Five minutes into the interview and already the Straight is worried that we’re getting too weird, too fast. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck dismisses any concerns.

“I have a high tolerance for weirdness,” he says, reached at the Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades. “Try me.”
Deal, we reply. Game on. But first, let’s set the scene.

Von Donnersmarck is doing PR duty for his double Oscar–nominated film, Never Look Away, the robustly imaginative, three-hour tale of an artist—based loosely on Gerhard Richter—whose life extends from a childhood in Nazi-era Dresden to art school in Communist East Germany, and on to defection and success in the schvinging Düsseldorf of the ’60s.

Opening Friday (February 22), the film is utterly meticulous in details extending well beyond getting its periods right.

But it’s the opening scenes set inside Joseph Goebbels’s notorious Degenerate Art Exhibition that cast a crucial spell, drawing on the exhibition’s unprecedented psychohistorical potency to instantly capture the viewer.

Visiting art historians, the writer-director proudly recalls, were “deeply moved” by its painstaking accuracy.

But its effect goes further than that.

In the end, it becomes a kind of conjuring, no?

“Yes. Definitely. I don’t find that weird,” answers von Donnersmarck, who describes his job as a filmmaker as “getting to the intangibles”.

“Something will happen that goes beyond what you can spell out and really directly describe. I think that a very sensitive person could come into your living room and—by the way you’ve arranged your furniture or not arranged your furniture, or by what you’ve chosen as furniture or by your pictures—would basically be able to intuit your whole life story. Because all that contains every bit of information. You don’t know where that information is hidden, but you know it’s there if you reconstruct it. So for that reason—I like the word conjuring—I try to arrange things in such a way that if there are spirits that can come, they’ll recognize the place and will come.”

Sadly, if there was one person above all that von Donnersmarck hoped would find himself intoxicated by this cinematic necromancy, it was Richter himself.

Instead—after sharing countless hours with the filmmaker, consulting closely on and apparently approving the screenplay—the notoriously thorny artist disavowed the film without seeing it.

“I was warned by various people who’ve worked with him quite closely that he always turns on you,” von Donnersmarck says before floating a number of plausible theories as to why, all of them generally boiling down to “a mixture of perfectionism and a desire for omnipotence” over the details of one’s own life.

“There might be an element of: ‘I’ve been defined so often by government systems that wanted to tell me who I am, what I am, the Nazis, the Communists, and so on—no one defines me,’?” he suggests.

Or perhaps Richter wasn’t prepared for the wave of publicity or the test screening that yielded a mere five out 376 people who’d even heard of him.

“In Germany! So that just shows you what a tiny bubble artists live in and how shielded they are from the noise of the world. They’re incredibly important, but to a very small group of people. I think it was just an unusual experience for him, and I think he didn’t enjoy that part.”

More than depicting the career arc of its Richteresque character, Kurt Barnert (Tom Schilling), Never Look Away unfolds as a mystery involving Barnert’s wife, Ellie (Paula Beer), his schizophrenic aunt, Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl), and a Nazi eugenicist who makes pawns of them all.

It’s through his art that Barnert unconsciously surfaces the clues.

And while the filmmaker has repeatedly insisted that Never Look Away is a fiction—because ultimately it is—perhaps von Donnersmarck simply intuited a little too much of Richter’s life through the way he arranged his furniture.