Journalistic practice requires introduction, but who doesn't know Hanna Schygulla? Most of the conversation that follows wasn't recorded on film sets. It just started there.

—Gideon Bachmann

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GIDEON BACHMANN: Does work with such different intelligences as Fassbinder, Godard, and Ferreri influence your own personal life?

HANNA SCHYGULLA: Oh, you know, what influences one's own life is a complicated story. It starts when you begin to grow up, with your parents, saying to yourself that you have become what you are because of them and how nice it could have been if they had been different, and you begin to complain, but in the end you accept how you are and can say, I am what I am.

GB: Do you have directors in mind now whom you'd like to work with?

HS: Not really. Which doesn't mean that I don't have favorite directors. Like Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky... but I don't have any concrete desires in this respect. If you wish something, it never happens.

GB: A lot of your energy seems to be devoted to remaining independent.

HS: Many people today seem to prefer the feeling of belonging. You could say there are stickers and fleers, those who stick to you like glue and those who flee from you all the time.

I am more of a fleer than a sticker.

GB: Don't you enjoy sticking?

HS: I can enjoy it, yes.

GB: But when the desire grabs you, you know that it won't last?

HS: Experience has shown me that everything in life is temporary. But I like it when things develop slowly over a period of time. For example, there was a certain security with Rainer Fassbinder, the kind of relationship where it was clear that despite an often curious barrier we would always have something to do with each other. Despite the pauses and the interruptions and the emotions. This I find a positive thing, and in the same way I find it great when you can be with someone for years and years and still be full of wonder about the other person.

GB: Is this a new discovery?

HS: Well, I have rarely had relationships that have lasted more than three years. But even simple friendships seem to last less now, maybe because of the kind of life I lead. This business of moving from film to film. After all, a film isn't just an actress and a camera and a director, it's at least thirty persons who share a good deal of their life for extended periods. And when the film is finished, that is also finished.

GB: In acting you are constantly called upon to be something new. Maybe your need for freedom and the desire to become an actress spring from the same root.

HS: Very likely, yes. It's a question of a style of living. I get very nervous when I realize I keep the same habits. I just can't stand it when I get bogged down and don't change.

GB: But why do something as public as acting?

HS: I suppose I've always wanted to be at the center of things, and playing roles is one sure way of doing something that puts you there. On the other hand, I need to have my own secrecy, my own space. It's a matter of independence. That's probably why the thing that attracts me most in men is independence. I can't stand the ones who constantly bend their desires to mine.

GB: So when people speak of the famous Hanna Schygulla, you are aware that Hanna Schygulla is many more things than they know about. . .

HS: Oh God, yes. After all, "La Schygulla" is just another role. It's a role not quite defined. And into which flow many currents. But you represent yourself somehow. Not always consciously, but when they come at you with a thousand cameras, obviously it becomes conscious. You can't help it. Always talking about yourself ... of course one is playing a role. But fortunately I have many moments when I am not exposed in that way.

GB: You say that privacy is essential to you. Is acting just as essential?

HS: I have never lived without it. When I was in school, while I wasn't in the center of things, I did have some sort of special position. Not because I was good in school, but because I was an exception. For example, this funny name. Not very German, after all. The people in my parents' apartment building have told me—my parents still live there—that I seemed to have an awful lot of energy as a child. My mother says I always insisted on going to find lost balls in the ruins near our house, where it was forbidden to go. I don't remember this particular fact, but I do remember that as a child I usually got to where I wanted to get. Even when the boys were bigger than I was, I managed to get my way.

GB: Do you sometimes do things now which you don't really want to do?

HS: Yes, but I hate it. It's my shitty education. ..a German specialty, indoctrinating us with a sense of duty. But I always rebelled. Even when I started acting with Fassbinder and his Anti-Theater I refused to become an integral part of the group. They all lived together outside Munich in a house in Peterskirchen. I refused to live with them, but I was there with them every day.

GB: In a personal relationship, do you seek that special position too?

HS: I find it very difficult to sustain social situations for very long. Even going out for dinner with people—everything always seems to take too long for my taste. Except when something important takes place between me and one of the people present . . .otherwise I feel driven by impatience. I have never been able to understand what simple sociability does for people. I am much better alone by myself. It gets to be much more complicated when there are others around.

GB: Does it bother you that your privacy is always being interfered with because of your profession?

HS: Yes, very much. Sometimes I get to the point where I have had enough. It's time to stop, Hanna. But somehow I go on, and know that I will, but I need pauses. I need to regain energy. And, after all, it can't go on like this forever. In the next five years exciting things will probably continue happening to me—films, I hope, at least one or two more. But one thing I can tell you: if in ten years I find that I haven't given up all this acting shit, I shall lose patience with myself.

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GB: What is the acting shit?

HS: {Laughing) All the superficiality.

GB: Isn't that part of the job?

HS: Yes, you have to squeeze the right spots to make something come out. You have to play the right keys. But there is a difference. Whether you just let it be, once you have squeezed it out of yourself, or whether you start fiddling with it some more to shape it into the image you'd like to create of yourself.

GB: Do you feel that in being autonomous, independent, in your life style and in your acting, you can contribute to an inner liberation of others?

HS: No. Maybe now that the parts I get to play are more important and tend to express ideas in that direction, I could begin to contribute some small bit. But I don't feel that I have much to offer inasmuch as I do not feel that I am far ahead of others in the struggle. I do remember being influenced myself by some films. There was a film with Christine Kaufmann which I saw as a child, in which she dances with a stone in her shoe and despite the bleeding goes on and on, that has remained in my mind; and then Korda's The Thief of Baghdad, although of course it's pure kitsch. I remember Sabu's floating above everything with the greatest of ease, and all those labyrinths, the giant cobwebs... and I remember Bergman's Wild Strawberries.. .and Antonioni's La Notte, the pool, all this waiting for something to happen which has already happened. . .I don't even want to say that these are great films, but they did something for me.

GB: Do you think you are achieving what you want in life?

HS: I have very mixed feelings in this regard. Sometimes I have fleeting moments of certainty, like a plummet that finds its center and equilibrium. A feeling that I cannot, really, become too untrue to myself. But at other times I feel that I waste my life with narcissistic nonsense. And that I am just becoming an object.

GB: Could it happen that you might give up acting?

HS: I used to think that I might, but now I rather feel that I'll continue.

GB: Would you like to have children?

HS: Yes, very much, on the one hand. But on the other hand I enjoy my independence. If I were younger by ten years, I'd have one at once, now. Without hesitation. But as matters are, there is a sort of a barrier: if I should disappear now, at my age, for two or three years, I would have crossed the line, so everything now depends on timing. But this is the one thing, perhaps, that could keep me from making one film after another: living an everyday life with a child.

GB: Would you accept the need for a father too?

HS: {Laughing) "Accept the need"... I love the way you put that. Well, the way my life is at the moment, it would be ideal....One wouldn't have to be together the whole time, but nevertheless there would be somebody. . .

GB: Don't you believe in marriage?

HS: Not only is it unimportant, but it is disturbing because of all its red tape. It's one of the state's inventions to control us better. I like the fleeting side of love. It increases the pleasure. Instead of perfect happiness, I'm after the perfect moment. That way, love, when it occurs, is like a present.

SCHYGULLA ON HER DIRECTORS

Rainer Werner Fassbinder: He was a great choreographer. He came from the theater, where precision counted. Rainer had been an actor himself, and he enjoyed walking the scene through for the actors before turning it over to them to do. But he did not explain too much; after all, explaining is deadly. . . .He was the master of irritation. There were moments when you felt it was all artificial, or exaggerated, or brutal, or disgusting, but then something would come along that was incredibly human, or simple. It was this mixture which produced a dynamic reaction in the spectator.

Marco Ferreri (The Story of Piera, 1983): He's got a lot in common with Fassbinder. He shoots very quickly. There's a wildness in Ferreri, a beautiful craziness. You can tell that there's a poet at work. He is stimulated by reality, he is awake. And that is fun. You have the feeling he's sharing his ideas with you.

Jean-Luc Godard (Passion, 1982): With Godard everything is like a difficult birth. He keeps everything inside, filtering everything through himself. All the decisions are interiorized. I constantly had the feeling, working with him, that he was walking a razor's edge, with an enormous amount at risk.

Margarethe von Trotta (Sheer Madness, 1983): Margarethe and I had acted together in a Fassbinder film, Gods of the Plague, so I was curious to see what she would be like as a director. It was as if I were with a sister who was suddenly directing me. She has lots of drive. She is a strong director.

Andrzej Wajda (A Love in Germany, 1983): Like all Poles, he is tied up with the collective history of his country. He is very intense. You always feel dramatic conflict in him. Just before he shoots a scene, he looks at you and there is fire in his look. He is asking you to give him all the dramatic electricity in you.