Marcus Schlenkrich on Sandra Hüller, star of his Austrian Oscar entry "Rose" and Berlin Best Actress winner: "She is a queen"
Marcus Schlenkrich credits his 17 years as an actor-turned-director for his work as a filmmaker. "Directing a film and directing actors are entirely similar jobs," he tells Variety. "Both require making the right choices under pressure and convincing others to believe in them. For an actor-director, this means convincing a filmmaker or […]
Speaking at Vancouver International, "Rose" director Marcus Schleinzer talks about gender roles and why society forces people to hide. Film Festival (VIFF)
As a filmmaker, Marcus Schleinzer owes his 17-year career as an actor director.
"Directing a movie and directing an actor are very similar jobs," he tells Variety.
Both require making the right choices under pressure and convincing others to believe them. For an actor director, this means convincing a filmmaker or producer. For a director, it means gaining the trust of the audience. Related Stories Netflix's 'Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging' Pilot Series How Netflix Uses Artificial Intelligence at VFX Studio Eyeline Revealed by VP Mohsen Mousavi at Screening Conference
Schleinzer admits that despite what people might think, he can be rather shy and timid. Casting offered a way to stay in the background while being deeply involved in the filmmaking process. He worked closely with Michael Hanke as his casting director for many years. But Haneke also gave Schleinzer opportunities to direct background actors and learn how a film set works. "He put a lot of trust in me," she says. Popular in Variety
Haneke was also the one who asked him to come out from behind the scenes and become a filmmaker himself, giving him three months to write a screenplay.
"I thought, 'Yeah, that was a compliment,'" Schleinzer recalls. But three months later, he called me and said: Where is the script? And I didn't even have a line."
Finally, he sat down and wrote one. Haneke liked it and refused to put it in a drawer, giving it to French producer Margaret Mongoose, who called Schleinzer and said she wanted to make it. "So I was trapped," he says. "I couldn't get away from it anymore. That's how they finally kicked me."
Her third feature, Rose, which premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF), is a black-and-white historical drama starring Sandra Holler as a woman who disguises herself as a male soldier in 17th-century Germany. By exposing the contradictions of a society that values people for what they can contribute while limiting who is allowed to participate, the film turns one woman's struggle to live freely into an indictment of more than the rules governing gender and belonging.
Schleinzer wrote the role specifically for Holler, whose performance continues to impress him even after countless viewings.
"She's the queen," he says. I've seen it in post production, whatever, I've seen it a hundred times. However, there were moments, there were lines, there were scenes, where he totally moved me, where I would start crying, where I would get angry again, like an audience seeing this for the first time. And this is the profession he has. This is your superpower."
The film began as a sprawling prose work of about 1,000 pages that traces Rose's life from early childhood. Of course, Schleinzer understood that no one was going to spend millions of dollars to make a 45-hour film. "So, we just ignored the first eight hundred pages and only focused on the last two hundred pages because the end of the novel could reveal itself."
When Holler read it, he told her, "You're crazy. It's not a script. It's a poem."
If there is a through line in Schleinzer's work, it is his fascination with marginal people. "It's very interesting to me where we are as a society, how we treat our so-called outsiders, what kind of society we are," he says. With "Rose," he turns his attention to what he sees as the biggest outsider group in the world: women.
The idea came from a conversation with a friend who called to wish her a happy birthday and said she had just finished a book about a woman who had been executed on the same date almost 250 years earlier. His alleged offense? wearing pants
The story sent Schleinzer digging into the archives, where she discovered numerous accounts of women who, for various reasons, masqueraded as men. Some wanted to escape unwanted marriages and sexual harassment. Others did so to gain access to education, employment, and military service. He suggests that some may also have been lesbian or transgender.
In England, Schleinzer notes, a woman rose to the rank of chief officer and fought for the British Empire. It was only at the officer's funeral that it was revealed that the person they had awarded so many medals to was actually a woman.
More than historical curiosities, such stories show how elaborate disguises can become necessary as a means of survival in a world that denies people the freedom to be themselves—both historically and today.
"It's interesting to see how much effort we put into our daily routine to make our masks," he says. "Sometimes your behavior is a mask: how you move, how you want to be read, how you hold your shoulders, how you walk."
The mask can act as armor and protect the wearer. "If it's something that helps you, I think it's okay," he says. "But when it becomes a cage, that's the weird part of it."
She describes The Rose as "a love letter to all those who, for various reasons, have to hide themselves, either to serve the society they really want to serve or have to wear a mask to achieve things they can't do without. They can't live their fullest lives because we don't let them."
Schleinzer explains that Rose is not a revolutionary who seeks to overthrow the society around her. He simply wants to belong, work and serve. The injustice is that he has to hide his identity in order to do what others do freely.
"I was born a feminist without knowing it," says Schleinzer. He grew up surrounded by women, and when he started school at age seven, he faced a different set of rules. He recalls realizing that "there was a different system in the world" and it was one he "didn't like very much."
This uneasiness reflects the film's treatment of sexual violence, which is present in the story but never shown graphically. Schleinzer deliberately chose not to depict his attacks, arguing that images carry a responsibility, especially in a culture saturated with graphic representations of suffering.
"The cruelest thing in the world is our own imagination," he says. "And the more I feed the imagination with images like this, the crueler we become, because we lose empathy completely."
For Schleinzer, it's important to embrace the violence without turning it into a spectacle, trusting the audience to understand its implications without showing all the physical details.
Ultimately, the main question Rose asks is not whether people should be allowed to break out of society's expectations, but why it's so restrictive in the first place—and what might change if people were given the freedom to find their place.
"The hardest thing is for a person to find their place," says Schleinzer. "We have to accept that change happens every day. And sometimes we have to give things time to see if it can be a good thing.
He suggests that the masks people wear do not need a fixed identity or a permanent disguise. They can also be helpful. "So maybe these things we sometimes call masks are just a means to get where we need to go."