Vienna Blood Special Production interviews & Episode Breakdown

Production Interview: Robert Dornhelm, Director

What are your key considerations in any project?

The key consideration for me to do a film is the script. If the script is any good or has a little bit of originality and is not just a rehash of another police drama, I’m interested. Police dramas in general don’t interest me, but this one, set in Vienna at the turn of the century, is very reminiscent of our times today, similar themes, subjects of nationalism, intolerance, war... that interests me. And to make a historic journey dealing with problems of our time is fascinating.

What films do you think about when you’re directing Vienna Blood?

The Third Man is a good reference. Graham Greene is a wonderful writer and he deals with the moral dilemma of the human race, issues of ethics and right and wrong. You can look at it today from our comfortable apartment somewhere and say, well, you know it doesn’t affect us. But in reality, if you don’t care about the human race anymore and accept it, we pretend all the bad things happened in the Third Reich.

We have similar situations today and the famous ‘Swiss boat is full’ is repeating itself. ‘Europe is full’ we say but we could easily absorb a few hundred thousand people with no sweat, and yet we are behaving like people did about 70 years ago. We have not become more noble human beings and that’s very disturbing and I would like to sound the alarm bells.

What does Vienna Blood have to say to contemporary audiences?

Any film that I do which is a period movie has to have relevance for today’s problems. If that’s not the case we wasted an opportunity. Yes, it’s nice to see beautiful costumes and Vienna at the turn of the century and recreate all that stuff. But without learning something for today’s problems it’s a pointless journey.

What do the lead actors bring to Vienna Blood?

What I love about our two protagonists is that they developed a wonderful chemistry. I think Matthew and Juergen have become personally very close and it’s like they are reacting off each other in an inspired way which I’ve never had the good luck to experience before because I’ve never done this kind of TV series. But it’s nice to see relationships and families develop. I have started to like it, so maybe I will do more series in the future!

What’s special about directing a period drama?

It is lovely to paint on a canvas, using oils and having a nice big frame. You can paint more generously and have more colours available than with a docudrama. Colour is not necessarily something good, but to be able to choose the colours and figure out how you want to portray the time that the story takes place is a wonderful luxury that I enjoy. I am, by nature, a minimalist and I don’t like to waste a lot of stuff. To create the strongest effect with the least amount of means is an ambition that I think every artist should have. To have a lot of material available makes life easier, but hopefully the effort is worthwhile and the audience are going to be taken on this wonderful journey to Vienna at the turn of the century.

How do you find working with the British cast?

The whole British acting department is like being able to play on a Stradivarius. You cannot make a wrong tone. The instrument (the actors) is always perfect. You can just touch on it and you change the tune - but they’ re always in sync with what we are trying to do and that’s wonderful.

Do you like surprises?

Every day there’s a surprise scene. I like to be surprised, and if the scene I already had in my head turns out the way I thought it would, it would be boring. What is nice is when an actor comes up with something that I didn’t think about. For example, we had a big surprise because one of our actors who was supposed to start filming with us, with whom I rehearsed the part, had to cancel because his daughter had Coronavirus. Overnight we had to get a new actor to jump in cold. At six in the morning he got his costumes done, at nine he had dialogue coaching to try to get the Austrianaccent away from him and at 10 o ’clock we shot the first scene. My great surprise was that he managed to do it well.

Production Interview: Steve Thompson,

Writer and Executive Producer

How do you go about adapting the Vienna Blood novels?

Writing a TV script based on a novel is completely different from the process of writing an original piece. Clearly, because you’ve got this fantastic material to start with on which you can base all of your decisions. The novels are about six or seven hundred pages long, and for a 90-minute TV drama that’s simply too long. And what Frank Tallis does in the books, is follow the journeys of many different characters - multiple protagonists. What we’ve done in the TV version is focus on these two people, the police inspector and the doctor and their relationship as they solve the crime. And consequently other small characters have to be lost along the way, we simply don’t have time in those 90 minutes to focus on everyone. Part of the process of adapting, in this case, is actually stripping out some really good things, some really rich storylines. There’s quite a job of restructuring the book and throwing away a lot of beautiful details that we are not able to use as we simply can’t fit them in the time. A lot of the restructuring is just focusing on the particular story we want to tell. The restructuring was the biggest part of the rewriting.

Do you have a viewer in mind when you write?

When I write the viewer I imagine watching it is me. I write things that I enjoy and I would want to watch I think. I guess different writers write for different people but I don’t, I write stuff that I think I would enjoy watching. When I used to write plays, occasionally I used to write them with my mother in mind, because if I put swearing in she’d always complain. I was a playwright 15 years ago and if there was a lot of swearing in it, I could hear my mother’s voice saying "Stephen it’s not clever to swear" and I’d take some of the swear words out! But most of the time I just write for myself.

Where did you want to take the characters in series two?

When I started the second series I wanted it to be the same but different. I wanted people to tune in and feel comfortable and familiar with the characters and the central relationship with Max and Oskar, to recognize it and to feel they were getting more of the same. At the same time, I want to serve them up something different and we did that in two ways.

The first is that Max and Oskar have both moved on in their personal lives. Max has started his own private practice - emulating Freud very much, he’s now taking private clients for psychoanalysis sessions. When we met him in the first series he was just working in the hospital, now he has his own private practice. And that gives us some really good drama because in the first episode of the new series he has his first private patient and it’s his patient who’s involved in the murder. So you can see Max’s world expanding.

At the same time Oskar’s world has changed. He has a new boss, one of his colleagues (Von Bulow) who doesn’t like him at all, they have a huge animosity between them. At the end of the first series Von Bulow is actually promoted and becomes Oskar’s boss, so that at the beginning of the second series, Oskar’s work life is very difficult and very tense and there’s this very abrasive relationship at the centre of it. Both of their worlds have changed.

How true to the period is Vienna Blood?

I think when we’re writing historical fiction it is incredibly important to be accurate. But at the same time we are representing a world that is distant and alien and it’s very important to be sensitive as we are doing that. For example, in the first series a woman is appallingly badly treated by the medical profession. She has an illness that the doctors of the period decide is hysteria, which is kind of a catch all for a lot of psychological problems, and she is treated with electroshock therapy. And actually watching that as a modern audience it’s appalling and yet at the same time we have a duty to say that this is as it was, this is actually what happened in the period and as shocking as it was we have a duty to represent it accurately.

How faithful are the scripts to the novels?

In the drama we make one or two decisions which are different from the original novels. When we first meet Max and Oskar in the first novel written by Frank, they’re old friends and they’ve been friends for a long time. I was interested in their first meeting because Oskar, immersed in the world of police investigations and crime, was not necessarily going to meet Max that easily. I was interested to find out how they had met and I wanted to write about that.

So an essential difference between the books and the TV version is you get to see how they meet. And it’s quite an explosive relationship to begin with. They are not immediately friends - they are not immediately drawn to one another. There is a certain amount of animosity and friction and that can provide some really good drama for us, so I think that was an essential difference. Nights Entertainment Magazine38

With each episode we enter a new world, a new part of Vienna we’ve never seen. The first episode of the new series is set in a hotel, and is very much about the politics of the hotel and the different strata - upstairs and downstairs - and the different people that mingle there. It includes the complexities and intrigue and the different, very rich characters who would mix and collide in a Viennese hotel of the period - they were incredibly elegant, beautiful palaces.

Our first episode focuses on this precinct of the hotel, which is somewhere we have never been before. Equally, the final episode of the second series is also set in a place we have never been to, and we enter the monastic world. A murder takes place in a monastery and that gives us a whole new aspect of Vienna and a different lens through which we can see the city. There are new worlds to explore and that makes it very exciting.

Would you have made a good detective?

Would I have made a good detective if I hadn’t chosen to become a writer? Actually, I didn’t choose to become a writer it happened by accident. I’m a mathematician by trade. My degree is in mathematics and I used to be a mathematics teacher, so I have a very structural, logical mind. Does that make a good detective? Yeah, probably it does.

Some great detectives work entirely on instinct and they can almost sniff out the criminal. If you look at some of Thomas Harris’ novels, the FBI detective in the novel Red Dragon for example, it seems not to be based on logic at all, it seems entirely based on instinct. Whereas other detectives are incredibly logical in their processes. That would be me, I would be the person who would sit down and sift the facts. And of course, somebody like Sherlock is a mixture of the two, he has an incredible encyclopedia of facts in one half of his brain but in the other half of his brain he has an extraordinary imagination which, however strange the crime turns out to be, he can actually imagine how it was committed and visualize it happening. The marriage of the two makes him brilliant. I’d be the logical half of the brain - Mr. Math's here!

How did you feel about the reception of the first series of Vienna Blood?

Very happy, naturally. Novelists are unaccustomed to reaching an audience of millions in one evening. The idea of Max finding his way into so many homes in a single 90-minute episode was very exciting.

Why do you think Vienna was such a cultural phenomenon at the start of the 20th century?

Largely because the Viennese loved socializing. The coffee houses and salons were places where people from all walks of life (with different interests) gathered to talk and exchange ideas. This proved to be very fruitful. Gustav Klimt, for example, was invited to an autopsy by the professor of anatomy at the medical school. Klimt attended the autopsy so that he could better understand the ‘truths’ behind the superficial appearances of the human form.

Cross-fertilization became the engine of Viennese creativity. Freud borrowed the techniques of poets and novelists in the service of science when he wrote his early case studies. Then, poets and novelists borrowed Freudian ideas in the service of art. Studies in Hysteria became a reference work, not only for doctors, but for authors, playwrights, and theatre directors.

The first episode of the second series, The Melancholy Countess, draws on your novella of the same name. What lead you to write a novella this time rather than a novel?

Actually, I didn’t decide to write a novella - I was asked to write one by my publisher in New York. The idea was to promote the Liebermann novels by publishing a low-cost novella on Amazon. I might publish The Melancholy Countess as a free e-book in the UK. Writing a short Liebermann story was a salutary exercise. I forget which famous novelist said that he didn’t have the time to write short stories but whoever it was he was very perceptive. Getting a short story to work requires a lot of thought and effort. Shorter forms are less tolerant of longueurs and authorial self-indulgence. Which is probably why there aren’t that many truly great novellas.

The Viennese, incidentally, were masters of the shorter literary forms. Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig wrote some of the finest and technically groundbreaking novellas of the 20th century. They both corresponded with Freud and made use of his ideas in their work.

During the filming of the second episode, which draws material from your novel Fatal Lies and involves a terrorist plot, there was an actual terror attack in Vienna. Do you think that Europe has laid to rest its ghosts of the early 20th century?

Well, Liebermann’s Europe suffered two world wars. Things are a great deal better now. But has Europe laid to rest its early 20th century ghosts? Probably not. Nationalism and extremism are still part of the political landscape. Migration across Europe is still a problem - or at least, it is still perceived as a problem. Antisemitism is still a problem. And so on. This morning [1 June 2021] The Guardian published an article about the recruitment of British soldiers into a neo-Nazi group called National Action; a cardboard swastika was displayed in barracks in Cyprus. If the quality of political leadership and debate doesn’t improve soon - on both the left and right - I fear that some of the mistakes of the past might be repeated once again.

Max’s crime solving technique draws on his psychoanalytic skills. Is there a similarity between the skills involved in detection and psychoanalysis?

Oh yes. The thing I miss most about seeing patients - I’m a full-time writer now - is the detective work. Most psychological problems are quite straightforward, but complex cases require detection skills: identifying clues, following leads, digging deep for answers. Retrieving a repressed memory that explains a symptom is analogous to the culprit being exposed by Poirot in the drawing room! It can be as thrilling and as intellectually satisfying as the last scene in an Agatha Christie. A final piece of a puzzle falling into place.

The third episode of the new series is based on your novel Darkness Rising and explores religious conflict in different guises particularly antisemitism. Is religious fervour a subject which you’re especially drawn to explore?

I’m very interested in religion and how belief systems develop. Although I am not anti-religion, I am antiirrationality, and antisemitism has always struck me as a particularly sickening example of irrationality.

When I started writing the Liebermann series in 2003, antisemitism seemed more ‘historical’ than it does today, which is both sad and worrying. Only a few weeks ago, I saw some disturbing images of a protest march in London which was openly antisemitic. The media seemed to respond with alarming complacency. It gives me no joy to say that with respect to antisemitism, the Liebermann books are more relevant in 2021 than they were at the time of writing.

Each book in the series takes us to a different side of Vienna. In this second series we get monastic life, a high-class hotel and the world of imperial politics. What elements are you looking for when you decide on the settings of your books?

For me, setting is everything. First there is the broad, colourful canvas of Freud’s Vienna. Then there is usually some form of ‘closed’ community - anything from a secret society to a fashion house. There is the world and then smaller worlds nested within the greater world. Once I’ve got a setting, plots arise spontaneously. A setting will suggest specific themes for exploration, and impose helpful limits. The dramatic space in which the characters operate will be clearly defined.

Fortunately, Freud’s Vienna was made up of many worlds. I was spoilt for choice! The worlds of the opera house, the military academy, the palace, the hospital, and so on. And they really were like worlds in Freud’s time - not just places. The imperial court, for example, used its own dialect. We think of detective fiction as a genre driven by a big central character. But, in reality, almost all of the great fictional detectives operate in distinctive settings. You need a distinctive setting for a big character to get sufficient traction to move the story forward.

Do you have plans to write more Liebermann novels?

I’d love to write more Liebermann novels, but whether I do or not rather depends on opportunity and time. For the past five years I’ve been otherwise engaged writing psychology books - a clinical memoir, a philosophical book that summarizes what the great psychologists can teach us about coping with life - and I’m currently working on a book called Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna And The Discovery Of The Modern Mind. It’s several things: a Freud biography, a book about Freud’s cultural context - and also, a book about how Freud and his Viennese contemporaries influenced how we think and live today.

When I’ve finished, I’d like to turn it into a TV documentary. If I do get an opportunity to write more Liebermann books, then it would be interesting to move him forward in time. A WWI trilogy could be quite exciting. I see Max as a medical officer on U-5, a real Austrian U-boat that was commanded by Georg von Trapp, who later became famous as the patriarch of the von Trapp family singers. Yes, that’s right, the family who inspired The Sound Of Music. This set-up would lend itself to some amusing exchanges. Max often pops into my head uninvited. Only this week he materialized – not in Vienna - but in a Cairo nightclub in the 1920s and I wondered what on earth he was doing there. I’d have to write another novel to find out.

Series 2, Ep. 1/3 - The Melancholy Countess

Amelia Lydgate (Lucy Griffiths), Max Liebermann (Matthew Beard), Oskar Rheinhardt (Juergen Maurer)

Autumn, 1907. When a depressed Hungarian Countess is found drowned in the bath of her lavish hotel suite, it looks like suicide.

Intense scrutiny falls on her psychoanalyst, Max Liebermann, who asked the Countess to stop taking her prescribed medicine and start taking a course of Freud’s talking cure with himself. Investigating Officer Oskar Rheinhardt teams up with the disgraced doctor to solve the riddle of the Countess’ death and clear Max’s professional reputation.

A post-mortem reveals that the Countess was poisoned, which turns Max and Oskar’s attention to Oktav Hauke, a young Second Lieutenant with a reputation for dubious relationships with rich, older women. When Max’s private practice is vandalized and transcripts of his meetings with the Countess are stolen, it seems that Max knows more than he realizes.

Max searches for clues to the identity of the murderer, but it will take more than understanding the source of the Countess’ melancholic dreams to unlock this case.

Series 2, Ep. 2/3 - The Devil's Kiss

Police Commissioner Strasser (Simon Hatzl), Oskar Rheinhardt (Juergen Maurer)

1907, Vienna. A beggar-girl finds a mutilated corpse in the slum quarter.

The man’s hand and tongue have been severed. Director Strasser warns Oskar that the victim was a Secret Service agent and the investigation is not the concern of the Leopoldstadt police, but when Oskar receives anonymous messages relating to the murder, he can’t resist delving further.

Max moves the street girl into the Liebermann home, hoping to recover her traumatized memories, while Oskar follows the trail left by his anonymous informant to a rifle and ammunition cache at a private address.

Autumn, 1907. A fanatical monk, Brother Stanislav, has been found brutally murdered in his monastery.

Suspicion falls on a religious Jew, Isaak Korngold, who had reprimanded the monk for spreading anti-Semitic rhetoric. After Oskar arrests the obvious suspect, the scandal edges the Korngold family business towards bankruptcy and threatens Isaak’s brother, Jonas’ upcoming marriage to Clara Weiss. Clara is left with little option but to plead with her ex-fiancé Max Liebermann for help. To Oskar’s annoyance, the monastery proves impervious to investigation. Max goes undercover and carries out enquiries in the guise of a monk.

Series 2, Ep. 3/3 - Darkness Rising

Liebermann (Matthew Beard), Brother David (Nicholas Matthews Max

Autumn, 1907. A fanatical monk, Brother Stanislav, has been found brutally murdered in his monastery.

Suspicion falls on a religious Jew, Isaak Korngold, who had reprimanded the monk for spreading anti-Semitic rhetoric. After Oskar arrests the obvious suspect, the scandal edges the Korngold family business towards bankruptcy and threatens Isaak’s brother, Jonas’ upcoming marriage to Clara Weiss. Clara is left with little option but to plead with her ex-fiancé Max Liebermann for help.

To Oskar’s annoyance, the monastery proves impervious to investigation. Max goes undercover and carries out enquiries in the guise of a monk.

Meanwhile Oskar’s investigation brings him into sharp conflict with Commissioner Von Bulow, who is convinced that Max is blinding him from getting to the bottom of a Jewish revenge murder.

Vienna Blood airs on BBC 2 this winter as soon as we have a concrete release date we will let you know,

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