by James Mottram, Reuben Lazarus
Vincent Perez’s Alone in Berlin follows the story the Quangels, a German husband (Brendan Gleeson) and wife (Emma Thompson) resisting the Nazi regime after their son is killed on the front. During the process of making the film Perez undertook his own research into his family that began to fill gaps in the family tree.
“While I was working on the script I realised there is a lot of similarity between the Quangel story and my family’s story,” Perez told us, with regards to the key narrative drive of nationalists resisting their own country’s ideology.
“I knew that my grandfather was shot by the Francoists [followers of Francisco Franco, Spanish Dictator during the Spanish Civil War] when he was 25 years old,” Perez says. “I discovered, during my research, the letter he wrote to his son, my father, one hour before he was shot.”
Perez’s mother is German, his father Spanish, and he would identify as French.
“In Germany, they keep everything, and if you research you can find word for word what you want,” he says regarding what he found when researching for the film. “I discovered that not a single member of my family was a member of the Nazi party, which is an act of resistance in some way. I discovered that an uncle was shot, Hans, on the Russian front. I also discovered a great uncle was gassed in ’41 at a prototype gas chamber they did at the psychiatric hospital at Hadamar. So, I went to Hadamar and met a guy that showed me this book with 15,000 names; all of the people killed in one year in those small gas chambers.”
Best known as an actor, Vincent Perez emerged as a heartthrob with a trifecta of classic French films: 1990 with Cyrano de Bergerac opposite Gerard Depardieu; 1992 with Indochine opposite Catherine Deneuve; and 1994 with Queen Margot opposite Isabelle Adjani.
Dabbling as a director since the nineties through a series of short films, Vincent Perez stepped up to direct a feature in 2002 with Once Upon an Angel with mixed results. Alone in Berlin is his third feature as a director, and by far the most successful both critically and commercially.
“I always said, ‘this movie will change my life’,” he admits. “I struggled, and I really feel I needed to find myself; become a man I guess. And this is what happened.
“I think now I have goals in life which wasn’t really the case before. Now I have stories to tell. I wanted to quit [directing] because I had no stories to tell. I did two features, I’ve done shorts but in fact I didn’t really have any stories I wanted to tell because I was searching for them. Now that I’ve done this film I have a lot of stories to tell.”
Alone in Berlin is available to stream, DVD and Blu-ray from July 5, 2017
Read our Alone in Berlin interview with co-star Daniel Bruhl.
