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And he had met Brad once and thought about him playing the lead part in that. And I said "I'm going to New York. Brad is doing Entertaining Mr Sloane on stage. After that I knew he was right for the part. We met and he was scared. He read the novel and he was even more scared. He read the script and was even more scared still. He's not gay. In fact his wife is due to have a baby the same day Querelle starts in America.

We didn't have much money and we couldn't pay enormous salaries. He came to Berlin for the costume fitting and Fassbinder just refused to speak to him. He was there every night at dinner for the two weeks before shooting started and Fassbinder didn't speak a work to him. He refused to speak a word of English, which he also did to Jeanne Moreau. But it wasn't as if he didn't want to speak to them, he was just shy. To work with three actors he had not known before, it was the first time in his life. But I knew Brad was getting very, very frightened and I thought it was not going to work out.

I told Rainer "You must speak to Brad. Tomorrow is the first day of shooting and Brad is calling his agent and his agent is calling me." And he said "OK, but I'm not going to speak any English." So I told him that I would sit in the middle and translate. So we did that and before Brad asked his first question Fassbinder looked up and said in English "I tell you one thing. I'm not going to ask anything of you that you can't do as an actor. So there's no reason for you to be scared." And I knew Brad had understood what he meant. And after the first day of shooting he fell under the spell. Fassbinder had this hypnotic spell the tenderness with which he treated his actors on the set. Privately it could be horrible. He could be cynical and humiliating but on the set he I was like a tender mother.

giggle. And it doesn't surprise me that many gays hate the film.

But straight audiences seem to like it. Perhaps because when you break down the barrier and the difference between men and women, because it's not there in Querelle, the other things become "normal" also. Things such as murder, betraying your best friend, the love between two brothers. But it's never brutal, never obscene, never astonished. All the film says for me is that this is totally normal. That's what I like about it.

What have you got planned next?

I'm going on to do a film with Paul Morrisey, the Andy Warhol director. He wrote a script for me and we want to start shooting the end of May in West Berlin. The film is called Baby Street. It's about the strange effect that growing up in the divided city has had on the young kids there. It's a comedy and a collage of situations of today's life and Paul Morrisey's weird fantasy. And then I'm going to do a documentary on an old nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. I've visited her a couple of times but it's difficult because she's scared. She was the only woman who had real power in the Third Reich and she had immediate access to Hitler. She had all the money she wanted. For example, she used 36 cameramen for Triumph of the Will.

I don't want to put her down, what interests me is what it was like to be so close to a devil, a non-human being or whatever you call Hitler. She's old enough so no one can destroy any of her life any more. She's 80 and she's wealthy enough through her underwater films and her picture books.

You like making documentaries? Wizard was the first one. I had so much

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The set for Querelle by Rolf Zehetbauer Why was Franco Nero chosen? Ten to fifteen years ago Franco Nero had the big macho image and was a big Western hero, and to give Franco the only closet queen/homosexual role in the movie, I think that was sort of Fassbinder's own wickedness. It was as if he wanted his idol from his days in Cologne to play this closet queen. Franco nearly went out of his mind. When he has to say "I feel like a woman without breasts" he was out of his mind. So I told Rainer we had to cut the sentence because Franco would not say it. Then Rainer came on the set and he just started an atmosphere of total aggressiveness. But not at Franco, at everybody else and they were scared so Franco got scared also and he said the

line.

How did the cast take to the touching and kissing?

After the first three days the entire team, about 250 people watched the rushes in the cinema and everyone was overwhelmed. Nobody had really expected to be. Also for the first few days there was an electrifying tension on the set but it relaxed and everything became totally normal. In the kiss scene. where Brad Davis has to kiss his screen brother, I thought it would be difficult for them, because all the lead actors are straight, but it was not.

Do you think straight audiences will like the film?

I've found that in Europe the aggressiveness toward the film comes very much from gay audiences because there's no apology, there's nothing nice about it. It's not a psychological or sociological film about homosexuality. It's similar in every country really where the people walk out, where the people

fun. Time stands still. I could sit there all night and play around with the material. And it was pretty shaky material I had to work with. I had to work with a handheld camera. Fassbinder would scream and we'd have to get out of the set. We had to make sure the shooting of Querelle was not disturbed so we had to sneak everywhere. When I first saw the material I thought it was horrible it's not in focus and it's shaky. I had about 10 hours of shaky, bad material. But I decided to make a principle of it and show you can get a film out of shaky material.

Why make a documentary on the making of Querelle?

I was really sad because there was this wonderful set that would be destroyed after the film. And then the atmosphere on the set was really strange. All these people came visiting. Andy Warhol came. Robert Rauschenberg came. So I thought I could just try to film the atmosphere.

I spoke with Fassbinder about it and he thought it was a good idea. We looked at the material together and he also told me not to be too scared because of the technical quality of the material. He told me I just had to use it. So he helped a lot. The interviews are quite funny because I would ask questions like a high school student. I never knew what questions to ask anyway. I wasn't interested in getting answers to my questions. All I was interested in showing the people, making them talk. Like Franco Nero is total vanity. His character in the movie says: "True humility can only be born out of humiliation, otherwise it is but vanity." And it was in the afternoon after he had said that that he presented himself as complete vanity in the interview. But it's not what he says that's important, it's how he presents himself.

40 CAMPAIGN MAY 1983