Daniel Brühl’s dark homecoming
The sometime Marvel supervillain on making his pitch-black directorial debut Next Door on home turf
TO MOST OF the world, he’s best known as Zemo, the sadistic Marvel villain who will spar with Sam and Bucky this month in The Falcon And The Winter Soldier. But Daniel Brühl is now calling the shots behind the camera.
“I wanted to direct for a long time,” Brühl says. “I never knew what would be the perfect first project, because I didn’t want to carry a weight that is too heavy. I knew that it had to be something very personal and very intimate.” Brühl found exactly that in Next Door, his directorial debut, based on an idea Brühl had “years ago”, with a script written by author Daniel Kehlmann. (The pair previously collaborated on the 2015 comedy-drama Me And Kaminski.) Naturally, it’s set in his adopted hometown — where it will also receive its world premiere at this year’s Berlinale Film Festival.
“It’s a story about Berlin,” says Brühl of Next Door. “It’s a story about gentrification, about neighbourhoods. You could almost describe it like a Western — or Eastern, since it’s in a Berlin saloon.” A two-hander, it sees a film star, Daniel (Brühl), rocked by troubling revelations suddenly dropped on him by his neighbour Bruno (Peter Kurth). “It’s like a long duel between these two — just not with guns, but with words used as deadly weapons.”
Playing a film star also named Daniel, about to audition for a superhero movie, seems fairly close to home for the actor-director. “I’m willing to be quite open about certain things that I have experienced in my life, and I have no problem in doing so,” Brühl says. But he is only lightly mining from his own experiences. “A lot of it is autobiographical, but the same amount of it is not,” he says. “It’s that mixture of mixing fiction and reality — slightly heightened. It’s personal, but there’s still a distance I felt to the character.”
What is consistent, for Brühl, is the tone. “I would describe it as a dark comedy,” he says. “It starts being very light, but then it gets quite creepy.” He laughs. “I’m playing Zemo, so you can imagine that this is my thing!” This is what happens when supervillains start calling the shots.