PAINTING A PICTURE

To make the creation of art in the film look and feel as authentic as possible, von Donnersmarck met with many modern artists, immersing himself in their world. He read Richter’s biography, Ein Maler aus Deutschland (‘A Painter from Germany’), among other biographies of artists from the era and educated himself further on art history of the time. “I met with a lot of artists in Los Angeles such as David Hockney and Thomas Demand, a German artist who makes giant paper sculptures, photographs them, then destroys them.

“In early 2015, I got to spend quite a lot of time with Gerhard Richter, who was very generous with his time. We also had many artists come to the set, people like Albert Oehlen and Andreas Gursky, and then we employed so many artists for the film because art is a very hard thing to show on screen. It’s a tricky process to have these paintings look real and for the audience to feel they are actually there witnessing these paintings happening. We needed to create many works of art that would be somehow true to that era – and that took a while.”