Cannes Legend Volker Schlöndorff Has No Regrets

(from right): Volker Schlöndorff with 'The Tin Drum' actor David Bennent at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, where the film won the Palme d'Or.

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This Cannes, Volker Schlöndorff is just here to enjoy himself.

“Go there for the fun,” he recalls former Cannes chief Gilles Jacob telling him recently. “You got the Palme already.”

It’s the kind of advice only a filmmaker with Schlöndorff’s history on the Croisette could receive. He arrived in Cannes for the first time with Young Törless in 1966, his debut feature and one of the opening salvos of the New German Cinema movement. The adaptation of Robert Musil’s novel about cruelty and authoritarianism in an Austrian military boarding school caused an immediate scandal. Mid-screening, Schlöndorff remembers, a German cultural attaché stormed out of the Palais shouting: “This is not a German film!”

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“For publicity, I couldn’t have asked for anything better,” Schlöndorff says now.

At 87, Schlöndorff speaks with the calm precision of someone who has spent decades arguing about cinema, politics and history — often all at once. His films have done the same. In dozens of features over six decades, from The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975) to Coup de Grâce (1976) to The Ninth Day (2004), Calm at Sea (2011) or Diplomacy (2014), his work has traced the fault lines of European history: fascism, terrorism, war, ideological collapse, and the uneasy compromises between morality and survival. Few filmmakers of his generation moved as fluidly between art house prestige, literary adaptation and political confrontation.

And few remained so closely tied to Cannes.

After Young Törless, Schlöndorff returned repeatedly to the festival through the late 1960s and ’70s, sometimes triumphantly, sometimes less so. He jokes now that several of those films “have fortunately been forgotten.” But Cannes remained the recurring stage on which Schlöndorff’s career unfolded — and where, in 1979, it reached its defining peak.

That was the year The Tin Drum, his adaptation of Günter Grass’ sprawling anti-fascist masterpiece, shared the Palme d’Or with Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. The pairing felt symbolic: New German Cinema meeting New Hollywood at the height of both movements’ artistic ambition. Coppola’s Vietnam epic alongside Schlöndorff’s surreal story about a child who refuses to grow up as Europe descends into madness.

After Cannes, The Tin Drum went on to win the Oscar for best foreign-language film, the first German movie to do so since the end of the Second World War.

New World Pictures/Photofest

“Sometimes, you’re kissed by the Muses, as I was with The Tin Drum. That will remain, forever, my peak,” he acknowledges. “As time goes by, I feel grateful to have had such a peak.”

If The Tin Drum became the film that permanently defined Schlöndorff internationally, it also clarified the themes that had always driven him. History, in Schlöndorff’s cinema, is never background. Politics enters bedrooms, kitchens and private lives whether people invite it in or not.

That worldview was shaped as much by biography as ideology. Born in Germany during the war, Schlöndorff spent his formative years in France, attending school there and beginning his cinema apprenticeship under such directors as Louis Malle and Jean-Pierre Melville. He absorbed the intellectual rigor of the French New Wave. Later, after international success brought him to Hollywood, Schlöndorff would find a counterweight in his friendship with Billy Wilder, who taught him “how to not let your profession entirely take over your life.”

But Schlöndorff is, was and will always be, in his words, “a political animal.” He was formed amid the ideological tumult of postwar West Germany in the 1960s and ’70s. Several of his films — The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, the omnibus film Germany in Autumn (1978), The Legend of Rita (2000) — confront the lingering presence of Nazi and authoritarian ideology in German institutions and the radicalization that emerged in response. Schlöndorff sympathized with the anger driving the student movements of the time and pushed back against those condemning the radicals, including German left-wing terrorist group the Red Army Faction, who were using violence to achieve political ends.

There were detours. Hollywood came calling after The Tin Drum. Schlöndorff turned down an offer from Steven Spielb