Christian Petzold courtesy of Toronto International Film FestivalAn Interview with Christian Petzold Daniel Theophanous July 2026 Interviews Issue 118 For a film named after a solo piano suite, Miroirs No.3 is surprisingly silent. The rare moments of music and sound in Christian Petzold’s latest film emerge naturally from within the world he has constructed, appearing at pivotal moments when feelings can no longer be repressed. Silence is a dramaturgical choice as precise as anything else in Petzold’s filmmaking. And with as much of his cinema these moments of rupture are carefully tempered, sedate almost; their effect is measured by the character’s psychological response. Their interiority proves more gripping than any conventional narrative. Over his three decades of filmmaking, Petzold has become a connoisseur of meticulous character construction. Characters are usually caught in states of transition and appear fully embodied, natural and lived-in; inhabiting storylines that rarely concern themselves with exposition or exhaustive biography. Instead, they begin with a schism: a chance encounter, an accident or an unexpected disappearance. Events that plunge them into total ambiguity. Their fixed identities come undone and are now in flux, continually evolving. It is Petzold’s fourth consecutive film with Paul Beer. A fruitful partnership encompassing portrayals ranging from low-key femme fatale, scorned lover, enigmatic free-spirit to neurotic, displaced music student. All of them existing within narrative uncertainties hovering between psychological and physical states. Between the dead or the living, desire and repression, appearance and disappearance. Miroirs No. 3 follows Laura (Beer), a young piano student, who survives a devastating car accident and is taken in by a grieving family. Like Petzold’s earlier films Phoenix (2014), Undine (2020) and Afire (2023), Miroirs No. 3 explores substitution, memory and desire, but in a gentler register, unfolding within the parameters of domestic life. Shrouded in mystery and in the unspoken, the film centres itself on the burgeoning mother-daughter relationship between Laura and Betty (Barbara Auer), with Laura wilfully taking on the role of surrogate to Betty’s dead daughter. A kinship emerges from shared experiences of grief, trauma and emotional displacement. In our interview over Zoom, Petzold has an endearingly roundabout way of explaining himself, answering questions in trails of thoughts. A wonderful quality here it not for the time constrains that come with media interviews. It’s a quality that, as mentioned in the interview, reflects his own contemplations on cinema as ‘people-in progress’. Like much of the initial opaqueness in Miroirs No. 3, as we move forward we arrive at a moment of illumination, of realisation where suddenly everything comes into place. – D.T. How are you today? It’s springtime in Berlin. Nice and sunny today, recovering from the weekend where thousands of people are outside drinking cheap beer. It’s a cheap city for tourists and a very expensive city for locals. Like in Barcelona and London, the tourists are ruining everything. Many friends of mine moved there a while back because it was a creative city but also cheap to live. Not sure that’s a thing anymore. No, it’s not. Gentrification has hit us hard in the last ten years. I have been living in this flat in Kreuzberg for 40 years with family. My kids grew up here. Now it’s just my wife and I. I think I’m the oldest person in Kreuzberg. It’s all becoming so corporate and, sadly, less bohemian. Perhaps one of the reasons why Laura wanted to leave Berlin in the film. The characters in all your films feel very real, fleshed-out. You give them space to fully reveal themselves. You have the camera linger on them even if they are not speaking. Cinema for me, is about progress. People in progress. Not about a situation, that is concrete and fixed. When I think of a character, I am not so bothered about their past or what were they doing before the film starts. It’s like the way we talked about Berlin, gentrification, the tourists. I make all these assumptions about people by looking at them. All through the filter of my experience and biases. Without even speaking to them, you can imagine all sorts of things, like their background, where they are going, what they are currently going through. Cinema for me is like making poetry of people in progress. Afire And yet it is very subtle, as a viewer you are trying to figure things out, even when much of it remains unresolved. I don’t like it in movies, when someone says ‘I love you’. I want to see loving in action. I want to see the seduction; I want to see the work of love. I am fascinated by the sequences in cinema where someone is leaving work, leaving jail, leaving their family, their village. And then, what is happening to them when they try to rebuild, to change their lives. To fall in love or to leave love. This is what cinema does, it makes poetry. In the small village I grew up, there was no cinema there but there was a film club. It was in a room at the local swimming pool. It was called ‘Film Club’ and set up by a gay couple for the locals, mostly for the youth in the area. Their programming was fantastic. The first movie I saw there was Blow-Up (1966). I was 13 years old. This was a tremendous influence on me. You see the protagonist in Blow-Up. You are given very little context. You slowly figure out he’s a fashion photographer but is spending his time shooting pictures in a run-down area, and then in a shelter we realise he’s taking pictures of homeless people. He ends up spending the night there. In the morning, he wakes up and makes his way down a street with brick houses and comes to a gate in the park. Walks through and starts taking banal pictures of trees only to witness a potential murder. This is revealed when the pictures are being developed. This is the moment we enter a new story. This incident has completely changed the course of the story but also has transformed the protagonist. This is for me, is where cinema starts. This is the philosophy behind Miroirs No. 3. Laura has a car accident and that is the moment everything changes. She wakes up, in a new reality, in a new place and surrounded by new people, entirely extracted from her previous life. And then slowly begins to rebuild her life, towards something that deep down she always desired. Laura’s character is steeped in ambiguity, a quality that’s extended to other characters and narrative threads, and I would say your whole filmography. Does this prove challenging when directing your actors? I would say it’s more of an issue at the beginning of a project when I must explain things. It’s tricky for them to get it as they are inside the story. I’m always having to explain it in bigger picture terms what I’m trying to get at. And then convince them not to get so caught up in the minute details and loose ends of their roles. Paula kept asking me who Laura was before the accident. My instant reaction was ‘I’m not interested about who she was’. But of course, she pushed back, she needs more to work with. My response was the audience don’t need it. She wasn’t convinced. And then I talked to her about her favourite book Alice in Wonderland. And maybe start looking at Miroirs No. 3 as a version of Alice in Wonderland. The car accident that Laura has at the beginning is like the ‘rabbit hole’ where a new reality opens itself to her. Now you say it, there are definite parallels with Alice in Wonderland. Did that convince her? Yes! Sort of. I explained that after the accident, Laura effectively becomes a young girl again. She was found at the side of the street and taken in by a motherly figure (Betty – played by Barbara Auer). She is clothed, bathed and fed. Betty is re-teaching her to taste, smell; her senses are coming back. She is then given a bicycle. She goes cycling with Betty’s son. I asked Paula: Do you know anything about Alice before she falls into the rabbit hole? The biography you are searching for is in the story. Audiences can get all the details from what happens on screen. I find it tedious to open with a ten-minute introduction of a music student from Berlin, her suicidal tendencies, the depressing summer she’s having. The accident is like the iron gate in Blow-Up. In that moment she’s awakened. Her senses are awakened. When you see someone actively trying to begin their life again, you don’t need to be told what came before. You can already see it. Afire And yet the film feels sensorially nostalgic, full of longing, still haunted by its ambiguous past. The past feels very present, even in its absence. Miroirs No.3 is a ghost story. The family’s daughter is dead but still very present throughout the house. You could say that Laura becomes the embodiment of that ghost. And the trauma has made the family a ghost of themselves. Disconnected from the rest of the worlds. A few years ago, my family and I were in a serious car accident. Nothing happened to us thankfully, but it was traumatic. And then, like two days later, we are in the kitchen cooking and pretending like everything was normal. Which is strange isn’t it? Some friends described us as pretending to be ghosts, doing everything as before, but with something altered, something wrong. Ghosts, for me, are characters that are on the other side and yet want to be part of the world. They want to materialise. This process of materialisation is what I wanted to follow with Miroirs No. 3. Or one could say that Laura becomes a ghost of herself after the accident. Exactly! I love ghost stories. I’m a big fan of horror. I like that moment when a film genuinely affects you. Miroirs No. 3 is obviously not horror, but I find it engages with some of the emotional register of the genre. Something happened to me while I was writing Barbara (2012) in a small cabin by a lake outside of Berlin. I was alone for two weeks, and at times I felt lonely. In the evenings, after writing, I would put on a DVD with a glass of wine, some cheese. One of the evenings I decided to watch a film called Ghost Ship (2002) by a director called Beck starring Gabriel Byrne. It’s not a major film. Watching it in the cabin, in the dark; I got quite scared. The kind of scare that stays with you. Two weeks ago, I went to a second-hand shop near my flat and found the DVD for two euros. I bought it. Watched it again, two days ago. Not a bad movie really, but not great either. I bought it to remind myself of how frightened I was the first time. Sorry I’m deviating from your question. Not at all! Betty and Laura instantly fall into this mother-daughter dynamic. Even though it’s never said, there’s a sense they are fulfilling a deep need in each other. Can you tell us about this relationship? One of my dreams is to make a musical. I would say the trajectory of musicals changed with Stanley Donan (Singing in The Rain, Funny Face). The dancing and the singing become the dialogue. Previously, in operas say, singing would only come when there was a need to express feeling. Then Donan came along and centred the singing and the dancing into the action. Both Betty and Laura love music. I structured their conversation not as predictable dialogue, but more like they were communicating through song and dance, or better say movement. Every interaction whether physical or verbal, was a choreographed dance. I was also thinking of social situations. Say you are at a party in Berlin, when someone asks, ‘what do you do?’. From that moment on, that becomes your identity. You are assigned a role. In this movie, this question never appears. Betty doesn’t know anything about Laura’s life in Berlin, Laura never asks Betty why she lives alone, why her husband and son aren’t with her. They are simply present for each other. A choreographed dance. Everything in the house is about the past. The dead daughter’s stuff all over the place. But these two women are present. Present for each other in the moment. Without the past dictating who they are. And what they are doing is rebuilding their lives. Miroirs No.3 When Laura discovers she has become a surrogate to the family’s dead daughter; she reacts badly. Even though throughout the film, you are inclined to think Laura knew exactly what was happening and was complicit in it. This is exactly the question Paula had on the day of shooting. She questioned me why Laura was so angry in the scene. Was it because she felt betrayed? No… she knew the whole time what they were doing. The thing is, she loved it. She loved being the substitute. She loved being someone else, inhabiting an identity, other than her own. This pretence lasted like four to five days. The moment their dead daughter is mentioned, the facade came down. Laura could no longer play the part. That is what she was upset about. This strange romance with the family was over. This film is only 86 minutes. Very few locations. Four main characters. A simple premise. It’s very minimal. But in the editing, we came to realise how complex it was because of all these feelings it invokes. The rough edit was 120 minutes. We cut a further 20, to narrow down and refine that complexity. The idea of a ‘stand-in’ or ‘substitute’ seems to preoccupy filmmakers. You have referenced Hitchcock’s Vertigo in interviews. Also, Spielberg’s A.I. comes to mind, and more obscure films like Yiorgos Lanthimos’ Alps and the recent British film In Camera. You could say Miroirs No. 3 attests to the success of such a concept, because as soon as Laura leaves, the family realises they were stuck and finally take action to move on. I have not seen Alps, I will look out of it. I would say it’s all premised on loss. Death affects only those left behind. In some scenes Betty is seen to just stand outside the house watching the road. When Barbara questioned why the character would do that. I explained that there must be a reason your daughter killed herself and this reason, however unfairly, is blamed on the mother. I’m a Hitchcockian director and Hitchcock always blames the mother. The mother is a monster. She is standing in front of the house, waiting for her daughter to come back from school. Perhaps Betty was applying too much pressure. The piano lessons, reading books, getting good grades. Maybe the daughter killed herself to escape. Maybe with Laura there was a chance to do things differently, to make it right. Though of course, that could never happen. For a film titled after a specific piece of music, music is remarkably sparse and entirely diegetic. What is the thinking behind that? Suicidal tendencies run, unfortunately, in my family. When someone has depression, they lose some of their senses, they become in a sense diminished and usually they begin to withdraw. This movie is about a young piano student, trying to rediscover herself, reclaim her appetite for life. She regains her taste and interest for things, and I want to show this transformation. I felt that using music too early is like having propaganda for feelings. So initially without music, I wanted to see people generating genuine feeling from within, recreating their senses from nothing. Not having it imposed on them by some music score. Miroirs No.3 In interviews you stated that you stop listening to music before you make any film, so as not to be influenced. I find it very cheap to create emotion through pop music. Like girl and boy in a car listening to a song. I find that cheap. Any music we hear in Miroirs No.3 is what the protagonists would hear by themselves. Like the birds for instance, I haven’t added for effect. Not like ketchup over hamburger for added taste. You hear music like it’s the first time in their lives. The scene in the garage where they both (Laura and Max [played by Enno Trebs]) hear the Frankie Valli song – The Night – on the radio, it’s their moment. Not ours. Originally there was a different ending, and you changed it after Paula Beer’s insistence. Can you tell us about that. I give space to my actors for their ideas, for the most part. Even when they say the opposite of what I want. Paula and I have a very good relationship. She is intelligent and modest. A genuinely, kind person. Three months before shooting she came to my flat and said that the ending was all wrong. I had originally written a sort-of happy ending. Something along the lines of Laura going back to the family with her bags and moving in with them. Paula questioned the morality of that decision. She questioned whether Laura would be free if she went back – confining herself to the role of someone else’s daughter. And of course she was right. But in that moment, I was attached to that scene. I think because of the global events like Ukraine, Gaza, Trump I wanted some positivity, some harmony. A happy resolution for the family. But of course, it was a lie and Paula felt that. We went ahead and shot the ending as I originally planned and of course it was a ridiculous decision, and it wasn’t working. Five months after the official shoot wrapped, we decided to reshoot only to discover Paula was pregnant. She was obviously pregnant when we were shooting and hadn’t told me. But I would say it worked out even better. Because of her pregnancy, Paula looked different and so did the character of Laura which fitted perfectly with the new ending.
