Josef Hader: The Landscape Plays a Leading Role

It is 11am in Berlin. My laptop screen shows Austrian cabaret artist, director, screenwriter, and actor Josef Hader sitting in his apartment in Vienna, connected to me via Zoom. Behind him, I catch glimpses of a room not unlike my own: sparse decorations adorn the white walls in his traditional, high-ceilinged flat. Josef Hader has been on stage as well as in front of and behind the camera since the Eighties. To mark the launch of his new film, Andrea Gets a Divorce (German title Andrea Lässt Sich Scheiden), we talk about growing up in the countryside and clarify whether it’s still appropriate to say ‘good morning’ at 11am.

Josef Hader: Hello, good to see you.

Amelie Kahl:  Good morning. Actually, I’m not sure if that’s an appropriate thing to say at this time of day.

JH:  As far as I’m concerned, it is. I always have to perform in the evening, so my rhythm has been pushed back a bit.

AK:  Are you a late riser?

JH:  I usually am, yes. I have very little energy in the morning. That was also my excuse for always doing poorly in school. Evening work suits me. And when you work in the evening, you have a wonderful excuse to sleep longer for a lifetime.

AK:  Why do you work better in the evening?

JH  Well, what can I say; there are owls and larks. Even science says so.

AK:  How are you feeling today?

JH: I need a vacation. But a little break is on the horizon.

AK:  How does it feel to finish a film?

JH:  It happens step by step. When you decide not to make any more changes to the videography, you continue to work on the sound. Then afterwards, you change little things in the videography again because, due to the good sound, you now feel like you should make this shot a bit longer. It’s an endless back and forth. By the time you’re at the final stage, you’ve tried so many things that you feel a slight disgust for the whole thing and say, ‘I want this to be done now.’ Then you don’t even want to think about it for a few days. In the end, you’re only starting to get interested in your own film again when the audience watches it at the cinema.

AK: Did you know that you would want to make another film after your debut, Wild Mouse?

JH:  Immediately after I’d finished it, I thought, ‘I’ll never do that again.’ Then that feeling faded away, and I felt like writing again. That’s what I always find the most rewarding part of the whole process – sitting somewhere with a vague idea and a notebook and brainstorming.

AK: What was your first vague idea for Andrea Gets a Divorce?

JH: I wanted to make a film set in the countryside, which is where I grew up – about childhood and hurt. I wanted to show this microcosm as I experienced it. I probably wanted to work through it a bit.

AK:  You capture life in the countryside incredibly well. Anyone who grew up in a rural region, including myself, can probably relate to it.

JH:  It’s interesting that this type of provincial, rural life is something so distinctly European, isn’t it?

AK:  What was it like for you growing up in the countryside? You now live in Vienna, in the city.

JH: Yes, I moved here when I was 19. I lived on the farm until the age of 10. Until I was six, I never really had a lot of contact with kids in a similar age group because I was an only child. I was raised mostly by my grandparents. I found primary school very unpleasant; I couldn’t handle the shock of having other children around me. At 10, I wanted to leave – or rather, my grandma talked me into it. She was very religious, and there was this boarding school that, in the Fifties, was for boys who wanted to become priests. In the Seventies, it wasn’t quite as strict anymore. Still, my grandma hoped I would become a priest later. I just really wanted to attend this school. One Sunday, they had an open day in my parish, and for the first time in our church, there was a drum set, there was a rock mass, and in the afternoon, there was an entertainment programme that included funny theatre plays. I thought to myself, ‘I want to be wherever I can do that.’ At ten years old, I actually wanted to leave home.

AK: Why?

JH: I wanted to escape the place where I had had to endure a bit of bullying here and there in primary school. Attending secondary school with those same bullies didn’t seem like a very appealing prospect. I thought to myself, ‘This boarding school offers so much culture; the kids there must be a lot nicer.’ Of course, that wasn’t the case, but then I started doing theatre at the boarding school. There was also a band, a choir, and a music room where you could play the piano, as well as a library. I valued the library the most. Even at a young age, starting in first grade, reading was an escape for me.

AK:  So you decided early on to be on stage. Do you prefer being a cabaret artist or a filmmaker?

JH: Being a cabaret artist suits me better because I don’t have to push myself to the absolute limit every day. Well, as a cabaret artist, I also push a certain type of boundary, but it’s one that comes easy for me: being on stage, alone. As an only child, I’ve been practicing for this role as a solo performance artist my entire life. Yet with films, there is this looming fear that any shooting day can go completely sideways at any point. It’s very stressful. If I were a full-time filmmaker, I’d probably be physically sick with worry.

AK:  Which aspect of it do you find the most stressful?

JH:  It’s so irreversible! During production, on any given day, you only have this one chance to shoot your scene, and any mistakes you make can’t be fixed; you can only obscure them a bit through editing. Though I don’t find the preparations for a film very exciting either; it’s all rather dull and very logistical. What I like most about filmmaking is writing and editing. I also adore the wonderful moments when an actor plays something in a way that is much better than what was written in the script. In those moments, I really love this job.

AK:  You probably learned a lot about writing when you were writing your cabaret pieces.

JH:  It’s not dissimilar. There are periods where you write a lot and periods where you delete a lot. Sometimes you let something in, lose control, a flow emerges – and then you start making deletions again. But what happens afterward is very different. With cabaret, I have very relaxed rehearsals with a director who has been working with me since the Eighties. It’s a long-term partnership. We meet every day and can change things again and again. Even after the premiere of the piece, I can play it completely differently in another city. With film, everything is completely set in stone once you’re finished.

AK:  Your new film, Andrea Gets a Divorce, has strong visual language. Few cuts, many long takes, and slow pacing. Did you have this style in mind from the beginning?

JH:  The environment shapes people, and in the countryside, this environment is the rural landscape. For me, it was clear from the beginning: the landscape plays a leading role in this film. If you chop it up with too many cuts, it won’t get the attention it deserves. Sometimes the scenery grins mockingly at the characters. This also shows that these people are not villains. They are simply shaped by their surroundings, just like people in the city. A story in the city could perhaps be told with more cuts.

AK:  Your character, Franz, is softer than most of your previous roles. Was it a conscious decision to play a more fragile character this time?

JH:  Ideally, when writing the script, I think about the story and all the characters, not just mine. That means that before shooting, I do some coaching with someone and think about the acting. Without thinking too much about the script, I try to get a feel for my character. You search for elements of yourself you might use and try to understand what you have to add from the outside to bring this character to life. Then, just before you start to shoot, you forget all these exercises again – and you trust that the role will encapsulate you like an invisible shell.

AK:  For a long time, you worked closely with Austrian crime author Wolf Haas. You co-wrote and played the lead role in the four book adaptations Come Sweet Death, Silentium, The Bone Man, and Life Eternal. How did this collaboration come about?

JH: Wolf Haas once said in an interview that his novels could never be adapted for film. Director Wolfgang Murnberger saw this interview, then read a Wolf Haas novel and thought, ‘It’s true; this really can’t be adapted.’ Yet one day, when they met, they tried to write a screenplay anyway. Then they asked me to play the lead, Simon Brenner. I said, ‘I’d love to, but I want to co-write the screenplay. I’d like to cut a lot of dialogue; Brenner talks too much.’ In the first draft, Brenner had this narrative, chatty tone which we see in the books. That’s how the collaboration started. It turned into a very nice and steady collaboration that lasted for many years.

AK:  How much influence did you have on the screenplay of the four Haas films?

JH:  Wolfgang Murnberger and I took turns writing drafts for the screenplay. Wolf Haas said he didn’t want to participate directly. He felt like he couldn’t win; the screenplay would either be worse or better than his own novel. He was still crucial for our collaboration, though. Due to his distance, he often suggested solutions which we couldn’t see because we were too closely involved with the text. Wolfgang Murnberger thought more about the cinematography, and I focused on the characters. Generally, we all agreed that we didn’t want to make this crime movie a whodunnit. I always found those Agatha Christie films terribly tedious; they reminded me of maths problems I had to solve in school. It’s always the same question: Who is the perpetrator? I always found that annoying. When I was writing, I tried to steer the script in a direction where we could infuse comedy with drama and spice up a crime story with elements of a thriller. I wanted the viewer to know as early as possible who the perpetrator is and to sympathise with them, to some extent.

AK:  Which one of the Brenner films is your favourite?

JH:  I like The Bone Man the best.

AK:  So do I. Why?

JH:  First of all, I like the story itself as well as the highly atmospheric storytelling. Secondly, renowned actors like Josef Bierbichler and Birgit Minichmayr are in it. Plus, I met my wife, Pia Hierzegger, on set.

AK:  I somehow thought you would say Silentium because of your connection to the church and religion.

JH:  Religion hasn’t really moved me personally in the last 30 years. I actually closed that chapter very early in my life. The church never had a huge impact on my personal development. I didn’t even have a guilty conscience as a child because of a sin; I was always relaxed. I always thought to myself, ‘If there is a God, then he has much bigger problems than my petty issues.’ As I grew up, I also outgrew my faith. Back then, I just thought that, as an institution, they were quite useful in some ways. Obviously, that has changed since the Seventies.

AK:  Can you enjoy your own movies after you have finished them?

JH:  That fluctuates. When I rewatch a film of mine after a long period of time, my assessment is usually mixed. Having had some distance from it, I find that some scenes are much better than I originally thought, whereas others don’t appeal at all anymore. With ongoing film projects, I’m very easily influenced by others. If people whose opinion matters to me like it, then I also find it better myself. Maybe I still make these things for an imaginary school class full of classmates I’m trying to please so they don’t beat me up, and they like me instead.

Credits

Words: Amelie Kahl
Photography: Manuel Nieberle
Styling: Joana Zibat
Styling Assistant: Luca Benz

As featured in SLEEK 80 – FORTUNE. Available in print and digital here.