Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke has been relatively quiet of late and hasn’t made a film since 2017’s “Happy End,” but his exacting reputation has been coming under fire in recent weeks. First, Juliette Binoche called him a “control freak” while recalling working with the filmmaker on “Caché.” “I thought, ‘He doesn’t give a shit about what I’m doing.’ So I said that to him; I said, did you see? Do you have nothing to tell me? I feel like I’m being left on the side,’” she recalled in a recent Indiewire conversation. “He said, ‘Really? Really?’ And then he started really telling me every single thing, what I should be doing and not doing, and then it became a nightmare. So I thought, “I shouldn’t have said anything.” For me, “Caché” is that.” Then, in another recent Indiewire, “Passages” star Franz Rogowski had similar things to say about the director, who is already known to be stern and a little fierce.
“Compared to the way [Haneke] treats his DP, he’s very kind with his actors,” Rogowski said, and to be fair, the actor had a lot of positive things to say about Haneke as well.
“I find him also very funny and brilliant. He’s a very smart and inspiring person. I have fun memories of our collaboration,” he continued. “When we shot ‘Happy End,’ I wasn’t very experienced. I mean, I’m not experienced now, either, but a bit older, I guess. There was a big scene where I am disturbing my mother’s dinner party, and I invited some refugees to our bourgeois dinner event, and then I give a little speech.”
“When we did that scene, Michael was actually dependent on me proposing something, but at the same time, he was so powerful in his own regime that I didn’t feel the space to come up with an idea,” he explained. “So he would just tell me, ‘You are cynical.’ That was too much for me to be confronted with a result that you have to create or an effect that you have to achieve. Sometimes, it might come across as you being the obstacle to what he wants, but the truth is that he’s very passionate about what he does, has a lot of energy, and is unforgiving. But he’s also unforgiving with himself. He can be cruel, but it’s never personal. It’s always about the movie.”
Rogowski also spoke about his next film, “Bird,” directed by English auteur Andrea Arnold and co-starring Barry Keoghan, which is on our list of the 100 Most Anticipated Films of 2024, and shed light on her patient filmmaking process.
“With Andrea Arnold, this [past] summer, the atmosphere was quite different from what I’ve experienced so far,” he said. “She would wait for the right moment to come, like a hunter, for hours and hours to wait for a bunch of kids to calm down until they could walk across a meadow and own the meadow and be in their own territory instead of being forced to pretend to do something naturally. And that’s her message.”
“I love to work with people that have a vision,” Rogowski said of Arnold and filmmakers like her. “And for me, they can be assholes as long as they take care of our project and are looking for something that unites us as cinephiles. But the worst thing that can happen is to work with someone [who] is just very kind and not good at directing, and then you have a good time. But the movie’s going to be horrible.”
Rogowski’s also in Terrence Malick’s long-awaited next movie, the Jesus/Satan biblical epic “The Way of The Wind,” and said Malick has been puttering around in the editing room for “years,” which is kind of Malick’s notorious way these days.
“That’s been editing for years,” he admitted, the film having gone into production in the summer of 2019. “I think we texted on New Year’s Eve last year, and I have no idea what he’s up to. He’s taking care of his family right now, and he’s editing, and he’s famous for being a very slow editor. He also has a very intense process of inviting different editors to his farm, and then they edit hundreds of versions. Basically, it’s part of the game to make them tired to a degree where they stop thinking, and they start editing on another level. But you should ask Terry; he knows much better than me.”
Indiewire even suggested that Rogowski might not even end up in the film, as Malick is notorious for casting and shooting actors and then leaving them on the cutting room floor, and the actor didn’t disagree.
“Exactly. You never know. It was like last time [with “A Hidden Life”], I was there only for a couple of days.” Will “The Way of The Wind” come out this year? Because if it doesn’t, that’ll be essentially five years in the editing room. Maybe Cannes 2024 in May, if we’re lucky? Rogowski’s “Passages,” which is excellent and on our list of the Best Films of 2023, is available now on MUBI.