Sebas­t­ian Schip­per: ​‘I’m so fed up with peo­ple try­ing to sug­ar­coat everything’

Shoot­ing a film in one take fits with the wild char­ac­ter of Ger­man direc­tor, Sebas­t­ian Schip­per. Vic­to­ria tells the sto­ry a young Span­ish woman who – on a night out in Berlin – meets a man and fol­lows him into deep trou­ble. We spoke to Schip­per recent­ly to find out about his pas­sions as a man.

LWLies: What’s the cra­zi­est thing you ever did because you were attract­ed to someone?

Schip­per: I think every­thing I’m doing is because I’m attract­ed. To not give you a philo­soph­i­cal answer: I was in Por­tu­gal with a friend and kind of heart­bro­ken because my rela­tion­ship was not going too well. I bought a real­ly cheap car, some kind of a con­vert­ible from oth­er Ger­man tourists who were in Por­tu­gal. It didn’t have a roof at all. It was not street legal. They just cut off this roof and went to Por­tu­gal and they need­ed to get rid of it.

I fig­ured out these guys would sell it to me and told my friend, ​‘Dude, I’m going to France’. He was like, ​‘What?’ He was kind of angry because we were sup­posed to be on vaca­tion togeth­er. So I bought it for very lit­tle mon­ey and drove for 36 hours straight with­out sleep­ing to see my then girl­friend in France. It was a dis­as­ter because her dad was a… what do you call that, a sergeant? And the car didn’t have any seat-belts or any­thing, so she wouldn’t sit in the car or go in the car with me. I was there in my big wild-at-heart look­ing car, and it was kind of a failure.

How long ago was this?

Twen­ty some­thing years.

Have you calmed down or would you still still do some­thing that crazy?

I would still do that, yeah. I have not calmed down – no. That has plus­es and minuses.

Will you explore those plus­es and minus­es in your future films?

Yeah. For a long time I thought I had to tame my crazy pas­sion or trans­late it into some­thing more colour­ful before it becomes enter­tain­ment. In Vic­to­ria I didn’t. It’s my fourth film, you know, but it’s the first one where it’s unabridged. It’s not soft around the edges. It has this kind of this raw ener­gy. I was not eye­ing a poten­tial audi­ence. I was not ask­ing myself, ​‘I won­der if peo­ple are going to like this?’, ​‘I won­der if this?’, ​‘I won­der if that?’ It was only about, ​‘If I like it, that’s what we’re going to do. This crazy one take is what we’re going to do.’ I was not try­ing to sug­ar­coat any­thing to make it go down eas­i­er because I also realised, as some­body who watch­es films or lis­tens to music or reads books, I was just so fed up.

Why were you fed up?

I’m so fed up with peo­ple try­ing to sug­ar­coat every­thing for me because they expect me not to be able to take it. Bring it, you know, give it me. If you sug­ar­coat things, or if you put ketchup on every­thing, maybe you’re afraid what taste will be left if you take the ketchup away. ​‘Oh, they won’t be able to under­stand that so I will make it eas­i­er for them.’ But what that some­times leads to is you cut the cor­ner off. What are you real­ly made of? What do you real­ly have to tell? If you’re wor­ry­ing so much about sell­ing it or get­ting it financed and all that, maybe, deep down you’re also afraid. Real­ly, at the end of the day, if some­body would come up and give you all the mon­ey you need for your project, maybe you’re a lit­tle afraid of of what you’ve got in yourself?

What do you love about movies?

You don’t watch them with your brain, you don’t watch them with your heart, you watch films with your ner­vous sys­tem and you can’t escape from it and you can’t ratio­nalise it. If you try to ratio­nalise what you’ve been through with a film you’re always going to fail. It will always by far excel what you are able to put into words. But you come out of the cin­e­ma and you’ve loved a film, and you’re not sure yet what your friend or part­ner or who­ev­er you’ve been there with thinks.

I’m always scared that they will hate it because you can’t talk them into lov­ing the film or the oth­er way round. I can’t be talked into lov­ing a film. If I didn’t like it I didn’t like it. Even if you both love the film, some­times the ratio­nal­is­ing is a frus­trat­ing act. What I love about films is they absolute­ly work on the lev­el of instinct and intu­ition and tell you that maybe the core of what we’re made of is not this over-rat­ed brain and even some­times over-rat­ed heart, it’s way more complicated.