The central idea is invisible in my films

DL After you discovered cinema, or re-invented it for yourself, and finding the power of the visual versus the verbal, did that change the way you wrote stories?

JH My stories were quite abstract, but after that first film my writing became more focused on writing scenes that express specific content through the action. I became very aware that film is told through people doing things, rather than thinking of things. Still, the notion of an abstract story has always remained very much present in the back of my mind. Although all my films have a story action on the surface, the main element is told between the lines. The central idea is invisible in my films, I would say.

DL Before we speak about your films in more detail, I was wondering whether, alongside writing, you were an avid reader as a child?

JH I was mostly into psychological books. I really loved reading Sigmund Freud. That came partly from my father, who loved psychology and connected a lot of ideas from Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, and Alfred Adler in his work. Their ideas were part of our discussions at the dinner table. I always thought, if I couldn’t make it as a filmmaker, I could be a psychologist.

DL Maybe we are a bit limited by the fact that we cannot see each other during this conversation – if we could, you would see a bit of an ironic sparkle in my eye, because psychology is not, perhaps, the first thing that comes to mind when I watch your films.

JH That’s true. Actually, I studied psychology for a year when I finished secondary school. But I hated it! All of a sudden, everything was reduced to finding an overarching explanation for all individual differences. Psychology tries to sum things up, gather similarities, explain things that in my perception are inexplicable. For me, it didn’t make sense at all to learn generalising concepts about how the human psyche works. So, I decided to go in the opposite direction and make works that understand every individual as different and, in itself, incomprehensible.

DL That for sure speaks more for your films, which are more behaviourist in a way, observing Handlung, people’s actions, without learning much about motive, underlying causes, or how characters have become who they are. Are you in that sense more of a phenomenologist as a filmmaker?

JH I would even add that what I am trying to say is that you cannot explain certain things. I am still working on making myself very clear about that. It is not possible to explain a person’s actions in a way so that suddenly everything makes sense. There is no sense. Everyone sees things differently and there are either various explanations or none.

DL That is quite a bold statement, and I like that, although I am not sure whether I agree because, for instance, I often observe in myself the desire for an explanation, or a form of understanding, whether in life or in cinema – even if that thought process is often more gratifying than the result. Is this desire for understanding something that speaks to you? Or is the recognition that there are no explanations, and that everyone sees things differently, enough, or even comforting, for you?

JH I am a definitely a person who always looks for an explanation but, the more I look for it, the more confusing and contradictory it becomes. The more one investigates something, the blurrier it becomes and the more it blends and refracts into different aspects. For instance, when I work on a story for a film, I do a lot of research and interviews and I do try to understand why people are acting the way they do. But, in the end, I try to find a form where you can choose from different explanations. I wouldn’t say that there are no explanations at all in my films; I’d rather say that there are various and different possibilities in interpreting them.

DL Let’s speak more about this when we get to the way you do research. Before that, I am curious how this worked in at the Vienna Film Academy, where you studied in the mid-1990s. The predominant narrative structure taught in European film schools is still the Aristotelian three-act story construction about a protagonist with a certain goal, and this is further influenced by the Hollywood tendency to impose causality and resolution on the stories we tell. Did your specific outlook on life and stories, the inexplicability of it all, and the ways you wanted to translate that into cinema cause debates with your teachers?

JH Even if you subconsciously know these things, when you start as a filmmaker you are not yet very aware or articulate about them. I only understood that what I liked was not exactly what was expected of me. That was very confusing for me. The teacher who taught directing did not like my work. I even had to repeat a semester, which I found incredibly embarrassing. I had set out to be a good director and now I turned out to be a very bad one. When I look at it from my perspective now, I can really see the misunderstanding. Even back then, I was trying to do something completely different than what the teacher was trying to teach us. After that, I had another teacher who was more of a go-with-theflow type, who said, ‘If you like it, it is OK’, and that was when I got an opportunity to develop more ideas and styles of my own.