It’s All in Franz Rogowski’s Gaze

In just five years, Franz Rogowski has grown from a respected indie film actor in Germany to an international name-on-the-poster leading man. He doesn’t fit the conventional movie-star profile, and that’s part of what makes his rise so intriguing. He’s not a jacked-up male model who could be poured directly into a superhero suit; he’s of average height, with a compact body, a soft voice, searching eyes, partial hearing loss, and both a facial scar and a lisp (from a childhood cleft operation). He’s appealed to some of the most vital filmmakers of world cinema, including Terrence Malick (A Hidden Life), Christian Petzold (Undine, Transit), Michael Haneke (Happy End), and Andrea Arnold (Bird, which was still filming when this interview was conducted and is due in theaters next year).

This year, he’s the name on the poster of Ira Sachs’s intimate and explicit romantic drama, Passages, about a love triangle between creatively gifted narcissists. Rogowski plays Tomas, a rising young film director who lives in Paris with his charming artist-husband Martin (Ben Whishaw). When Tomas has a fling with a young woman named Agathe, played by Adèle Exarchopoulos, it effectively destroys the marriage. But that’s far from the end of a tale that repeatedly twists back on itself, with each character rallying from what seems like a permanent position of weakness and becoming the dynamo driving the action. Tomas is easily the most irksome and appalling of the trio, hooking up with Agathe, who worked on his most recent film project, then casually announcing the escapade to Martin, but only after having sex with him first. Things get uglier when Tomas decides to remain with Agathe and meet her parents; he shows up late in a sweaty crop top, smelling of sex he had with someone other than her. Tomas occasionally seems conscious that he’s causing great pain to others, but he’s mostly fixated on his ability to make art and live life in thrall to his appetites.

Despite all this, Tomas remains hard to hate. Why? Maybe it’s because Rogowski modulates his tone so expertly that the viewer can never be sure if the character is behaving deliberately or just surrendering to the same mesmerizing force of personality that enables him to get funding for his movies. (Sachs told NPR he showed Rogowski classic gangster movies starring James Cagney, who understood how to play “an absolute sociopath, but so beautifully and with such charm that it’s really magnetic cinematically.”) The result is the most psychologically credible made-up film director since Joe Gideon in All That Jazz — and similar to Bob Fosse’s alter ego in how both the character and the performance push the limits of sympathy. Speaking to Rogowski about Tomas and some of the other very different characters he’s played confirms that the the gentle-voiced, sad-eyed charmer of Sachs’s film is plugged into the heart of the man who plays him.

What does it feel like being known in America? You’re kind of an international name now.
I’m very happy and thankful for the constructive perspective from outside, because sometimes I am not my own best friend. But at the end of the day I just want to find the right scripts and make the right movies and avoid the noise. Sometimes it’s all so overwhelming. It can get to a degree where it just makes you stupid or full of yourself, or you think you’re great. It’s not a creative place for me, to think that I’m great.

What attracted you to Passages? 
When I read it, I was like: Fuck, how am I going to justify this terrible behavior? Then we started talking, and yeah, this character, Tomas, is a human being struggling, and he wants the good things. He is just not really capable sometimes of creating peace and intimacy — rather the contrary. But it’s not his aim to hurt people. His aim is to be seen. Seen by others and seen by himself. But it’s not easy when you need friction and immediate feedback in order to feel yourself. You usually inflict a lot of pain on others.

Do you think he’s a bad person?
No. I mean, there’s an interesting difference between bad people and bad in terms of evil. I don’t think he is a person who wants to hurt other people because he enjoys hurting other people. I see Tomas as too self-centered to truly understand others’ needs. He speaks another language from them and doesn’t understand what they need, what they want. As an actor, I think I was interested in the potential and absurdity of his realities conflicting or being in opposition to others’ realities. He really sometimes just doesn’t see what’s going on! Like when he’s meeting his new girlfriend’s parents.

It’s a lot. 
When he’s in the kitchen right after arriving, he says, “Yeah, maybe I should take a shower,” but that’s not because of the crop top he’s wearing, it’s because he had sex like an hour before.

As an actor, emotionally, analytically, how do you enter a scene like that? 
I created this moment where I was shaking her dad’s hand and I was telling him that he has a very strong handshake. Very strong! I wanted an absurd little moment there, because if you are dressed like Tomas in that scene, there is no way that you can establish a strong masculine handshake with someone.

Do you add things like the awkward handshake to scenes the instant that they occur to you, or do you have to work them out beforehand with the other actors or the director, get their approval or agreement?
Depends on your collaborator. Some directors are thankful when you surprise them, and some want to protect their own creation. Most of the time it’s a combination. You are trying to create something that lives and feels spontaneous, but it is actually built. Ira, I think, is a bit of both.

Can you describe being directed by him, particularly in the film’s many uncut long takes, including the sexually explicit ones?
The intimate scenes were exciting for all of us, because nobody knows how it’ll be and how it’ll work. We just felt like, “Okay, let’s talk it through.” And we did the same thing as we would do every other day: talk about the camera and the angle we want to shoot in. You’re a bit more tense because it’s a sex scene, and we all know that sex can be great, but it can also be horrible. This is fictional sex, but to a certain extent it’s the same thing; if you feel ugly or exposed or insecure, it’ll be extremely difficult to create something intimate. A sex scene is a scene that talks about a couple, and you see the contrast a bit later in the movie between a couple having sex — really a couple, like, two people being one — in contrast to someone getting to know someone else and facing this otherness. These two long sex scenes are introspective sculptures of these two relationships and the differences between them.

I think the sex scenes are also, as all the other scenes in Ira’s movies, a very intimate, personal statement. He’s observing his own creation, and you can watch it with him through his eyes for a very long time. It’s something that he cares about, something that’s important for him. You have longer takes, therefore you experience the arc of a scene. For example, after the sex scene, Tomas wakes up, he sits on the bed, and then he starts sharing this horrible news. It’s intense! After a long sex scene, this? It’s quite surprising. In the world of auteur cinema, they want to make a statement not just with the script but also in terms of the camera, so they choose an angle that says something about the scene, and they don’t feel the need to show each face that has to say a line. You don’t always have to hear or see or feel everything. That leads to terrible editing. It’s a very sad parody of the system, how things are often done now. There’s no feeling of the collective space that we are in anymore. It’s like it’s a collection of individual performances: “I have a line!” “I have a line!” “I have a line!” But it doesn’t re-create this social plastic that is called society.

In general, this is something that I would also like to achieve in my life: to know what I need and what is important to me and skip the rest. Also, Ben has a very nice back! It’s nice to see him in action! He’s a good fucker.

What else can you tell me about working with Ben Whishaw?
Ira said, “Let’s meet with Ben in a café.” So we went there, and Ira said, “Okay. Franz, this is Ben, and Ben, this is Franz. Bye!” He left, and then we had to talk and share our insecurities and our curiosities. Ben was wearing some very interesting earrings, so I said, “I really like your earrings,” and then we exchanged a bunch of compliments and we started to create something together.

The first movie I saw you in where I went, “Wow, who’s that?” was A Hidden Life, the Terrence Malick film about an Austrian conscientious objector in World War II, in which you play a fellow conscript named Waldland who seems ill-suited to war because he’s so instinctively playful and kind. What was your approach to working with Malick, known for his free-form filmmaking?
There was no preparation. I didn’t learn any lines, as far as I remember. I was right in the middle of shooting a film in France with Michael Haneke, and I just flew in, arrived on set, and ten minutes later I was wearing a WWII costume. I ended up in a cell with August Diehl, the leading actor, and I started improvising with the camera. We began improvising with the light. I remember feeling the light in the window, and then the cold glass of the window, and then using this kind of situation to communicate between this outside fantasy and him, the imprisoned man.

From there, I was just improvising on different ideas. Sometimes Terry would come and whisper something in my ear and just give me a few words. He once gave me a whole page of text, but it was just meant to be an inspiration. One of the things that Terry is incredibly good at is making you feel seen and wanted after just a couple of seconds. He does kind of know who you are somehow, even though you’ve only met for five minutes. After five minutes, I felt like, Oh, wow, he really knows what color I can bring to this painting. He knows it and he wants it, so I can actually just start creating things. It’ll be all fine.

There’s a whole bit where your character takes straw dummies that are intended for bayonet practice and arranges them in little tableau. It’s almost like an affectionate joke on all those Terrence Malick scenes where lovers frolic in nature: How did that happen?
I remember us sitting on a staircase. It was in the backyard of this military camp, and they just handed me a bunch of props. It’s a bit like cooking, you know? You don’t know what’s in the fridge, but somebody has put some very good ingredients in that fridge, and somehow the stove is also really good, and somehow there’s also a really good cook. It felt rather intimate and almost like a student movie, but then you look and you see in the background tanks, and then you see 200 soldiers all in costume, and you start realizing, okay, it’s actually not a little student movie. We’re in a Terrence Malick movie.

You play a very different kind of character in Disco Boy, about the relationship between a French legionnaire and a guerrilla fighter in the Niger delta. That’s a movie in which you’re really carrying the story. The point of view of the film is anchored to your character. And this is not a man-child like Tomas or Waldland. He’s a much harder person.
The film is by the writer and director Giacomo Abbruzzese. My character, Aleksei, is fleeing Russia to find a job, and to become European, he decides to join the army in France, because if you do that for five years you will get French citizenship. He serves and is sent to war and comes back traumatized. I think to Giacomo the story has a bit to do with ghosts, and something maybe supernatural.

There wasn’t much improvisation. Most of the time we were sticking to the script, because I’m not fluent in Russian, not at all. I was well prepared. I had a language coach. But because I didn’t speak a single word of Russian, I felt more like, okay, I need to prepare for this and keep it together and work on my body. We had a lot of shooting days within a short amount of time. When you are on a set with somebody like Terry, or now with Andrea Arnold, you do a scene a day, maybe two. There’s some air on the set, you know? Disco Boy was the first feature film where we had to use a lot of brutal force to make a movie under hard conditions. Hard conditions.

Do you have to make physical adjustments when you’re playing a character from another era because of the way social mores and conventions change over time? For instance, Waldland in A Hidden Life is probably more like your great-grandfather than he is like you.
I think a big mistake actors can make is to pretend to know how people have felt in earlier times and use history to empower themselves. I mean, I guess it’s similar to cultural appropriation, you know? If you’re a Method actor and then you pretend to be from a concentration camp, the truth is that you have no idea what it felt like to be there, and you just want to win an award and make a lot of money. Maybe you know how to make a traumatized face, but I think it’s just not true that you have any real clue of what that might have felt like, because you live in Los Angeles and you have a big house. So what can you do? One method is to weaken your physical system to a degree where you just feel the pain and tiredness of someone who is malnourished and loses a lot of weight to a degree where it’s hard to walk up stairs. For example, I did that for Great Freedom.

I wondered if you did that for that film: the extreme weight loss or deprivation approach. 
I did. I was just trying to find another way to bring myself to a point where it would be superhard to get through a day of shooting, and use these moments of shivering and tiredness and this very weird physical state that you’re going through when you stop eating, to help build the character.

One of the things that pretty much every movie I’ve seen you in has in common is that there are many moments when you’re looking — really looking: at another actor, usually, but sometimes at a room or an object or even an animal. Is it just luck that you end up in so many movies where you get to lead with your eyes?  
The honest answer is, in every movie that I’m in, a day will come when I forget my lines, and when that happens, I sit there and look. I keep it together, try to keep the traumatized face, and look good! I’m half-traumatized, half-sexy, and I don’t know my lines.

Come on, now — is that true?
It’s half-true. I think cinema has always been about these cracks in the surface where the light can get in, and the eyes are just a wonderful window to the interior and the hidden. And also, words sometimes say things they don’t mean — or the other way around. So whenever I can, I try to integrate my eyes into my acting.

It might also partly be because I don’t hear so well, so I look more! Maybe sometimes directors think, Oh, wow, this is so intense, how he’s using his eyes in this scene with this other actor. But really I just want to understand what the other person is saying.

Is it easier to act for the camera alone or with another actor?
Humans have a tendency to constantly change their temperatures, colors, emotions. Sometimes even the best actors are less predictable and stable as a partner than a camera. So once you’ve established what needs to happen in a scene, it can be quite comfortable actually to find that sweet spot next to the lens and then to do all those things that your body remembers. In that moment, you can just open up, and the shot will tell a whole story by itself. I love acting with the camera. I think it’s quite funny to pretend that it’s a human being.

When you watch a finished film, do you remember the experience of making it?
Yeah! It stays in your tissue. You remember the energy on set. There are tense sets, there are funny sets, loud sets, silent sets, aggressive sets, formal ones, and so on. You remember, for example, Terry’s energy with his actors and the camera, and him coming to you while the camera’s running and whispering those weird lines into your ear. That will stay with me forever, you know?

Or Andrea Arnold: She avoids trucks and big cranes and other impressive machinery, so every set blends into the surroundings. You don’t start shooting before you become a part of your surroundings, become a part of the neighborhood, become a part of the landscape. Her capacity for allowing life to happen even though you’re moving and every minute is expensive, and to wait for this moment instead of forcing the moment, is something that will stay with me forever.

I don’t know. I’m training to be a better member of the species. I’m a Protestant: I wake up and I’m already guilty for existing, and I have to do something! My biggest desire is to just be and relate. All of a sudden it’s not you who needs to approach life, but life comes to you. Life happens to you. There’s a totally different experience when life happens to you than when you try to create life. All of a sudden, you can be touched and you can be changed.

That’s interesting. Storytellers are taught that the core of drama is the decision: The character makes a choice, and then there are consequences from that choice. But in life, a lot of times we don’t actually make the decisions. The decisions are made for us.
It’s funny how scared we are of that reality. We keep telling ourselves that we’re in charge, and we can make it happen, and we’re in total control. But to me, the moment where I feel somehow — how can I describe it? — where I lose my will and start existing: These moments are quite rare and very precious, because most of my life is spent on willpower, and it’s so tiring, you know?