
Christian Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3 has arrived stateside and, on the occasion of its NYFF premiere, I had the pleasure of speaking to him yesterday morning. Our full conversation will arrive with the film’s theatrical release next spring, but it seemed worth skipping ahead just a mite and sharing a tidbit on two projects he’ll be making in the next couple years.
While a festival fixture best-known for his quiet, often tender character dramas, Petzold has maintained something of a side career working in German television’s crime-anthology factory. (Think any number of cop shows we have here but at feature length and with significantly more formal strength.) He’ll be returning to that world soon, telling me:
I’ll make two things. One for TV, a crime story, 90 minutes. I like to make them because when you’re working for German TV—primetime Sunday—you are not an artist. You are surrounded by an ordinary world. There is the news before, and after there is a political talk show about political things. And so I had the feeling not to be so alone. When I make a movie for cinema, I have to go to Toronto, Telluride, so on, and I’ve made one movie—if it’s a masterpiece or not, but I’ve made something. But cinema, it’s like one house in a street and not the big, fantastic museum at the end of the street. I like it.
He’ll then embark on a new feature “the year after, in one-and-a-half years.” Per our exchange:
I’m making a movie for cinemas about fighting against capitalism by a group of young… what’s the name in English for people who can make curses?
Witches?
Yeah, like witches. Political-left witches who are killing capitalists.
Sometimes great directors step up and give us the film our world needs.
I also spoke to Bi Gan yesterday. At the end of our interview (coming with Resurrection‘s release on December 12) he revealed the seven-year wait since Long Day’s Journey Into Night won’t be repeated––his next film can be expected in two years. (If he goes for another Cannes premiere, we could narrow that down to 18 months.) No further details were shared, surprising exactly nobody.
The post Christian Petzold’s Next Feature Will Follow “Political-Left Witches Who Are Killing Capitalists”; Bi Gan Offers Update on New Film first appeared on The Film Stage.