As a teacher, I try to find out what my students want to express

DL In film school, you met some of your future collaborators – directors and producers like Barbara Albert and Antonin Svoboda, and director of photography Martin Gschlacht, with whom you started the production Company coop99, and you have been working together with your sister Tanja on all your films since your student film FLORA (1995) and your graduation film, INTER-VIEW (1999).

JH Back then there was no real, let alone vivid or welcoming, film industry in Austria. There were a couple of old white men running their companies and producing their films. There also weren’t any international co-productions. The idea of starting our own company was born out of necessity; founding our own company helped us to produce our own films. The first film we made was LOVELY RITA in 2001, still as a co-production with one of those old Austrian companies, but also with French producer Philippe Bober, who has been attached to all my films since, and whom I had met when INTER-VIEW was selected for the Cinéfondation of the Festival de Cannes and won the Special Jury Prize there.

DL You are a teacher yourself at the Film Academy in Vienna now. What has changed since you were a student? What do you hope to bring into the classroom from your own experiences?

JH As a teacher, I try to find out what it is that the students want to express. My task is to ask questions rather than give advice. It is important for a young filmmaker to find the self-confidence to try out new things and to follow their own ideas. There is a lot of comparison between young filmmakers because they can see each other’s works through the internet. So, it is important nowadays to focus on what your personal view is and not to get distracted by what everyone else is telling you.

DL Your work has been compared with that of your fellow Austrians Michael Haneke, who made FUNNY GAMES in 1997 when you were in film school and Ulrich Seidl, whose DOG DAYS from 2001 brought him to a wide international audience in the same year you made LOVELY RITA. It is often written that you were their student, but I understand that is not true?

JH My teachers at film school were Axl Corti and Wolfgang Glück. When Haneke started to teach, I had practically finished my studies at film school. Seidl didn’t teach there.

DL Let’s speak about the importance of research for your work. LOVELY RITA is a portrait of a young girl consumed by teenage angst and awakening lust who ends up running away from home and committing a violent act. It is loosely based on a story you came across in a court file. Do you usually go looking for certain types of material or do you find them by chance?

JH I usually conduct the main part of my research after I have written down a first idea or a simple logline for a new film. After that, research becomes very important for me, because I find that the material I discover that is drawn from reality is very rich and detailed. And, as we discussed earlier, reality offers many different and even contradictory perspectives. There is not one true perspective. One person says this, another says quite the opposite, sometimes there is written material, then there is other evidence.

So, the most interesting thing about research for me is that I find that full kaleidoscope of contradicting perspectives I try to find the storyline that allows me to show the many different perspectives. In the case of LOVELY RITA, I was reading a story about a girl who was heavily psychoanalysed because she had murdered her parents. I had access to all the interviews conducted by psychiatrists with this girl. It was over a hundred pages, very detailed, super-interesting conversations, and all those interviews led nowhere.

In the end, no one could have said ‘this or that’ was the reason for her act of violence; there were a hundred little incidents that added up to something, but in themselves those events were mundane and normal for a teenager’s life. And, not all teenagers kill their parents. So, it was also a bit of a coincidence, a stupid accident. That was exactly what impressed me, that it was not fully explicable. The way I understood the story was that it showed a terrible lack of meaning, in the sense that it was not leading to some larger understanding of life or something. I liked the absurdity of it.

DL When you use the word ‘absurdity’ here, can you explain a bit more what it means for you? ‘Absurd’ in the sense of ‘incongruous’, which has a humorous element to it, or more in the philosophical sense?

JH Sometimes the absurdity is also funny. And sometimes not. I think the absurdity is that we take ourselves very seriously, we think everything what we do, what we want, what we feel, is very important. But, from a different perspective, it might not be important at all. From a more distant perspective, a lot of what we do is in vain, pointless, and ridiculous.

DL Is there always a form of tragedy in those absurd situations then?

JH Yes, I think so. It is for a reason we say comedy and tragedy are a couple. It is definitely about understanding that we as human beings are not as important as we think we are, and that we are doing a lot of things without having the slightest idea about the consequences that will arise or the reasons why, but because we think so much about them, we think they are significant and meaningful. That is already absurd about us, and I think that is a perspective that I am trying to find in my filmmaking. To think that in a split second, a bad coincidence, something might happen, and our life might just end while we are in the middle of something “important”. When I think of that, a lot of things become futile.

DL Is that insight also something that makes life more bearable? Is there comfort or solace in the notion that life is perhaps senseless?

JH Sometimes. I think in my film LOURDES (2009) [about a young woman who goes on a pilgrimage to Lourdes and experiences what may be or not be a miracle – DL] I was trying to find a comforting side in the fact that there is no justice and we all will die someday – the tone of the film is quite friendly. Most of the time, we do not think about dying, and I think we should think about it more. A lot of things in the world happen because people forget about their mortality. We all act as if we are immortal and banish the certainty of death from our conscious minds.

DL During this interview, we have discussed a lot of serious matters, but the tone of your voice is clear and cheerful, and every now and then I hear you laugh. I had the same experience while watching your latest film, CLUB ZERO (2023), which deals with behaviour control, education, perfectionism, and related mental disorders, in that the audience reaction was divided: some people (myself included) had to chuckle every now and then, whereas others seemed more absorbed by the grim austerity of what was being depicted. Are you in general a funny person? Do you have a joyful take on life?

JH Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I can be a funny person. I like to make jokes, although they are the kind of jokes that you find in my films [laughs]. But that does not make me a joyful person. I enjoy humour, or absurd jokes, but I am also a quiet and introverted person who tends to overthink things. I am a worst-case-scenario kind of person.

Making a film means always anticipating what might go wrong. That is part of being a director, but it is also part of my character. Whenever I meet friends, or go somewhere, or hear a story, I always immediately imagine what tragedy could happen.

DL In some of your films, like your sophomore film Hotel (2004) and the more science-fiction minded Little Joe (2019) you seem to have an interest in genre. In fairy tales, in horror. Hotel can almost be described as a version of “Little Red Riding Hood”, but with an invisible big bad wolf; Little Joe is derived from the delusion that someone has been taken over by another entity, a trope that has been employed in particular in the various versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers; and you have said before that CLUB ZERO is inspired by the folk tale “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”.

JH After LOVELY RITA, HOTEL has a more abstract way of telling its story. For me, it is an experimental film in a way. I found it was very interesting to explore and dove more into visual ways of storytelling after my first few films. I was very much inspired by the films of the US avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren. I love her film MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943), and I find that she created the surrealist atmosphere of the film not through tricks or special effects but only through editing. She employs a certain vision of the passing of time that is reminiscent of dreams. There are a lot of repetitions in her work, time is stretched and time is shortened, and I wanted to learn from that. Hotel was the first film in which I explored all that, to become sure about how that is done.

DL Can you give an example?

JH The hotel has a certain geography. There is a swimming pool, there is a staircase, and up the staircase there is a corridor that we see several times in the film. The corridor has one corner. And throughout the story there are moments when the main character, Irene, goes there. Some of them are real actions but sometimes she dreams of going there. She dreams of walking up the stairs and looking around the corner and seeing herself walking down the corridor and then we cut back to her face seeing herself, then we cut back to herself from behind, walking away. And then she follows herself though the corridor into the darkness. This is a very simple idea, but I wanted to explore the way you can create a surreal scene only through camera perspective and editing.

DL This is also a strong example of a type of visual storytelling that is hard to write into a screenplay but where the contributions of the visual team is key. Have you developed a certain methodology of working with them over the years?

JH The main tool I use to create my film language is the storyboard, and the principal question I ask myself when deciding upon the visual style is, How does the time pass? All my films have elements of real time and of edited time in the way I just described, when the editing sort of heightens the reality. The editing creates a sense of discomfort, of something uncanny, where the construction of a space becomes weird and disturbed. For instance, when a person looks in a certain corner of a room, and we see there is a door. And then the person looks there again, but now it is a different corner. That is a very simple method of blurring and distorting reality with very basic tricks. Nothing is really visually muddled; it is only through the editing that you confuse the layout of a scene. This has a very strong impact on the subconscious of the viewer; sometimes they don’t even really notice it, they just experience this vague sense of discomfort. When I draw the storyboard, which I do alone, I create the time gaps, the disorientation, and the images of my films.

DL It is clear that you prefer mise-en-scène over plot to create tension between reality and other layers of experience, as well as between what you show and what we as viewers might expect. Can you speak a bit more about what you enjoy about making the découpage yourself as a part of the construction of the story?

JH Découpage is the alphabet of filmmaking. The shot list in filmmaking is like the sentence in literature. It tells the story visually, with all its seen and unseen layers. What occurs between the lines in a novel is comparable to what is out of frame in a film. I like to draw the audience’s attention to what is outside the frame because that is where our hopes and fears lie.

DL So, in that sense there is a direct relationship between the architecture of the narrative and the architecture of the visual form, style, and location.

JH In my films, the set is like the psyche of the characters. Instead of giving psychological explanations, I give visual and geographical atmosphere. My characters are sometimes even stereotypical, but the rooms they are in tell something about their emotions and create the atmosphere of what is being told.

DL Does that mean you enter the field of symbolism when you translate the psychology of the characters or the situation into art direction and production design?

JH Not so much. For me, symbolism simplifies things too much. I prefer to think that I create iconic images that can be translated into different meanings.