Budding Filmmakers and Professional Training in Germany

Director Oskar Röhler (Elementary Particles), for instance, started out working as an author for theatre director Christoph Schlingensief. In the year 2000 he was awarded the German Film Prize in gold for his picture No Place To Go (Die Unberührbare. Tom Tykwer (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer didn’t go to film school either. In 1999 he, too, received the German Film Prize in gold for Run Lola Run – and he got one in silver for Heaven in 2002.

“I’ve never been to film school because there was no such thing in the early ’60s,” recounts Reinhard Hauff (67), former head of the Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie (German Film and Television Academy) in Berlin (dffb), in a conversation with Oskar Röhler (47). “Film schools are not a must,” says Hauff, whose Stammheim won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale festival in 1986. “You can study law or be an intelligent librarian and hit upon the insane idea of becoming a filmmaker. If you really want it, you’ll achieve your desire at some point.” Hauff was a student in dramatic arts, German and sociology, but dropped out when Bavaria Studios offered him a vacation job as an assistant in the light entertainment division. When Wim Wenders and his first-year students at the just-opened Munich Film School shot a picture in the Bavaria Studios canteen, he thought: “Damn, I should really be doing that too.” But he had already long since begun directing his own movies.

A rocky road

Oskar Röhler applied to dffb twice – and was turned down each time. At 29 he wrote his first screenplay, at 35 he made his first motion picture. Gentleman, the psychogramme of a violent criminal, was screened at dffb in a low-budget seminar. “I found it exciting to see whether the guy had anything to say even if he had no formal training and there was no money,” recalls Reinhard Hauff, with whose backing Gentleman was then shown at the Munich Film Festival. Röhler is grateful to him to this day: “It’s incredibly important to pull a guy out of his doldrums and give him some help.” Without film school, “you’re an outsider,” he says. TV stations, in particular, were “deaf” to his repeated applications.

Camerawoman Birgit Gudjonsdottir also knows how much rockier the road is without academic training. Born in Iceland, Gudjonsdottir first did a four-year programme at a photography school, then took a job at a camera rental service and worked her way up to focus puller. Now she teaches at the Filmakademie in Ludwigsburg and shoots documentary and cinema films as well as television series and promotional films. Film studies afford an opportunity to try things out, she explains in the 2003 yearbook to the First Steps Award for fresh talents in the industry. “I could never afford to make any mistakes. If I had screwed up I would have been out of the game in no time.” That aside, she has always envied film school alumni their old-boy networks. “People from film schools passed me left and right because they had their networks. It was very hard for me to build one up.”

There’s much to be said for film studies, concurs fellow camerawoman Sophie Maintigneux, who began as a film material assistant and has since shot over 60 features and documentaries and worked with directors like Eric Rohmer and Jean-Luc Godard. “Young people should go to film school, particularly for the opportunity to shoot a lot. Each film student makes five or six films during his studies. That’s quite a luxury,” says Maintigneux, who was born in Paris in 1961 and teaches today at film schools in Berlin, Ludwigsburg, Cologne and Zurich.

Demos are crucial

To be sure, outside autodidacts do have access to film festivals for young filmmakers and receive assistance by the ZDF network’s Das kleine Fernsehspiel, but the hurdles there are high as well. The visiting cards that bear the applicants’ signature are quite simply their films. And demos are expected of autodidacts, too. “Most applicants without diplomas have previous experience as assistants or interns in various areas of film production,” admits Katrin Steffen, one of the editors of Das kleine Fernsehspiel. They’re subject to the same requirements as film school graduates: they have to submit samples of their work and projects on the basis of which to decide whether to hire them or not. And they do have a shot at making it. Take Antje Kruska and Judith Keil, for example, whose film about cleaning ladies in Berlin, Queens of Dust (Der Glanz von Berlin), was enthusiastically received by the public in the Perspektive Deutsches Kino (i.e., Young Innovative German Cinema) section of the Berlinale in 2002. Both had been previously working as assistant film editors.