Miroirs No. 3
Following a fatal car crash in the countryside that leaves her injured and her boyfriend dead, Laura (Paula Beer), a pianist visiting from Berlin, is nursed back to health over several days by Betty (Barbara Auer), a quiet woman who lives near the crash site. Through carefully placed moments of subtle exposition, German filmmaker Christian Petzold slowly reveals to the viewer the extent to which Betty (who seemingly lives alone, but then…not) needs Laura to be a part of her daily life. Much of the fun of Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3 then comes in the mysterious yet heartbreaking ways the narrative plays with and upends expectations, both the viewers’ and the characters’ on screen. For different reasons, both women are grieving in different ways.
Like his new movie, a conversation with Christian Petzold is guaranteed to take you in numerous directions. Filled with an abundance of wisdom, wit, and enthusiasm for countless cultural and historical citations, Petzold’s interviews and post-screening Q&As are crowd-pleasing, fatigue-less lectures that have become anticipated, can’t-miss events amongst the American arthouse community. (Film at Lincoln Center’s recent retrospective of Petzold’s work saw each of their in-person Q&As with the director completely sold out). On the occasion of the theatrical release of his latest feature, Miroirs No. 3, I took the opportunity to speak with Petzold about his thoughts on Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, why cinema loves abandoned places, and whatever else he wanted to talk about. Miroirs No. 3 is currently in select theaters, courtesy of 1-2 Special.
Filmmaker: You’ve previously spoken about the fairy tale aspects of your films and how Miroirs No. 3 is, in many ways, your Alice in Wonderland; the film is filled with mirrors and takes you directly into the looking glass. Undine (2020) is another obvious example, of course. I’m curious about using these fantastical stories as jumping-off points for new projects of yours.
Petzold: Once when I was in Paris, I stayed in a small hotel near Jardin du Luxembourg. One morning, I took a walk after breakfast, and there are so many scenes in French cinema and the Nouvelle Vague that feature Jardin du Luxembourg. And while it’s not very complicated to film a kiss scene or a love scene or a divorce scene in Jardin du Luxembourg, it’s very, very hard to film a love scene or a kiss scene or to show any kind of desire within the German reality, because we have no Jardin du Luxembourg here! I always wanted to try to recreate that world with the making of a movie.
When I was eight or nine years old, I was living amongst these ugly surroundings, and so I would go on an adventure and visit a small forest near the highway. There was a fantastical atmosphere there, a mystical atmosphere, and I think cinema, when someone falls in love or is on the run or is being chased, changes their world too. For example, in Undine or Miroirs No. 3, the world has changed for the characters, and so the structures and science [that make up] fairytales are beginning to seep into their world. In Miroirs, there is a shoe; someone has lost a shoe in a car accident…it’s almost as if she is Cinderella, right? The red car is something from a Jean-Luc Godard or a François Truffaut movie, or it’s the car of Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate. But it’s not a quotation, just something that proclaims: “This is the world now, for these people, and we are intruders into this world.” We’re like a surveillance camera. We are watching what is happening in this world. That is the idea.
Filmmaker: What kinds of discussions did you have with your longtime cinematographer Hans Fromm about how to shoot those moments? Or are elements such as camera placement and when to shift perspective already indicated in your screenplay?
Petzold: Hans is a fantastic scientist, I must say. He knows everything about lenses and cameras, he has all of these skills, and he’s reading all of these magazines from Los Angeles and so on. But our [discussions] are completely different. When I was a student at the film academy [Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin], I read a sentence by Éric Rohmer where he said, along with Jacques Rivette, that “the camera position is a position of morality.” This is something that Hans and I agree about. For example, I don’t like having the camera on the shoulder or shooting handheld, because with this camera placement, you have no position…you’re just following something. It’s like this Direct Cinema shit from the 1960s, I don’t like that. On a shooting day, I will start with rehearsals with the actors. There’s nobody at the set excerpt for myself and the actors and their costumes. We rehearse the whole day, sometimes for two or three hours, and there’s no camera involved. The producers want to commit suicide when they make a phone call to ask, “Are you shooting yet? It’s 11am.” No, no, they’re just rehearsing. And only as we finish does Hans come in to watch the last rehearsal. After that, the actors go into makeup for one or two hours, and Hans and I sit down and work on the storyboards and the camera positions. We talk about what we have just seen and what the scene is really about. For example, in Barbara (2012), on the first day of rehearsal, we came to understand that this was a movie about surveillance, about people who know that someone is watching them. But then we had to question what our position was [as the viewer] in that scenario, because we are watchers too. Hans and I talked about that a lot, and then we knew what the movie was about. We knew what [Miroirs No. 3] was about due to our discussions about the position of the camera and about the car crash that opens the film.
Filmmaker: And on Miroirs No. 3, I’m sure the camera placement influenced how you chose to build Betty’s home from scratch.
Petzold: Just 20 minutes ago, I had a discussion with [Dry Leaf director] Alexander Koberidze [also in New York for the theatrical opening of his new feature], and we were talking about abandoned places. I told him, “Cinema loves abandoned places because abandoned places are projects that have failed.” Cinema is always about failing something: failing love, going into bankruptcy, etc. So this house that you’re describing doesn’t exist in real life—no, we built it completely. The porch doesn’t exist, the piano room doesn’t exist…there’s nothing there. We built everything: the white fence, everything. My idea was, in this “abandoned” house of Betty’s with ruined and broken things like a [dishwasher] or a broken fence or a broken bicycle—and also broken minds and broken souls—this house must have been a project for her some years ago, a project born out of a group of people, in this case, a family. This family tried to have a transparent, open space into the world. There’s a porch [facing] the street and all these things. The house is filled with windows and doors, and it’s a very open [space] where the wind and the light can come in. I think this house was a project for them, and in this now abandoned house with the ruined things, you must now see their desire, and you must feel the desire of this group of people who want to have a fantastic life. This is something Hans and I, for example, always tried to find a camera position for, one that shows off an open window or an open door [in the back of the frame]. [Typically] when Germans have a family, they build a house, and their house has to be a cave—their porch is built on the backside of the house, and when you are coming into the house, they then close the door and are essentially living in their cave. They don’t want to have any contact with the outside world. The family in this film is the opposite of that, as they want to open up everything, so the wind goes through the curtains and continues through the house. They tried to “refresh” Germany, but it was a total defeat for them.
Filmmaker: The film includes, quite prominently, the Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ song “The Night.” Of course, there’s a Frankie Valli song featured in another film you love very much: Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978). Did your love for that film influence your wanting to include a Four Seasons song in one of yours?
Petzold: My friends and I had discussions some years ago about The Deer Hunter, and I made the point that it is a movie about the working class. It almost has something to do with Donald Trump and his first presidential campaign [in 2016]. What you see in The Deer Hunter is a working class that is losing their work and that has to go to Vietnam to die because nobody needs them anymore. It’s always the same! The wars start when capitalism is in crisis, and you can see it in The Deer Hunter. The movie is fantastic in every way. There is this scene where the barkeeper plays a nocturne by Frédéric Chopin on the piano, and I have Nina Hoss play the same nocturne in Barbara. The world is really full of shit, but in this moment, we show that people can have moments of relief and comfort. That’s what’s happening there.
The other music in The Deer Hunter comes [via] the song “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” by Frankie Valli. In the film, you can see the energy of the working class and their love at the wedding and through dance…there’s so much energy to them and that energy is eventually channeled into the Vietnam War. At the end [of the film], they’re sitting together eating eggs and drinking coffee and singing “God Bless America.” In the final scene in Miroirs No.3, on the porch, they are drinking coffee and eating eggs, and it’s a reference to The Deer Hunter. It’s also a scene with a family, a group of people which, while traumatized, choose to live on.
Regarding Frankie Valli, I first heard a song [of his] in a movie by Miguel Gomes. I was in Seville on a jury at a film festival, and one of the films we saw was from Miguel Gomes [The Tsuga Diaries (2021)]. It’s about coronavirus times and follows some artists who are in exile on an old farm and choose to have a party there. This party reminds us of what we had lost during the pandemic. We had lost our clubs, our theater, our cinemas, our open spaces, our social lives, and then in one scene, these people are dancing to a Frankie Valli song, “The Night.” When I heard this song—it was the first time in my life I had heard it—I couldn’t understand that “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” and “The Night” were from the same singer, the same group. I was astonished. I love this song so much.
Filmmaker: You’ve spoken about reshooting the final scene that Paula Beer had initially expressed some concerns with, and then once you were in the edit several months after shooting had wrapped, you realized she was right?
Petzold: It was the first time in my life that this ever happened and I felt totally ashamed about it. Half-a-year before shooting, Paula Beer and Enno Trebs [who plays Max in the film] visited me in my office and they sat there in my chairs and drank my coffee and my tea, and they clearly had something on their minds. They had read the script and liked it, but they said that the ending was all wrong and that they didn’t understand it. I asked, “What is wrong with the ending?,” and they said that they didn’t understand why [Laura] is coming back to the family. In the script, she returns to the family and she wants to live there with them, as a daughter, for her whole life. The script was finished and I was so proud of it. The last sentence of the script was along the lines of, “She’s opening the gate to the family, and she’s going to be a part of the family for her whole life.”
Filmmaker: It was “the best sentence you’ve ever written,” you’ve said.
Petzold: Right, I said this to the actors, and they felt ashamed and went away. I had no doubts, though. I thought, “I have these actors with their bad thoughts, and it’s only now that we are making our fourth movie together that they start to criticize. But I’m the boss!” Then when we were in production and shooting this final scene for the first time, something was wrong, but I didn’t know what. And later [in post-production], at the editing table and in discussions with [my editor] Bettina Böhler, Bettina said the same thing as Paula Beer and Enno Trebs. She said, “Something’s wrong there,” and then I experienced a four-week depression because I couldn’t change the film anymore, and the movie was going in the wrong direction. But my producer reassured me, “[to reshoot the final scene], it’s only one day of extra shooting and would cost us 20,000 Euros…we’ve got that.” and so we were able to reshoot the end scene, although now with Paula being eight months pregnant and her skin and everything being different. It was a fantastic final picture of her, because now [her character] has left the family and has a life of her own. Perhaps they will meet and talk with each other again, but she’s not a daughter [to them] anymore. She’s an adult person. And this must be the final scene.
Filmmaker: You’ve worked with numerous members of the cast before, but I believe this is the first time you’ve worked with Barbara Auer since The State I Am In (2000) some 25 years ago. In a way, her role in Miroirs No. 3 serves as an interesting companion role to her character in The State I Am In.
Petzold: We’re actually going to be shooting together again this summer, making another movie. I hope actors know that each character they play becomes a part of their biography and that [the characterizations] come from their own identity. Barbara told me that she still had this [muscle] memory of the mother she played 25 years before in The State That I Am In. That film [like Miroirs No. 3] also involved a mother and daughter, it also involved death, and it involved a desire that cannot work. In The State I Am In, Barbara played a mother who had to live underground [the parents were former Red Army Faction operatives forced to live in hiding] and she had a daughter she couldn’t provide a social life for, a regular school for, etc. And now, in Miroirs No. 3, Barbara is playing someone who has a dead daughter but is trying to have a new daughter! It’s as if she’s playing the same character, and yet it’s totally different. It’s complex, but I think I understand how she worked.
Filmmaker: In reading and watching a lot of your other interviews, it’s always fascinating to hear you speak about how either real-world events or pieces of cinema or other artforms have influenced your films. When you’re promoting a film for a number of months after it premieres, do some of those connections become even clearer to you? Are those influences always on your mind when you’re writing the screenplay, or do they perhaps come out in other ways during production and then later when discussing the film ad nauseam?
Petzold: Yeah, it’s both of those things. For example, I heard that when John Cassavetes made Husbands, he came into the editing room with all of this material, and the editors said, “I can’t see the story in this material. It’s fantastic material, but I can’t see the story. What is this movie about?” And Cassavetes admitted, “I don’t know.” He later went into a hotel room with a typewriter and all of the footage, and as he was rewatching all of the material, he began writing [what amounted to] a novel. He then brought the novel to the editing room for the editors to read, and only then did they say, “Now we understand it. Now we can edit the movie.” It’s a little bit of a similar [process] for me. When I’m sitting with the editor at the editing table, I often see things I didn’t know before. But then there are other things I did know before. For example, in Rebecca (1940) by Alfred Hitchcock and in Nosferatu (1922) by F. W. Murnau, the fear you have when confronting those characters comes partly from your never getting to see them walk toward you as they get closer. In one scene at night, when Nosferatu opens a door, he’s far away from the camera, and then the next moment, he’s right in front of you. And then in Rebecca, you never see the servant [Mrs. Danvers] walking toward you, she’s always just directly there. This is not human, right? It gives you fear. It reminds you of when you were a child and did something wrong. In my memory, my mother or my father were always just there, watching me! And this feeling is something you can learn from cinema or it’s something I can talk with my actors about, and Barbara Auer can play it differently when she knows her character is meant to [suddenly appear]…she’s just there. For example, when Paula Beer is at the piano and Barbara says, “You are playing piano?,” Barbara is just directly there in the room with her. You never saw how she came in or got closer. And I showed both actors Rebecca and they understand what cinema is about.
Filmmaker: You mentioned working again with Barbara Auer this summer…I read you’re also going to be shooting with Paula Beer and Nina Hoss on a film two years from now?
Petzold: In two or three years, yes, but I have to write the script first. I have finished three scripts, and I’m working on the fourth now. When you pass 60 years of age [Petzold is currently 65], it’s like you’re writing many, many things to at least have something for your last years.
Filmmaker: And that’ll potentially be the fourth script…
Petzold: The fourth script, yeah. It’s about a theater group in Germany, and their theater is [about to] close, and this is their last play. The capitalistic world is coming, and then a musical company buys this theater, and this is a very bad ensemble with bad and very jealous people. And in this moment, when they lose everything, they’re getting braver. Their last [performance] will be of The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov. This is the play they’re putting on. Nina Hoss and Paula Beer, in this movie, would be playing enemies.
Filmmaker: That’s a very Chekhovian conflict.
Petzold: [laughs] Yes.
