 But I think the so-called golden age of streaming is already over, because now that the streaming wars have basically been settled, with Netflix having emerged as dominant, everyone is cutting costs, and streaming is simply becoming the new TV. And the films that are produced by streamers more and more seem to subscribe to older TV styles. I don’t think there’s much hope that streaming will be a partner for a new dawn of cinema or anything like that. For a while, they spent a lot of money on prestige. But I think only a few very big names profited from this generosity. A film like Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019) would probably never have been made in this shape without the streamers.

 With German-based funding at the present, the big overhaul that was promised – with tax rebates, more automatic funding, and the obligation for streamers to invest in German cinema – will not come any time soon. A lot of people are frustrated and fear that there will be bankruptcies. It’s a difficult time for German cinema now.¹³

MA: This is now the third film that you have co-written with German novelist Ulrich Peltzer. Could you comment on the nature of your collaboration?¹⁴

Years ago, I spent some time at the artist residence Villa Aurora in Los Angeles to work on the script for what would become The Lies of the Victors. I was struggling a bit. When I met the Austrian writer Kathrin Röggla there, I asked her if she would possibly be interested in collaborating. As she did not see herself as a screenwriter, she declined but mentioned a friend, Ulrich Peltzer, who she said was very much into cinema. She thought we might be on the same wavelength, which turned out to be true. We met in 2005 or 2006 and immediately felt that it’s fun to talk about cinema together. That’s what our collaboration mostly is: a dialogue. We meet and write and talk. Usually, Ulrich sits at the computer. We talk about how a scene should be, then he writes it down and reads it aloud, and I give feedback, suggesting what a character might say and so on. It’s really a dialogue, and this conversational style of working really suits me. It’s fun. We are very fond of each other. We are currently working on a new script. One of the reasons for this harmony, I think, is that for Ulrich it’s a side gig. He is primarily a novelist, so for him script writing is basically a holiday. He knows that he’s writing for me as a director. I’m usually the one who gives the first impulse: I tell him that I want to make a gangster film, or that I want to make a film about David and Bathsheba in modern times, as with The City Below, and so on. This is usually how our projects start.

MA: To what extent do you ever discuss the kind of language your protagonists should speak?

I think Ulrich has a very distinct way of writing dialogue. His influence in terms of dialogue on my films is significant. If you compare the films I have written, or, as with Till the End of the Night, that Florian Plumeyer has written, you notice there’s a big difference in terms of how the dialogue works. Ulrich’s style of dialogue is such that answers are never given at the right time. 

There’s this Charles Ives’ piece “The Unanswered Question” (1908). In a way it names what Ulrich likes in dialogue, and I came to love it: you pose a question, and then maybe two or three answers later you get the answer that addresses the first question. There’s always this kind of lunge [Ausfallschritt], like in boxing, where you step aside so you don’t catch the blow. I think a big part of the aesthetics of dialogue in my films co-written by Ulrich is due to his poetics that he has developed over many books. Of course, it’s transformed in my films. It’s not the same as on the page, but it’s influenced by his books, by his style of writing.

JF: In this case it certainly had to be. You wrote it in German with Ulrich, and then you had it translated.

It was tricky because much of the wit, fun, and rhythm of the German dialogue was necessarily lost or at least transformed. I was happy to convince a friend of mine, Alban Lefranc. He’s a French writer and publisher of a German-French literature magazine called La mer gelée. He also wrote three somewhat biographical novels, about real life German personalities, biographical fictions really, one of them on Rainer Werner Fassbinder. ¹⁵ He translated the script. But I’m not entirely capable of judging how close it is to the original German. He’s a great writer in his own right, so I really trust him.

JF: Were there things that he thought would not work well in French?

Yes, matters of small wordplay and references. Nothing serious, but it adds up.

MA: One German sentence remains untranslated, however, and it’s a great little moment in the film, as it throws the audience for a loop as much as it does Carlo (Nassim Rachi). As Charles Mahr shows him his old office and reveals that he had a significant relationship with Mela (Delphine Bibet) prior to her blindness, Mahr, in melancholic mood, recites the one German sentence his father taught him: “Wunderbar ist die Katz mit Hundehaar” (literally: wonderful is the cat with dog hair). As Carlo, incredulous, tries to repeat it, Mahr, bemused, adds: “The Krauts.”

Charles Mahr (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) showing Carlo (Nassim Rachi) his old office

Charles Mahr (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) showing Carlo (Nassim Rachi) his old office

Charles Mahr (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) showing Carlo (Nassim Rachi) his old office

This line has a nice backstory. When we interviewed German filmmaker Hans-J​​ürgen Syberberg for Revolver, he and his wife told me about the time they were invited to Francis Ford Coppola’s house. ¹⁶ Coppola was designing a gubernatorial or presidential (I forget which) campaign for the Democrats and was interested in Syberberg’s input about how to influence people, just because he figured that as a German Syberberg must know a thing or two about how to seduce the masses. At one of the parties at Coppola’s house, the Syberbergs met Marlon Brando, and it turned out that the only German sentence Brando knew was this one. It’s not a saying that I was familiar with in German, but I loved it.

MA: I googled it, and other than your film nothing comes up. It’s a great line precisely because it’s so nonsensical. This relates to what we talked about earlier: that you are interested in the detours interspersed in the plot, that you hope the viewer is willing to embrace these detours and suspend their desire for linearity. These detours – whether at the linguistic or plot level – enrich the film, forcing us to consider whether there’s any real significance to such moments or whether the film simply breathes for a few seconds.

I really like the Limerick tradition, the nonsensical or almost nonsensical. It’s a play with language: these lines are sticky exactly because you can’t really know what their meaning is.

MA: Obviously, Death Will Come is a genre film, yet it also differs from its conventions, including in the fact that it does not offer a clear resolution. As we’ve discussed before, you always intentionally appeal to the viewer to participate in the telling of the story, to help actualise the story’s virtual potential.¹⁷ In Death Will Come, this desire for an active viewer is made quite explicit in the dialogue between Tez and Mahr near the end. He says to her that the question is precisely: “how should stories end?” And she replies, “Yes, this is the question, but everyone has to answer it for themselves,” as she pushes the envelope with the second half of her payment back to him. Then we see how she puts the revolver belonging to one of his (now dead) henchmen, Zinédine (Mourade Zeguendi), on the table together with a handful of bullets. The thumping noise of the revolver being placed on the table and the metallic sound the bullets make as she drops them in front of Mahr might remind us of similar sounds we heard at the start of the film, before we even saw the first image. This is not quite the film’s ending, but you and Ulrich must have discussed this moment. So: what stories do you hope viewers tell themselves after they’ve seen the film? 

Tez (Sophie Verbeeck) and Charles Mahr (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) discussing how stories should end in Death Will Come

Tez (Sophie Verbeeck) and Charles Mahr (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) discussing how stories should end in Death Will Come

Tez (Sophie Verbeeck) and Charles Mahr (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) discussing how stories should end in Death Will Come

Tez (Sophie Verbeeck) and Charles Mahr (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) discussing how stories should end in Death Will Come

I would say that the film makes you aware that stories are being built for a purpose, and then they’re not enough to cover what life is about. For me, this question – Are we able to write our own lives? – really recurs from film to film, including here. Mahr is involved in an interesting contradiction because he tries to create a labyrinth in which he wants to die. He tries to be in control of his fiction but doesn’t want to succeed. It’s fear-driven, and it’s fearless at the same time, which you could say is a very male thing: to rather die in your own fiction than live in a reality that is open to others.

I also think that filmmakers must consider the fact that audiences can watch a film more than once. In that sense, they can give different answers to the same questions. In a genre film, this means that the audience is in the know about what will happen, which shifts the emphasis on variations within the plot: what happens exactly, and how is the information delivered, that is, how do we learn about what exactly happens? To build a film is like being in a maze, where losing your way happens by design but should not feel forced or frustrating. This is very tricky to accomplish. We try to address this problem by isolating the plot points. You could say that many of our most important plot developments happen offscreen, so the audience can concentrate on the moment after and on the character rather than merely on events. This is something I tried first with I Am Guilty, in which we as viewers are always late to what has happened, and so we don’t have the privilege of witnessing the decisive moment – we are denied any kind of commanding overview of the plot. 

That may be the realistic aspect of my film: storytelling is always dealing with the aftermath, and this harkens back to my feeling that in life we are generally in love with cause-and-effect romances, in other words, that in our lives many causal chains are fictitious to begin with. We want to believe that we make a difference, and we manipulate timelines and memories to trick us into believing such flattery. What we fear most is the universe’s indifference and the existentially meaningless nature of our existence. In this sense, storytelling, at its root, means turning accidents into fate, random events into connections. Stories connect us, give us gravity, and that is our main religion, so to speak. Everything else is an add-on. 

MA: To stay, then, with the tricky notion of realism, a concept that is often misunderstood. On one hand, as viewers, we sometimes derive our sense of realism from certain traditions of realism in art, including film. But what the movies sell us as “realistic” is often quite contradictory to life itself, as you just explained. Arguably, people often don’t have the right responses or don’t come up with good or correct answers at the right moment, so we always struggle to make sense of why things take place. In contrast, in, say, the version of realism presented in classical Hollywood cinema – including in its crime genre films – we seem to get the right answers always in timely fashion. 

Can we, then, turn to one scene from Death Will Come that I think exemplifies quite nicely what we are discussing here and that resonates with similar scenes we can find in virtually all your films? When Tez goes with the older, blind woman, Mela, to a bar, the film abruptly and at every level takes a detour. A bar is, of course, already a different space than the “real world.” One goes to a bar to escape reality a little bit. Bars are differently lit and designed, often more expressionistically, with alcohol and often other drugs, as well as (sexual) desire, present. And this scene is very much about desire. In this sense, the film takes at this moment a swerve into a different, parallel world, and in so doing it also swerves into a different genre tradition (of the melodrama, perhaps). These kinds of scenes exist in virtually all your films, such as, e.g., The City Below, which contains an interlude in which the banker protagonist Roland Cordes (Robert Hunger-Bühler) visits a junkie to watch him shoot up. Could you talk about your thinking about these kinds of scenes, your desire to include them as detours in your films?

Roland Cordes (Robert Hunger-Bühler) watching a junkie (uncredited) shoot up in The City Below

My German teacher in high school talked about the seductiveness of the subjunctive, the fact that language’s biggest lure is its ability to say: what if? This scene is about entering a space in which words create a fantasy and not the other way around – a space where you can dream of a different life. It goes so far that Mela asks Tez to be an actor in her dream by approaching the female bartender whom Tez described to her – an object of desire that Mela is only able to see in her mind’s eye because she’s blind. So, in a way, it’s the purest form of living in a fantasy.

But this scene is also about Tez’s temptation of living a real – in the sense of “normal” – life. She tends to have this soldier-like detachment from real life that I think many people experience in their lives. So, Mela’s invitation of Tez to dream and even to act within Mela’s dream – this setup is very attractive to me. It’s really one of my favourite scenes in the film, because that’s exactly what the wonderful beauty of language is about: to imagine to be something else, to live in a state of untethered desire. 

The script included a morning-after scene, showing how Tez says goodbye to this bartender the next morning. We never shot it, but it was all about this question of living a normal life. In the Bible, it is similar: could Jesus be a normal person, could he live a normal life? Eventually, he decides against it, and Tez also decides against it. Maybe she might be able to change herself after the ending. We don’t know, but at this point, she’s not yet ready to touch ground in a way that is both open to the imaginary and to the world.

Mela (Delphine Bibet) desiring through the eyes of Tez (Sophie Verbeeck)

MA: Another way of putting this is that Tez, unlike, say, Robert DeNiro’s character in Michael Mann’s Heat (1995), does not let her desire get in the way of doing, and finishing, her job. Still, this scene foregrounds her desire as queer, which connects Death Will Come to many of your previous films, from I Am Guilty to Till the End of the Night. What do you make of this aspect of your films? And, given the ongoing conversation about representation – about who has the right to represent whose stories – I wonder whether you and Ulrich Peltzer solicited advice about this aspect of the film, just as you did about the representation of the trans-protagonist in your previous film.¹⁸

We didn’t have any special counsel in this instance. As for why I’m drawn to the issue of queer desire, I think the questions that interest me are: To what degree do we choose our own desires? Is desire something that limits our freedom? Or, on the contrary, is it a form of freedom because we can’t choose it? These characters represent this question: could my life be different, are there alternatives? Desire, here, is not merely a matter of sexual desire but also of how to live one’s life. In that respect, I was always in awe of Ossessione (Obsession, 1943) by Luchino Visconti. There’s this tramp, Spagnolo (Elio Marcuzzo), the guy who lives on the street and asks: “Why do you want to own a house?” He is essentially promoting homosexuality as a way of life that does not entail owning things – or people. I always found this wonderful. I think owning things and people, with institutions such as marriage functioning as a sort of ownership agreement, are a big part of the problem in this world. I guess this is the larger context that explains why my films occasionally include “non-normative” desires. In this sense, it’s probably not so much a contemporary queer idea but more like a reservoir for the possibility of living a different life that may or may not be within reach.¹⁹

MA: The crime plot of Death Will Come has something to do with virtual reality: some of the criminals need money to fund the building of an erotic centre where sex would be offered virtually, by having customers wear VR glasses. Their experience would be filtered through a machine eye. And in the bar scene we just discussed, we see how Mela is desiring through Tez’s eyes: Mela wants Tez to describe how the women in the bar look, but only those that interest Tez. Initially, there’s one woman that catches Mela’s attention based on Tez’s description, but Tez is more drawn to the bartender. This, in turn, seems to intensify Mela’s investment in Tez’s desire. Both cases – Mela desiring through Tez’s desire and customers using VR glasses to have their desires addressed – have something to do with contemporary experience moving away from the body as such. This idea already occurred in Till the End of the Night, where it was also framed as a conflict between an old way of doing business (and crime) and a new one, with the former still being invested in the alleged authenticity of the “face to face” (or fist to fist) and the latter seeking to disappear in the flow of virtual transactions. 

In Death Will Come, the old, dying crime boss, Mahr, is the one character who from the start does not want to have anything to do with this new world of virtual sex (and crime), as an early scene establishes. As a result, his wanna-be-partners-in-crime turn against him. 

Charles Mahr (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) trying on VR glasses in Death Will Come

But there’s also the moment when the young hitwoman, Tez, who would seem to be more in tune with the contemporary world, makes, in a way, a similar “mistake.” When she has one of Mahr’s antagonists, Patric de Boer (Marc Limpach), tied up in an abandoned warehouse that she occasionally uses for her operations, she fails to realise that he’s wearing a smartwatch, which allows him to call for help even as his hands are bound while she’s away to get some food. And later on, Mela tells Tez that, in the past, it was easier to keep secrets because people took pride in remaining silent. But in this contemporary environment of “immediacy,” as Anna Kornbluh calls it – of the instantaneity of (social media) communication – this kind of silence is much more difficult to maintain.²⁰

So, throughout the film, there are these moments of tension between the old and the new. Can you talk about this obvious interest on your (and presumably Ulrich Peltzer’s) part in this conflict, not least also given that you are working in a medium, the cinema, that itself appears increasingly to belong to an older world. There is clearly a meta-aspect involved in thematising these questions of contemporary technologies by using the “old-school” technology of the cinema.

Yes, this challenge by the virtual world is really threatening cinema. But it doesn’t do this in a way that is progressive, i.e., by offering something that is better or more modern. What is interesting to me, however, is the fact that cinema cannot incorporate or absorb contemporary technology as it has with all the other arts. I always say that cinema is the black hole of the arts. So far, everything has been sucked into cinema – dance, novels, poetry, architecture, drama, etc. Cinema was in a way like the River Spirit in Studio Ghibli’s Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (Spirited Away, dir. Hayao Miyazaki, 2001), the spirit that sucks in everything. And now, we seem to have reached this saturation point when cinema is not able to digest this new medium of virtual reality – so far, at least, I have not seen a really good film that has managed to do this. I think it’s because cinema is about bodies – it works only with bodies. Yet cinema itself might be a first step away from the body, because we just sit down and watch other bodies within a film. In a way, it’s already part of this modern problem, this modern trajectory leading away from bodies. But cinema seems to be unable to digest this new medium of VR and this new era of AI.

So, it’s true that Death Will Come touches on the mortality of the medium itself. But the wider frame of the question, I would say, is how in the last 500 years or so most of technology, and thus capital, went into addressing the question of how we can conquer time by making the physical body unnecessary, how we can overcome the limits of our bodies – and thus also the limits of our brains and our memories. We are in the midst of having to address a whole new set of ethical questions. My film touches on this only very briefly. But the question is whether a sex trade in which the victims are no longer humans constitutes progress or not – to me, this is a very interesting question. 

We did some research on these questions, and the VR sex industry is a booming business. A lot of money is being put into virtual pornography and so on. At the same time, we visited some brothels that we were scouting for shooting locations, and the stories we heard there about abuse were horrific. Abuse is standard operating procedure in these places – there’s a lot of pain there. And the question is, if we can solve this problem with technology, then perhaps that is better? I have my doubts, and I think Mahr has his doubts about that, so, in a way, Mahr is my representative here, because there is a certain honesty in the cruelty and ugliness of the old world.

MA: I’m also curious to hear about some of the films that influenced you for Death Will Come. We presume Melville’s Le Samouraï, but what else? For instance, this is not just a hitman or a hitwoman film; especially with the Mahr character, it’s also about a kingpin on the decline. Claude Sautet’s Classe tous risques (The Big Risk, 1960) with Lino Ventura and Jean-Paul Belmondo comes to mind. Louis-Do de Lencquesaing resembles Ventura somewhat in terms of physique and demeanour, and Nassim Rachi, who plays Carlo, seems a bit like Belmondo. So, are there specific films you had as reference points for Death Will Come? 

And, secondly, can you talk about how you work with such influences? Clearly, you are not imitating other films or directors, nor are you restaging scenes from other films. But you know so much about film history, which makes me wonder whether you have reflected on how other films become a tool for you in shooting your own films?

There are films that are very dear to me, and, obviously, they influence me. But I try not to designate certain films as models for my films. For example, I usually don’t screen films for my collaborators or tell them they must see this or that film. We might watch a scene to prepare, but that’s about it. The Big Risk is great. I like it a lot. Another film that was very influential for me was L’armée des ombres (Army of Shadows, 1969), the Jean-Pierre Melville film that I’m most drawn to at the moment. It’s a resistance drama that’s shot like a gangster film. I find it very emotional; it’s a great film. 

There are many other films I like, such as Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955); and there might be scenes where I think of this or that film. But I really try to make a new film and don’t want to drown in references and memories. I usually don’t watch films immediately before I shoot, for example. I have to be sober, in a way, to make my own film and my own choices. Photography is more influential at that stage, because, with photography, I don’t have the fear that it might be too influential. I usually collect many photographs to share with my cinematographer and my production designer to discuss certain aspects of them, including light and colour and how clean or how busy an image should be.

And, in this case, such a picture became part of the film. The Giuseppe Maria Crespi painting, “Hecuba Blinding Polymnestor,” was not in the script, but we found it in a museum in Belgium where we also shot. We liked the painting so much that we decided to make it our model for the lighting throughout the film. So, the way that my cinematographer, Reinhold Vorschneider, set up the lighting was influenced by this image, and then we incorporated it into the plot. In the script it’s just a nondescript picture. It just happened to be the case that this painting depicts the blinding of a man, and we thought, wow, that’s wonderful, this really suits our story.

Hecuba Blinding Polymnestor by Giuseppe Maria Crespi

MA: The fact that it is a classical painting is interesting, too, given your goal of making a more classically composed film. Whereas for your previous two films you developed and used what you call a “scan cam” technique of filming, you don’t deploy this style of shooting in Death Will Come.²¹

Yes, we simply thought that we had exhausted our flamboyance and exuberance of stylistic adventures. I figured that for the time being we should restrain ourselves.

MA: Death Will Come concludes with a double ending. First, we see Tez leaving the house and follow her walking near the beach, where she then hears a shot from within the house. Then, after a longshot of the ocean without Tez in the frame, you cut to black. For about eight seconds, that’s all we see, while listening to the extradiegetic moody soundtrack continuing from what appears to have been the final scene. Suddenly, however, a sort of epilogue starts, as we return to Mela’s office where her assistant informs her of the arrival of the mysterious Italians. We had heard once or twice about them before, but we do not really know who they are – we assume they are also part of a crime gang. And then you show us Mela in a medium close-up, virtually enveloped in a black mise-en-scène, as she turns with her eyes open offscreen, to screen right. At this moment, the image dissolves from her office back to the bar scene, where we see her reclined, wearing her sunglasses. It is as if we are now witness to her memories of that moment. But this image is simultaneously subjective – her recollection – and objective, for this image is one we saw earlier (from a different angle) and isn’t one she herself has (or could’ve) seen of herself. 

Mela (Delphine Bibet) recollecting in Death Will Come

Could you talk about the decision to have this second ending, a sort of epilogue. It seems as if you might be setting things up for a sequel. As viewers, we now want to know more about Tez and Mela, but we also want to know who these Italians are. And Carlo is alive, too.

To be honest, I’ve never thought about making a sequel. But it’s true that, with the way the ending is constructed, a new story about the remaining characters could emerge. But as you know, the first prerequisite for a sequel is the success of the first film, and I don’t know if we will be that lucky!

This double ending came about during the editing of the film. It was not in the script, which ended with the scene at the beach. Ending the film by connecting Mela back to the bar scene is something that my regular editor (since I Am Guilty), Stefan Stabenow, proposed to me. For quite a long while, I wasn’t certain whether it would be a good idea. But now I think it’s a very effective framing device, to establish that this story, as with every story, has been made up by someone who needed to imagine it. I mean this might sound strange, but it points to the artificiality of the whole endeavour for me.

Endnotes