Five minutes into the interview and already the Straight is worried that we’re getting too weird, too fast. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck dismisses any concerns.

“I have a high tolerance for weirdness,” he says, reached at the Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades. “Try me.”
Deal, we reply. Game on. But first, let’s set the scene.

Von Donnersmarck is doing PR duty for his double Oscar–nominated film, Never Look Away, the robustly imaginative, three-hour tale of an artist—based loosely on Gerhard Richter—whose life extends from a childhood in Nazi-era Dresden to art school in Communist East Germany, and on to defection and success in the schvinging Düsseldorf of the ’60s.

Opening Friday (February 22), the film is utterly meticulous in details extending well beyond getting its periods right. But it’s the opening scenes set inside Joseph Goebbels’s notorious Degenerate Art Exhibition that cast a crucial spell, drawing on the exhibition’s unprecedented psychohistorical potency to instantly capture the viewer. Visiting art historians, the writer-director proudly recalls, were “deeply moved” by its painstaking accuracy.

But its effect goes further than that. In the end, it becomes a kind of conjuring, no?

“Yes. Definitely. I don’t find that weird,” answers von Donnersmarck, who describes his job as a filmmaker as “getting to the intangibles”.

“Something will happen that goes beyond what you can spell out and really directly describe. I think that a very sensitive person could come into your living room and—by the way you’ve arranged your furniture or not arranged your furniture, or by what you’ve chosen as furniture or by your pictures—would basically be able to intuit your whole life story. Because all that contains every bit of information. You don’t know where that information is hidden, but you know it’s there if you reconstruct it. So for that reason—I like the word conjuring—I try to arrange things in such a way that if there are spirits that can come, they’ll recognize the place and will come.”

Published February, 2019