An Interview with Daniel Kehlmann, Author of G.W. Pabst Novel "The Director"

I had the opportunity to interview Daniel Kehlmann about his 2023 novel "The Director," newly available in the English translation. The book is about the life of Austrian film director G.W. Pabst, who returned from Hollywood to Nazi-occupied Austria and agreed to make films under propaganda minister Josef Goebbels. We discussed how filmmaking influenced his novel, life under fascism then and today, David Lynch, and more.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Author Daniel Kehlmann.

NICK ZIDARESCU: Well, I love the book. I just finished it the other day, and I'm very thankful for the opportunity.

DANIEL KEHLMANN: Thank you so much.

NZ: One of the things I noticed pretty early on in the chapter “By the Pool” – it had a very filmic quality to it... When I was reading it, I kind of imagined a camera following each character as they split off. Throughout the novel, you also have passages where Pabst is learning how to edit and we get the language of film editing explained to us. We see in detail how he's directing, how [his assistant] Wilzek is moving the camera. Does the language of cinema or the process of filmmaking influence your writing and your artistic process?

DK: In the case of this novel, it absolutely did. I'm very happy that you noticed that that was a filmic trick I use, the camera at the party scene or the camera always moving with someone else, to the next group of people. The subject you write about influences the way you tell the story, and so I felt like I wanted to use movie elements and movie tricks in the way I'm telling the story. And then, of course, it is also about making movies.

When Pabst makes The Molander Case – we don't have that film, it disappeared, and it was probably not a lost masterpiece – so I invented that. But I felt like to a certain extent, I had to shoot that movie, like I had to write these scenes on set so that the reader feels they have seen part of that movie. So I was, in a way, directing it on paper. So yeah, a lot of the practicalities of movie making went into how I was trying to tell that story.

NZ: And your father was a director? Do I have that correct?

DK: Yes, yes.

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NZ: Do you feel like growing up around that prepared you at all, or were you already familiar, or did you have to do your own research to figure it out?

DK: Both. I was familiar to a certain extent – I visited lots of film sets in my childhood, and there I was around people who made movies. And also I was involved in some movies myself in the last 10, 15 years, so I wrote several scripts. I wrote the script for a TV show called Kafka that's also out in the US on a small streamer called ChaiFlix. So I thought a lot about movie making in the last few years also in practical terms.

Still from miniseries Kafka (2024), co-written by Daniel Kehlmann

I felt pretty well prepared to write about someone who makes films, makes movies. I still had to do some research, especially about editing. Because today it's a completely different ballgame, I don't have to explain that to you! There's no comparison to how they edit films now and how they did that in the '40s or even before. And Pabst was one of the masters of editing, one of the inventors of movie editing. So I felt like the editing had to be an important part of the narrative of him working as a director, but that needed some actually quite difficult research because it turned out it's one of these things where Google cannot really help you. Just Googling “how did they edit a film in the 40s,” you don't get very helpful results. Actually, I was lucky to talk to some people who still remembered the technology from back then. So that's where I got most of it from.

NZ: What differences or similarities do you find between writing a novel and then writing scripts?

DK: It's really different. The script is all about scenes, obviously. I mean, except if you're Terrence Malick and you do these long, beautiful, lyrical, sweeping camera movements, but most movies are actually moving from one scene with people talking to each other or doing something to the next. And you have to realize every scene that's longer than about two minutes is a very long scene. So you have to adapt to a completely different rhythm of how the story is told. And in a novel you can always say “Okay, let's stop here and I'm going to explain a few things to you,” which in a movie is very difficult.

It can be done, but it's much more difficult to do it without people getting exasperated or bored. So, adapting a novel into a script means you have to rethink the story completely…Just for fun, a few years ago, I adapted a Thomas Mann novel [Confessions of Felix Krull] for a German film. It was an interesting experience to completely rethink the novel as a movie. And it's mostly about [how] you can use a narrator's voice a little bit, but just a little bit. Most of it, you have to have it all in scenes happening between the characters like on a stage.

Still from Confessions of Felix Krull (2021), co-written by Daniel Kehlmann

NZ: Would you ever direct a movie or a TV show?

DK: People have asked me, and at this point I might be able to get someone to give me the money to do it, but I don't think I could do it. I have spent a lot of time on movie sets by now, and it made me realize I can’t do it because… Look, if I'm on a set and in charge, I just want to be done with this. And when I see the actors do the first take I feel like, “Yeah, that was great. That's fine. Let's move on.” And then I see the director say, “No! Let's do another one.” And I'm like, “Why? That was good.” And the same thing when it's about the props or getting the set right. Everything somebody shows me seems fine right away. I'm like, “These are people who know their job, let's move ahead.” So I would be every producer's dream director while we're making the film because there would be no trouble whatsoever. And then you would get a really profoundly mediocre film. So I'm better [off] not trying this.

NZ: Toward the end of the novel, Pabst and Franz are running around with the film in their backpacks. The whole time he's…not really in the moment. He's thinking about “How would I direct this?” Do you find yourself doing the same thing as a writer when you are walking around and seeing things, experiencing something? Do you ever find yourself thinking, “How would I write about this? How would I craft this?”

DK: Only when I'm getting towards the end of a novel. So then the novel has such a strong pull and it's so present in my mind that I'm actually in this mind space a little bit. With Pabst in the scene it actually even gets surreal a little bit because when he decides to make a cut, that part of the experience is gone right away, so they get to the train station faster because he just cuts out part of their escape route of getting there… But in psychological terms, I know directors and I know they're thinking like that, and how can they not? How can they not think “Where would I put the camera now? How would I do this?” It also made sense to me. I'm pretty sure he did think like that a lot.

NZ: Yeah. And obviously this version of him is fictional, but when I read that scene, it felt like him doing that, him mediating this experience, was almost compulsive. And he's almost trying to romanticize it, and [believes] that he can turn it into something beautiful because he believes that he's this great director. Do you think that this way of experiencing the world through the lens of craft, do you think that made him more able or willing to adapt to what the regime wanted out of him, to… become complicit in what he was doing?

DK: I think so… I'm not defending it, but I would say to a certain extent it's understandable how a director could be more susceptible to the seduction of an authoritarian regime telling them, “You can do whatever you want, you can have any budget you want, you can have all the actors you want.” One of the strange things in Pabst's weird career is that he had more artistic freedom in Nazi Germany than he had in Hollywood. In Hollywood, they did not allow him to even decide where to put the camera or which actors to cast or how to edit the film. And a director always has to convince other people of their vision. It's always an uphill battle. It's always about getting people to give them the funding and the resources necessary.

Still from Pandora's Box (1929), directed by G.W. Pabst

And so I feel, yes, of course it makes sense… even more so because at first the Nazis are actually not just luring him, they're forcing him to make a film. And then he somehow finds that he still enjoys making films, and these are not the worst conditions. And this is, of course, already a pact with the devil, but it's a pact with the devil he's sliding into in a very slow and seemingly innocent way. It is not innocent, but I can see how he gets there. And that's also my job, of course, as the writer, as the novelist. I have to be the lawyer of the main characters. I have to show why they're not monsters, why they're doing what they do.

[Pabst] is narcissistic to a certain extent. But he does also take in the world around him, and he's not [a] violent or abusive person. He's more like a weak person, who is always weak except when he gets to make a movie. When he gets to make a movie, he's really decisive and he's able to be in command and tell all these people what they have to do. But outside of that, he's kind of indecisive and easy to push around. You could say he's a much more socially acceptable and friendly version of Leni Riefenstahl.

NZ: So you mentioned [that] in this very specific time we're living in, there's a sort of mediocre person that is emboldened by the resurgence of the far right in the world right now. Did you anticipate that when writing this novel? Was the release of this novel [and] the way that events in the real world are coinciding, was that a happy accident? How intentional was that?

DK: I would call it a very unhappy accident. I mean, it is a happy accident for the book coming out in English right now… But I could honestly do without that happy accident… I would prefer the world to be in a better place… So the novel came out in German already more than one and a half years ago. When I wrote it, actually, I didn't think that Trump would ever come back. I thought, “There's no way that's going to happen.” And then, when the book came out in German and in other languages, like, for example, in Hungary, where it got a lot of attention…it seems to get a lot of attention wherever there's an authoritarian turn. And people asked me about the relevance of it. And I have to say I didn't think about it like that when I wrote it… I did want to write about everyday life in a totalitarian state.

For me, Pabst's biography is so interesting because with him coming back from a free country into the dictatorship in his homeland, I as the narrator come back there with him. I can enter it with him and learn the rules with him, so to speak. So as a storyteller, he gave me a very interesting access [point] for getting into this dark world of the authoritarian state, from the angle of someone who comes back from Hollywood.

And I was interested in writing about everyday life in dictatorship, and complicity…not the big huge criminals, the people who are mass murderers, other people have written about them, very, very important and very good books. I wanted to write about the small compromises, the compromises in the workplace, the compromises of being in a reading group and reading a [Nazi propaganda] book…the compromise of being in an old people's home, because even in an old people's nursery home you had slave labor everywhere.

There was no space in the dictatorship where you could not be aware of what was going on, to a certain extent at least… I got very, very strong reactions from Russia also, because, of course, Russian directors are in exactly that same situation. Either they go into exile or they stay and then see how far they go in making compromises. It seems America is getting into a situation like that. I mean, there's no way to deny it. If you saw the last Oscar ceremony, all these people who used to be so vocal about political issues suddenly didn't have anything to say.

NZ: One thing about the book club scene that really struck me is that I think it kind of mirrors what's going on here [in the U.S.]… people are being disappeared, we're sacrificing this multicultural artistic world for a really dull cultural life and… the lady who's hosting, she brings out those trinkets she gets from the store… One of the great things about the U.S. is the diversity here and what that leads to in terms of the culture here. And we're sacrificing that for easy convenience, a so-called convenient life, people wanting a better economy for themselves, which is not going to happen… these false empty promises of [being able to] buy more.

DK: One thing you learn from the German experience is sadly, it's not going to come back ever. If you look at Berlin in the '20s, which was so diverse and so cutting edge and so vibrant culturally and so interesting… the Nazis exchanged that for something really, really mediocre and dull and boring in terms of cultural life, and German cultural life stayed very mediocre and dull and boring after the war.

In culture, what's lost is lost forever.

There might be a renaissance at some point much later, but that's really not something you can ever count on.

NZ: Pabst was obviously a real person and you're not writing a biography here. So when you decide to fictionalize someone's life, you open up the world to your own creative choices and you get to choose how you portray the world…How did you negotiate balancing between the fictional and the real? And did you come across any challenges doing that?

DK: That's a very good question. And when you deal with real people, you always have to ask these questions in a very serious way because they're artistic and moral questions at the same time…I feel like the longer people have been dead, the more I feel you're morally free to do things with them creatively. No one would feel it would be morally problematic if you write a novel about Julius Caesar and you invent a crime that he probably didn't commit. No one would say, “Oh, that's really bad. You're not allowed to do that.” And the reason is because he’s been dead forever and also because he was a pretty brutal dictator…

It all becomes much more urgent or important when you get closer to your own time with somebody like Pabst, where there’s still people alive [who] either knew him or knew his wife or also were relatives. So you have to actually believe that the things you invent would have been possible to a certain extent.

And the most challenging question was, of course, when I invented him using extras from Terezín concentration camp. And I was thinking very hard about, am I allowed to do that morally? I mean, legally, there's no question about it. Legally, I'm allowed to do that. We looked into that. The main reason I felt I could do it is because in the Nazi era they did it for other films. He was the co-director of a film where it was actually done, Leni Riefenstahl's Tiefland [which we see Pabst co-direct in the novel]. And then there was slave labor everywhere around the German movie industry, so in the films he did make in the Third Reich, they actually used forced laborers from Eastern Europe. And I don't think there's such a big moral difference between using forced labor or using extras from the concentration camp.

Still from Tiefland (1954), dir. Leni Riefenstahl

The one thing is more radical as an artistic choice, but I don't feel it's ontologically on a completely different level. And also, I use it as a dreamlike scene where it's still not entirely clear that it happened. In the little afterword of the book, I'm actually saying that we don't know what happened, so I'm making clear that it is an artistic choice and an invention. I was kind of glad and relieved to see that when the book came out in several languages, no one was unclear about that.

Everybody I talked to, everybody who talked to me about the scene had understood that it was an invented scene. And that was very important to me. It's also a moral question about how you think about the choices your characters made. So I feel much less of moral pressure to be fair to Leni Riefenstahl because she was such a terrible Nazi, and there's more of a pressure to be fair to someone like Pabst. And of course, there was the question of his son, his real son, Peter Pabst. I looked into the few things we know of his biography in the Third Reich and afterwards, and in his case, I changed the name – I gave him an invented name, Jakob, to make clear that this is not the real person.

NZ: Since there was very little [information] about his real life son, did you find it challenging to create the story that his son goes through?

DK: I found it challenging, but also very important, because there was part of the story that I wanted to tell, [which] is what it's like for a very gifted, very bright boy, not even yet a young man, to be subjected to this brutal authoritarian school system. My father was born in 1927. So he was 17 when the Third Reich ended. He was half Jewish, so he was expelled from school when he was 15. But before that he did go to school under the Nazis. And I used a lot of the stories he told me for that.

So this part of the book feels very personal to me because it's Pabst’s son in the book, but I used some of the stories my father told me…

When I sat in the archive in Berlin and looked at the papers of the family, I had invented that [Pabst’s son] was a very gifted drawer, but then stopped drawing, stops creating art after the war. And then I saw some of his drawings – which actually existed – even though I thought I had invented that.

That moved me so much, I can't even begin to tell you. It shook me to the core.

NZ: One thing that also struck me about the novel is I felt like it had a very darkly funny, darkly comic tone a lot of the time. Would you say that’s a fair characterization?

DK: Absolutely, yeah.

NZ: Was cultivating that tone important for you? And what were you hoping to achieve through it?

DK: Two things:

First thing, writing about an authoritarian state – of course, the authoritarian state is absolutely terrible – but it's also really, really ridiculous. It is a system where really stupid people have so much more power than intelligent people and, apart from the fact that that's terrible – as I said – it does also lead to situations which are objectively absurd and funny.

So there is something about the totalitarian state that you can best relate with dark humor. And actually, that has always been done, especially by the movies.

Still from To Be or Not To Be (1942) directed by Ernst Lubitsch

One of the genius strokes of Lubitsch is that he discovered that phenomenon so early with his masterpiece film To Be or Not To Be (1942), which is still one of the best films about Hitler ever made. And it's such a funny film. And you have a tradition of that up to Jojo Rabbit (2019)… and there is also Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009), which is not funny in the same way, but it's definitely not a super serious film…I would say it's a wild comedy in a way.

There are also some really good books who do that like Vladimir Nabokov's "Bend Sinister," which has a fictional dictatorship where you can never decide whether it's Stalin or Hitler…back then he was also the first one who saw that equivalence on the level of everyday life, [that] these totalitarian states were very similar. And that is a very funny novel. I always felt like it wasn't a conscious decision. I always felt like this is the only way to actually tell the story of life under Hitler… that reading group chapter, it’s terrible because they're all really afraid to even criticize that very mediocre writer they have to read. But I also do admit that I had a lot of fun writing that. And I was laughing out loud sometimes.

NZ: Speaking of all these films…I know your literary influences are pretty well documented. Are there any specific films that have inspired your writing? Or TV shows? I know that I saw you're a big Sopranos fan, which I am as well.

DK: I would say David Lynch has been so formative for my worldview, especially how to deal with surrealism, how you're free to leave so many things unexplained and still have something that works…how he works with atmosphere and beauty and terror and fun - he can be very funny. I was 16 when Twin Peaks came out, and it was exactly what people are now saying it was… That was long before Sopranos. Television was ridiculous. Television was Dallas and Dynasty. And then there was suddenly Twin Peaks. It frightened me so much. I couldn't sleep.

When the demon reveals himself the first time that was kind of traumatically frightening. And it was absolutely formative for me as an artist. And of course then saw everything David Lynch did before and followed everything he did after, and I would say I would be a different person.

NZ: One of the things I really like about his work…he really gets at the evil that is lurking underneath men and human beings in America in this very visceral fashion. That's something he's tapped into throughout his whole career. Do you feel like that also influenced the stories that you tell?

DK: I think so, even though there is a lot in his work I don't think anyone can imitate. And one of the things is actually that evil. Evil in David Lynch's films feels so real and so bottomlessly evil.

This visceral reality of evil is something he does so much better than anyone else. And I would love to say I'm influenced by that, but also I think the truth is I don't quite understand how he did it. So I would love to be able to do that, but I think I'm not there yet.

"The Director" is available to purchase in its new English translation on the Simon & Schuster website as of May 6, 2025, and is also available at other online book retailers.

-Nick