Cinematical Interview: Julia Jentsch

The Manhattan JCC has a reputation for being one of the noisier venues for film screenings in the city. Each new film screened there is received by an audience of largely infrequent moviegoers who don’t think twice about shouting out cheers or jeers, letting their cell-phones chirp ad infinitum or shuffling out of their seats during the first reel for greener pastures. But January’s standing-room-only advance screening of Sophie Scholl: Die letzten Tage was something different; it made a quiet, captive audience of everyone in attendance.

Scripted largely from unsealed Nazi records, the film tells the story of Sophia Magdalena Scholl, a 21-year old student activist arrested in February 1943, only days after Germany’s bloody defeat on the Eastern front. Amid fears that she may be linked to a serious resistance movement, Sophie is placed in the custody of a seasoned interrogator who leads her through a maze of pressurized questions, each of which could sink her life if answered incorrectly. Quiet and understated, with bursts of outrageous anger, Sophie Scholl is a powerful film that locks us into the point of view of the accused and never relents. As with Carl Theodore Dreyer’s Joan of Arc, the shifting contours of the heroine’s face fill every silence, telling us more about her emotional turmoil than words can say.

Cinematical recently spoke with Julia Jentsch from Germany, where she is performing six nights a week in Munich in Münchner Kammerspiele and in Hamburg in Bitterer Honig, about the challenges of taking on Germany’s dark history, the dangerous power of free expression, and Sophie Scholl’s nomination for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

Ryan: There's a pivotal moment early in this film when Sophie is finishing distributing her flyers at the university and she tosses a remaining stack of them over the side of the balcony railing, drawing attention to herself. She could have left well enough alone and just melted back into the crowd - why do you think she took that rash, defiant action?

JJ: When you're doing something that is dangerous - you want to do it, but you're a bit frightened - there is adrenaline in your blood. There's a moment when she hears the school bells ring and she thinks 'Now nothing can happen to us anymore. I will push this down because then they will be distributed all over and everyone will read it.' It's a moment of maybe being too sure of what you're doing. When you feel you're doing something right, you feel that no one can hurt you. You feel so powerful and energetic in that moment. And you do it. After she does it, you say, 'My God, why did she do this?' You could also ask why they had almost left the university building, but then they returned. This is how it was. This is what they later said, and what was researched. But you just say to yourself 'Oh my god, why didn't they just go out? Then they would have been free. They couldn't have been captured.' But youth and energy, I think, is what made them do it.

Ryan: After beginning near the point of her capture, the film never backtracks and gives the audience a large sense of her earlier life or the beginnings of The White Rose movement. It pushes forward. Did you feel that was a correct choice for the film?

JJ: Of course you could make a movie about her whole life, but the choice to concentrate on these last days was made because there is already a movie existing of the time before - The White Rose, shot by Michael Verhoeven. I don't know if you know this movie, but it's about the time before, when Sophie lived in Ulm and then she moved to Munich to study there. It ends at that moment when Sophie and her brother are captured. So this movie continues the story and it concentrates on the last days and it shows how a normal young girl, a young student, becomes stronger with every decision she makes and how much energy she has and how she can fight for freedom of speech and for human thinking under the pressure of this regime.

Also, the interrogation protocols - you couldn't read them for a long time. A lot of people didn't know they existed, but then they were found and the director read them and he wanted to make a movie about this interrogation.

Ryan: What is your sense of what Sophie was trying to accomplish? What goal did she want to attain?

JJ: Sophie wanted the war to be ended as soon as possible. There were some organizations that sent clothing and food to the Eastern front for the German soldiers. But Sophie said 'No, we don't have to do it. We shouldn't do it. Because there is no difference if German soldiers are dying because of the cold weather or if Russian soldiers are dying because of the cold weather.' She said 'The problem is that people are dying there, in a terrible war, and we have to end this war, and because of that I wouldn't send anything to the Eastern front that would keep this war alive.' This is what she was thinking.

Ryan: How could Sophie and The White Rose movement have been viewed as such a danger to the regime? Why do you think that her actions were so threatening to them?

JJ: This was the moment, the time, when the Germans were beaten at Stalingrad. The regime was frightened about losing the war. The inner circle had to keep people as followers and believing in them, the regime, Nazis, and that's when The White Rose saw a chance. There just needed to be one more word or one more action, and there would be a revolution in Germany. They thought so, but of course, unfortunately, it wasn't like that.

The Nazis were also frightened about the views - what if people changed their minds, their way of thinking? [So they brought in] Judge Freisler - he was called the 'blood judge.' They wanted to say to everyone: 'Now you see what is happening to someone who is not on our side.' They wanted this to be a symbol - a bloody and cruel symbol - to make the other people afraid. They wanted people to be afraid to say or do something against the Hitler regime.

Ryan: Can you give me some insight as to how you prepare for a role like this? What kind of research went into it?

JJ: First I read books, biographies that have been written about Sophie and The White Rose. She wrote a lot of letters to her family and her boyfriend and her brother. I could read these and I could read in her diary. Also, the director did some video interviews with her sister and another friend of Sophie's, and I could see these interviews. This gave me a very good impression of the time, and what they were thinking about Sophie and how they described her. But the most important research for me was the screenplay itself. The author and the director did two years of research for this project, and the screenplay is really very correct in its details. 90 percent of the words that are spoken in this movie are based on what she said in reality.

Ryan: Is this history routinely taught in the German school curriculum now? Do German schoolchildren learn about Sophie?

JJ: I don't know about everyone, but pupils learn about it at school, in the history lessons when they are talking about the time and the regime, and the German resistance. But there is not so much time to learn about the story of The White Rose - there are so many details. So I think to have some movies about this time and about this story creates a good possibility to learn.

Ryan: Tell me a little about your film acting ambitions - do you have any interest in acting in English-language films?

JJ: Of course I would love to, if it's an interesting story and an interesting role, but I'm not doing anything special to make a movie in English. I would like to do movies not only in Germany but in other countries, and in other languages. It's a good possibility to get to know other interesting people and directors. It's more open than only making movies in your own language and your own land.

Ryan: Now that the film has earned an Oscar nomination, have you made plans to attend the Academy Awards ceremony this year?

JJ: Yes. Because of Sophie Scholl there have been so many awards and parties and invitations, and most of these I couldn't join because of the theater. For the Berlinale, I could just come to Berlin for one night. So my manager, just in case there was a nomination for the Oscar, kept me two days free so I can come to L.A. I'm very excited about it, of course.