Interview with Sven Bohse
Trieste Film Festival 2006
Das Mass Der Dinge
Your film deals with life’s priorities. The main character in the end decides that his work is more important than his love life, and he seems to be happy with that. Why didn't you decide to say, as the most would have done, that personal life has to be more important than career?
I wanted to show a circumstance when you have to make decisions: in this case it was between work and love. So on one hand the main character looks happy in the end, when he has become a famous chef, but I also showed the hard time he had making his decision: maybe someone is really happy having spare time, while someone else is really unhappy not working hard.
Why did you choose to make a movie showing most of the entire process of cooking and how did you work on that topic?
It was quite improvised: I wanted to make a film about food because I think it's a good metaphor for many different situations, such as the filmmaking itself.
I entered with my camera in a real kitchen, and I found out that there are many things, connected with the process of making food that people would never expect: it's hard work, even though it doesn't look like.
Speaking about the filmmaking, probably the most complicated thing was to make the actors look like real cooks: some of them were professionals, and the difference with the others was really evident. Even in a small assignment such as cutting onions: the main character, for example, had never cooked before making the film: he had to train a few days before the shooting started and he cut himself a few times. We had a real cook as a trainer, and I'm glad that we were able to end up showing a lot of the food-making process in the film in a realistic way.
What do you think about short films: are they just starting points to make longer films or something completely different?
I think that there are important differences between short and long films: when you have a short time you can care a lot more about details, the shooting, and you can also experiment more. In a long film you have many more things to think about, to begin with the characters, whereas in a short film you don't really have the time to develop the characters in a complex way.
For what concerns my personal work, I've always made short films that were tests for longer ones trying to put as much story as I could, even though it's not always possible to develop it.
Do you think that a short film comes from a narrative idea or does the plot structure follow the images already done?
I think it's a personal thing. For me, shooting a film is all about telling a story and presenting a specific idea: I have it in my mind before starting any work. I can't start shooting the images without having a precise narrative structure in my mind, but I know that some other directors used to work in the opposite way: they start filming and they get the story out of the images they're making.