Paweł Pawlikowski on Fatherland and the Beauty of Brevity

The Polish director opens up on his new film about Thomas Mann’s return from exile to war-ravaged Germany and feeling like a “total rebel” in today’s era of epic runtimes

Paweł Pawlikowski has a confession to make. In the editing suite for his new film, the 69-year-old director may have trimmed down the final cut by a few minutes, just to mess with selectors at Cannes Film Festival. “I do feel a certain thrill that I’m going against the grain and getting away with it,” says Pawlikowski of Fatherland, by some measure the shortest to screen in the main competition packed with runaway runtimes. “In my contract it said the film had to be at least 90 minutes, so I thought oh God, you know, it’ll need to have really long credits.”

Pawlikowski’s film – all 82 minutes of it – offers a fictionalised take on a momentous journey: Nobel Prize-winning author, humanist and anti-Nazi campaigner Thomas Mann’s return from exile to Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War. The country has recently been split into two, and Mann (Hanns Zischler) is giving speeches on either side of the Iron Curtain, where whole throngs of dignitaries vie for his legacy. At his side is his daughter, writer and activist Erika (Sandra Hüller), a formidable figure in her own right. She knows that the trip is going to be a circus but agrees to go anyway, at her father’s request. (This part is a fiction: Thomas was accompanied on the trip by his wife, Katia, in real life.) Meanwhile Klaus (August Diehl), Erika’s troubled younger brother, is conspicuous by his absence.

Though a discrete story requiring no previous viewing, Fatherland can be seen as the last instalment in a trilogy of films from Pawlikowski. Having spent much of his career in the UK, the director returned to Warsaw in 2006, where his mind turned back to the Poland of his youth. He describes leafing through old family albums as a starting point for Ida (2013), the first film in his triptych, which established its distinctive aesthetic: crisp black-and-white cinematography from Łukasz Żal; old-school, Academy aspect 4:3 ratio; and rigorous compositions “where a good, strong photograph is kind of the touchstone”. By the time of 2018’s Cold War, a picture was emerging of the filmmaker’s ambitions for the trilogy, which portrayed the grand sweep of postwar life in the communist east through concisely rendered but lyrical stories of sexual and familial estrangement. “[It’s about] making sure that every scene carries weight,” says Pawlikowski of his flair for reducing a drama to its barest essentials, “rather than having scenes that explain stuff, or are just kind of showing off.”

Fatherland is Pawlikowski’s first film set in Germany and features, in Mann, a literary titan the country naturally turned to after the war to salvage some vestige of national pride. Despite all this, says the director at a roundtable interview in Cannes, his writing was less a point of interest for him than the image of Mann, readily searchable online, rolling up to a speech in Frankfurt in a shiny black Buick. “That was one of the reasons why this story suddenly came to life for me,” he says. “When you film the car from inside, it’s round like a space capsule; I thought that [Thomas and Erika] looked like space travellers staring out at these destroyed landscapes.” Mann’s dapper entrance is completed by a dashing white suit, which the director says was an invention, “but felt kind of good. Mann was elegant, always; he had a lot of outfits with him, like Marlene Dietrich.”

Pawlikowski got the idea for his film after being sent a copy of The Magician, Colm Tóibín’s fictional biography of the author, by producers Mario Gianani and Lorenzo Mieli. Declining to adapt it, he instead zoomed in on the details of Mann’s return from exile and his relationship with his two eldest children, Klaus and Erika. “[Mann’s work] felt really dry to me when I was young and wanted more of a kind of visceral literature,” says Pawlikowski. “But with age you start to appreciate the precision and thoughtfulness with which he describes the world. It’s actually communicating something very subtly; it’s not just mannerism. But then of course when he was in this situation where he had to talk to crowds it was a complete disaster; they didn’t take in anything that he was saying.”

This brings us neatly to the drama of Fatherland, which begins with Mann’s address in Frankfurt. Erika surveys the scene with a contemptuous eye: many of these people are former Nazi collaborators looking to launder their reputations in public, as in one scene where composer Richard Wagner’s grandsons solicit Thomas’s approval for a festival they’re hoping to revive. (Their mother, Winifred, was a close personal friend of Hitler’s.) Meanwhile Erika’s ex-husband, Gustaf Gründgens, an actor who got cosy with Joseph Goebbels during the war, receives a slap for his troubles after approaching her at the bar.

Hüller’s performance in these scenes is a masterclass in barely concealed contempt and indignation. Pawlikowski, a fan of the actor and AnOther cover star’s work since Toni Erdmann, says she was the only person he entertained for the role: “Sandra was a no-brainer because I love everything that she does. She doesn’t emote or signal what she’s doing; she’s just got this extra gear where things kind of happen beautifully.” Zischler was chosen as Thomas for his “elegance in thought and manner; it feels like he’s from a different era”, while August Diehl just had that “period, decadent feel about him”, plus a close personal attachment to Klaus Mann’s own writing that took Pawlikowski by surprise.

As they prepare to head east, Thomas and Erika receive some devastating news. Erika, enraged by her father’s hollow speech-making in the face of personal disaster, berates him for his callousness and political naivety. She is, of course, dead right. By his own admission, Thomas is a man of the old world, shaped by the patrician ideologies that the Second World War helped bury for good. What he hopes to achieve with the trip is a question he doesn’t have the answer to. Despite this, it’s tempting to wonder if Pawlikowski, with the old-fashioned elegance and concision of his craft, feels a kinship with Mann as a custodian of the “old ways”?

“Honestly, I feel like a rebel!” says the director, allowing himself a smile. “With the noise and length and too-muchness of everything now, I feel like I’m totally going against the grain. But it’s not on behalf of some fuddy-duddy values or anything. It’s just liberating for me to do it.”

Fatherland is out in UK cinemas on 23 October. Read our cover feature with Sandra Hüller here