Children are very clued in: Markus Schleinzer

Markus Schleinzer was born in Vienna in 1971. He has worked as a casting director from 1994 to 2010. During this time he participated in over 60 feature-film projects, including Jessica Hausner's Lovely Rita, Hoteland Lourdes, Ulrich Seidl's Dog Days, Benjamin Heisenberg's Sleeper and The Robber, Shirin Neshat's Women Without Men, and Michael Haneke's The Piano Player, Time of the Wolfand The White Ribbon, for which he also cast the children, coached them and worked out their scenes with them. Michael is his first feature film. Excerpts from the interview...My thoughts kept returning over the past few years to the way that perpetrators and the notion of the perpetrator are dealt with in public. And there is scarcely a crime in this discourse that is so flatly condemned as child abuse. It is one of society's greatest crimes, such that even sterling citizens who feel strongly about the law would love to return to mediaeval justice and start to wish all manner of things for the accused. I myself am not free of it either when I hear about things like this, which go beyond what I can imagine and picture to myself. And over long stretches I followed the yellow press, which has been left almost entirely to deal with this subject. That really shocked me and I wanted to take a look at it myself. I have attempted to approach the topic without disguising anything, and film fiction offers exactly this possibility. To this end, I have deliberately avoided looking at cases from here or abroad and chosen a constellation of people I did not know from the media.The yellow press likes to work with catchy phrases like "the monster of ... " and so on. But monsters are not people - they are mythical creatures, something from fairy tales. So the offender is denied all humanity. Obviously the distance we have to assume to perpetrators is incredibly important. And the means we use to create this are arbitrary. Because it is simply a matter of making the distance between us and the people who acted in that way as large as possible. One doesn't want to have to look at someone like that, let alone be bracketed with them by perhaps being identified with them.We mostly look for inner and external factors, which allow us to pigeonhole others. But not necessarily to understand and fathom them, but rather to push them away from us. We always have the same formulaic approach, this compulsive search for "redemption" by means of psychological explanations, which are reinforced by inventing desolate biographies. I have consciously attempted to override this mechanism in . My main point was: I can only approach criminality of whatever kind if and when I acknowledge it, am on equal terms with it. I have to acknowledge his existence. That is not to say forgive, that I think is reserved for the victims. And judgement is done by the court.What's it like when you live with someone under such conditions? For both of them? How is it when, after a certain time, the initial protests are over and the first difficulties in the adjustment phase have been negotiated? To our minds that is now a relationship. They have already been together, have got used to each other - what it's like? That's what I wanted to relate.And a certain kind of sexuality also appears because it is a part of this life together, which of course is totally steered by the perpetrator. But here again the perpetrator doesn't try to do anything but live according to a cliche picture of normality. He tries to be like everybody else. He makes a big effort to adhere to the rites of normality because that is what conceals his crime. I am interested in these self-created idylls, which are presented as "natural" and "normal " - because for me they also prise open the normality and everyday life that I live in.Knowing that in an extreme situation one needs and looks for normality, so that one can make this extreme situation viable and maintain it - that casts a special light on everyday life and the normality that goes with it. What does it mean for my normality - how much of it is simply self-protection and how much just hanging on to certainty?Even if abnormality is the opposite of normality, I don't think it permeates every area of life. The abnormal is just one facet. In the perpetrator's abnormality, his paedophilia, has driven him to abduct this child. But that is not something that makes him stand out, so that one would immediately back away from him. And then when, as is typical of such cases, the neighbours come running up and say "he was always such a nice person", they are attempting somehow to balance up the dysfunctional side with the functional one. This lack of comprehension - how can someone who once looked after my cats suddenly be abnormal? That seems quite improbable to us, because it endangers our own normality.The most important thing was total honesty. At one of the last castings one of the mothers got up and left because I couldn't promise her that I would be able to protect her child in the future. I cannot guarantee that the child who played the part will never be teased by his fellow pupils at school. I can't do that, it would be a lie to say I could. But we attempted to give the child the necessary tools by talking and discussing, speaking and also listening, so that he can also stand up for himself, be his own person in this topic. So the most important thing was to find parents who not only would let their son to play a role like this, but who would also be interesting discussion partners; and finding a child who had the right amount of talent and a healthy personality with both feet on the ground.I can't make a film about abuse and at the same time be guilty of abuse. That of course very much affects the child, because he plays the victim, but also the person who plays the perpetrator, Michael Fuith. It was really important that in the preparatory phase, we took a long hard look at who we are ourselves before beginning to talk about the characters.I have the advantage that I've already worked a lot with children. In particular by Michael Haneke was a big lesson. I wouldn't have dared take on if was still wet behind the ears. I have learnt that one must approach children and meet them there where they are, which is to say in their childlike reality. That was really important. So it was not a matter - particularly with such a topic - of dragging the child up into the world of adults.We talked quite openly with him and he developed certain strategies. I repeatedly gave him the chance to think for himself about what was going on in his character. What was also important was that he helped design his cellar room. He painted all of the pictures that are hanging in there.Actually he should answer that. All I can say from what I saw was that he plunged himself totally into the story, that he did a great deal of research and that time and again it was doubtless difficult for him to open himself up to a person like that and to depict that figure, so that one could follow actions logically even if one can't condone them. He took this on with great honesty and his work was excellent, but I hope that his next role is something quite different.