RABIYE KURNAZ VS. GEORGE W. BUSH, your seventh joint work as screenplay writer and director, is about to have its first public showing. Let’s start by jumping two hours ahead: how do you want to leave people after this film?

Laila Stieler: Empowered.

Andreas Dresen: Angry in a productive way.

Does this kind of material find you or do you have to look for it?

Andreas Dresen: For me, the journey began when the then producer Christian Granderath pressed Murat Kurnaz’s book into my hand in 2008. I read “Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo” straight way and it left me extremely agitated. The book aimed directly at my sense of injustice. Anger also arose that I couldn’t channel. I simply couldn’t believe that something like this was possible and happened in our time. I then went to Bremen and met Murat. He told me his story in the course of long conversations. It was extremely impressive how he talked about these years in Guantanamo with great mildness and without any desire for revenge whatsoever. So the original plan was to tell Murat’s story, this almost Kafkaesque situation in which he found himself imprisoned without any prospects and mostly without social communication. But I didn’t manage it, to be honest. Cinematically, there was none of the dramaturgical shimmer of hope that is common to classic prison dramas. All the drafts got bogged down in bleak hopelessness.

Until the change in perspective. You met Murat’s mother Rabiye and her lawyer Bernhard Docke …

Andreas Dresen: Yes! Suddenly there was this couple. I met Rabiye, this wonderful woman with her immense strength, her courage to face life and her very particular humour, over dinner in Bremen. I already knew Bernhard Docke from the meetings with Murat. The idea that it might be possible to tell the story better from the perspective of these two people came to me as soon as I was travelling home on the train.

Laila Stieler was not yet involved?

Andreas Dresen: No, we were both still tied down with our work for GUNDERMANN. I didn’t want to land Laila with a second difficult project. During one of our long crisis talks ...

... one of your walks in the Uckermark.

Andreas Dresen: Exactly, that’s where I also told Laila about the Kurnaz story, without any ulterior motives.

Laila Stieler: I’d heard about it before, but just in passing. I don’t know if I’d have wanted to get involved if it had really been a film about Murat’s time in Guantanamo. Narrating that particular hopelessness that he experienced there is not really my thing as a writer. But I thought the new perspective was great and I was almost a bit insulted not to have been asked (laughs) …

Andreas Dresen: I admit the idea was seductive, but I had no idea whether it would really work. It wasn’t until Laila’s 20-page exposé that it became clear to me she was the only one who could and must write the screenplay.

Let’s go into your joint work on the material and begin with Rabiye Kurnaz – of course!

Laila Stieler: The first meeting with Rabiye was already love at first sight. She’s not only a great person but also a gift for me as an author. Inspired by her appearance, the idea also emerged of linking the political background of her story with comic devices. My son had also just started puberty at the time and as a mother I increasingly grew into Rabiye’s perspective and could imagine the fears that arise when children start going their own ways. I liked this universal aspect from the start.

You mention the comic aspects of the story. So those weren’t just stylistic devices to strengthen the character of the mother, to bolster her cinematically?

Laila Stieler: We didn’t need to mould or adjust anything. Rabiye made it easy for me to write about her. When we first met, she was still showing the marks of a serious illness, fragile, touching, and I didn’t know if we’d see each other again. When we met for the second time, a few months later, she drove up to the station in a sleek white Mercedes convertible. Then we sped through Bremen to loud electro-pop music. And then a few months later we were in a shisha bar with one of her sons, and she asked me when our film would finally be finished. That’s Rabiye. She keeps her spirits up. She has humour, strength, and is dazzlingly contradictory. If I think of her as chaste, she’s permissive. If I take her for naive, she’s smart. And if I consider her worldly, she‘s suddenly very pious. Rabiye has often turned my expectations of her upside down. “God is there to make life easy for us, honestly, Laila!“ she said to me once. What a sentence! Telling her story partly in a comic way appealed to me a lot, on the one hand because it’s something that’s not necessarily obvious with this theme, and on the other hand because it coincides with my attitude to life and telling stories.

It is admittedly reassuring that the humour in RABIYE KURNAZ VS. GEORGE W. BUSH is drawn from the real Rabiye. What could the lead actress Meltem Kaptan still bring to the role? What did she have to bring to it? What was she expected to bring to it?

Andreas Dresen: We spent a long time looking for the female lead to play this wonderful, idiosyncratic woman. She needed to have a certain congruence with the real Rabiye and of course a German-Turkish background. But most of all, she had to be able to carry the film energetically. A certain naivety was important, as that’s what makes up this character’s beauty and strength. Rabiye needed naivety to take on this fight in the first place. Too much reflection would more likely have led to resignation in her case. Meltem Kaptan, a stand-up comedienne who has never played a main role in a film, moved me emotionally from the very the first screentests. Although she has no children herself, you’d like to someone like her to be your mother. A woman who puts her arms around the world and charges forward. A lioness!

Meltem Kaptan shows herself to be very versatile, connecting the tragic and the comic, often in just tiny moments. A gift?

Andreas Dresen: Yes! Meltem is a quick-change actress. Sometimes she’s loud and forceful, sometimes totally permeable, so that you see her open heart beating. It’s not a technique you can train, you either have it or you don’t. Meltem also has a very good sense of timing when adapting the text and the character. In reality, she’s very different to Rabiye.

Laila Stieler: An example: for a key scene in the courtroom at the Supreme Court, I wrote in the screenplay: “Rabiye’s gaze wanders over the listeners and lands on Bernhard. She observes him with so much warmth that it almost hurts.“ I had to write it that way. But how are you meant to stage it? I left the sentence in as it was, for the feeling and temperature of the scene. Now I watch the film and see that Meltem acts it! She actually acts it! This warmth that almost hurts. I’d definitely like to mention our casting director Karen Wendland here, because the quality of the actresses she produced just for the casting of Rabiye was fantastic.

Rabiye, and her position, stand for the strong role of mothers in the Turkish and Arab world. Murat Kurnaz and also Mohamedou Ould Slahi in his “Guantánamo Diary” talk and write over and over again about their mothers in particular, full of love, respect and longing.

Laila Stieler: There are also many fathers who are actively dealing with the situation of their sons in Guantanamo. But back then in Washington, at the time of the Supreme Court’s decision, Rabiye was in fact the only woman in the group, which is why she had a special role there. In my experience, there’s a greater focus on the family in the Turkish or Arab world than is the case with us, at least that’s what I see in the Arab branch of my own family. They meet up more regularly. The ties are closer. If someone’s at risk of losing their way, they deal with it. Who exactly and how is in turn decided in the relationship structure of the families. If someone develops a particular strength and inclination, the other steps back. I suppose it’s like that everywhere. In our case, the fight for Murat was simply Rabiye’s area.

Rabiye’s eldest son was released from Guantanamo in August 2006. Did her story need this time interval, maybe, in order to be told today?

Laila Stieler: There would certainly have been additional obstacles earlier. Rabiye was seriously ill for many years. It would have been more difficult to talk to her about a film. There would certainly have also been different research interviews than was the case later. We would have certainly become a lot bitterer. What happened between 2001 and 2006 didn’t just traumatise Murat and Rabiye but the entire Kurnaz family. The father and Murat’s brothers were also sucked into the maelstrom. Ultimately, they withstood the pressure, but they went through the mill.

Andreas Dresen: I, for one, definitely needed this interval in order to see Rabiye’s story positively, and to understand that it is precisely this perspective that’s the more obvious one for me, because it speaks of the strength of the weak. When we learn of major political matters in the media, we often resign ourselves because we feel there’s not much we can do about them. And then suddenly it seems that we can! The world, as monolithic as it may appear, is changeable! A Turkish housewife from Germany can make stones dance. Starting out from Bremen, she can strike out against the U.S. president and win. Narrating that in a film was, for me, irresistible, because it’s so encouraging and nevertheless raises lots of questions.

What is the most important question for you?

Andreas Dresen: How can what happened to Murat Kurnaz and all the other people who were wrongly detained in Guantanamo, and are still being detained there today, be allowed to take place in our democracy?

Was it difficult to bring the lawyer Bernhard Docke into the film as a character and keep him next to this bundle of energy that is Rabiye Kurnaz?

Andreas Dresen: Bernhard Docke was definitely intended to become one of two equal main characters. It appealed to us, for the tone of the film, that Bernhard also has a very particular, subversive and rather dry sense of humour, something I’m very familiar with having grown up in northern Germany. When you see him in his office with the mountains of files relating just to the Kurnaz case alone, you get a rough idea of what he’s achieved over all the years. He is the intellectual engine of the film, because that’s also what he was for the legal process. With Rabiye and Bernhard, heart and mind complement each other in a wonderful way. They work on different premises: he is controlled, she impulsive. It is incredibly beautiful to experience them together, to see how, over the years, these two very different people grew towards each other, chafed each other, developed trust in each other, and needed each other as friends. Telling the story of this couple who have so much love for each other in a very unique way has massive charm. It’s the heartbeat of the story.

Laila Stieler: Bernhard Docke didn’t make it quite so easy for me as Rabiye, reserved, cautious and sceptical as he is. He scrutinised me repeatedly in my meticulous research and asked me all these uncomfortable questions: why do you want to make this film? What audiences do you want to reach? He never let it be known if my answers satisfied him or not. But he nonetheless patiently explained the legal background to the case, which is not at all easy to grasp, time and time again. How do you fight for the freedom of someone imprisoned in no man’s land where legal remedies just don’t reach? In the constellation of the characters Bernhard and Rabiye, I had the wonderful possibility of allowing Rabiye to ask all the questions I’ve asked myself and possibly also affect the audience without having to write long, explanatory monologues. The fact that Rabiye digs deeper or understands something in a very idiosyncratic way, and that Bernhard responds and corrects patiently, is simply part of their constant banter. But Bernhard has some very emotional moments, too; when it comes to Rabiye’s suffering and the manoeuvres of the German government, he almost goes up the wall. And because he sensed our attitude was essentially one of solidarity, I think that, over time, he came to have great confidence in all of us and he was forthcoming, understanding and extremely willing to help.

The language mix of Turkish, German and English, sometimes in just one sentence, is a powerful ingredient in the film’s liveliness. Was that decided at the start?

Laila Stieler: Yes, that was the intention, but implementing it was really demanding.

Andreas Dresen: It had to be this way because it corresponds with reality. It’s an international story and yes, this is how people speak in in many Turkish families in Germany. It was a challenge when casting the roles and a crazy experience when filming because there were times when I myself didn’t understand anything that was said. Only a language coach could help there. I had the ambition that it had to be right linguistically, right up to Turkish dialects. We also worked rather meticulously on the subtitles.

Laila Stieler: The word “waitress-style” is my personal favourite. It comes from a translator I went through the Turkish and German-Turkish sections of the screenplay with. I’d asked her to consider typical language creations, if they exist. She pointed out that the Turkish language is very figurative and flowery, and that terms of endearment are used all the time. I’d already got a sense of that but hadn’t yet implemented it in the dialogues. So “aşkım, balım and hayatım” were added in, meaning “my dear, my sweetheart, my life”, which are often hung on the end of a sentence.

Could this actually be an example for us to draw on, my treasures?

And this wonderful “Echt jetzt” [“Really”] spoken either as a question or exclamation?

Andreas Dresen: That comes from Rabiye. She also says “Gefellt mir!” in every second sentence [a mispronunciation of the German “Gefällt mir!” or “Like it!”].

RABIYE KURNAZ VS. GEORGE W. BUSH is by no means a victim film, although the family has of course become a victim. But one key aspect comes through: the way politics and society deals with victims is for the most part incomprehensibly defensive, sometimes presumptuous, and often downright shaming, regardless of whether it’s to do with abuse, persecution or terror. Why do you think this is?

Andreas Dresen: I think it’s particularly the case if a society that has to deal with victims bears some of the responsibility itself. The Guantanamo system, which still exists after 20 years, is wrong per se. It is inconceivable! Democracy has failed on a grand scale in Kurnaz’s case, not only in the U.S. but clearly also in Germany and in Turkey. Murat Kurnaz spent five years caught in a border triangle, in a mesh of responsibilities constantly being pushed back and forth. It makes me angry how ignorantly the German government has behaved and behaves towards Murat Kurnaz and his family, how they refuse to issue an apology, let alone award compensation. No one wants to take responsibility. There’s a lot I can understand. They were complicated times back then after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. There was enormous pressure on politicians, and this resulted in a few hasty and incorrect decisions. We may grant politicians that, but what we shouldn’t grant them, in my view, is not to rectify what needs to be rectified based on better knowledge and in line with later findings.

Laila Stieler: No one likes to assume the victims’ perspective. It would mean identifying with their powerlessness. This makes it all the more important in my opinion to present this position openly, to give this status a name. The press as fourth estate is playing an ambivalent role here. To some extent, they’re turning people into victims. How quickly prejudicial judgements are made! In this case, it was the “Bremen Taliban”, in the NSU case it was the “kebab murders”. On the other hand, without the press it wouldn’t have been possible for Bernhard Docke to generate so much publicity for Murat Kurnaz. When I was writing the screenplay, I often asked myself what I actually thought when I heard about him for the first time. Was I immediately appalled by what had happened to him? Or did I initially doubt his innocence? It’s not pleasant but very informative to catch yourself with your own bias. Maybe it’s the same for others, too.

Andreas Dresen, you are yourself a constitutional judge in Brandenburg. Have you also taken a fresh and different look at law and jurisprudence through your intense activity with the Kurnaz case?

Andreas Dresen: I think that the Supreme Court in the United States made a really good impression. It’s one of the most optimistic aspects of this story: rule of law remains rule of law; it can’t be eradicated just like that. So the separation of powers definitely has an effect. Whether, in the end, it can always take action and dodge the feints of the political world is another matter. Admittedly, my work at the court operates on a completely different level, but even here I witness how politicians can’t just do what they want. There’s always an authority that checks whether political action is constitutionally sound or not. I find that very comforting.

The discussion with Laila Stieler and Andreas Dresen was conducted by the author Andreas Körner in December 2021.