What was the inspiration for you to make COPILOT?

We live in an era where more and more families and relationships are divided by ideology. Screenwriter Stefanie Misrahi and I wanted to bring a love story fraught with political polarization to the big screen. We portray the time prior to the big bang" of political polarization, the end of the 1990s. An amour fou against the backdrop of a terrible historical event which, in its violence and symbolic power, created a lasting void and enigma within us all.

A film about power and powerlessness, life and death, a couple that fights, lies to protect itself, hurts and loves one another. A woman who enters into a situation that changes her entire life – and that of the rest of the world. The focus of our attention is the tragic figure of Asli, in whom, at the end of the story, something has been irrevocably destroyed – Asli who was so close, Asli who cannot help but ask herself if she might not have acted differently.

Along with producers Roman Paul and Gerard Meixner, I began the substantive process of gathering materials shedding light on murderous terrorists and their wives. The thus-gleaned research material served as a springboard for screenwriter Stefanie Misrahi and me to address the fate of two protagonists who emerged in part from our research and in part from our hearts and minds. Examining the wife of a terrorist's emotional life is not fact-driven: although we researched heaps of source material for COPILOT, the film isn't simply the narration of a historical sequence, but rather my own distillation of stories and characters we encountered along the way.

Canan Kir and Roger Azar, the actors portraying Asli and Saeed, carry the narrative over a period of six years.
Please tell us how you found them.

Even while writing the script, I found it difficult to imagine using the tried-and-tested method of casting from a pool of familiar actors. In all my previous films I'd worked with untrained people in supporting roles. In COPILOT, I wanted to counter the tragic world-historical event towards which the narrative arc is leading with players whose acting feels "unpracticed" and with whose faces and behavior the viewer has no prior associations. For the main and supporting roles, I wanted to find people who brought grand acting talent but whose voices and behavior had not been trained for the stage, and with whom I could define and rehearse the way they act in front of the camera in parallel to the development of the script. The intention was to work with unused faces all the way down to the most minor roles in order to achieve authentic depiction, and thus trigger that magical instance in the viewer – it may really have transpired that way; Asli and Saeed might really have felt and acted in that manner.

Casting director Susanne Ritter and I organized a casting process that lasted almost a year. I worked with over five hundred untrained and aspiring actors across the roles. Using different audition partners, I had them improvise unprepared situations in a wide variety of ways, specifying only obstacle and goal. One can best see a person's character when he or she is reacting spontaneously, under stress, on impulse, and outside the comfort zone. I didn't want them to act, I wanted them to comprehend who they were in the posited situation and see whether they could remain true to that. I wanted to ensure that the character of the person fitted the role, maybe even that the person was the role.

Canan Kir very swiftly appropriated the role of Asli. She has what I like in actors, that talent to cast herself into situations, to make them real for the instant without recourse, without being aware of or having an external eye on herself.

And then, Canan has something only Canan has – an existential drama reflected in her eyes.

But I had difficulties finding our second lead. Our film starts with a young man who, having been born to parents traumatized by war, has just arrived from Lebanon in a country that had to be rebuilt. I liked many of the Lebanese living in Germany during casting, but never really bought their Lebanese origins. It soon became clear that we'd only find our actor in Lebanon. Together with producer Roman Paul, screenwriter Stefanie Misrahi, and Beirut-based casting director Abla Khoury, we held casting calls in English and French for one hundred and twenty men over three weeks in Beirut. Roger Azar was the penultimate to enter the room. I'll never forget the force, empathy and pride with which he portrayed Saeed. Throughout the shoot, I sought to recover in him that one first performance. But repetition isn't produced by my modus operandi; no two takes are alike. Roger did, however, create forceful takes. He's an improvisational artist who reinvents every scene, every moment – someone who assumes the right to do anything while acting, someone who's driven by the need never to bore himself. It was with this force that he created Saeed.

It was clear to me that we'd uncovered talent, but being able to improvise in German isn't simply a matter of learning the script by heart. Roger had to learn to think in German in order to be able to react spontaneously. We provided him with an apartment in Berlin, gave him pocket money and, with the help of the Goethe Institute, organized a six-day-per-week German course that lasted almost a year. Roger not only has a talent for acting, he also has the intellect to absorb language.

How did you prepare for the shoot?

Canan Kir, Roger Azar and I started improv rehearsals a year prior to shooting. In the initial stage, I was concerned with laying the groundwork and building trust between the actors and myself. We met every other weekend in my living room to just generally rehearse being a couple: two people falling in love, a couple in a relationship, a couple having problems…

The second stage, before the actors had even read the script, was to improv rehearse situations from the script: here I dictated the situations and Canan and Roger themselves interpreted them. The rehearsals were filmed and evaluated along with screenwriter Stefanie Misrahi and editor Denys Darahan. The script changed as a result. In some cases, entire scenes were rewritten in terms of sequence and dialogue. So in fact the script was created through an interplay between the natural sensibilities and improvs of the players.

After about six months of pure improvisational work, Canan and Roger read the script for the first time. We immediately began group script analysis, during which the scriptwriter, acting coach and one lead or the other sat together for a week and analyzed the book from the perspective of their respective character. We then changed certain scenes in the script once again, and I was able to go over to working on set with a clear, jointly agreed idea that virtually precluded discussion, questions or ambiguities during filming.

And what was important to you on set during the shoot?

I'm not interested in actors observing themselves from the outside while they're acting: watching themselves, evaluating and then finally pretending. The ensuing acting is often rash and not thoroughly staged – neither director nor actors generally have enough time for anything else. Players need the opportunity to let their acting come from within in order to achieve authenticity and acting that doesn't come across as unreal and theatrical.

The film set, its crowded nature, technology and camera, are basically inimical to good acting. I try to preempt this, to afford conditions in which actors can unfold and create verisimilitude. To this end, my creative team (camera, set design, costume, make-up) and I have elaborated a modus operandi that allows actors precedence. Throughout preparation and shooting, all departments attempt to serve this principle. DOP Christopher Aoun and production designer Janina Schimmelbauer set up locations and lighting in such a manner that actors and cameraman might move through a full 360 degrees. Some cabinets and furniture were included and could be used by the players. Places where the characters live or spend time are made their own by the actor beforehand. Canan made the bed in Asli's apartment, did the dishes and rummaged through the fridge; Roger slept a few nights in Saeed's apartment. They wore their costumes at home for days on end.

Another antagonist to authentic play-acting are the players themselves: their own inner insecurity and plan, their preconceptions of a scene they reel off without having entered into the moment. In my experience, actors achieve good performances by paradoxically forgetting everything they learned in front of the mirror during rehearsals and entered into their subconsciousness, and re-experiencing the moment. This is precisely what we afforded the actors in rehearsals. We made them able, on hearing the word "Action," to really experience the instant, to sense it and make it come to life. This is why I didn't rehearse during, or even for a month prior to shooting. Blocking rehearsals, too, were always kept short. During shooting, we were able to recover and apply techniques we'd worked towards during the year of rehearsals.

Canan and Roger knew they had to succeed in moving me with their acting. I'm satisfied when I look at my monitor and consider what I see to be real. All of us found the shooting process of five months over three continents to be exhausting. A bond had formed between Canan, Roger and me during the anomalously long rehearsal period of one year that carried us through the stresses and strains of a lengthy shoot. The fact that I wanted to get the best out of them had made its mark and I was not infrequently left speechless by their playing. I'm aware that my way of attaining really genuine play-acting is exhausting for actors. I demand their complete attention, I drive them from their comfort zone and demand spontaneous portrayal of scenes. I give one actor information the other doesn't have access to, but to which he or she must react spontaneously. I want to be surprised, to never see the same sequence of events twice. The masterful dedication Canan and Roger brought to bear on this film commands my absolute respect!

How did you develop the art and costume design and the film's visual language?

COPILOT begins with a young, blossoming, naive love. The unimpeded carefreeness of one's early twenties should be palpable in the color palette and locations. Pastel tones, perhaps even in the sense of rose-colored glasses, and that ex-GDR atmosphere that was still so tangible in the 90s. The beginning of the film, the carousel as a symbol of what's to come: a world that's almost a little fairy-tale-like, rustic, a seaside Germany where a German-Turk and a Lebanese meet. We start the film young and bright, with a reduced palette and few patterns, and conclude with darker, more satiated colors and restless onscreen patterns.

It was important for me not to glorify or celebrate the 90s, the era in which our narrative begins, through set design and costume (as is so often the case in historical films). I didn't want to drown out the two main characters and their type of conflict with intrusive backgrounds, or let the set distract from this focal point. Our film, however, wasn't supposed to take a purely realistic approach, but rather to captivate the viewer by subtle, imperceptible means in much the same way as Asli is enchanted by Saeed. Unlike in any of my other films, it was important to me to firmly control the look of the images, yet let them seem uncontrived by employing a handheld camera.

The film's general ambiance was created by the team of DOP Christopher Aoun, set designer Janina Schimmelbauer, costume designer Melina Scappatura and me. My creative team and I watched films together, collected photos, and finally created a color and form palette for costume, set design and lighting1. The precepts we established were strictly adhered to and determined the film's look. We shot rehearsals with Canan and Roger with various lenses, always evaluating them as a foursome and discussing light and space at length.

Because the 90s have just become fashionable again and are frequently used in advertising and videos, costume designer Melina Scappatura chose to consciously buck this trend. In her costume selection, she always posed the question: at what point does a cut or material seem too hip? She thus designed her own, very unobtrusive, 90s look for the costumes.

We determined locations and the material characteristics of the places. Elements like sea, wind, sky and being at a high elevation became guidelines. Likewise, we didn't just express the change in Saeed and Asli's coming-of-age via makeup and costume, but also via the progression of the set-design.

As a German growing up in East Germany and the child of an Algerian father, how much do you see yourself in Asli and her story?

Like our lead character Asli and her husband Saeed, I grew up in two worlds. Having been the child of an Algerian in the GDR, I know the balancing act between a Western lifestyle and Muslim culture. My father was only a Muslim when it suited him. When we had visitors from Algeria, the Koran was opened, prayers were said and pork was renounced. My father found it difficult to act out his faith in Germany. COPILOT is also a story about the contrasts facing migrants from the Islamic cultural sphere, their interaction with one other, and the way their feelings find expression.

Asli and Saeed both feel foreign, but simultaneously at home in Germany. It's important to me to show a variety of Muslims in Germany. Asli's mother is conservative in the traditional sense, but not in how she practices her religion. It's a difference that's often given too little weight in debates. Often, it's not so much the religion as the tradition that's practiced by the conservative. Neither Asli nor her mother wear headscarves, while Asli's sister has chosen to don it and to adhere to her religion more closely. I didn't want to address this topic explicitly, but preferred to include it as an incidental aspect.

Saeed is from a very liberal family. Feeling foreign on arriving in Germany, he finds a sense of familiarity in a religion he turns to increasingly. The change in his views isn't something he discusses with Asli. She senses, but doesn't inquire into it or only does so very late. Asli's way of putting off raising issues, of suppressing feelings and needs that might strain social relationships, such as those of family or partnership, may seem unusual in Western terms, but is widely considered polite in Arab and Turkish culture.

This is something I know very well from home. Often it's not the truth that counts, what's important is that personal relationships are preserved. Relationships such as a marriage or family mustn't be endangered or damaged and sometimes have an even higher value than one's own genuine needs.

Feelings such as sadness, joy and anger, on the other hand, play out directly, loudly, and immediately. That's why I wanted my film to feature a lot of talking, shouting and crying, while needs are only sparingly discussed. I wrote and directed the scene with Saeed's parents in Lebanon in the light of both how I experience my Arab relatives and myself. We witness a couple in an exceptional situation and see them acting impulsively in a way that's hard to imagine in a German family. On the other hand, we see Asli struggling with the issue of how to deal with the radicalization of her great love. We see her difficulty in sharing her problems with her parents or with Saeed, for fear of being a bad wife, daughter or daughter-in-law. Our film never stands still: the characters move through space and their emotions, suppressing or vociferously engaging with them.

Finally, Asli and the audience are confronted with the issue of guilt – the guilt of not knowing or of not wanting to know. How did you decide on the way to end your film?

I set out to make a film about the human drama that unfolds when you're forced to watch the man you love turn into a stranger. What particularly interests me is the way Asli deals with the doubts that occupy her. She knows Saeed is planning something behind her back, but will go no further than a certain extent in confronting him. She loves Saeed and senses that if she goes deeper, their relationship will collapse. Asli remains silent to preserve their love. She doesn't stand up for what she wants. She doesn't say out loud what she thinks, but acts in the background because that's what she's learned and how she is.

She's a character whose actions are passive. Passivity in a lead is a no-go for screenwriting. It was a challenge for Canan Kir, screenwriter Stefanie Misrahi and me to depict the mechanisms of repression without portraying her as ignorant or naive. We equipped Asli with ambition and intelligence; she has accomplished a lot compared to the family background she comes from. Her mother and sister lead lives that have nothing in common with hers. Asli had to struggle with great tenacity to attain the lifestyle she chose for herself. To me, Asli is a strong character, yet she doesn't act with strength in interpersonal relationships. We created scenes between Asli and her mother to show how much they love one another, but much as in her relationship with Saeed, Asli can barely oppose her overbearing mother, or at least not directly. So as not to endanger her relationship with her mother, she secretly pursues her goals behind her back. Asli has never learned to resist dominance.

For me, it's a film about a woman who grasps, but too late, that she could've acted in a more emancipated way. I hope that the film manages to trigger in viewers an urge to shake Asli, to wake her and say to her: talk to Saeed, pose more questions, don't be satisfied with what he tells you; emancipate yourself and follow your heart even if this comes at a price.

At the end of our film, Asli has reached a point she'll look back on and contemplate for the rest of her life. We all know such moments; looking back, we ask ourselves why we acted the way we did. Was it an unconscious action, something that just happened to us, or was there a point of growing awareness? Did we repress it, intentionally looking away? This is the point where we want to undo something but can't. It's the issue of complicity that will forever echo in Asli.

I want to make films that don't end with answers but instead send forth their viewers with questions, questions that aren't easy and that everyone will answer differently for themselves. COPILOTS poses the question: is one guilty if one doesn't want to acknowledge the truth, hasn't experienced its consequences or has willfully ignored them? What is Asli's guilt if she has acted in the name of love and only acted in accordance with all she has learned?

Even if her story is set in the 1990s, Asli seems in some metaphorical sense to be a symbol of our European life right now: Europeans desperately clinging to their lifestyle, comfort, safety and freedom, and at times closing their eyes to the violence, suppression and destruction their lives may rely upon. Is Asli a sort of Cassandra, a warning or example we should pay heed to?

Asli stands in the eye of the storm. There's the glimmer of a possibility that if Asli had made a real effort to find out what was going on, she might've been able to anticipate the disaster and do something about it. Here, a comparison with the EU is revealing. It raises the question as to what a competent citizen is. Is it he who trusts that those in power know what they're doing, or rather she who always attempts to obtain sufficient knowledge as to fulfill the very function of a democratic citizen? Europeans' history is one in which bloodlines decided who shall and who shall not be a ruler. Democracy is not yet old, just as Asli is very young and has only now emerged from the nest of an intrusive mother.

Maybe like Asli, citizens of the western world have to learn not to look away; to admit, whether it hurts or not, that something is awry, that we're not making optimal use of democracy, and that sometimes a retreat into a blind spot from which one no longer has an overview, but instead the quid pro quo of apparent peace, will always come back to bite us.

At a certain point, radicalization will have progressed so far that people can hardly be brought back. Asli senses this when Said returns from his disappearance. Asli's friend advises her to separate from him, but she does the opposite.

In Buddhism, it's said that whether one creates bad or good karma depends on one's intentions during actions of possibly severe import. One wonders whether Asli's intentions were self-centered or born of love for her husband. One considers and reconsiders whether one can continue to sympathize with her or whether her intentions have established her guilt. That is to say, we distinguish between subconscious actions and a more-or-less conscious repression, and evaluate these things differently.

With colonization, for example, the Europeans conducted a very conscious act of empowerment and consciously devalued people in colonized countries so as to appropriate their wealth. We're not waking from a sleep in this regard now; it's far more the case that we've consciously refashioned our own guilt into the denigration, and even destruction of others so as to enrich ourselves. Power is the key factor here.

From the very start, Asli has no tangible power that she means to maintain and increase. The value she derives from her blindness to the facts is to be found on the emotional level. She doesn't consciously harm others. I deliberately didn't elaborate whether she actually knows, or could have known, what Saeed is doing behind her back. One knows what's going on and can't claim otherwise, no later than when a human zoo or colonial wares store sets up in your city, or when the crematorium on the hill in Buchenwald starts emitting smoke.

In Europe, now, we can no longer rest easy on the notion of unconscious action. When people drown in the Mediterranean, they do so under our watchful gaze. When mining companies in Africa exploit children so that we can maintain growth, this takes place with our knowledge and tacit consent. We repress this, and this guarantees our unequivocal guilt. My film leaves open whether Asli is repressing or acting subconsciously.

Even if her story is set in the 1990s, Asli seems in some metaphorical sense to be a symbol of our European life right now: Europeans desperately clinging to their lifestyle, comfort, safety and freedom, and at times closing their eyes to the violence, suppression and destruction their lives may rely upon. Is Asli a sort of Cassandra, a warning or example we should pay heed to?

Asli stands in the eye of the storm. There's the glimmer of a possibility that if Asli had made a real effort to find out what was going on, she might've been able to anticipate the disaster and do something about it. Here, a comparison with the EU is revealing. It raises the question as to what a competent citizen is. Is it he who trusts that those in power know what they're doing, or rather she who always attempts to obtain sufficient knowledge as to fulfill the very function of a democratic citizen? Europeans' history is one in which bloodlines decided who shall and who shall not be a ruler. Democracy is not yet old, just as Asli is very young and has only now emerged from the nest of an intrusive mother.

Maybe like Asli, citizens of the western world have to learn not to look away; to admit, whether it hurts or not, that something is awry, that we're not making optimal use of democracy, and that sometimes a retreat into a blind spot from which one no longer has an overview, but instead the quid pro quo of apparent peace, will always come back to bite us.

At a certain point, radicalization will have progressed so far that people can hardly be brought back. Asli senses this when Said returns from his disappearance. Asli's friend advises her to separate from him, but she does the opposite.

In Buddhism, it's said that whether one creates bad or good karma depends on one's intentions during actions of possibly severe import. One wonders whether Asli's intentions were self-centered or born of love for her husband. One considers and reconsiders whether one can continue to sympathize with her or whether her intentions have established her guilt. That is to say, we distinguish between subconscious actions and a more-or-less conscious repression, and evaluate these things differently.

With colonization, for example, the Europeans conducted a very conscious act of empowerment and consciously devalued people in colonized countries so as to appropriate their wealth. We're not waking from a sleep in this regard now; it's far more the case that we've consciously refashioned our own guilt into the denigration, and even destruction of others so as to enrich ourselves. Power is the key factor here.

From the very start, Asli has no tangible power that she means to maintain and increase. The value she derives from her blindness to the facts is to be found on the emotional level. She doesn't consciously harm others. I deliberately didn't elaborate whether she actually knows, or could have known, what Saeed is doing behind her back. One knows what's going on and can't claim otherwise, no later than when a human zoo or colonial wares store sets up in your city, or when the crematorium on the hill in Buchenwald starts emitting smoke.

In Europe, now, we can no longer rest easy on the notion of unconscious action. When people drown in the Mediterranean, they do so under our watchful gaze. When mining companies in Africa exploit children so that we can maintain growth, this takes place with our knowledge and tacit consent. We repress this, and this guarantees our unequivocal guilt. My film leaves open whether Asli is repressing or acting subconsciously.

CHRISTOPHER AOUN ON COPILOT

My visual approach on COPILOT was one of creating a film that feels like the subjective recollection of Asli's five-year relationship. The camera is intimate, realistic, but allows itself to break with realism by interjecting poetic elements. To lend images to Asli's feelings and inner conflicts, we exit the style of the film and dream away along with the protagonist.

Asli is in love with Saeed and imagines flying. She sees herself in Lebanon, perhaps her subconscious is warning her. And at the end of the film she has to look herself and her reflection in the eye and ask if she could've done anything differently.

Together with Melina Scappatura (costume) and Janina Schimmelbauer (production design), Anne Zohra and I decided not to place a focus on the 90s in order to both give the film a timeless aspect and to place more of an onus on the emotions of the characters. Memories are subjective, not nostalgic or historical, and change according to the viewing habits of successive generations. So the film's visual language doesn't try to recreate the "90s look," but rather to interpret said decade emotionally. This look doesn't change over the course of the five narrated years, either; it remains the subjective view of a woman who remembers moments and sees all these memories as one single unbroken strand.

For director Anne Zohra Berrached, it was particularly important to give the actors as much on-set freedom as possible and to create space and time for improvisation. As a result, gaffer Niels Maier and I often had larger, 360-degree acting spaces illuminated so as to give the actors the sense of being on "real" locations and not on a set with intrusive equipment and long scene-change intervals.

In terms of the lighting itself, we decided on natural light, which, however, could shift and be exaggerated in its intensity and color range at particular moments by way of a mirror to the characters' interior states. The choice of colors here emphasizes the characters' emotions. Examples of this include the decision to have Asli move into a red light district where the house opposite throws a flashing, glaring light into her room, thus giving viewers the feeling she's not inside her own four walls, but rather defenseless and ever restless.

A further example is the multiple repetition of the beach motif, which reflects the emotional state of Asli and the status of her relationship. The romantic beach with its few summer colors where the main characters meet appears again in a cold, uncomfortable winter when the relationship is more advanced, and again later as a symbol of paradise.

Shooting was done on a SONY VENICE with 1.3x anamorphic VANTAGE lenses to lend the film a poetic remove from reality without this becoming obtrusive or distracting from the characters. The particular acuity of the camera was the starting point for a digital image processing with colorist Dirk Meier that aimed to offer an image quality featuring the sharpness we've become accustomed to today while simultaneously including an analog look.