Portrait of Andrea Maria Dusl
published in Skylines 5/2001
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Moonlight Lady
For 12 years the Austrian film-maker Andrea Maria Dusl carried the idea for her first film, Blue Moon, with her, everywhere she went. Now she’s finally made it, with Josef Hader in the leading role. Portrait by ANDREA MÖCHEL
The lady’s in no hurry. Exactly 76 minutes after ordering a soft-boiled egg, she picks up the spoon, cracks the now-cold shell, and resumes her breakfast at Vienna’s Café Rüdigerhof. She took her time with her first film as well: she got the idea for the story in 1989, during a day trip to Bratislava, where she had gone to get an eyeball-to-eyeball impression of the world behind the Iron Curtain. And suddenly Johnny Pichler was standing in front of her: a Viennese estate agent who had been left by his wife. In Bratislava on business, he fell in love with another woman, lost her and then searched Eastern Europe before finding her again on the shores of the Black Sea.
Initially, the fictional Johnny Pichler existed only in Dusl’s mind. For 12 years he danced in her head, telling her various versions of his story. She listened carefully, began writing the screenplay, investigated possible locations, rewrote the script, applied for financial support, rewrote the script again, convinced the actors, found a production company, and wrote version no. 17. After 33 days of shooting early last year, she finally had Johnny Pichler alias Josef Hader where she wanted him: captured on 16-mm film.
Thinking in images is nothing new to Dusl: after finishing grammar-school, the 40-year-old Vienna native completed her education in the master class for set design at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts. Soon she was making a living as an illustrator for newspapers and magazines. Every week she still draws and submits political cartoons. In the mid-1990s she also began writing for the Vienna city magazine Falter. For one of her first articles she researched the history of the Schweizerhaus Restaurant in Vienna’s Prater, but found her imagination getting in the way. “I threw in a few things I invented about the Middle Ages, and now they’re part of the place’s official history.” Embarrassed smile.
You’d never believe she was a tough journalist anyway: too mischievous are the tiny crow’s-feet around her eyes; too haphazard is the centre parting of her long, light-brown hair; too thoughtful her gaze as it sweeps across the room before coming to rest on the leaves of an indoor plant. “I don’t have a profession in the conventional sense”, she says. But she doesn’t conceal the fact that she’s mainly interested in film: “It has everything: music, images, people”. And her movie has actors like the Austrian stand-up comic Josef Hader and D. W. Buck, who has also made a name for himself making films like Männerpension (aka Jailbirds). Working with actors of this calibre was quite a challenge, admits Dusl, as she slices a breakfast roll, rolling the dough into a little ball. She feels a certain sense of responsibility for the careers of the two actors, who quickly said yes after she sent them the screenplay. And like all good actors, they’re “easy-care”, says Dusl. It’s the untalented ones who cause problems. But with 250 people on the set in Odessa there were a few of those, too, she says, as the ball of dough disappears into her mouth.
Her directing style comes through in interviews as well: “You’ve got to include that”, she says, when the conversation turns to her parents, a Swedish mother and a Viennese architect for a father. She means the fact that both came from artistic families. And she’s the family kind as well, says Dusl, but single at the moment after several “long and formative relationships”. She would still like to have a daughter. At some point.
The image that Dusl uses to describe shooting is “swimming through liquid concrete” because she had to fight to get every single detail in the 127 scenes exactly right. It matters whether there’s a vase of tulips or a cuckoo clock in the background. That’s why she prefers the French word réalisateur instead of régisseur to describe the director’s role. “It expresses the fact that you’re always having to compromise when you make a film. You simply have to.” For money if for no other reason. In the case of Blue Moon she kept the budget down by shooting in Eastern Europe. It cost only about 1.5 million dollars to make a 90-minute film – unbelievably cheap in the movie business. She was helped by her fondness for the Eastern bloc.
Back in the 1970s, when she was still at school with her three younger siblings and performing as a singer with a band, she didn’t buy the cliché of the “evil Russians”. After all, they had created glorious music and wonderful literature. She was enthusiastic about Communism, which seemed to her to be “more attractive than Christianity” because “in theory, at least, everybody has an equal opportunity and sin doesn’t exist”.
“Stalinism wrecked people”, says Dusl today. But she has retained her interest in the inner conflicts of people who had to learn the hard way that capitalism doesn’t mean paradise either.
While others travel to Paris or Washington, Dusl has used her holidays to explore Lviv and Kraków, Kiev and Odessa, always on the move, always listening to her vague longings, like the characters in Blue Moon. Before she even began shooting, she had taken around 7,000 photographs of possible film locations: lonely bus-stops, dilapidated hotels, run-down service stations.
Dusl doesn’t like to hang around the same place too long, even in her private life. “I like to come and go, and not be somewhere all the time.” The Moon doesn’t shine every night either.
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Filmemacherin Andrea Maria Dusl
Mondsüchtig
12 Jahre lang trug die Filmemacherin Andrea Maria Dusl die Idee zu ihrem
Debütfilm „Blue Moon“ mit sich herum. Jetzt hat sie ihn mit Josef Hader
in der Hauptrolle selbst gedreht. Porträt von ANDREA MÖCHEL
Die Frau hat es nicht eilig. 76 Minuten, nachdem sie sich ein weiches Ei bestellt hat, nimmt sie das Besteck in die Hände, knackt damit die schon kalte Schale, und dann widmet sich Andrea Maria Dusl gemächlich dem Rest ihres Frühstücks. Ihren Debütfilm „Blue Moon“ hat sie auch nicht gerade vom Zaun gebrochen: Eine Ausflugsfahrt nach Bratislava brachte sie 1989 auf die Idee. Sie war hingefahren, um die Welt hinter dem Eisernen Vorhang endlich mit eigenen Augen zu sehen. Und dann stand Johnny Pichler vor ihr: ein Wiener Immobilienhändler, der von seiner Frau verlassen wurde. In Bratislava verliebte er sich in eine andere und musste ihr quer durch Osteuropa nachreisen, um sie am Ufer des Schwarzen Meeres wiederzufinden. Das Besondere: Johnny Pichler existierte vorerst nur an einem Ort – im Kopf von Andrea Maria Dusl. 12 Jahre lang erzählte er verschiedene Versionen seiner Geschichte, bis sie ihn – alias Josef Hader – im vergangenen Frühjahr nach 33 Drehtagen dort hatte, wo sie ihn haben wollte: auf einem 16-mm-Filmstreifen.
In Bildern zu denken, ist Dusl nicht fremd: Die 40-jährige Wienerin absolvierte die Meisterklasse für Bühnengestaltung, ihr Geld verdient sie bis heute als Zeichnerin für Magazine, dazu schreibt sie für den „Falter“. „Ich habe keinen Beruf im herkömmlichen Sinn“, sagt sie. Dass ihr Hauptinteresse beim Film liegt, verhehlt sie nicht: „Da ist alles drinnen: Musik, Bilder, Menschen.“
Für die Dreharbeiten verwendet sie das Bild vom „Schwimmen durch flüssigen Beton“. Weil sie um jedes Detail gekämpft hat. Es mache eben einen Unterschied, ob im Hintergrund einer Szene eine Vase oder eine Kuckucksuhr zu sehen sei. Deshalb mag sie das französische Wort „Réalisateur“ auch lieber als das deutsche „Regisseur“. „Das drückt aus, dass Filmemachen immer eine Frage von Kompromissen ist. Die müssen begangen werden.“ Schon allein wegen des Geldes. Bei „Blue Moon“ kamen die Drehorte in Osteuropa dem Budget sehr zugute. 21 Millionen Schilling für 90 Minuten – ein Klacks in dieser Branche. Dank sei dem Faible, das Andrea Maria Dusl für den ehemaligen Ostblock hat. Während andere nach Paris oder Washington reisen, erforschte Dusl in ihren Urlauben Lemberg und Krakau, Kiew und Odessa, immer in Bewegung, immer einer diffusen Sehnsucht folgend, wie die Protagonisten von „Blue Moon“. 7.000 Fotos von möglichen Schauplätzen hatte sie schon vor dem ersten Drehtag gemacht.
Auch privat hält es die Filmemacherin Andrea Maria Dusl nicht lange an einem Ort. „Kommen und Gehen ist schön, immer da sein aber nicht.“ Der Mond scheint ja auch nicht jede Nacht.