For years people have said Perfume couldn’t be adapted for the big screen because of the difficulty of portraying the sense of smell. What made you believe it could been done and that an audience would understand what your lead character’s going through?
“I was never so worried about it, honestly. I thought the book does make it work and it obviously doesn’t smell, so there must be something about the language that this guy’s using that was so successful to make people feel in the olfactory universe. I felt like if it’s a matter of language, and this was literature language, it’s a task for us to use our language, the cinematic language, in order to take as new territory and be as inventive as we can to get transparency into this experience.
This was the challenge of the film. Why should I make a movie if I don’t feel challenged? I didn’t particularly worry about it because I thought I had an instinct how it could be made. I also felt like as long as we can really stay with this guy, you know, this guy who doesn’t even see the world, he smells it, he sees the world through his nose, he smells his way through the world – and as objective as we can make it, as much as we then go through his perception, and be inspired by that and try to make camera and light and colors and sound become something that seemingly is connected to his perception, then it will be working.”
Were there parts you had to leave out that you hated to see go when you were adapting the novel? Did you get everything in that you really wanted to include?
“Yeah. I mean, I was part of the writing team so we really worked very hard to get to something like a faithful adaptation that, at the same time, really finds its specificness and its individual perspective on the material. I really wanted it to be a very subjective version of Perfume but, at the same time, truthful in the degree that I wanted the readers to not feel disappointed about what they felt remembering about the atmosphere and the darkness and a certain climate that the novel has. We wanted to absolutely capture that, but then take off on a very specific interpretation. Not only of the story, but particularly of the character – the main character.”
I find it very interesting that you actually compose the score, write and direct. How do those creative tasks work together and at what point do you start thinking about the score?
“From the start. We’re composing it, actually, paralleling. The music happens while we’re writing the script. Johnny Klimek, Reinhold Heil, and I sit down day one, actually, and do our composition work. For me, it’s always like that. I feel like I understand very much about the structure and the motivations of the characters when I’m writing the script, but I really do understand the atmosphere and the emotional and the more abstract part of the film when I’m investigating the music, and when I’m planning the music for it. It really helps me to imagine the film properly before I actually start shooting it so when I then come to the shooting, having worked for three years on the music and three years on the script, I really feel like I know exactly the two worlds and how to combine them. I’m the one who is kind of the membrane that has to filter it to everyone and they have to access me to know what’s the ambience that they’re moving in. Sometimes it really helps that we had already pre-recorded the music, that we could play it on set. We had it on set and just played it loud while we were shooting a scene with the actors.”
Which changes more – the script or the score?
“I think the script has more complicated moods and stages. The music comes so much from an instinct that you’re just refining it all the time and trying to make it work more precisely and be more atmospherically convincing. But once you’ve found a good theme for music, usually you stay with it. And, of course, we had a little bit too many themes. We had to get rid of some stuff, but we basically just got the music more and more close to the film. Or let’s say we got the film more and more close to the music because the music was so influential for it.”
You saw a lot of actors for the lead role of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille and wound up casting Ben Whishaw. How did you know he was right for the role? What set him apart?
“After really having seen dozens and dozens of actors, he was just the one guy that appeared to have all the skills that I needed for this character. We needed so many complicated and diverse energies in one person. We needed somebody to be quite innocent and, at the same time, pretty dangerous. You know, somebody who comes across kind of boyish and inexperienced and at the same time, has a scary side and a violent side to himself. We needed somebody that an audience can root with for 2 ½ hours, even though he then slowly becomes somebody that really breaks all these rules and we more or less agree with, that they’re good. He’s kind of a challenge to our moral, let’s say, capacity.
In the novel, it’s fantastic because you can’t just let go of him. Until the very tough and bitter ending, you stay with him. I wanted to achieve the same in the film. So we needed somebody like Ben who could, I think, carry a film of that proportion on his young shoulders and who, at the same time, doesn’t have any baggage that he brings along.”
