Why Edward Berger’s Teenage Daughter Had The Final Say On ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’

When Edward Berger talks about the impulse to make the WWI saga Quiet on the Western Front, he says he can only speak as a German filmmaker, adapting a classic German novel (by Erich Maria Remarque) about the horrors that a German battle inflicted on him. youth. Something in him wanted to contribute to an international conversation about the futility of war.

“Of course we were responsible for two world wars in the last century, which left a lot of scars and traces in our DNA,” says Berger. “Unfortunately, war seems to be a never-ending subject.”

Berger is hesitant to draw comparisons between his film and the situation in Russian-occupied Ukraine, but was struck by the world his film will be released in when he saw a post on German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’ Instagram page that read Images from Ukraine in 2022 and Belgium in 1916, images that Berger himself used for research. “You couldn’t tell what year it was,” Berger says of Tillmans’ defiant link. “The burnt stumps, the trenches, the muddy fields and soldiers. They were interchangeable. It just keeps repeating itself.”

Berger’s film, which he co-wrote, features his own visual interpretation of the horrific carnage of war – an opening sequence that chillingly depicts the system wide-eyed at the bloodied uniform of a dead soldier in protagonist Paul’s “new” gear. (Felix) Kammerer fits) is executed as the next harmless attack in battle.

“The war machine became a big deal, how it eats up these kids,” says Berger, “so we tried to find a similarity in the images. How the machine comes back to life and life becomes meaningless. Within a few days they die of their soul.” .”

Berger asked his composer Volker Bertelmann to reflect this in the music as well. “I told him to destroy the images, not to sentimentalize them,” says the director. “What’s that sound in Paul’s stomach?” What came back was a score marked by a booming sulphurous battle cry played on a heavily amplified harmonium. Berger adds: “You can hear the inside of the pump and it became the subject of taking your last breath. It’s the feel of the war machine.”

A contrast to that violent howl was also essential to Berger’s vision, so he searched next to or among the mud and blood for what he called “Peace Bags,” whether it be the chirping of birds or the silent poetry of a beautiful landscape. “It was important for me to create an idea of ​​what we’re destroying,” he says. “If it’s just hard and muddy, you go blind and deaf. The goal was to look at these pictures and get melancholy.

Faced with tight budgets that required rigorous preparation, Berger led everything in advance with veteran cinematographer James Friend in a hotel room as they covered walls with drawings and staged fight scenes with an iPhone. They ended up with a 300-page picture Bible. Then, in the middle of filming, Berger’s doubts about the task at hand crept in – especially as the Kampffilmtage took their toll – the collaboration was more than purely artistic. “Sometimes I was really devastated and saw myself sinking into the mud and [James] was very helpful and said, ‘You know what, let’s focus on one shot at a time.’

That “one shot” actually referred to how they filmed battle scenes: sticking to what their main character sees in battle. “Normally you’d probably shoot with three, maybe four cameras to capture everything, but we thought if we had four cameras, whose perspective is that?” says Berger. “We wanted to make you feel like you’re with this kid. So we filmed everything with one camera. And every shot that goes next was only made to make Paul feel lost and lonely.”

Getting one sequence right particularly nagged at him: the lone, devastating, real-time murder of a French soldier in a crater that Berger’s 17-year-old daughter told him was of immense dramatic interest. “My kids aren’t really interested in what movie I’m going to do next, but when I mentioned ‘All Quiet,’ my daughter said, ‘I only read it in school. You have to make it. I cried seven times. And that crater scene is the best scene in the book,” Berger recalled. “It’s the heart of the movie, it’s so moving.”

However, what was planned as a four-minute sequence ran for 11 minutes. When his assistant director asked him to simplify it or it would take four days of shooting, Berger says: “I had to decide which ear [to listen to], because in the other my daughter said, ‘This is the best scene.’ Luckily I listened to my daughter. And Felix put so much into each shot that he cried for four days. He carries the scene.”

Even later, when the editor wanted to shorten it, Berger insisted it be left long and anxious, a German filmmaker who shared his view of the destruction’s effects with moviegoers. “I wanted the audience to go through it with him and get really mad about it. I knew if we took shortcuts we would betray the soul of the book.”