Entertainment
Pawel Pawlikowski on Cannes Hit Fatherland INTERVIEW
Pawel Pawlikowski‘s seventh feature “Fatherland” came into the Cannes Competition with high expectations, and judging from audience and critical reaction, it should win a prize or two. Sandra Hüller is a frontrunner for Best Actress, having just won that award in Berlin for “Rose.” After all, this is the Polish filmmaker behind Oscarnominee “Cold War” (2018) and Oscar winner “Ida” (2013).
And, given that “Fatherland” also parses European history through complicated characters, and is filmed in black-and-white in the Academy ratio, Pawlikowski grants that he has unintentionally fashioned a trilogy.
The movie confronts Germany’s post-World War II trauma in a family road movie centered on three characters: the Nobel Laureate novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler), his daughter and assistant Erika (Hüller), and his son Klaus (August Diehl). The movie kicks off with a bravura five-and-a-half minute locked off single take of Klaus in Cannes, sitting naked on the floor by a bed with a sleeping young man. He talks on the phone with Erika, who tries to coax her depressed drug-addict intellectual twin to come on a road trip with her back to Germany as his father accepts the Goethe prize.
“When is the last time you felt anything?,” he asks.
I sat down with Pawlikowski at the J.W. Marriott in Cannes. The father-daughter relationship at the center of this heady literary movie about the “collapse of Europe,” he said, “seems to connect things.” While Italian producers initially pitched him a biography of Thomas Mann, he rejected making a biopic. But something in the book triggered the nugget of what would become “Fatherland.”
“There is this little moment, which I use as a starting point to invent a story,” he said. “When Thomas goes to Germany, he’s in an interesting situation. It rang a bell. Everything’s collapsed, everything he believed in. He’s trying to regenerate it in a one-man operation. He tries to bring together Germany and transcend the ideological division.”
Scenes of the humanist Mann speaking earnestly to auditoriums full of people who likely do not hear him are strangely resonant with today. (Pawlikowski put enormous time into finding the right faces for the extras.) “He’s like a boxer going into the ring,” said Pawlikowski. “That’s his big entry.”
Around that same time, Klaus committed suicide and his father did not attend the funeral. “Suddenly, I knew I had a critical mass for a film,” said Pawlikowski. “There was the historical context that was also psychological. And this triangular family drama.”
It’s also the first time Pawlikowski is dealing with real people, although he fictionalizes freely. He hints at Erika’s homosexuality as an American journalist flirts with her. “It’s hinted that she had a relationship with Betty, one of the journalists who crops up,” said Pawlikowski. “And Betty has certain expectations. Erika just cuts it short now, because she’s on a mission, and that affair is long in the past.” (Erika is also, fascinatingly, married to gay British poet W.H. Auden.)
Pawlikowski, who studied German literature in Germany, said that Mann was gay, “but super repressed,” he said. “He sublimated it in his work. No one thinks he never acted upon it, he was writing about it [‘Death in Venice’], but quite overtly in his diaries about his fantasies. He had crushes and loves for certain men throughout his life. That’s what so annoys Erika at some point. He turns everything into words, he turns everything into art, and he exploits his feelings, repressed passions, and fantasies creatively. He even wrote in one of his early diaries that he desired young Klaus. His diaries were in a safe in Munich in 1933 when they escaped. The big fear was that the Nazis are going to get hold of these diaries. There was a secret mission organized by Erika to rescue the diaries from the Nazis.”
In West Germany, Erika attends a fancy cocktail party, where she runs into a handsome man who turns out to be her ex-husband (Joachim Meyerhoff), a Nazi actor. He tells her she had it easy, with her languages, skills, activities, and rich father. The bile rises in Hüller until she whips out her hand and slaps him. “Everyone assumes she slaps him because he’s a Nazi, but she slaps him because he hit a nerve, because she was a nepo baby,” said Pawlikowski. “Without the father, they would have no money, no contacts, none of this lifestyle that they had. They lived on the Riviera, drove around, were super well-educated, and had fantastic connections.”
Of course Pawlikowski went to Germany’s most lauded actress to play Erika. In the slap scene, “You watch the transformation of her face, and it really, really happens,” said Pawlikowski. “She doesn’t seem to be acting. She has this fake smile, and then in her eyes, what happens there? There was one take where things come to the surface, brilliantly, in a way that’s not scripted and not acted, it mysteriously unfolds.” (Given the recent Academy Award rule changes, Hüller could land two Best Actress slots and a third for Supporting for “Project Hail Mary.” And still to come is “Digger.”)
For the single take prologue, Pawlikowski kept sculpting it with Diehl, taking things out, putting them back in, to reach the right length and cadence. “August was good at that jazzy approach, playing back and forth with you,” he said. “He was totally open into for that kind of musical approach to performance. The whole thing had an integrity to it.”
Klaus pops up in the movie a few time like a hovering ghost. “That was a tricky decision,” said Pawlikowski, “I’ve never done that in my life. But this kind of astral projection, if somebody dies, it has been recorded, and [Erika] is so missing and craving him.”
One of Erika Mann’s many skills was driving, which she does in the movie, ferrying Mann around in a giant glossy Buick. “She did long distance rallies,” said Pawlikowski. “And drove often with Klaus. They drove to Kazakhstan, across the Steppes. She wrote with Klaus about driving around the Riviera, and she was behind the wheel. [The Buick] was a difficult car to drive, so Sandra had to really practice a lot, and she’s a really good driver herself. But this car is really heavy, and the gears are tricky, so it took a bit of prep.”
As for the look of the film, cinematographer Łukasz Żal returns, bringing far more camera movement than before. “Everything results from the material, it’s not like I’m imposing this style,” said Pawlikowski. “I like the photography to be strong and concentrated, so that’s the basic kind of principle, but then you do whatever is right. It’s a road movie, but the camera moves when it has to move, but it doesn’t move just to have a bit of cinematic gesture. It’s super primitive and simple, like in silent movies, like the old films. When the camera started to move, it was only to get to get somewhere interesting.”
One spectacular sequence at the start of the film shows Thomas and Erika Mann looking through the car window at the wreckage of the war. “We needed to have an archival moment without using archives,” said Pawlikowski. “We found a street, which was pretty damaged, in a part of Poland which used to belong to Germany. We built some ruins in the foreground, but they’re not painted in, they’re really there. And we found the right extras to look right and busy themselves, and then with digital we painted out satellite dishes and modern windows. We wanted to establish this basic principle where you have an intimate relationship at the center, father-daughter in a capsule, they’re protected from the world. The whole film is about a big vista and a small relationship.”
[Editor’s note: Spoilers for the conclusion of the film follow.]
At the end of the movie, as the Manns leave Weimar to go back West, they see a ruin of an old church. They skip out on their escort and enter the church. “It’s a mutual understanding and urge to see something that’s not official, that’s not part of the official program,” said Pawlikowski. “They’re tuning the organ, which is damaged, when they come in. They happen to play a Bach chorale, play it badly, but still strong enough for us to be moved, and it’s only more moving because it’s a broken organ, and it’s bad. But it still works.”
The music opens up the floodgates for the audience as they mourn Klaus and feel the elegy for everything that’s lost. “You don’t know how to achieve it,” said Pawlikowski. “It’s not so easy, because you write it, imagine it, play the music, and you get moved. But we have to find a church. Then we have to find an organ to put in that church. Then we have to like create an atmosphere where the actors do it in an accidental organic way: how do you engineer that? By the time we shot the scene, they were really close, Sandra and Hanns, and Hanns had some personal grief that he was working through, so the first take, it worked. She takes his hand. That’s the beauty of cinema, when you have good photography and within it you have things that seem to unfold mysteriously rather than like pressing buttons.”
“Fatherland” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. MUBI will release it at a later date.
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As Larry David‘s comedic trip through U.S. history comes to an end, he took credit for one of the nation’s more recent presidential scandals.
On Friday’s season finale of the HBO sketch comedy miniseries Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, President Barack Obama made a surprise appearance as himself in a sketch set in 2014, as David advised him to wear the now-infamous, outrage-inducing tan suit during his live press conference on military response to ISIS.
Following some banter on how the POTUS avoids stains, David accidentally spills juice on Obama’s suit jacket when he leaves the room. When the 44th president returns, the comedian recommends he wear the tan suit that Obama planned on taking it to Turin for NATO Summit, for “a daytime event, it’s outdoors, a little more casual.”
“First of all, it’s a gorgeous suit,” David declared. “And this is casual Friday!”
“It is a great suit,” admitted Obama, as David told him, “Oh boy, oh boy. I think this is the move. … Old lips won’t let you down. You’ll thank me!”
As Obama models the look, David gives him his signature, “Pretty good! Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good.”
“You sure about this?” asks Obama, as David assures him, “Never been more sure about anything in my life. People are going to be talking about this for a long, long time.”
Obama’s cameo in the finale comes as David marks the United States Semiquencentennial with the seven-part sketch comedy limited series, which recounts major events in U.S. history through the comedian’s signature observational humor.
David’s longtime Curb Your Enthusiasm partner Jeff Schaffer, who serves as an executive producer on Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, previously told Deadline that Obama, who produced under his Higher Ground banner, reached out to his buddy David to ask if he’d be interested in making the show to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday.
“When you’re doing a show about American history, you want to do it warts and right now we have this orange saggy wart that we wish would go away,” said Schaffer. “But the nice thing about having President Obama produce this and be a part of it is that this country’s had a lot of fuck ups, we’ve seemed to have learned very little, but we’re still moving forward sometimes, and then we move back a little bit, but we always move forward again. While Larry’s pointing out a lot of the steps back, the President is telling us we can still step forward.”
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Matthew McConaughey shows off his vocal skills (and some hidden banjo talents) with his latest role in The Rivals of Amziah King.
On Friday, Lakeshore Records released the single and music video for “Quill” from the original motion picture soundtrack, performed by the Oscar-winning and co-star Ben Hardesty, also featuring Miranda Zickler, Angelina LookingGlass and Andrea Pister.
Set in the backwoods of Oklahoma, The Rivals of Amziah King follows the musically gifted Amaziah King (McConaughey) and his bluegrass-playing band of misfits while overseeing the premier honey-making operation in town. When Amaziah’s estranged foster daughter unexpectedly returns, he leaps at the chance to reconnect and create a family business. But the honey game is ruthless, and Amaziah’s rivals threaten to destroy everything he has built.
Premiering Aug. 14 in theaters, the Andrew Patterson-written-and-directed drama also stars Angelina LookingGlass, Cole Sprouse, Jake Horowitz, Tony Revolori and Kurt Russell.
Producers are David Heyman, Teddy Schwarzman, Jeffrey Clifford, Michael Heimler, James Montague and Will Greenfield.
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With their latest directorial outing, Jane Schoenbrun used subtle pieces of nostalgia to deconstruct the slasher genre.
The Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma writer/director explained to Deadline that they wanted to create “a mindset where you can really enjoy something scary,” noting the frequent symbolism of candy and junk food as providing an atmosphere “that’s actually safe” while diving into a horror movie or exploring sexuality after trauma.
“There is this idea that if it gets too real, you can turn it off, that you’re exploring something dangerous, doing it in a way that’s actually safe,” said Schoenbrun, who is non-binary. “Which in my experience of coming into my sexual identity post-transition, kind of required some gummy candy on hand. What I mean by that is, even if we’re going to be exploring scary and vulnerable and potentially embarrassing, triggering parts of ourselves, we trust each other well enough to know that at any moment, we can be like, ‘Let’s stop, we gotta just eat some fucking gummies.’”
In Schoenbrun’s latest film, Hannah Einbinder stars as queer director Kris, who is tapped to helm a new installment of the long-running Camp Miasma horror franchise. While courting Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the actress who played the “final girl” in the original film, to reprise her role, the pair spirals into a psychosexual frenzy as the slasher’s killer, Little Death (Jack Haven), comes to life.
Acknowledging the problematic trans representation of horror films like Psycho (1960), Sleepaway Camp (1983), The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995), Schoenbrun admitted the genre has been “catnip to me since I was 10 years old,” and they jumped at the chance to direct their own.
“So many slashers do have this sense of humor, and even if they’re not overtly meta like the Scream movies are, they’re so aware of their own tropes and the sort of rituals … And I just loved that from a young age and loved all of the little rituals within it, and so, getting to make my own is just like play and joy,” they explained.
“But it also felt like the perfect way to talk about sex and to talk about my experience as a trans person post-transition, learning how to come into a sexual identity that I could feel comfortable within, because so many of these movies are obviously deeply engaged in gender and sexual roles, and these movies have so much to say for better or for worse about deviants,” said Schoenbrun. “It is there in the DNA of the slasher genre that these movies are talking about fear and desire, gender and sexuality, normativity and deviance. And that’s all swimming in the toxic soup of the genre, so I wanted to remake it in my own language.”
Read on about Jane Schoenbrun’s love letter to the slasher genre with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, now playing in theaters.
DEADLINE: It was really fun to see the slasher genre through your eyes. Tell me about finding inspiration in that genre and “final girls.”
JANE SCHOENBRUN: I mean, it was the easiest thing in the world because it’s just one of those genres that has been catnip to me since I was 10 years old. I just raided the horror section of the video store as a kid from an age when I really shouldn’t have been doing that, like in 5th grade, I watched in the span of about one week, every Nightmare on Elm Street movie. I think that I was always drawn to movies and really anything entertainment where it felt forbidden in some way, like the thing on the tape, how is that even allowed? And that’s the thing that I love about a lot of my favorite slashers. Don’t get me wrong, I love like brutal ones, like I love Texas Chainsaw, that’s a nasty movie at its core, and that’s what’s so special about it. But so many slashers do have this sense of humor, and even if they’re not overtly meta like the Scream movies are, they’re so aware of their own tropes and the sort of rituals of, OK, what’s the most outrageous way that like these like dumb kids can get killed? But watching it, it’s not about fear a lot of the time, it’s about joy and celebration. And I just loved that from a young age and loved all of the little rituals within it, and so, getting to make my own is just like play and joy. But it also felt like the perfect way to talk about sex and to talk about my experience as a trans person post-transition, learning how to come into a sexual identity that I could feel comfortable within, because so many of these movies are obviously deeply engaged in gender and sexual roles, and these movies have so much to say for better or for worse about deviants, whether that be Norman Bates or Buffalo Bill or Sleepway Camp or Jason, Michael Myers, Leatherface in drag. It is there in the DNA of the slasher genre that these movies are talking about fear and desire, gender and sexuality, normativity and deviance. And that’s all swimming in the toxic soup of the genre, so I wanted to remake it in my own language.
DEADLINE: I’m curious about the symbolism of all the processed junk food and the chandelier of wrappers.
SCHOENBRUN: The junk food in the movie, I forget when it found its way in there. It’s like so much of the movie is about, like I said, ritual, about being in a mindset where you can really enjoy something scary, whether that be Kris [Hannah Einbinder] in bed, with, you know, with Raisinets and the popcorn, watching a schlocky horror movie, or the two characters learning how to be present and enjoy sex after a lot of trauma. There is this idea that if it gets too real, you can turn it off, that you’re exploring something dangerous, doing it in a way that’s actually safe. Which in my experience of coming into my sexual identity post-transition, kind of required some gummy candy on hand. What I mean by that is, even if we’re going to be exploring scary and vulnerable and potentially embarrassing, triggering parts of ourselves, we trust each other well enough to know that at any moment, we can be like, “Let’s stop, we gotta just eat some fucking gummies.”
DEADLINE: And one thing I really love—I just feel like it’s a theme in your work—is how it depicts the way media and entertainment influence us. Why does that inspire you?
SCHOENBRUN: I think it comes from a fascination and sensitivity to the complex relationship between what we think of as fiction and what we think of as reality, which we tend to, as a society, think of as pointing in one direction. Like, reality dictates fiction, not vice-versa, but when you actually look at the way the world works, it’s like one echoes off the other. And I think a complicated, sometimes terrifying and sometimes beautiful way, where the fiction, the cultural norms, the things we grow up looking at on our screens, the roles that we’re told people play, they kind of inspire us to create reality. There’s something liberating when you start thinking in that way. I think it’s a way of thinking that we as a culture, could do a lot more of. To think about the idea of fiction inspiring reality just as much as reality is inspiring fiction, is a potential path to liberating us from this hellscape that they’re telling us is the only way the world can be.
DEADLINE: And I know you have the Secretary reading. Tell me what it’s been like prepping for that and why you all chose that movie.
SCHOENBRUN: I mean, that was such a huge influence on on Miasma. There just aren’t that many fun and funny movies about deviant sex. And just the way that movie is like feather light while talking about really raw and taboo things, it is just really inspiring to me. And the dynamic between those two main characters is definitely one that had a lot of influence on on Kris and Billy’s [Gillian Anderson] relationship in Miasma. And it’s already to me a very queer movie in its way, but having Gillian reading the James Spader part and Hannah reading the Maggie Gyllenhaal part, I think it’s just gonna be like a very unique joy. Honestly, we’ve been prepping a little bit, but I think it’s just gonna be about getting up there and feeling the chemistry of it all, and just letting these folks who we have all gotten to know each other really, really well, but we haven’t actually done anything wacky and creative like that in a while, like as a reunion, it’s gonna be a real blast, I think.
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