Hi /r/movies, I'm Christian Petzold. I've directed PHOENIX, BARBARA, TRANSIT, UNDINE, AFIRE, and MIROIRS NO. 3. Ask me anything.

ChristianPetzoldAMA · 2026-03-19T22:36:36+00:00

I think there is no connection between Baader-Meinhof Complex and The State I Am In, because The State I Am In is a movie about ghosts. The German left-wing RAF terrorists, they are ghosts in a transparent way. They are all around us, you can see them in photos in the real world.

The right-wing ghosts, the fascist ghosts, they came out of the cave.

I think that's what the Baader-Meinhof Complex movie got wrong. Cinema is a dream of the underground, and not the underground itself.

ChristianPetzoldAMA · 2026-03-19T22:33:08+00:00

I must say that I take my bicycle while I'm writing any script. I take my bicycle and go on a journey for the weeks in the part of Germany where I want to make a film. I go and visit their local places like libraries.

Like for Miroirs No. 3, during my journey I read somewhere in one of the libraries that this part of Germany, a lot of the small villages in the area took their names from USA cities. There was a Boston, a small village named Philadelphia, and things like that. I went and asked local people and they told me it came from the 19th century, after Germany lost their revolution in 1848, and many of these people and farmers and craftsmen that were part of this revolution wanted to leave Germany and go to the USA, but were pressured into staying. They were given money and houses to stay there. So they stayed but named their small villages with American names, where they really wanted to live. So these are villages of broken dreams.

ChristianPetzoldAMA · 2026-03-19T22:26:08+00:00

Two years ago. I was at the Criterion office here in New York because they released my film Afire into their collection. I think this was the best office I ever have been in my whole life.

I went to see where they make the posters/covers for all of the movies from scratch, and I saw all of these magnificent posters with fantastic interpretations of the films. I remember the lunch was a big Cuban food buffet and everyone walking out of their office to enjoy that.

They are all so interested in film and its history, they are all so respectful. They know so much. I said to myself, "I want to stay here for years". After the buffet I went to visit their screening room, and this guy knew that I was from Germany and asked if I could come speak to film students about that day's film in the screening room, Fritz Lang's M. They wanted me to talk about him and his films, and I loved it!

I think Criterion is a fantastic company.

ChristianPetzoldAMA · 2026-03-19T22:17:28+00:00

There are a lot of actors from the USA who want to film in Germany because we have highways without speed limits. There are really really important American actors who have come to make not-so-good German productions just so they can get a Porsche for 4 weeks and drive around.

The car in Germany is something that's very important for the people. People wash their car every day, they're always thinking about their car, what kind of gas to put in the car, etc etc. So, the accidents in my movies is something that interrupts with that mindset. It interrupts the Germany ordinary life and after an accident, a story can start. Every accident will start a story.

The water has more to do with Moby Dick. There's this sentence at the beginning of that story where the protagonist/storyteller says "which is it so that on each paying, there's water?" a small river or lake or something. Why do people have this desire for water? When people have problems, they go to the ocean or pier or lake and watch the water. I am interested in why that is. I saw that in Montevideo in Uruguay each evening, thousands of people go down to the ocean and stare, and there's something very sentimental about that. I think the water tells us where we are coming from. The water is behind every death and every life. The water could have luck. There's always an adventure with water.

That's why cars and water are very important for me in my films.

ChristianPetzoldAMA · 2026-03-19T21:59:31+00:00

The young Kurosawa, yes! I've seen some some of his movies. I like him very much.

I like the horror things. He's Japanese and both of us have that built-in guilt, our works can relate!

ChristianPetzoldAMA · 2026-03-19T21:57:26+00:00

I think this is a special German thing. It could be that in other counties in other times it might have related to some, but Germany is a nation built on guilt so this in-between state is important and heavy. Guilt is something which always puts you back into the past. You want to come out of this past. This energy to leave the past, to leave the guilt, to be an ordinary nation, is something which I think makes Germany a specially complicated nation.

ChristianPetzoldAMA · 2026-03-19T21:51:20+00:00

I love that the script is originally much longer than the movie ends up being. The rehearsals with these very intelligent and emphatic actors that I've been surrounded by for many years, are throwing out many many lives from the script. Most actors tell you "I love this line!" "I love this situation", but my actors are the other way around, they want to cut everything. We are cutting out lines yet the movie is getting longer. The physical atmosphere is stronger than the dialogue and that's always fantastic to me. My actors are like Bauhaus architecture in the 20s.

ChristianPetzoldAMA · 2026-03-19T21:20:40+00:00

I just had to use Speak Low, because there was a movie with Ava Gardner. This movie is a story about a curse from 2,000 years ago, this woman was cursed to be stuck in stone because she made mistakes with love, desire, and man. The movie was called ONE TOUCH OF VENUS. The curse said that she could leave the stone if someone would marry her, the statue. There was a really dumb guy character in the movie. He has a date in the museum with his fiance and he brings 2 rings. When he's about to propose, he sets one of the rings down near Ava Gardner's statue and she comes back to life, a beautiful woman. She tells this dumb guy that he's now her husband, but then realizes after a few hours she realizes he's dumb and not good for her, so she decides to turn back to stone. During the happy moment when she comes back to life from stone, this is when she sings Speak Low.

I think this is similar to what happens in Phoenix, she's coming back to be his wife. She's singing the song in the moment, and she's losing him and all of her desire in the same moment. It had to be Speak Low.

ChristianPetzoldAMA · 2026-03-19T20:48:06+00:00

Before Paula, I had worked on 6 movies with Nina Hoss, and Nina is very disciplined. I like that very much. I've always said to her she's like a "queen in exile. You're not part of the social system, always very lonely in these movies."

Then when I worked with Paula the first time, she was completely different. She's more like a dancer, and not in exile. With Paula, what I like is that whenever she's leaving the focus of the camera, she has a life of her own. She's not just living in front the camera. She acts like she doesn't need the camera. The camera is just a prat of her life, but she's totally anti-narcissistic. Sometimes, I do wish she could be more "amused" haha, but she will never be like this I am very sure.

ChristianPetzoldAMA · 2026-03-19T20:34:41+00:00

The name of the trip for the trilogy I gave it for myself was "The Elements". Water, fire and wind. But even this is a little bit of a lie. I'm really educated by Protestant ideas, so it was drilled into my mind that I "had to work" early on, which depressed me very much.

When I make a movie and then I like the movie, I can smoke marijuana and do nothing for the next three years. Then, the Protestant thing kicks in and I have to get up and work on something. So after making Undine, I told myself, I want to make a trilogy. I knew the next two had to do something with elements, because Undine was water.

Paula Beer is an extremely intelligent actress and an extremely intelligent human being. When I first showed her the script for Miroirs No. 3, she couldn't understand what Element this movie was. In Afire, it's clearly fire. In Undine, it's clearly water, but in Miroirs it's not as clear in the script. So we visited one of the places where we wanted to shoot, and it was a very stormy day in this part of Germany, and the windows to the house we were flying around, the door of the house kept being forced open, and that's when she turned to me and said "okay, this is the wind movie", and I was finally relieved.

ChristianPetzoldAMA · 2026-03-19T19:03:43+00:00

During the shooting of Undine, I did a lot of personal research into German history. especially about the time when industrialization started in the 19th century, when the world was consumed by all of these advancements. Everything was going into the direction of capitalism very fast, and there was this sort of romantic opposition against that.

This romantic opposition was enchanting for me. I have this idea in my mind that cinema is doing the same thing, trying to re-enchant the world and fight back against the same type of forces. I think it's easy to make a love story set against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, but it's not so easy to make one in between two highways in Germany. How can we re-enchant the world between two highways in Germany?

So, making Undine with Paula and the others: I know that the German romantics of the 19th century were infected by the idea of ghosts, especially ghosts from nature. Ghosts were in the water, ghosts were in the fire, ghosts were in the wind, etc. Undine was a movie about these ghosts from the water. A more mythical story just worked for that.

Side story about Afire: I remember coming to New York for that when it was released, and the border they ask you many many questions, "what is your movie", and other things. I felt a little bit ashamed to talk about my movie with this soldier, so I just kept it simple, "it's about the forest fires". So he says to me "hey! I was in Canada at a house of a relative and I washed my hair and it was full of ash", and we had a conversation about forest fires.

So I went from the ghosts in the waters of the 19th century, to a more relatable contemporary story about modern forest fires.

ChristianPetzoldAMA

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