Volker Schlödorff

Born the son of a doctor in Wiesbaden in 1939, Volker Schlöndorff left home in 1956 to study in a Jesuit boarding school in Brittany.  After graduation, he went to study political science in Paris where, in 1959, he formed a close relationship with the filmmakers of the French nouvelle vague such as Louis Malle, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Pierre Melville.  During this time he was writing the screenplay to his first feature, Der junge Toerless which became the first international success of the New German Cinema and won the International Film Critics Prize in Cannes in 1996.

With The Lost Honor Of Katharina Blum (1975) from the novel by Heinrich Boell (co-directed with his wife at the time, Margarethe von Tratta) Schlondorff made his breakthrough into the German box office.  Because of this film and because of his political engagement in general, he was attacked as a communist sympathizer.

The music for Katharina Blum as well as Toerless and Swann In Love was written by Hans-Werner Hanve.  As a result of his connection to Hanze, Schlondorff was engaged to direct a number of operas between 1974 and 1984 including including Wir erreichen den FluB by Hans-Werner Henze, Katja Kabanov and Totenhaus by Leos Janacek, as well as La Boheme and Lady Macbeth aus Mzensk.

Meanwhile in 1979, his film The Tin Drum, adapted from the eponymous Gunter Grass novel, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and an Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

In 1983 he made the French/German co-production, Swann In Love based on the novel by Marcel Proust.  In 1984 he went to New York to make the film version of Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman with Dustin Hoffman, which was to be the first time Schlondorff would work with John Malkovich.  Schlondorff remained in the US for some years after this where he made the TV movie Murder on the Bayou (1985) with Holly Hunter and The Handmaid’s Tale (1990) from the Harold Pinter play.

The fall of the Berlin Wall brought Schlondorff back to Germany where he made Voyager in 1991.  The Ogre (1996), based on the Michael Tournier novel, was Volker Schlondorff’s first film since 1991 and brought him back together with John Malkovich.  The film caused a controversy in Germany, but received enthusiastic reviews in America, where Schlondorff returned returned to make the 1998 crime drama, Palmetto.  Meanshile, he and Wolfgang Kohlhaase had been developing The Legend of Rita (2000) since 1993.