An Interview with Florian Pochlatko about his debut How to Be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World

Writer/Director Florian Pochlatko makes an auspicious feature film debut with How to Be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World. This topical drama, which premiered at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, has viewers meeting Pia (Louisa-Céline Gaffron) “at a very strange time” in her life; she has just returned home from a stay at a psychiatric hospital. 

Pia takes a thankless job working in her father Klaus’ (Cornelius Obonya) printing company, and she argues with her mother, Elfie (Elke Winkens), a voice-over artist who is frustrated narrating programs on zombie snails. Pia has thoughts like, “Are my parents actors?,” suggesting the unreality of her life with them; but it could also describe how they hide the truth. (Klaus is on the verge of losing his family business, and does not discuss it, which troubles Pia.)

She also struggles to get closure from her ex, Joni (Felix Pöchhacker), who has a new girlfriend. Her interactions with him range from sweet reminiscing to scary, as when she comes to his house late at night hoping to get her stuff back. (Joni doesn’t have anything of hers.)

How to Be Normal… chronicles Pia’s efforts to get up and get through every day by taking her meds – she doesn’t always – and try to find a sense of meaning and purpose in the world. She feels “stuck in a never-ending comedy.” But she experiences delusions, and at times behaves strangely, as when she attracts attention outside a crowded bar by acting wildly in front of and against the window.

How to be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World © Golden Girls Film

Pochlatko films Pia in a distinctive style that mirrors her fractured experiences in the world. He shoots scenes in different formats and uses quick edits, as well as flashbacks, text, and other cinematic devices to layer the narrative. Moreover, the filmmaker plays with what is real and imaginary, substituting characters at times and creating moments of artifice to reflect Pia’s perceptions. 

In addition, the film uses humour with moments of deadpan absurdism and surrealistic touches that lighten the heavier subject matter. How to Be Normal… asks big questions, from what ‘home’ is, to how to handle mental illness, and how to cope as the world is falling apart. 

Pochlatko spoke with Senses of Cinema about his film after attending the Berlin Film Festival.

– G.M.K.

 I am always curious about the background of filmmakers who make their feature debuts. How did you come to make films? 

My surroundings. My parents use to run a cinema and video store in my hometown. As a child, I was strolling through all these film covers. This was my socialisation. A lot of my family members had something to do with film. My uncle [Werner Pochath] was a forgotten exploitation star. He made Jess Franco films and acted with David Bowie [in Just a Gigolo]. Unfortunately, he passed away during the AIDS pandemic in the ‘90s. When I was 12, I started taking the home video camera to make films. 

Mental health has been an especially important topic since the pandemic. What prompted you to approach this subject? 

It wasn’t my initial idea to make a mental health film, but it’s where private lives and being a cultural worker intersect with each other. In March 2020, I started to think about the idea of this film. By the time I began working in January 2021, I had a lot of close friends who had made several suicide attempts. When I started to write, I was in admiration of people who had these episodes behind them. If you have lost your grip at this point in your life, you probably know yourself a little bit better because you have to get to the core of yourself [to start healing]. Then there was the pandemic, which is the time when people [with mental health issues] will shine because of the chaos of the whole world. I thought this is going to be an important topic, and because I know a little bit about it, I thought maybe I can talk about it. 

How to be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World © Golden Girls Film

What did you learn in your research and interviews?

The tragedy is that depression is often invisible. In my research, I realised almost everyone has an anchor point to certain topics. That also scared me. I wasn’t aware that everyone has a relative or a friend or has trouble themselves, but that is what happened. It is such a delicate topic – you can do everything wrong tackling this topic. People who went through psychiatric experiences develop a very dark humour about this situation. It turns into a very absurd world and the system is inherently absurd in a way. I wanted to tackle the humour in this absurdity. 

Pia talks about dissociative disorder, anxiety, and bipolar disorder but her condition is never specified. How did you determine how to present her character and depict her condition? 

I tried to be as truthful as possible to the experiences people shared with me. The script is based on oral history. People who have a long history of psychiatric experiences, their diagnosis changes over time. It also depends on the culture. The European catalogue of psychiatric disorders is different from the ones in the States. It has a lot to do with gender, skin colour, and social background. Those factors are all in play in diagnosis. With mental health being discussed widely, there are a lot of diagnoses thrown around, but they also frame people in a way that you sometimes have to question. I talked to psychiatric workers – doctors and researchers – and most of them told me if you want to make this right and authentic, you have to blur the conditions.

On the other hand, if someone is struggling to find themselves – and that’s not limited to people with mental health conditions – there is a lot of fragmentation to the feeling of being oneself. It correlates to people with acute manic episodes, but it also reflects on ideas of my own fragmented perception of myself and how others perceive you. You can’t control how other people perceive you, or how people frame you, and where you belong socially. That is the field I was thinking about in relation to the idea of self. I thought about the idea of the self being questioned more. If you talk to Gen Z people, they are more connected to the world; their interconnectivity probably comes from the internet. I worked with a scientist who talked with me about how influencers are having more mental health issues. In the field of mental health, it’s a very blurry line – how do you diagnose someone and how does the diagnosis influence their behaviour? 

How to be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World © Golden Girls Film

Likewise, you make various stylistic choices and create narrative layers in presenting Pia’s thoughts and behaviour. You play with the screen format, quick edits to show an intense episode, and other devices. How did you conceive of the film visually and create a tone? 

I want to answer from a cultural science perspective. I come from Austrian social realism. When I first read Mark Fisher’s book, Capitalist Realism, I was very captivated. He analysed postmodernist aesthetics. I was a student of Michael Haneke’s for almost 13 years. We were very close collaborators. His films go back to Chantel Akerman, and we can see this grave depiction of the world. This was a juxtaposing anti-statement against the flashy images of capitalism. This is what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism.” He quoted “It is easier to picture the end of the world than the end of Capitalism.” He talks about how the capitalist system sucked in all counter-movements. That’s why Kurt Cobain became so depressed; it took him half a decade to go from the countermovement to the mainstream he wanted to criticise. In this aesthetic field, a lot of films have this outside perspective on this greyish world. I wanted to go into it. I chose an aesthetic that looks as appealing as Netflix, but at its core, it is trying to reflect on that. 

On a filmmaker-cultural level, I tried to depict the manic-depressive state of someone living today. The secondary media reality becomes as important as the real world. That’s why Gen Z all feel like life is simulation now. If you spend too much time on your laptop or cell phone, the outside world becomes very estranged and this fits the topic of someone detached from reality. I wanted to depict the fragmentised idea of self and still being interconnected with the media world. I wanted to stay true to the experience of the main character, which is very manic and ADHD [Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder]. It piques in all different directions. 

How to be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World © Golden Girls Film

You often shoot the film from Pia’s point of view, so viewers experience her world through her eyes. But you also show her mother’s troubles, which reflect the ripple effect of Pia’s issues. Can you discuss your decisions on when to pull focus on her and when to pull back and show a bigger picture in telling her story? 

The whole idea started from gathering all these oral histories of patients who told me: “I turned into a werewolf, and that’s why I ended up in psychiatry.” Or “I was waiting on the street corner every night for Kendrick Lamar.” So why not take this literally, and use this as the perspective of reality and work from that point? The character of the mother is dear to me. There is logic to her starting to [lose] focus. Diagnosis is very fluid and being close to someone who is suffering from a loss of reality, or a loss of self, or a loss of stability is very difficult. Sooner or later, it starts to affect you and there are complementary disorders, like codependency. You also find a counteraction of a state of mental health crisis. I don’t want to diagnose the mother either, but there is some sort of anxiety involved, which maybe comes from her being worried about her daughter.

I got the sense that Pia’s parents saw their daughter as “a problem that needed to be solved.” Meaning, they want to help her but are obstacles as much as allies. Likewise, Pia’s interactions with others are often fraught. I appreciated her efforts to connect with people, but they were unsure how to respond to her. This was very impactful in how people treat folks with mental illness. Was that your intention?

In this question lies the toughest part about the whole narrative. On the one hand, you have to be very clear and strict about personality disorders which exist, and you can’t romanticise them. You have to take them seriously. But on the other hand, how people treat you builds a framing, and you start to behave in the way other people treat you. This is a self-reflective loop. 

You put people into a box and make them feel they are not capable. Stripping people of their agenda is oppression. It is a weapon of cultural war. Migrants pushed towards borders of illegality, or in the Middle East, Iranian women who speak up against systems are seen as being problematic or “mental.” There is an Antonio Gramsci quote at the beginning of the film. “The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born, now is the time for monsters.” Gramsci was put into jail by rising fascists. In jail he had mental health issues, and he started hallucinating, and in that hallucinated state he started to write about the crisis of the hegemony. If you analyse this loop, you can suppress people and make them behave a certain way. That is not the sole explanation for any mental health issue, but it can contribute to it. 

The idea was you may turn into your own cliché if you are treated that way. I wanted to depict that in the film. If people treat you in a certain way long enough, you try to counteract by showing people the monster they make you. That influenced the narrative. That shouldn’t diminish the fact that there are really personality disorders and mental health concerns.

How to be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World © Golden Girls Film

Yes, I like that your film creates a conversation and encourages people to talk about mental health with people who may be suffering, because everyone tiptoes around it.

This is what I tried to do. My friends and I talked about [mental illness] to heal each other. If you make an experimental film in a way that appeals to a mainstream audience, maybe it can help start a healing process. What you said correlates with why I made this film. I wanted to reach out to others to engage in this process.

The film addresses issues of truth and trust. We all have secrets and sometimes we express them. Pia’s father is in denial, her mother is having a crisis. Pia may be an unreliable narrator. Can you talk about this?

This is a very Austrian film. We grew up in a postwar society that neglected our own role in war over the centuries. That affected every aspect of social life in this country: children of people in the postwar depression, how people were educated at the time and did not talk about conflict. Counteracting that was a generation that was raised trying to talk about everything and that lead to generational conflicts. I tried to address that, and this blurry idea of truth in this film is influenced by the post-factual age where it is not important if something is true or not. Major actors in the right-wing extremist field use that to their advantage to diminish others. In this post-factual digital age, several truths are competing. Maybe it is not relevant if this is true or not. 

The film asks big questions about how to cope with the world falling apart. What message do you want your film to provide folks who are struggling in the world? This is not limited to Pia’s situation, or people with mental illness. How do you want your film to heal people?

Maybe my idea was to be silly about it. We all feel the same in this world, and something that resonated with me is a quote by Charlie Kaufman who said, “The only thing you can maybe do with your art is make other people and yourself feel less alone.” We can sit and make fun of the situation we are in without diminishing its seriousness. The times are super dark especially for people in the States. Looking from a European perspective, it is like looking into a dystopian future that is not so far away. It also can happen here.

Which is why we need coping mechanisms. 

My main actress Louisa would say it is “practicing resilience.” How soft can we stay when the world is so tough at the moment? The most extreme thing I can do as a filmmaker is trying to stay as soft as possible. This is the most rebellious act. I’m not a cultural pessimist. That is why we both do cultural work, so we can be a tiny part of some sort of narrative. They managed to ruin the world in two generations. Maybe they can build up the world in two generations? I’m not a fan of the purge idea. It is not necessary that everything falls apart so we can rebuild it. It is not impossible for an individual to make a change from their laptop.