The Universal Theory
Directed by Timm Kröger
Premiere at the Quad Cinema in NYC on Friday, September 27

by Andrea Schmidt, Staff Writer

Warning: This interview may contain plot spoilers. Interview has been edited for length and clarity.

A Cold War era thriller set in the mountains of Switzerland, The Universal Theory first premiered at the 2023 Venice Film Festival and will see its US premiere this upcoming Friday at the Quad Cinema in New York City. Director and co-writer Timm Kröger spoke from Berlin with MovieJawn’s Andrea Schmidt.

MovieJawn: Congratulations!

Timm Kröger: Thank you! It’s amazing, I suppose. It started out in Venice last year with this film, and it’s still a bit surreal to me. Council of Birds (Kröger’s first film) was in Critics’ Week and people told me it was a big deal, but it was my graduation film, and I hadn’t planned for it to be shown anywhere, really. I guess we then had some credibility for the German funding system…. I don’t know how we ended up in this world where we got the money for the film, actually.

MJ: You’re actually the second filmmaker I’ve interviewed this year who has said that their idea for a film came to them in a train.

Kröger: I was on the train from Berlin to Ludwigsburg near Stuttgart and editing my first film. We had talked about making a film set in the 1960s, because my first film was set in 1929. We thought there should be two or three films set over the twentieth-century…I guess on trains you have these ideas and they move. In ten seconds, I saw the title, and I knew the film was going to be black and white, and set in 1962 in Switzerland, and there were going to be physicists who go skiing, and kind of a Lynchian dark secret underneath the whole time.

MJ: It makes sense with the origins of cinema-trains and such. Maybe I’m reading too much into it.

Kröger: No, I love old school trains. I think cinema is far poorer now that we have electric engines. Actually, in the 60s they already had electric engines, but steam trains are so great. Horses and trains—they need to be in films.

MJ: You’re a cinematographer, correct? On Sandra Wollner’s previous two films?

Kröger: Yes, she’s also my partner. She’s shooting her next film in Tenerife.

MJ: I loved The Trouble With Being Born. I watched it at the height of the pandemic…. Is there a chance of Council of Birds being distributed at some point?

Kröger: I think we’re going to make a third film, and then it might be prudent to push it. I mean it’s quite a different film…It’s kind of a slow moving film…. I always just think of “what do I want to see.” It sounds stupid, but it’s something you need to hold dear, because you then have a chance of something special occurring. For the next film, I’m exploring a bit more entertainment.

MJ: I’d like to ask about the casting.

Kröger: I had a casting director who worked in Germany on a lot of arthouse productions. She actually came up with Olivia Ross…She was just Karin. With Johannes it was a bit more complicated. I don’t know if you know the Edgar Reitz film Home Away from Home. I had an idea for a bumbling idiot/genius character. It fits the time so well. He’s sort of a dandy, sort of a genius….I looked all over and couldn’t find anyone….Someone suggested Jan Bulöw to me ten years ago…Five years later he made that film about Udo Lindenberg….Then, I looked at him, again, and I met him, and I thought, “This is going to be more interesting, because he’s not an introvert, like the character I had in mind. He’s very much the rockstar and very outgoing. He’s a very charismatic guy, so I needed to tone him down completely. But it was a lot of fun with him….I had some doubts in that, do I believe that he’s a physicist, and then I decided, that doesn’t really matter, because the story is about someone who never really gets to be a physicist. I would like to watch him for two hours not becoming one. And he has a kind of physical, I wouldn’t call it attractiveness, that’s not for me to judge, but for the camera he knows how to move a certain way, and he has a lot of actor’s instincts, which they don’t teach in acting school.

MJ: Yes, he’s beautiful onscreen! I wanted to ask about Dr. Strathern and the dynamic with Johannes. I did a PhD and actually had a good experience, thankfully, but I know of these power plays represented on screen.

Kröger: Hanns Zischler? He’s an intellectual, he really is. Basically, I typecast him. In Spielberg’s Munich, he has a medium-sized role. He can talk about anyone-Goethe, Deleuze, a kind of Renaissance man. They had that dynamic naturally, but Hanns is really a warm-hearted person. Unfortunately, we had to give those energies to the other character.

Gottfried Breitfuss (who plays Dr. Blumberg) nobody really knows him and that’s such a shame. He’s a natural talent, much more so than so many actors. And he’s really full of joy, and actually a friend of Jan Bülow.

MJ: I wanted to ask about filming. You shot in Austria, right?

Kröger: Yes, I wanted to shoot in Switzerland, but that was not financially viable, and then we found the hotel location in Austria. Sixty percent was shot in Austria and forty percent in Germany. A few exterior shots are from Switzerland.

MJ: I was thinking it’s the creepiest hotel I’ve seen since Jessica Hausner’s Hotel.

Kröger: Yes, that hotel is quite famous. You can see it in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. And we married those shots to the interiors, which were shot at a real hotel in Austria, which was abandoned since the 1960s and built in the 1880s. It had a real ghostly aura, which you can’t build in a studio. We couldn’t, we didn’t have the money. We looked at places where we didn’t have to change a lot.

MJ: Could you talk about the editing process?

Kröger: Yes, my editor, Jan Enderegg, was there on the shoot, as well. We needed an assembly cut for financial reasons two weeks after shooting. The first cut was terrible. Jan did his best, but you can only do so much in two weeks. And then we sat together for half a year to a year. It wasn’t as complicated as editing can be. Obviously, the music was a big aspect of that, because we didn’t have it yet. We decided to use two hours of pre-existing film score, which sounds like a terrible idea, but it turned out to be a great way of structuring the film, and also communicating with my composer. He then understood the energy I was looking for in different scenes…. It was completely intertwined with the editing. The editing in this film was mainly about music.