Johannes (Jan Bülow) has never met the pianist Karin Hönig (Olivia Ross) before, or has he?
Photo: © Neue Visionen Filmverleih
The search for a world formula is not new. Stephen too Hawking was looking for the world formula. Did you want to challenge yourself with the title?
Yes! The title is downright megalomaniacal if it promises nothing other than the universal formula. We all know that the world formula does not exist, at least not yet. I’ve also always wanted to make a film that deals with humanity’s biggest questions.
Interview
IMAGO/Future Image/Thomas Schröer
Tim Kroeger was born in Itzehoe in 1985. After graduating from high school, he began studying at the European Film College in Denmark. In 2008 he completed a second degree at the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy, first in image design/camera, then in the documentary directing department. “The Theory of Everything,” shot in black and white, is his second feature film as a director and earned him his first invitation to compete at the Venice Film Festival in 2023.
Where does this need come from?
I always like movies when they are fantastic. By that I don’t mean that they have to have particularly great special effects, but rather that they ask metaphysical questions. A good “Star Wars” film does something like that too. He asks questions like: “Is there life after death?” or “Is there a deeper meaning in life?” Cinema gives us partial answers to these questions. For me, that’s exactly what makes a good film – with all the abysses that lie behind it.
Can you briefly summarize “The Theory of Everything”?
I had the idea that the film would be called “The Theory of Everything”, that the film would be black and white and that it would be about skiing physicists and a dark secret under the hotel in the Swiss Alps in the 60s. Roderick Warich, who is responsible for 90 percent of the plot, brought the characters and the atmosphere into a coherent, very complex whole. It was important to me that you are gradually drawn into a dark, almost nightmarish maelstrom of secrets that you want to get to the bottom of together with the main character.
Johannes, the film’s main character, is writing his doctoral thesis about multiverses and goes to the Alps for a conference that never takes place. In general, the non-occurrence of events plays a major role. There’s something unreal about that.
Somehow it was clear to me from the beginning that this congress would never take place, but that much more interesting things would happen instead. The film lacks certain answers, but provides new answers to unasked questions. Because there are so many questions piling up, it is very difficult to understand everything in the film the first time you watch it. The big question, of course, is: What is happening under this hotel? It could be a conspiracy of mysterious men, but there could also be more banal answers to what is going on here. But one thing is clear: the film is about shifts, about possible differences between parallel worlds and the abysses that open up within them. Dreams and false memories play a key role in this.
At the beginning of the film, Johannes dreams of the theory of everything and then wants to find out the mathematical formula for it. Why is the dreamlike so important?
I’ve always been fascinated by how clear science merges with more esoteric elements. The history of science is full of such examples. The chemist Friedrich August Kekulé, for example, solved the mystery of how the benzene molecule is structured when he dreamed of a snake biting its own tail. He came to the conclusion through his daydream that it must be a ring structure. Our main character Johannes also follows such a dream, much to the dismay of his doctoral supervisor. At the same time, the film raises the question of fate. The idea of the multiverse challenges the concept of fate because there cannot be one true path, but billions upon billions of paths. This means that the decisions we make, including what happens to us, may be arbitrary and without meaning. Maybe we live in a universe that doesn’t care about us at all. It happens very often that human biographies fail, and not just in the history of science; But we are not used to failure in the hero’s journey as we know it from the cinema. This film takes the template of a hero’s journey and takes it seriously, but takes our hero to another place that is not so comfortable – an abyss that turns his entire reality and ultimately the construct of his persona on its head – I believe You don’t have to be a physicist to relate to this feeling.
Why are films about multiverses so popular?
As a filmmaker, I think many people think so, you have to go into the gap between worlds in order to even enter new spaces, because it feels like everything already existed in the cinema. At the same time, films are somehow seismographic for cultural and political developments. As a society, we lack a legitimate utopia. We try in a thousand ways to break out of this strange apathy that surrounds us, but we don’t know how the future will continue without ending up in fantasies of doom. In superhero films we are shown how the world could end, but it still usually has a happy ending that maintains a kind of status quo. This may reassure us briefly, but it is an empty promise. In the past, cinema was, at best, not a descriptive review or pure entertainment, but rather capable of pushing the zeitgeist forward. The cinema has to go there again. Until then, the multiverse is like a cultural twitch in search of new solutions and utopias.
How do you feel about the idea of multiverses?
Although I was raised as a rational skeptic, I sometimes indulge in the illusion and delusion of following some deeper meaning that I myself do not yet understand. It’s similar with filmmaking. You have to think a bit esoterically and still remain skeptical. What makes films special is that they transport the logic of night worlds, of dreams, even of nightmares into a daylight space where everyone gathers. It gets dark and you are sucked into a story that, like life itself, is not always clear and understandable.
How can you get the audience to think about existential questions?aotheradd?
Cinema has always been a mixture of art and circus. If a film wants to be successful, it has to be escapist or meaningful. This film is, in a sense, my cautious step towards popular cinema. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer perhaps shows that this can be achieved every now and then. The sophisticated art house film is not dead at all, but it has fewer viewers than ever before. We will probably never again achieve that everyone flocks to the cinema and that cinema is a public medium in the sense of Sartre. But you can’t give up on this dream when you talk about filmmaking, otherwise we’ll quickly end up with subsidized art.
“The Theory of Everything”, Germany/Austria/Switzerland 2023. Director: Timm Kröger; Book: Timm Kröger and Roderick Warich. With: Jan Bülow, Olivia Ross, Hanns Zischler, Gottfried Breitfuß. 118 min. Now in cinemas.
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2023-10-29 17:42:11
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