With North Face, rereleased in January 2010, director and scriptwriter Philipp Stoelzl, a multi-talented and sought-after opera, music-video, commercial and feature-film director has succeeded in newly defining the genre of the mountain film and transposing it to the 21st century.
The breathtaking adventure of the failed attempt to scale the Eiger North Face for the first time is based on a true story whose excitement and drama can hardly be surpassed. North Face keeps viewers as breathless as if they were out there climbing the mountain themselves instead of sitting comfortably in a theatre…
You produce operas, shoot music videos and commercials. How did you get the idea of making an Eiger film?
Boris Schoenfelder, who first had the idea for the film, was looking for a director for the project and sent me the script. The bizarre story of Toni Kurz took hold of me right away. For one, there's the intense drama about four people and their brutal, existential struggle to survive on the mountain. For another, there's the historical aspect about the ideological exploitation of mountaineering in the Nazi era. It is this very special mixture which, in my view, makes this story so exciting for the cinema.
What did you find particularly fascinating about the historical background of the story?
There's something existential about the murderous ascent of mountain faces in the 1920s and ‘30s. Young men with few perspectives in life set off on their bikes to climb a dangerous mountain – they're in search of a goal for themselves, any kind of goal. And, if need be, they're ready to die to achieve this goal. Obviously, this fitS very well into the canon of Nazi mythology, and was accordingly ideologically exploited and held up as a heroic deed. Just listen to Robert Ley, the KdF (Kraft durch Freude = Strength Through Joy) boss: “German youth trains its strength and virility in a struggle with the mountain and learns how to die!" And so forth. To give everything for an idea, a myth, to sacrifice one's own life if need be: this fatalistic flirt with heroic death is what the Nazis found so interesting in mountain climbing. Intellectually, it was only one small step from there to marching towards the Urals for the German Reich.
North Face was shot under extreme conditions. What were the biggest problems?Filming is never easy, even in a café: you bring all the material, light the rooms, have the actors made up and dressed. You have to shoot lots of program in very little time… But in the mountains, everything is doubly or triply difficult: even tiny dialogue scenes are problematic since you first have to hang the people on the ropes. And then you have to get up there in the first place. That's already half a day right there. Then you've got everything set up – and it starts to rain. And so on and so on… It's frustrating. It's not without reason that Luis Trenker and his colleagues often spent years shooting their films before they were finally finished.
Did you often think: “Dammit, what have I gotten myself into?”
To be truthful, yes. Especially when the weather was bad and we had to wait. That's sheer horror for an impatient person like me. In one scene, Toni Kurz and Andi Hinterstoisser are at the summit in Berchtesgaden and we needed sun. It's supposed to be beautiful and brilliant (in this scene), as a contrast to the snow disaster later on in the film. On the first day: thick fog. We wait the whole day. Then we go back down without having shot one meter. Second day: more fog, but now with tiny gaps of sun in between, lasting maybe two to five minutes. So we shot the scenes in these gaps. It went okay - it had to. But it's awful for everybody, especially for the actors, since you obviously never get into the flow of a scene. At the Eiger, I had my absolute low, and I still get stomach cramps and feel wretched when I think of it. The shooting was almost finished, we had doubles in the ice field and wanted to film from the helicopter, shots that I still urgently needed for the film. The producers had freed funds for one last time. But it was simply too warm, and there was a danger of rockfall on the Eiger.
I can still see myself sitting in the sun on the Kleine Scheidegg below the Eiger North Face feeling utterly depressed. We had all we needed: two bright red copters, the doubles in their costumes, cameramen – but it was too warm. The money was gone, the opportunity had passed. I think that every film has its own inner life, and that the element of chance is much bigger than you want to admit, but when you're shooting a mountain film, you're much more at the mercy of chance. MP
(Excerpt from an interview conducted by Dirk von Nayhauss, published in "Nordwand – Das Drama des Toni Kurz am Eiger", AS Verlag, 2008)
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