This story about “All Quiet on the Western Front” and director Edward Berger first appeared in the International Film edition of awards magazine TheWrap.
Erich Maria Remarque’s classic anti-war novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” was adapted into an acclaimed film by director Lewis Milestone in 1930, winning the third Best Picture Oscar. The harrowing tale of young men sent to fight in the trenches of World War I, told from the perspective of a teenage German soldier, later got a TV adaptation in the 1970s, but Edward Berger’s new Netflix movie marks the First German-language adaptation. from a book that was banned in his home country when the Nazis came to power.
The film is Germany’s entry into the international Oscar race. Berger spoke with TheWrap at the Netflix offices in Hollywood.
Why adapt “All Quiet on the Western Front”?
The main reason to do it is because it is a German book. When the producer suggested it, he felt so obvious. He had been waiting for them to do it, and no one had. But also, there is a fundamental difference in the perception of the war if it comes from the perspective of someone who won or liberated Europe. That comes from a place of heroism and sometimes also glorification: “We win, we beat the enemy,” and so on. And I totally get it: that’s heredity, rightly so.
But Germany is the only country in the world, to my knowledge, that twice in the last century succumbed to its destructive impulses and brought terror to the world out of a sense of nationalism and superiority. And that leaves us with a feeling of guilt, shame, terror, horror. Nothing good came of it, you know? Just scars and damage. So automatically a war movie made in Germany will feel very, very different than an American movie.
In United States during World War II, movies became part of the war effort, and you watched them not only supporting the characters to survive, but supporting them to win.
And kill the other guy. With this, ideally you don’t support the Germans to kill the other guy. But you want everyone to survive, you know? Every death is going to be a terrible death.
One thing in his film that was not in the book or the American film is contrasting the soldiers in the trenches with the German high command sitting comfortably while children are sent off to die.
Yes. I wanted the contrast between that perspective and the mud. First of all, we started the film two and a half years ago, when we felt a political movement in the United States, a political movement in England with Brexit, Hungary and France voting to the right… In institutions that safeguarded 70 years of peace in Europe, it was he introduced language that felt more aggressive, more confrontational, and more nationalistic.
There was demagogy and propaganda. It reminded me of a time that we already had 100 years ago, and it seemed appropriate to make a film, although there was not a war yet. And then a couple of years later, this is what it leads to. The children in our film are basically indoctrinated by propaganda, manipulation and demagogy. And that’s not too different from what happens today in other countries where people think it’s completely okay to attack others because someone up there uses language that makes them believe it.
The high command is not in the book, it is invented. And we invented it for two reasons. I wanted to create that contrast and therefore highlight or heighten the sense of worthlessness and meaninglessness that these kids go through. But the main reason was that Remarque wrote this book 100 years ago, when the First World War was still very much on people’s minds. Now we have forgotten. It has been overshadowed by World War II, by a century of history. And so he wanted to remind us of the circumstances. Because when Germany signed the treaty, some people created the myth that the politicians stabbed the military in the back and that they would have won if we hadn’t surrendered. And from then on, there was a rising nationalist resurgence that said we were betrayed. It was the seed, and he wanted to shed light on how the end of World War I was only the beginning of World War II.
When that nationalist revival happened and the Nazis came to power, the book was banned. Do you have a presence in Germany today?
Yes. A big reason I made the movie is my daughter. She was 17 years old at the time, and I mentioned this project to my wife. When I do this, the children often get up and leave the table, because they are not interested. (laughs) But when I mentioned “All Quiet on the Western Front”, my daughter turned around, looked at me and said: “I just read it in school, it is the best book I have ever read, I cried five times, you have to do it. “
The movie was clearly a huge undertaking.
It was very complicated. I drove to the set of these battle scenes in the morning with my DP, and almost cried because I thought, “We’re never going to finish this.” It felt a bit like a big wave that would crush us. And there were days when team members would come to me with their Fitbits, dressed in sturdy rain gear, and they’d say, “You know what? I ran over a half marathon today in full gear.” Or 500 extras running through the mud and rain in felt uniforms that absorb water.
It was exhausting, physically demanding and very expensive for a German film. (laughs) But you’d probably be surprised at how cheap it was compared to an American movie.
How important was it that your main character, Paul, was played by an unknown actor?
It was absolutely important. The first image I saw for this role was a photograph of Felix (Kammerer), the actor we ultimately cast. He is in a very famous theater ensemble in Vienna. He’s just out of acting school and he’s doing smaller roles. We brought him in because he has a great face, an old-fashioned, transparent, sensitive face. And he was great.
But I’m the person who walks into a store and says, “This suit looks great, but I’ll try all the others, too.” And then I go back to the first. So I looked at probably 500 actors. We flew Felix back from Vienna four times, and the best call I ever made was to call him and say, “Do you want to play this part?”
The main thing was that the story is about the loss of innocence, how a child becomes an emotional cripple and a killing machine, and how you cut out every emotion you have to save yourself. Because even if they don’t kill you, they will kill your innocence. And to portray that innocence, he wanted someone that German audiences wouldn’t associate with another role. It was really his first day in front of the camera, the first day of shooting.
How carefully did you have to plan the immersive battle scenes?
We sat down for months to plan and storyboard every shot, especially the battle scenes, to try to figure out how to do it. We would not design a shot without knowing how it would be possible to shoot it. And if you now compare storyboards to editing, it’s almost exactly the same.
I always try to put the audience in the main characters, mainly in our case, the protagonist Paul Bäumer. I want the audience to be in his shoes or right over his shoulder so they get a visceral experience, a physical experience of what this kid is going through. I want them to walk out of the movie and feel like, “I just went through this.”
Read more from the International Film Edition here.
