Hinterland by Stephen Ruzowitzki on Opinion 4

hinterlandOn Rai 4 An “expressionist” thriller from director Stephen Ruzowitzki, the Oscar winner for Fraudsters – Operation Bernhard, The film stages the search for a serial killer in 1920 Vienna after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Hinterland – cast and characters

Murathan Muslu: Perg
Liv Lisa Fries: Corner
Max von der Groeben: Severin
Mark Lempach: Rainer
Mathias Schweighofer: Joseph Severin
Margaret Tiesel: Concierge
Maximilian Jadin: Hoffman
aaron frizkovacs
Stipe Erceg: Farmer
Timo Wagner: Kra: Gerster
Germain Wagner: G: Starkenberg
Peter Chance: Steiner
Nilton Martins: Captain
Eugen Victor: Goalkeeper
Wolfgang Pisseker: Prison Guard
Markus Schlenzer: Pocketmart
Konstantin Rommelfangen: Sixth
Lucas Walcher: Heeresmati

Hinterland – Plot and Trailer

Vienna, 1920. The Austro-Hungarian Empire has collapsed. Peter Perg returns home from the Great War after years of captivity. But the Vienna he returns home to is nothing like the place he once knew. The new Austrian republic thrives on social and artistic freedom, but anti-democratic agitation and unemployment loom large. A stranger’s life in his hometown takes a turn for the worse when one of his former teammates is found murdered. Suddenly mysterious murders of veterans are on the rise. Connecting personally with the victims, Perg decides to bring the killer to justice. He finds an ally in the cold forensic doctor Theresa Korner, with whom he has a deep and shared history. Their investigation takes them to the darkest corners of the city, as they come face to face with a ruthless and methodical killer and intrigue within the police force. But when the killer’s web closes around Perg, he is faced with the moral dilemma of his life.

director’s notes

• Hinterland talks about toxic masculinity. Perg and his millions of comrades return from war, the last place where man can prove himself against man. They have lost this battle, they feel shame and anger, they suffer for their “failure”. They react to this with blind aggression – against others, against themselves.
• In this new post-Great War era, nothing seems right and straight to people like Perg, everything seems distorted and out of place. We sought to portray an image of an essentially distorted world in a digital version of the silent film classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for Hinterland, which we worked with expressionistically crooked backgrounds.
• Hinterland was shot almost exclusively on blue screen. We have tried to strike an exciting balance between this world of tough, loud and brutal men and the complex souls with existential wounds of our heroes.

(Stephen Ruzowitzki)

Stephen Ruzowitzki – Biographical Notes

Academy Award for Best Foreign Film Screenwriter and Director Fraudsters – Operation Bernhard (2007) was born in 1961 in Vienna, Austria. Growing up in Düsseldorf, Germany, he studied theatre, media, film and history. Stephen Ruzowitzki began his career directing music videos for bands such as The Scorpions, No Mercy and Justin Timberlake (“Best Video” nomination, MTV USA). One of his first feature films, successors (1998), Telluride, was a hit at the New York Film Festival and the Toronto Film Festival and won over twenty international awards. Body structure (2000) became the highest-grossing German genre film of all time. After directing a blockbuster film like the children’s film The Magic Book of the Sorceress Martina and the Little Dragon (2009) and cold hell – you will burn in hell (2017), Ruzowitzki began working in the United States, where he directed Blood Relations – Fatalities (2012) (with Eric Bana, Sissy Spacek, Kris Kristofferson and Charlie Hunnam) and co-created series such as 8 days (2019)e savage (2020). In addition, Ruzowitzki adapted Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund (2020) for film.

Murathan Muslutefan (Peter Perg) – Biographical Notes

Murathan Muslu is an Austrian actor born in 1981 in Vienna, Austria to Turkish parents. He left school at the age of fifteen and spent much of his time collecting and watching VHS tapes, which he refers to as his “acting school”. Muslu made his debut Father

(2011) directed by Umut Dag, which won him the prestigious German First Steps Award and marked the beginning of his acting career. Within four years, Muslu achieved great recognition, and won two of the most important Austrian acting awards for his performance. cracks in concrete (2014). Since then, he has played more than 20 leading roles in German and Austrian films and TV shows, as well as in Sky mini-series. 8 days (2019) and in the Netflix series Horizon (2019).

Liv Lisa Fries (Dr. Theresa Korner) – Biographical Notes

Liv Lisa Fries was born in 1990 in Berlin. She has been acting since 2005 and is one of the most famous young German actresses. Variety named him one of its “10 Europeans to Watch” in 2017. Her portrayal of Charlotte Ritter in the acclaimed TV series babylon berlin (2017-2021) received acclaim from critics and audiences worldwide. The fries got a lot of attention from the movie she deserved it (2010) by Thomas Stiller, won the 2012 Golden Camera as Best Emerging Actress. He landed his first big screen role in 2010 in the award-winning drama stronger than blood Directed by Oliver Keenley. He starred on the big screen heal E by Dietrich Bruggemann boy 7 by Izgur Yildirim, both in 2015, and the young Lou Andreas in the role of Salomé In Love With Lu – A Philosopher’s Life (2016) by Cordula Kablitz Post. Tragicomedy of Alexander Alluka rocket perelman (2017) in which Fries plays the young fashion designer Jane and premiered at the film festival Max Ophüls Preis. He starred in 2021 Felix Krull statementAdaptation of Thomas Mann’s famous novel and spy-thriller Munich – on the brink of warShe returned in 2022 to shoot for the fourth season of Babylon Berlin.

interview with the director

For your film “Hinterland” you chose an interesting era – the years after the end of World War I – that raises a rarely asked question today: what happens when hostilities cease but no one knows why? Which laws are still valid and, worse, are they not the same as before?

What ideas inspired you to focus on this era?

I was involved in a project many years ago that was set in this period, but ended up with nothing. At the time, I was reading a lot of literature from the early 1920s and immediately after the war, and it struck me that the cultural shock after World War I was much greater than after World War II, not only in Austria but all over the country. Europe. After all, discussion of the Holocaust was taboo for a long time and became the focus of attention much later. Everything fell apart after the First World War. People really felt that something was over and something completely new was beginning, unlike in the fifties, when it took a lot of effort to maintain the peace and tranquility that had been so hard established. Was.

“Hinterland” combines two elements that guide the narrative: the horror-thriller genre clashing with historical periods and the pursuit of serial killers. Three people are listed as authors: Hanno Pinter and Robert Buchswenter as well as you. How did the script develop?

The first time I got a chance to read the script was 10 or 12 years ago. The Vienna Screenplay Forum was a program where young writers could ask experienced peers to discuss their screenplays. In the case of Hanno Pinter, I was cast, and my impression of the script was very mixed: in some places I thought it was incredibly good, but in other places it was completely half-baked. Hanno taught himself to write screenplays and broke many unwritten rules, leading to great and unusual solutions, but also showing in places why unwritten rules matter. Then I didn’t have time to focus on the material. But years later the script reappeared on my desk. It was a good progress, but I still felt some places needed major changes, and I also introduced some new elements like the romance. He explicitly credits Hanno Pinter with creating the story; The basic features – the historical context and motivation of the serial killer – were present from the beginning.

Dr. Korner, the female protagonist, is an expert in forensics, a profession otherwise reserved for men. It not only represents liberation, but also represents the new spirit of the 1920s. How do you see your female protagonist?

Dr. Korner is the mentor who steers Perg in a new direction. And she is someone who lives up to that new spirit, which she also portrays on the basis of her love story with Perg. It was very important to me that Perg’s wife, whom he thought was dead and had gone into the countryside, should not be treated as foolish, old-fashioned and naïve in her opposition to Dr. Körner; Instead, she too had to appear to be a strong and intelligent woman. I didn’t want their former life to be devalued by Perg’s decision not to return to her. The idea was to illustrate how important his relationship with his wife was still, not to make it a symbol of the past.

How did the idea to create a historical setting with visual effects and blue screen shooting come about?

The decision was deeply tied to what we wanted to say. The world, society and culture changed so drastically after World War I that those who did not experience it firsthand, as they returned home after years of being in a POW camp, felt that the whole world had become worthless. That’s why it would be appropriate to present this distortion in visual form as well. I don’t think this is a cinematic technique suitable for all types of material. In this case it matters a lot. We ourselves described the project as a “Digital Doctor Caligari Cabinet”, because that too was a world created from expressionist distortions. As far as technology is concerned, the first person to be credited is Oliver Newman; developed that initial concept and also produced the film. Digital Art Director Oleg Prodes created projects based on historical photographs and some he took himself. Since we were dealing with an impossible world where the perspectives weren’t perfect, we shot with the actors first, giving them every leeway in terms of acting, and then adapted the distorted world to the images of the actors we’d already filmed Was.

Hinterland – Soundtrack

• The film’s original music is by composer what statement (Collective, Bad Banks, Le Chemin du Bonheur).
• The soundtrack includes the song “La Paloma” from 1863. Sebastian Iradier,