Great Freedom, starring Franz Rogowski, is showing exclusively on MUBI in many countries starting May 7, 2022. The actor is also the subject of MUBI's retrospective, Franz Rogowski: Man of the Hour.
Franz Rogowski in Great Freedom (2021).
Some people just have it—"it" here being largely indefinable and perhaps even a quality others also possess but for whatever reason doesn’t galvanize the masses like that rare individual. German actor Franz Rogowski is one of those people, a once-in-a-generation talent whose meteoric rise has been as surprising as it is warranted.
Though he’d featured prominently as both a lead (in German director Jakob Lass’s 2013 bizarre romantic improvisation Love Steaks) and a supporting player (with turns in both Sebastian Schipper’s 2015 single-take Victoria and Michael Haneke’s 2017 family drama Happy End, in which he memorably performs karaoke and dances to Sia’s Chandelier), Rogowski’s star truly began to rise when Berlin School auteur Christian Petzold cast him in his 2018 masterpiece Transit, which launched the face that launched a thousand appreciations of it, particularly in the United States where he had theretofore been largely unknown.
“An Unlikely Sex Symbol, Poised for a Breakthrough,” declared a profile of the physically compelling (a quality clinched by his uniquely handsome face, owing in part to a cleft-lip operation he had as a kid) actor in a 2018 issue of the New York Times, only a few months after he was dubbed a European Shooting Star in advance of the 68th Berlin International Film Festival. That same year he starred in German director Thomas Stuber’s In the Aisles; the next couple years brought performances in Angela Schanelec’s hypnotizing ode to Bresson, I Was at Home, But…, Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life, and Undine, another film with both Petzold and his Transit co-star Paula Beer.
More recent projects include roles in Peter Brunner’s Luzifer and Gabriele Mainetti’s Freaks Out; viewers can expect to see him in Malick’s forthcoming Biblical epic The Way of the Wind and Ira Sachs’ Passages, in which he’ll star with Ben Whishaw as a longtime couple whose lives are upended when one of them sleeps with a woman, played by Adèle Exarchopoulos.
Rogowski’s masterful ability to portray singular characters whose dimensions are expanded by his subtle yet evocative performances reaches new heights in Sebastian Miese’s Great Freedom, wherein he plays Hans, a gay man imprisoned in Germany during and after World War II on account of Paragraph 175, a statute that criminalized sexual relationships between men, which, though modified to be less prohibitive in the late 60s, wasn’t outright abolished until 1994. Initially having been returned back to jail following his liberation from a concentration camp, Hans’s resolve nevertheless grows stronger as he’s depicted over the course of three decades (and multiple prison stints) refusing to apologize for who he is, finding real love in the process.
I recently chatted with Rogowski about this illuminating performance as well as the whole of his life and career thus far, from his humble beginnings as a creatively freewheeling ne'er-do-well for whom film acting was something of a fortuitous divergence to his current ambition of continuing to make movies and seeing where his auspicious career goes from here.
NOTEBOOK: Can you expand on your background, both in general and as an artist?
FRANZ ROGOWSKI: I come from southwest Germany. My father is a doctor, my mom is a midwife. I have six brothers and sisters, and I grew up with three of them. In general, I had a very hard time succeeding in school and all the other institutions that followed. I tried to be many things and ended up being an actor.
NOTEBOOK: And you were also a dancer and have done some theater, too is that right?
ROGOWSKI: Yes, I tried very hard to make pretty pirouettes and to do the splits, but the splits never fully worked and the pirouettes ended up being very weird performance art. I would not really consider myself a dancer in the classical sense, rather a performer that was used to physical theater.I think theater is quite challenging for me. It’s such a huge space, and you have to shout and scream and everything is so intense. I kind of prefer the very intimate space, the fact that the camera can capture very, very tiny spaces and micro-mimics, and you can find a dance in just a way of looking at someone. When you create silence in between your lines, it’s something that in cinema works very differently. Maybe I’m just too shy for theater.
NOTEBOOK: Did you study dance?
ROGOWSKI: No. I tried very hard, but it didn’t work. I tried to finish high school; didn't work. I tried to be an actor, and after a year they told me I should maybe move to physical theater. Then I went to a physical theater school. After a year they told me that I should really continue doing this, but please, somewhere else. I had to move again, then I started contemporary dance in Berlin and then in Austria. I just collected a bunch of different approaches toward performing, and performing can be text-based, but it can also be movement-based. I guess it was a pretty productive time but also frustrating to never really fit in. I really tried hard, but after a couple years struggling, I was almost done with theater. I wanted to be a bike messenger. The day before I applied to become a bike messenger, I met a friend at a party and she told me about an audition for a dance piece. And then I ended up being a choreographer for a couple years, and that brought me back to theater one day. Again, not really through something positive, rather a negative experience of being a dancer in theater and always being somehow the atmosphere to the actors. I wanted to be in their position, to collaborate with the director and not just be a part of the atmosphere. I had to leave theater to become an actor in the cinema.
NOTEBOOK: Which artists, from any medium, provide inspiration for you?
ROGOWSKI: I’m more inspired by nature and by natural people than culture and cultural people. I’m more inspired by little moments of interaction between people I see on the street and the energy that I can feel when I’m away from human beings than when I go to the theater. I love culture; obviously I’m doing cinema. But the energy doesn’t come from culture itself. It’s more that I’m collecting energy somewhere else and then I find my own way to express it.
NOTEBOOK: Is there an example of that with Great Freedom, for instance? Something outside the film or culture in general that inspired you for that particular performance?
ROGOWSKI: Yes, of course. When it comes to a specific project, the motivation, why you want to do it, is very concrete. Sebastian brought a very beautiful script, so I was excited to meet him and do this movie together. On the other hand, I became aware that I was not dealing with the fact that I grew up under [Paragraph 175] as I maybe should have been. A lot of experiences that I grew up with now make sense to me. Before they were just weird occasions. I felt like this is something important, it’s something good to be told.
Love Steaks (2013).
NOTEBOOK: You came into acting for film somewhat accidentally, after Jakob Lass offered you a small part in one of his films for which you were working as a choreographer, which led to Frontalwatte [2011] and then Love Steaks. I’m curious about this idea of coming to an area of performance accidentally.
ROGOWSKI: Jakob’s work is based on improvisation. That was something I was dealing with for a couple of years. I used to do performance theater with a collective called Banality Dreams, and they were working on absurd theater and a lot of exercises that were looking for a constant flow of ideas, where you would create instantly but also let go instantly. So the moment you have an idea—it’s just the way we’re socialized—we label it, we name it. And by labeling and naming our ideas, they kind of die. They turn into something that has a certain purpose. I was already used to a lot of exercises trying to overcome this rationalizing of one’s stream of ideas and creating a toolkit with which you could do instant compositions or improvise quite freely, a bit like a child. Jakob was very interested in creating scripts that are not based on dialogue, or not so much based on, say, the human drama of misunderstanding each other, but rather he called it a skeleton of drama, where he’d come up with a rough storyline but then he would create moments of misunderstanding where the actors, with each take, would come up with new solutions to their own problems in the character’s life. It felt quite natural to start [film] acting with somebody that was not so much interpreting written lines but somebody who was interested in instant composition and improvisation.
NOTEBOOK: You said yourself that you’re a little shy. How do you reconcile that with the improvisation you’ve had to do in several films? For example, Lass’s films, Schipper’s Victoria, and Malick’s A Hidden Life?
ROGOWSKI: There’s always this gap between you being a person with a life and then a fictional character that is a written construction and the product of somebody else’s mind. How do you overcome the fact that you will never be that person? One way is to get as close as you can to this fictional character, but another way is to integrate and incorporate the material that you are constantly delivering by being alive. Even if you are playing somebody from the 18th century wearing very weird clothes, you might feel certain emotions that are totally inappropriate in the moment of acting your character, things that have nothing to do with the actual purpose of the moment you’re capturing. But if you’re able to use those feelings, you can use what is actually there, and you’re not just producing something that is made up. I always try to create a setting in which I can coexist with the character that I am playing. I am not just the character, and I’m not just me. I’m together with the character in my body, and we’re trying to have fun. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. You can work with Haneke, who’s a control freak and really knows what he wants, but inside of this precision and limitation, you might feel very free. And then in other moments, when you have totally free improvisations with Jakob Lass, you might be overwhelmed by an unlimited amount of possibilities, and you don’t feel free at all. Improvising is also the art of not labeling things too much and not putting things in a box, but accepting the fact that you are constantly failing.
NOTEBOOK: In the context of any one of your great performances, do you feel like there’s failure involved in those?
ROGOWSKI: In each second you’re experiencing a certain amount of disappointment. You meet someone and to a certain extent it’s great, but there might be other things that are disappointing. And those disappointments, they’re not something negative, they’re actually opening your eyes. The more you’re failing, in terms of your dreams are failing, in reality, the more you’re actually waking up. Also, failing in front of another actor, in front of the camera, if you allow yourself to fail, to lose your character, it can be something enormous and very positive. Because all of the sudden you’re totally naked, and at the same time, you’re wearing clothes from the 18th century.
NOTEBOOK: Do you have an example of that from one of your films? Is there an instance in particular where you feel that you were failing, either in front of another actor or in front of the camera, but it transformed into something different?
ROGOWSKI: I think it has to do a lot with your own perception. What I might consider a failure might be not a failure at all to someone else. I see a lot of failure when I look at myself. But, for example, in Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life, there’s a moment when I’m talking to August [Diehl, who plays the main character], and I’m sitting at the window of our cell, and I’m talking about life and how life could be and what we could do and how I imagine my life to be. The truth to the moment is that we were just put in that cell and we didn’t know each other, and I had no clue what to do. So I just started talking and I moved toward the light, because I knew the camera might enjoy our faces being close to the light, and started talking. I didn’t know what I’d end up saying. And of course this needs a director who is interested in such things, and Terry is very interested in instant compositions and improvisations, so we felt pretty free and safe to do this. But the outcome is a failure in terms of it is totally not what it was intended to be. It was something that happened out of a sequence of ‘here and nows’ that led to a sequence that kind of makes sense.
Happy End (2017).
NOTEBOOK: Victoria is such a technical accomplishment, this idea of shooting an entire film in one take. I’d love to hear about your experiences shooting that film, with everything we’ve talked about regarding this duality of being improvisational and reserved, physical and introspective.
ROGOWSKI: The biggest challenge for me was the director’s approach toward our group. He was just throwing all of us into a couple of rehearsals and free evenings where we were asked to have fun together. His expectation was that we would be this group for real and create these bonds before we’d start shooting. Part of the group were friends for real and others, like me, we were from totally different backgrounds. My father being a doctor, I had nothing to do with the rough side of growing up in Berlin.. At least for me, I was a bit lost between what is real and what is fictional and how close are we for real, since we don’t know each other. Often on set you’re working with strangers creating very intimate moments, and sometimes it’s easier when these worlds are very separate from one another, and you have a space in which you are talking with each other, getting to know each other, and ten minutes later you play a love scene and it is not the same. In Victoria, for four weeks, it all became one big bubble. The night became the day, the camera became a part of our group. We were very excited and also very scared sometimes. I remember after the second take of the movie, the director invited us to his home and told me and another guy from the group that we were really not supporting the movie and that we’d have to go much further in terms of energy and character. I never smoked that many cigarettes within a week. It took us another week to do the third take, which is actually the movie, and it was one of the most terrifying weeks of my life.
NOTEBOOK: I read that when the camera wasn’t on you, when it had moved to another character or someone was out of the scene for whatever reason, that you’d all have to still be in character. Is that when you were smoking all those cigarettes?
ROGOWSKI: It’s interesting. Acting off-screen can be more challenging than on-screen. On-screen, everything is quite clear. But to stay in character off-screen for thirty minutes, that’s very challenging.
NOTEBOOK: I’ve read that you sometimes take inspiration from the fact that you can’t relate to your characters. How does that inform your acting style? This acknowledgement of not truly ever being able to have that character’s experience?
ROGOWSKI: I will try to give you an answer. I’m a bit trapped in this interview situation where I have to label myself, therefore I come up with all kinds of theories about myself that I actually don’t have. Because people want to get to know me, so I start creating those theories. To a certain extent they might be true but on the other hand I think this is constantly changing over the years. Each project adds another experience and another approach. I guess when I see American actors, often I’m very impressed by the fact that they seem so hyper-real and hyper-emotional, and truer to a degree that I find miraculous and breathtaking. Me as a German, I have more of a tendency to create a distance, or disconnection, between my own perception of myself and the actual moment that I’m in. I’m just using who I am and I’m trying to see the beauty in it, and I’m trying to use the material that I have, instead of comparing myself to others and trying to be the way they are. If I’m honest, very often my emotions are not that sparkling and not that bright, and there’s like a constant anxiety that is overlapping everything. So sometimes what creates a clear vision to me is actually to create those emotions within the actions of a character or by listening to someone else and rather creating space for the other actor. Finding the rhythm of a scene can create so much fun and humor and you don’t have to make the scene your own in terms of owning all the emotions. It can just be a funny rhythm that you add to dialogue that’s already written. This is the current me, trying to be an actor, but it is really not a concept I can recommend as a solution for good acting.
NOTEBOOK: Overall how do you respond to this process of being probed and forced to define yourself? Which I apologize for doing, by the way.
ROGOWSKI: I think it’s part of the system we live in. We’re very good at naming things and labeling things and finding quick solutions. Me being confronted with the same question over and over again doesn’t necessarily mean that I have to find one answer to the same question. I’ve given a hundred different answers to the same question, sometimes, and sometimes they also contradict one another. The truth is, I don’t really have the answer to a question, it’s more like an energy exchange. You ask me something, and then I give you an answer. Maybe we have the same conversation a year from now and the outcome will be totally different.
NOTEBOOK: I’ve read in several interviews of yours where you talk about authorship as an artist and you talk about how that connects to a director’s authorship, the screenwriter’s authorship, etc. Conversely, you’ve worked with several filmmakers who are considered among the greatest auteurs working today: Christian Petzold, Terence Malick, Michael Haneke, among others. How does this reality of film as a collaborative art but also one that is often thought of as having a single author resonate with you?
ROGOWSKI: On the one hand, I have ideals, and I live for those ideals. I have dreams. On the other hand, there’s a reality that’s confronting you with a lot of compromises that need to be made along the way. Sometimes acting is a very trustful and intimate collaboration between two minds that connect and therefore create more than just the sum of their two parts. That is a very beautiful experience. Also being guided by someone who at the same time lets you off the leash but is always there to save you if you run in the right direction is a beautiful situation that maybe only children in good families can find themselves in, that you are free to run around but in case something goes wrong, there will be somebody to protect you. It creates a setting in which you can play around and be a child in the sense that you can stop thinking and experience. That’s very good, often, for a character. But in other moments, acting is very close to prostitution. Even being a prostitute delivering intimacy and emotions that seem to be real for money can be an art form, and I think in some cases, there are also collaborations between needy people and a professional who gives them a sexual service that are enjoyable, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that the prostitute has authorship. The fact of being an interpreter and of being someone selling fake emotions for fictional characters, and defending those to a degree that they turn into reality, is a violent act in itself. It is something that a normal person would never do, you would never sell your emotions to someone to use them for a project. The fact that you’re offering the very intimate you to someone to play around with and to use for a fictional character is a very fragile and sometimes violent experience. What I mean in terms of authorship is that probably to a certain extent it’s the opposite of authorship. It’s surrendering to someone else’s authorship and letting this person use you as a color, as a material, as a piece of clay or whatever the sculpture is made of. That can be a very painful experience, especially if you’re like me, a German control freak. I don’t want to pretend that I’m not interested in authorship. Maybe one day I will also do other things and not only interpret others’ work but also create my own work.
NOTEBOOK: Along those lines, where would you like your career to go from here?
ROGOWSKI: For now I’m pursuing my acting career and my family life. My dad was just here the other day. He’s sixty years old now, and he just went to his first techno party. That was a very funny experience. That’s what I’m pursuing, and every now and then I’m going to make a movie.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.