theartsdesk Q&A: actor Lars Eidinger on 'Dying' and loving the second half of life

To get Lars Eidinger "right", one must take him cloven hoof and all. He's intense, unconventional, and driven – but by what, exactly? Self-hatred, he says. Complacency, his critics say. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.

But if two things are certain, it's that his performance as an emotionally withdrawn conductor in Matthias Glasner's Dying confirms him as one of the finest German actors of his generation, and that he has a sublime talent for character-building.

In the film, which is divided into five chapters, Glasner explores his personal relationship with his mother. Yet the family drama is far from being a therapeutic exercise or a settling of scores. It's a radical depiction of human decline, as brutally honest as it is absurdly funny.

Eidinger plays Glasner's alter ego, Tom, a workaholic artist who is absorbed in his professional career. He is the conductor of a youth orchestra that's rehearsing for the premiere of his best friend's latest composition, "Dying". It's a deeply moving and wildly irritating death score.

Tom meanwhile experiences his parents' fadeout. At his father's funeral, his mother reveals that she has terminal cancer. There is nothing to worry about, she claims, as she has already taken care of everything. An anchingly long silence passes between mother and son as they sit at the table in her clean and tidy middle-class flat. "I believe that most artists grew up feeling unloved, inadequate, and wrong," Glasner has ruefully observed.

Tom's private life is no walk in the park either: His pregnant ex-girlfriend has asked him to help her with the birth and upbringing of her baby, though he isn't the father. His younger sister Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg) stumbles from one disaster to the next and increasingly takes to the bottle after her affair with her married dentist boss goes awry.

Chaos and crisis are omnipresent in Dying. It's an outrageous family saga, a thrill ride of euphoria and pain, revulsion and compassion, love and humiliation. Talking at last year's Berlinale, Eidinger reveals his approach to portrayting Tom and explains why the second half of life may well be better than the first. 

PAMELA JAHN: When was the last time you spoke to your mother?

LARS EIDINGER: I won't tell you. It's too private.

Did acting in Dying change the way you look at the relationship you have with your parents?

No, I think a lot about my parents anyway. I don't need films for that. In this case, I concentrated specifically on Matthias Glasner's story. Of course, the film speculates that there are parallels in every biography. But that's exactly why I think it's extremely courageous of him as a director to open himself up like that. It starts with the film poster, which says: "Hans-Uwe Bauer as my father." I was very impressed by the fact that he completely dissolved the distance between himself and the work, and I was particularly interested in this approach of someone saying, "I'm filming my life." I wanted to be part of that because it allows me to explore myself as well.

Why do you think that he decided to do it?

Matthias is doing it primarily for himself. It's not about giving the film a special label. It's clear what's on his mind, and he wants to share that with others. That's how it felt during filming, like reading someone else's diary.

Some scenes are so bizarre that it's hard to imagine they actually happened.

Yes, for example, that his mother greeted him with a handshake his whole life. 

Did you know Matthias before you worked together?

No, not personally.

Was that an advantage?

Interesting question. I think that Matthias thought about it a lot more because, as the director, he has control over the casting process, of course. I notice time and again how much actors depend on filmmakers, hoping that they will feature in their imagination. I have no influence over that. Then it's like a miracle every time someone like him calls and says, "I'm making a film about my life, and I would like you to play the lead role."

What kind of person is Tom?

That's always difficult to answer. In Hamlet, for example, it says that to truly know another person is to know oneself. But don't get me wrong, I don't want to wriggle out of your question. I just notice how quickly I might restrict or limit a character by attributing certain characteristics to them. The fascinating thing to me is that human beings are ambivalent. Lilith Stangenberg (pictured below), who plays Tom's sister Ellen, sums it up nicely in the film when she says: "I am the opposite of everything, I am the opposite of the opposite." That means you are always both. Like in the scene when Tom is sitting there talking to his mother and he says: "I'm as cold as you are," while hot tears are streaming down his face. At that moment, you get a glimpse of how complex human beings are in their nature.

The same can be said about the tone of the film. On the one hand, it is characterised by an almost frightening honesty, and on the other hand, it is extremely entertaining.

When I received the script, on the cover it said: "Dying, also a comedy." That fitted in nicely with what Matthias had told me when we first met. He was looking for actors with "funny bones", as he put it. I think that explains why this film is so difficult to grasp. 

Did you hesitate to accept the role?

There are two answers to that. First, I really wanted to do it, regardless of who else would be in the cast, simply because I found the story compelling and because I liked the character. But then I had arranged to meet Matthias for a walk to talk about the film – and I forgot. In that moment, I was practically recast. I firmly believe that things like that don't happen by chance. There was a reason for it, something inside me that refused to let it happen. Maybe I had too many doubts about whether I could really do the role justice. When you play a historical figure, for example, it's always a huge responsibility because you feel a duty to the person. But when you're portraying someone who is actually present, who is also the director, the pressure is even greater because you spend the whole time trying to live up to the image that they want to create of themselves.

You've already mentioned the key scene in the film when Tom sits down with his mother after his father's funeral and the conversation slowly escalates into something abysmal. What was it like filming that?

The scene lasts 24 minutes without interruption. What you see in the film is the first take. We shot it without rehearsing. Afterwards, Matthias came up to us, put his arm around Corinna Harfouch, who plays Tom's mother, and stood with his back to me. I thought, OK, what did I do wrong? But then I realised that it wasn't about me at all, but about the perspective. At that moment, Matthias wasn't thinking about himself, but about his mother, and he compared it to what Corinna had done. Everything else was completely secondary to him.

Do you think that the traditional concept of family is largely overrated these days?

Yes, I think there are certain assumptions that only lead us to distance ourselves from one another even more than ever before. Phrases like "you should honour your parents" or "parents must love their children unconditionally". I believe that outdated principles like these sometimes prevent us from engaging in conflict. 

Why is that?

Perhaps this conversation between Tom and his mother is so interesting because it describes precisely this generational conflict: why are we who we are? And how much does that have to do with our history and our family, with the way we grow up, how we are raised, how we raise our children? Tom is himself both a child and a father – and in that sense, if you understand family as the smallest unit of society, the film naturally has a great political relevance.

Matthias Glasner has said: "Artists are children". Would you agree with that?

I don't know. I love children. I often long to be a child again, or I search for my inner child. But I think you can also romanticise it. I recently met an old friend who is a painter, and he said that the second half of life is what matters. I found that interesting, because it's always easy to become nostalgic and to think that there's not much left after you've reached the halfway point. But it's more a case of seeing it as the beginning of something new. For example, when I read my diary from when I was 19 or 20, I look at that person as if he's a stranger to me. It's a fallacy to believe that you stay the same. I am a completely different person today, and I wouldn't want to trade that for being a child again. I derive my entire self-image as an artist from the awareness that I have gained over the years. As a child, I would not be the artist that I am today.

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