Austrian unknown makes a big noise with All Quiet On The Western Front
THE original version of All Quiet On The Western Front, released in 1930, won five Oscars including Best Film and Best Director.
And the powerful new adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s World War I epic may just follow in its footsteps when the Academy Award nominations are announced next week.
It’s already shortlisted as Best International Feature Film and experts think it has a shot in a number of other categories, including cinematography, make-up, sound, visual effects and best adapted screenplay. Variety even thinks it may get a mention in the Best Picture category.
And yesterday it received 14 Bafta nominations, including best film and best film not in the English language.
Which makes it all the more astonishing that its star is a movie novice: an Austrian straight out of drama school who was picked by director Edward Berger to play German soldier Paul Baumer because of his ‘innocence’.
Berger told me: ‘When we were thinking about who should play Paul, the first picture which producer Malte Grunert sent me was of Felix Kammerer [pictured in the film]. Malte said, “My wife is working with this young man in theatre in Vienna. He has just left drama school, and he’s never been in front of a camera.”
‘I thought he looked great. He did not feel buff, but looked more like a student than a soldier; and there was something old-fashioned about his face, too.
‘I wanted someone who had an innocence about them in terms of their relationship to the camera. Also Paul is such an iconic character that I didn’t want audiences to think that they had seen him in something before . . .
‘We saw him a few times. At the second audition we gave him the boots and that helped him with the heavy gait.’
The film, which is out on Netflix, was shot in Prague at the height of the second wave of the pandemic, in just 52 days. The young actors lived in apartments in the same building and became very close.
Berger, who also shot the TV series Your Honor and Patrick Melrose, was determined to make his war film stand out from the crowd. The 1930 adaptation was directed by American Lewis Milestone. But the German’s take was different — ‘ because we have grown up with a different history.
‘You can’t look back on that period of German history with any sense of pride or honour. Instead, I have grown up with a sense of shame and guilt. How can you deal with this terrible thing that happened?’
He added: ‘When we made it we had no idea it would be so relevant. This was long before the war in Ukraine.
‘I was looking at the photographs of the trenches in Ukraine and they are exactly the same. If you put them side by side, it’s really shocking. Nothing has really changed, not even the weapons.’