Nikolai Kinski, Director Florian Frerichs on Sex Scenes Always Being “Super Awkward” and ‘Traumnovelle,’ Their German-Style ‘Eyes Wide Shut’
Remember Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick’s exploration of marriage and relationships starring Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise? Of course you do!
Now, get ready for Traumnovelle, a new adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s famed erotic short story that inspired Eyes Wide Shut and that opens the Oldenburg Film Festival on Wednesday.
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The drama, from German director Florian Frerichs (The Last Supper), stars Nikolai Kinski (Vikings: Valhalla, Masters of the Air) and Laurine Price (Phoenix, American Crime Story) as a respectable upper-middle-class couple that gets drawn into a secret world of erotic fantasy. The film also stars Detlev Buck, Bruno Eyron, and Nora Islei, with cameos from Sharon Brauner and Sharon Kovacs. Produced by Warnuts Entertainment and Studio Babelsberg, the movie will hit German cinemas in early 2025, courtesy of Apollo Film.
Before walking the red carpet in Oldenburg, Frerichs and Kinski took time out for a Zoom chat with THR about the film, portraying erotic themes and sexual tension in the age of #MeToo and how the shoot compared to the long production process for Eyes Wide Shut.
Schnitzler wrote his novella Traumnovelle (Dream Story), about a man whose wife confesses to having had sexual fantasies involving another man, in 1926. Why do you think its themes still reverberate to this day?
Florian Frerichs That was actually the point when I read it again, years after we read it in school. I saw Eyes Wide Shut, maybe in 1999 or so, and then forgot all about it. And when I was in Budapest promoting my first feature film, The Last Supper, at the film festival, I actually read it again. And I thought: “Oh, right, this is what Eyes Wide Shut was based on. But this still feels so contemporary.” And I felt maybe this is something that can actually be done in another way, in a way that hasn’t been done before, because there are so many layers of interpretation given to the reader.
I found it very interesting because all the other films had a different approach, each of them individually. And I think that we are adding onto this in our own way. It basically deals with the human condition. I’m also a married man. I’ve been together with my wife, back then girlfriend, for 20 years. We met at high school. And all these things are definitely not alien to us. We know these things, and it must have been the same, with different circumstances, 100 years ago, 500 years ago, and it will still be the same in 100 years.
Nikolai Kinski It’s definitely timeless. My first introduction to Schnitzler and to Traumnovelle was in Vienna, shooting a biopic [Klimt] about Gustav Klimt, where I played [Egon] Schiele, with John Malkovich. And at that time I wasn’t familiar with Traumnovelle, but it was also loosely based on it. It was quite a loose interpretation. But I fell in love with Vienna, and for me, that was the first kind of something that piqued my curiosity about this. I had seen Eyes Wide Shut, and I learned about Traumnovelle being the inspiration and sort of put the pieces together.
Ultimately, I think it’s timeless because it not only approaches the human condition, but our inner lives and that tension between our inner and outer lives and the duality of life, in this, very specifically, in fantasy versus reality, dreams versus waking life, desires and repression, and just the kind of tension that we all carry within ourselves. And it’s done in such a modern way. It was ahead of its time in really capturing this essential conflict within all of us and something that is a truth. We learn and we evolve through confrontation, through self-exploration, through basically shedding light into the darkness. That’s the essence of storytelling, going through a kind of journey. And that journey takes confrontation, it takes pain. It takes all these things that need to be overcome and to get from point A to point B.
In this day and age, there’s so much that we try to do in our conscious waking life, in terms of self-improvement, in terms of awareness. We do everything from meditation to self-help and all these things. And yet, dreams still remain such an unexplorable part of our subconscious. And to find the connections between the conscious and subconscious is so exciting. That’s what attracted me to this project and made the experience so fascinating to really connect those dots.
You mentioned desire. How challenging is it for an actor and for a director to express desire and bring it to a film screen without having to spell things out too much?
Frerichs That’s the reason why I wanted Nikolai to play this part because he’s a very thoughtful actor and a very thoughtful person also in his private life. He has this kind of meta layer within himself. He knows how to express big feelings without showing them in a big way. I think this is something that many German films, or European films in general, suffer from — that the screenwriters and also the directors and some of the actors think that big expression means big emotion. But the only one time where he shows big emotions [in the film], when he starts to cry, it is even more gut-wrenching because beforehand he only played with his eyes. You can look closely and see that there’s a blink in his eyes, and then, it hits him. It makes it much stronger.
So Nikolai is very much an actor who can play with the psychology of the character without doing too much. It’s very, very subtle. If you had done it in a very expressive way, it would not have worked. Because if he’d been a very expressive guy, he wouldn’t have minded his wife having fantasies about other men. He could just get the next chica and have fun, you know? But he’s reflecting on these things, and this really moves him from the inside, and you can feel that. So Niko was perfect for that role.
Kinski I’m drawn to ambiguity. I find things much more interesting when you have to think and you have to investigate. It is much more interesting to think something through than to show something. I’m always trying to just be present, to be in the moment. And that’s what I guess came across. If it works, that’s good.
On TV shows and films nowadays, you typically have intimacy coordinators and advisors. How does that work in Germany and how did you approach filming on this movie?
Kinski It’s something that’s become part of the culture. And I actually think, if done right, it’s very freeing because there’s clarity, so you can concentrate on the work in that framework. Sex scenes are always super awkward. It’s always a huge challenge to make something sexy that in the making of is so unsexy. On top of the awkwardness of having an entire film team [there] and everything that’s going on, you always have the awkwardness of trying to figure out how far do we go. So there [is a] pragmatism to having an intimacy coordinator. The German one is maybe even more pragmatic. You have marks so you touch here and touch there. In one sense it’s super unsexy. But in the other sense, it’s helpful.
It’s helpful to just have rules, and then you work within those rules. It feels like that gets some of the other stuff out of the way. It’s important because desire and these things are an important, essential part of our experience. I’ve noticed that there are also, for example, in Venice, so many erotic films.
I was going to ask you about this return of erotic movies…
Kinski There’s been a reckoning, and for good reason and measure, for a good cause, the #MeToo movement and everything. With that has also come a certain amount of fear around the taboo. There has been a tabooization, a bit, of sex. And I think there’s perhaps a desire to re-explore that now with new approaches — like you said with intimacy coordinators — and a new sense of awareness. I welcome that. I think it’s great.
Frerichs We’ve been showing the film to our friends, and we’ve also been getting notes. And I was explicitly asking about this, so I can tell you: people over 40 thought, well, it’s a bit soft in terms of the sex scenes. But people under 25 were like, “Oh, my God, this is super kinky. How far did you go?” This is really interesting. There has been this kind of switch, I don’t know, 10 years ago. If you watch the latest James Bond films, there’s not much sex anymore.
Kinski Ultimately, I think what’s interesting is that this film is not explicit in a sense, but I think it really potentially opens up a doorway into your mind if you let it. And in the best sense, hopefully, it gets people thinking about what’s allowed and about their own sexuality, their own desires, the repressions, and all these things that have this tension of being taboo. So, it’s maybe interesting for a younger generation that is growing up in a culture that is maybe a bit confused. But I don’t know, I guess it depends on the [social] circles. I feel like the younger generations are quiet, but I guess things are constantly evolving.
There are all these stories about how long the shoot for Eyes Wide Shut took and all its challenges. How did the shoot for Traumnovelle compare?
Frerichs I think they had exactly 400 days, and we had 28. (Laughs.) But, of course, I’ve invested six years of my life into it. It’s a super low-budget film. And with the lack of budget, if you want to make a movie with good production value, you need to invest time. The money that you don’t have, you need to invest in time. So I was doing a lot of different things at the same time. But when we were on set, we were very, very structured. We knew exactly what we needed for the edit, and that’s what we got. Only very rarely did we do extra shots. I knew already what I needed for the edit. I think there are many other films where you can edit around and make another film out of the material. I think this version is the only version. I don’t think that you can really rearrange it, because we shot it so much with the edit in mind. Being a low-budget filmmaker, I’m used to a much more stressful set, so this was very relaxed for me. We were very much prepared. And also the actors were terrifically prepared. They knew their lines, which is their main job. I’ve had different experiences. It’s really a pain in the ass. Because I’m also not the kind of director who wants to do 40 different takes with little variations. For me, it’s five to six takes, and then it’s usually either the first or the last one.
Kinski For me, it felt like I was shooting the entire time. I shot every single day. I’m in, I think, 99 percent of the scenes. So I was literally shooting nonstop, and there was no downtime at all. It became extremely surreal. One thing that was great with the film was the opportunity to learn about a new story, a new person, a new aspect of something that you’re also personally interested in, in this case through the character going deep into into the subconscious and dream worlds.
But then there was this kind of overlap between shooting the entire day and also doing a lot of night shoots, and then coming home to sleep. I really started to dream as the character. I also got interested in lucid dreaming during that time and was doing all this reading, from Carl Jung to all this stuff about dreaming and lucid dreaming. And I was a lucid dreaming being in a sense — bringing your conscious into the subconscious, and vice versa, and then dreaming as the character, dreaming as myself, and then bringing that back into the shoot. So it became this perpetuum mobile where everything just melded together. So it was a major mind fuck, but one that was conducive, I think, to the film.
What are the key differences between the approach you took in Traumnovelle and other film treatments of Schnitzler’s novella?
Frerichs I like the ambivalence in which Schnitzler wrote it. It leaves it all to the reader to interpret if this is a dream or if this is reality. And is it his dream, her dream, or, most interestingly, is it a mixture of dream and reality? I tried to capture this spirit, which was, to me, one of the most important parts of the film.
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