The Great Acting Blog: “”I Think I Let Him Play A F***y Vampire” – Mario Mentrup Q & A- Part 1″
Mario is an actor, musician, and filmmaker, who lives and works in Berlin.
In 2007 he wrote, directed and played the lead role in the feature film, I Do Adore. The film itself is superb, as was Mario’s performance in it. I was intrigued to learn more about the thinking which lead this actor to undertake such a massive creative endevour. As this blog often investigates the notion of actor as artist, I was delighted when Mario agreed to participate in a Q and A, which we conducted via email. I have split the blog into two parts, and will be publishing the 2nd part on Wednesday. Mario’s answers are honest and compelling, and he offers many provocative ideas about acting.
TGAB: What first compelled you to become an actor?
MARIO MENTRUP: When i was age 12 maybe 13 in the years 1977/78 punkrock and pubrock like Dr. Feelgood or Eddie & the Hotrods was on german TV but also a huge revival of Elvis / James Dean /Paul Newman Films. I was very fascinated by them, but didn’t really bother fantazising myself starring in a movie or performing on stage. This all was bigger and too big for life. And the films were too old and i was too young for Punk.
Dutch TVprogramme screened these days an original american version of “Taxidriver” and this had a big impact on me; to see this pale thin italoamerican guy and infamous actor going his psychopathic way all the way. This was bigger than life but also had a raw urban hypermodern punk vibe and this was very important and i had waited for a film like this. The impact of De Niro in this role was so overwhelming that i needed ages to really enjoy the performances in his later Films, so i nearly forgot about him. 20 years later, 1998, i became really interested in his work. Back then when i was 16 or 18 i went into Godard Films which were screened in the cinemas , saw “Permanent Vacaction” on TV, read a lot of novels. Now some guys and me had formed a punkpop band and i also joined some noise rock /postpunk side projects. The times were crazy in a little city in northern Germany: During or after our concerts at youth centres or autonomous spots or in schools we were confronted by a very mixed crowd and crazy energy: teddyboys, some left wing – working class but some right wing- working class, and Mods – unfortunately many of them were right wing or even in the northern German Neo-Nazi scene like the German Skinheads, Ghouls, New Romantics and the stupid old Punks. Although I was the typical grammar -school -Leftie and saw the uprise of the German Green Politics Movement , this kinda politics were not really my thing. The Structure and elements of Extremism – left or right, Class struggle and of course the german Anarchist and Nazi history or bios from Jaques Mesrine ( french Public Enemy No.1 in the 70s) or Franz Jung (Anarchist in the first half of the century) or Alexander Herzen were topics i was interested in. Cutting edge. 1985 i was doing civil service in a sanatorium – which means i was far away from any urban hypermodern cutting edge-vibe. In Cinemas the Popcorn-Blockbuster era had settled down and in a provincal town like i had to stay then, the best Films at the Videostore i could get my hands on were “Terminator” or “Dirty Harry”. MADE IN BRITAIN on german TV by Alan Clarke with Tim Roth crushed my system. This rude portrait of a hyperactive sick but hyperintelligent right- wing british Skinhead made the ultra impact on me. Ultra contemporary and In -Your- Face: the film and the performance of the actor Tim Roth.
Now my secret drive was to make Film. Still i didn’t bother to go to acting school, because in Germany there were only theatre acting schools. I wanted Film. So I kept my secret to myself, did some weird hyperamateurish- trashy Super 8 Films, went to Berlin formed now a Noise Rock Band. Besides i was studying literature. Mainstream TV culture and Cinema or Theatre in Germany didn’ t show any other option than to be interested in underground our No Budget Films by early Wenzel Storch or Christoph Schlingensief or to spend the nites in Cinema Clubs which were screening DETOUR by Edgar Ulmer or 70s/80s Cronenberg Films. Still no real impulse to see myself in Film business.
Finally 1988/89 a filmmaker wrote a script with and for me. For preparation we had watched a lot of Movies (because he was on a film academy) and rehearsed frome time to time. In Summer 1990 i starred in his feature film in black and white ,35mm, plot and characters and asthetics loosely following the path of Jean Eustache and also referring to Jarmusch’ STRANGER THAN PARADISE. Still i was not really convinced of being an actor. I had to get 28 years old to be focused on wanting to be an actor as my profession.
1996 i played a character in a short film KUDAMM SECURTIY. It had an impact on myself and on the audience. The jury in Tampere/Finland elected it 1997 as Best International Short and wrote this words about it: “Like a good clean punch in the face in the morning.”
There it was: Impact.
I stopped my band projects and went right into acting business. That’s it.
Maybe? Or everything is not as it seems and the impulse for me to
be an actor is a complete other story i dont know about.
TGAB: So, at 28 you committed to life as an actor. How did you proceed from there? Did you try to make collaborations? Or create your own work? Or take the traditional route by getting an agent? Or a bit of everything?
MM: I had to stop my band- and music- life to avoid type casting. People knew me as a frontman of a harsh hardcore noise rock act, and that influenced the very small range of my acting roles : juvenile delinqiuents, rock musician, troublemaker. That was it.But time is flying away and soon. Two years later people had forgotten my former life and my roles got more challenging. But i hadn’t forgot my intense life from before – i suffered and was missing the outbursts of my Stagelive a lot. My compensation was Djaying, spinning records. In order to get the crowd to dance, i played 70s Disco and mixed it with some Disco House of that time and 80s /90s Electro; some 70s Pubrock and Novelty pop classics I dropped into . And it was good money.
1996, i had turned 31, i finally got an agent, before that it was impossible to get one without a diploma of a Theatre school. Agents are good to represent your rights and to get the money in. But that they can make you survive, i doubt that.
Nowadays i don’t got an agent. The concept to have a personal manager is now more my interest. I work on it.
Filmmakers from the DFFB Berlin- filmschool- and especially the director of that time Reinhard Hauff ( famous for his Film “Stammheim” back in the 80s) – liked to work with me and so i played in more than 10 Films (Shorts and Features) produced by DFFB, these included small and main parts in Features co-produced by ZDF- Kleines Fernsehspiel. This TV programme had also produced classics like Jarmusch’s “Stranger than Paradise” as well as Films by Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge or Agnes Varda. In the meantime i learned to know the independent filmmakers of the “Cologne Group”. They were titled as the 1990s – followers of to the Munich Group – a late 60s/early 70s loose Association by the Filmmakers Klaus Lemke-Rudolf Thome-May Spils & Werner Enke-Eckhardt Schmidt and others. Both groups made contemporary non-academic fast and entertaining films about all-day-life. I saw a short film programm by the Cologne group and liked to join in from time to time as an actor.
For example the feature film, a comedy DIE QUEREINSTEIGERINNEN ( english Title: Like in Urugay) by Rainer Knepperges and Christian Mrasek from 2005 is such a film. In 2002 Rainer Knepperges met me and Claudia Basrawi to write Lines, Plottwists, to develop the characters. Then Knepperges wrote the script on the basis of our meetings and in 2003 we shot . I took some time for us to get into the festival circuit, but the film sold very well for a Low Budget Flick, including TV and DVD and Cinema Theatre sales.Claudia Basrawi, a writer and actress, and me played together in some theatre pieces. She and Rainer Knepperges also starred in two of my Films. Since 2005 i direct and produce independent Films with Volker Sattel, a filmmaker and Cameraman.
This is not a practice, i would say, that is the way to go, because as soon my first Film was out .it became increasingly tough for me to get acting jobs. You know why.
TGAB: No – tell us why.
MM: Actors- gone- directors are suspicious in our business, aren’t they? The business tends to see them as troublesome. I also wrote a novel or songs and i write and direct films. Basically for me it is all the same. You must get to know the characters, you must get the sign of the time and space. You must be a very aware person. Because I’am an actor i like to work with actors for my films. And i know more and more about them. Or less? I don’t know, but it deepened my awareness.
TGAB: Yes, also I think actor-producers are seen as a threat. I agree aswell, it is all the same – it’s what a lot of people don’t understand, that writing can still be acting.
MM: Right, you only have to watch actors who are aware of that and who are good directors too:Robert Duvall in “Tender Mercies”… watching him i can hear this actor talking about the shooting the camera angle and discussing the lines. Great. Great acting. Dennis Hopper made great Films, “The Last Movie” is bitterly underrated, not to forget. Peter Fonda’s “The Hired Hand . And Barbara Loden’s “Wanda”.
TGAB: I also really love Duvall in his self-directed, The Apostle, a brilliant performance…Perhaps we could move onto your own feature film now, I D
o Adore. How did it come about?
MM: The last 20 minutes of the Movie “Ich begehre” or “I do adore” are a in a way a loose adaption of a minicomic by Jordan Crane: “Hands of Gold”, but very very loose. The comic itself seems like a adaption of the last scenes of GREED by Erich von Stroheim. I was very much attracted to the comic’s representation of bright day-and sunlight, sunrise, sundown and black night. That is the main thing we adapted. And maybe the purity of the essential aspect of dying in the desert. Another idea was Buster Keaton. I mean a Buster Keaton- more tragic than comic. So maybe i wanted to make a americano-germano Flick? ….Wait a minute…
Me and Cameraman and Editor Volker Sattel tried to create a cinematic experience by working with a digital camera. So we choose to go back to the strategy of Edgar Ulmer, Monte Hellman or you could also say: Jean Renoir or Louis Feuillade or Pasolini or Glaube Rocha, which means to film outside, on the road, natural lightning, no production company, no limits and no restrictions. We were actually lucky. It was such a hot Summer in 2006 when we filmed in Brandenburg-Germany and Poland. I always thought I only could only shoot in southern Europe or somewhere.
The first hour of the film is more influenced by Movies of Claire Denis or whatever. I do not remember.
There is a lot of George Bataille, Julia Kristeva in in and my interest during those days in the meaning of hell or purgatory in judeo-christian, gnostic belief or for the psyche and last but not least for Cinema. A ex-girl friend of Volker Sattel said after a first screening, that this is a film about manic-depression. After another screening a guy asked me if i really had suffered that much. I told the guy, that i had had much fun during the days of shooting and that this year had been a crazy but overwhelming time, in work and else, in my life.
But please, give me a hint what you want to know.
TGAB: …What was your angle as an actor? Of course you are the filmmaker, but you were also the lead actor in the film. Was there certain thinking which lead you to do both jobs, or was it something that just happened naturally? Were you saying something about what an actor can be, or what acting can be, generally, by playing the lead role and directing the film?
MM: Hm…
At first i tell you about my co-actors…They were tremendously important: Pascale Schiller, the lady that joins my character at the lost Super Mall – parking lot. She had read the script, that was it. We didn’t need to talk. And I knew that. She couldnt do wrong. Just right. We knew us from playing theatre with each other. Plus she already had played in a film of mine before. In 2007 she would got an award as Best Actress for DIE UNERZOGENEN a film by Pia Marais; and she was marvellous in Werner Schroeter’s last Movie THIS NIGHT from 2008. Pascale did exactly, and more, what i had wanted from her. Actually she didn’t like her role, she told me later, after the shooting, that is the funny part about it. Today she is in peace with it. My “Cannibals” were Haymon Buttinger and Claudia Basrawi. I knew what to ask them for and i they surprised us all. They burnt the fire. Finally, Vivian Bartsch, the Lady in the long Bathroom- Scene (actually one of two rare scenes where somebody is speaking)- I had seen her in Ulrich Seidl’s MODELS and she was the right one for me. The bathroom scene, and especially the final monologue about Love and relationship in front of the big window, gave her some trouble. The sunlight was getting away…. Remember: we only work with natural light, yes and we hadn’t finished the scene at all. No more shooting-day in the villa left. So not much time left for experiments. Damn. Viviane suddenly said that she would like to rap the words and lines of the monologue. Everybody looked at me. Pure Shock. Nobody expected we would ever finish this scene. It was my pure belief in this great actress that made me to tell her to fucking go for it. Volker Sattel looked at me, and I saw -after a slight idea of disbelief in his eyes- he trusted me and… Action.
Nope, Viviane didn’t do any silly imitation of Rapping or bullshit, the words just came out her mouth in a brilliant melody and rhythm… Done. That was the big moment I knew in order to be a director it is cool to be an actor.
What had let us, me and Volker Sattel, to the decision that apart from directing i would also do the main acting- role part? First of all Volker told me that i was the absolute right one for the part, and since he would be very close with me all the time as the cameraman and co-director, i decided, because of the small budget and small amount of time (we shot that film in 15 days) to actually play it myself. No big fuzz about it. And we know there would be a lot of physical challenging scenes, and i did not had to persuade myself to do these scenes. Good decision, I can tell you now in retrospect. We had trouble with a very drunken actor and trying to get him somehow sober again was something. And we had trouble with an actor who surprisingly had been scared to do a scene.
We were totally dependent on the ever changing moods of the weather, so that emotional stress caused deep trouble. But i kept calm. Because i know as an actor or human being that it can really happen you are unable to speak the easiest line or to do the easiest steps. It is super-important not to get nervous about it. So why should I, as a director get nervous about it. Of course,later we had more hours in the editing process. But…To your question, if i was saying something about acting or what acting can be, by playing the main role and being the director, i will have to answer this question with a simple :No.
But i knew so damn well what i wanted to create, i mean my character is silent and nearly transparent all the time through – during the editing process we often forgot that this silent skinny guy was actually me- but in the last ten minutes this silent person goes beserk. If you not really following as a viewer(and that is not a shame, in fact the film invites the viewer to meditation or Daydreaming) you will not get a single hint why suddenly this soft character switches into a Madman. I wanted no explanation. No psychological action. I wanted this out-of-the-blue happening. Something which i admire so much in japanese Fims. Not only in films of Miike Takashi.
I think even John Cassavettes Films does this to you.
End of part 1. Part 2 will be published on Wednesday.
