European Films

Though the subject of the film is heavy and its tone is serious and even cerebral, the actors assured that on set this makes less of a difference than an outsider may image. Says Karl Markovics: "Though I risk to disappoint, a film set is a film set, whether you are making a silly comedy or a drama set in a WWII concentration camp. I would lie if I told you it was any different. The only day when things were really different was when the real Mr Burger came to the set and we got an idea of how these things might have really happened. Of course it is impossible to know it exactly and normally I never think about these things because they tend to make your work impossible. I just try to tell the story as honestly and well as I can. There was no particular preparation or reading up on history or anything like that. I just had and used the screenplay".

 

August Diehl, who plays Burger in the film, said of his preparation for the role: "A lot of subconscious work. I liked the opportunity to work on Die Fälscher because it gave me the opportunity to play a more idealistic character for once, someone who was not the main protagonist but who set up, or cleared the way, for a more ambivalent protagonist. Once on the set, I pretty much agree with Karl: when you get the screenplay, you know what the whole film will be about, but on set you can turn this off. All that counts when you are on set are the next few minutes".

 

Of course this does not mean that the film’s subject matter leaves the actors cold. Markovics adds: "The larger themes are of course present in the back of your head. When I left home to go to airport to start working on this film, I was waiting at the bus stop. There was an obviously Jewish orthodox couple there with two children and I realised that 65 years ago these people would not have been standing there".

 

The character of Salomon really existed but his scenes set after the war that bookend the film are fiction. On the psychology of his character, Markovics says: "It came with a lot of possibilities and unknowns. My take on Salomon would be that he is simply and artist who can’t find any work and gets into counterfeiting because of that. He is a perfectionist and tries to perfect his counterfeiting skills even when working for the Nazis simply because he seems to have repressed or forgotten the emotional weight that came with the imprisonment. I guess he looks at life in terms of winners and losers".

The director, who adapted Burger’s book himself for Die Fälscher’s screenplay, said of his choice for this historical subject after his two Anatomie horror hits: "I had the feeling that it should be possible to talk about what is for us a still very little discussed topic: Nazism. When I happened upon this true story, I knew that it was what I had been looking for. It is a completely serious story but also deals with bigger universal questions".

 

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