Pawlikowski’s Fatherland Ties Mann’s Wound to Slaps

Pawlikowski on – Pawel Pawlikowski discusses “Fatherland” at Cannes, from its black-and-white single-take prologue and Thomas Mann’s Berlin-to-Weimar journey to the real-life grief behind a triangular family story. He also talks about Sandra Hüller’s transformation in a pivota

Pawel Pawlikowski arrived at the J.W.. Marriott in Cannes with “Fatherland” in the Competition—and with the kind of expectation that can feel heavy before a film even reaches the screen.. Inside the story, Thomas Mann tries to stitch Europe back together after the collapse he believes in fractures around him.. Outside. Sandra Hüller’s performance has already drawn comparisons to Berlin-winning acclaim for “Rose. ” adding fresh pressure to a film that’s built to unsettle.

The Polish director’s seventh feature looks European history in the eye through three tightly bound figures in a family road movie: Nobel Laureate novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler). his daughter and assistant Erika (Hüller). and his son Klaus (August Diehl).. “Fatherland” also carries a formal signature—shot in black-and-white in the Academy ratio—and Pawlikowski says he “unintentionally fashioned a trilogy. ” even if the film stands alone at Cannes.

The movie opens with a bravura prologue: a five-and-a-half minute locked off single take of Klaus in Cannes. naked on the floor by a bed. a sleeping young man nearby.. From there. Klaus talks on the phone with Erika. who tries to persuade her depressed drug-addict intellectual twin to come on a road trip back toward Germany as Thomas Mann accepts the Goethe prize.

“When is the last time you felt anything?,” Klaus asks.

Pawlikowski’s account of how that story came together starts with a refusal.. Italian producers initially pitched him a biography of Thomas Mann, but he rejected making a biopic.. Still, he says something in the book caught him—specifically, a “little moment” he uses to invent the narrative.. When Thomas goes to Germany, Pawlikowski says, “he’s in an interesting situation.. It rang a bell.. Everything’s collapsed, everything he believed in.. He’s trying to regenerate it in a one-man operation.. He tries to bring together Germany and transcend the ideological division.”

He also describes Mann’s on-screen presence as something close to combat.. “He’s like a boxer going into the ring. ” Pawlikowski said. calling it “his big entry.” Pawlikowski spent “enormous time into finding the right faces for the extras” for scenes in which Mann speaks earnestly to auditoriums—moments he says still land with resonance.

But the emotional engine behind the film’s triangular drama sharpens around Klaus’s death.. Pawlikowski says that around the same time Klaus committed suicide and his father did not attend the funeral. “Suddenly. I knew I had a critical mass for a film.” He adds that it wasn’t only historical context; it was psychological too. alongside “this triangular family drama.”

There are also intimate tensions inside the fictionalized history.. Pawlikowski points to hints about Erika’s sexuality as an American journalist flirts with her.. “It’s hinted that she had a relationship with Betty, one of the journalists who crops up,” he said.. “And Betty has certain expectations.. Erika just cuts it short now. because she’s on a mission. and that affair is long in the past.” Pawlikowski also notes Erika is “fascinatingly. married to gay British poet W.H.. Auden.”

The director’s discussions of diaries and fear add another layer of strain.. Pawlikowski says Mann was gay. “but super repressed. ” and that he “sublimated it in his work.” He points to Mann’s diaries: “No one thinks he never acted upon it. he was writing about it [‘Death in Venice’]. but quite overtly in his diaries about his fantasies.” Pawlikowski says Mann had “crushes and loves for certain men throughout his life. ” and he adds what “so annoys Erika at some point” is how the writer turns everything “into words… into art. ” exploiting “repressed passions. and fantasies creatively.”

Pawlikowski even cites a diary detail he says included Mann writing “that he desired young Klaus.” He connects that to a real threat: the diaries were in “a safe in Munich in 1933 when they escaped.” The fear. Pawlikowski says. was that “the Nazis are going to get hold of these diaries. ” leading to “a secret mission organized by Erika to rescue the diaries from the Nazis.”

In West Germany, that rescue mission collides with social power.. Pawlikowski describes Erika attending “a fancy cocktail party” where she runs into her ex-husband Joachim Meyerhoff—playing a Nazi actor.. He tells her she had it easy—“with her languages. skills. activities. and rich father.” Pawlikowski says the resentment builds in Hüller until she “whips out her hand and slaps him.” He stresses a nuance that complicates easy readings: “Everyone assumes she slaps him because he’s a Nazi. but she slaps him because he hit a nerve. because she was a nepo baby.”

Pawlikowski continues, “Without the father, they would have no money, no contacts, none of this lifestyle that they had. They lived on the Riviera, drove around, were super well-educated, and had fantastic connections.”

Around that scene, Pawlikowski leans into what it cost and what it revealed.. “You watch the transformation of her face, and it really, really happens,” he said.. “She doesn’t seem to be acting.. She has this fake smile, and then in her eyes, what happens there?. There was one take where things come to the surface. brilliantly. in a way that’s not scripted and not acted. it mysteriously unfolds.”

He also points to how his collaboration shaped the prologue and performance timing.. For the single-take prologue. Pawlikowski says he kept working it with Diehl—“taking things out. putting them back in. to reach the right length and cadence.” “August was good at that jazzy approach. playing back and forth with you. ” he said.. “He was totally open into for that kind of musical approach to performance.. The whole thing had an integrity to it.”

Klaus appears in the film “a few time like a hovering ghost,” Pawlikowski says.. It was a “tricky decision,” he admitted.. He hadn’t done that before. but he ties it to recording and grief: “this kind of astral projection. if somebody dies. it has been recorded. ” and Erika is “so missing and craving him.”

Erika’s role isn’t only emotional—she drives.. Pawlikowski says she does long distance rallies and that she’s “also. fascinatedly” someone who can take control of the road.. In the film, she ferries Mann around in “a giant glossy Buick.” “She did long distance rallies,” Pawlikowski said.. “And drove often with Klaus.. They drove to Kazakhstan. across the Steppes.” He adds that “she wrote with Klaus about driving around the Riviera. and she was behind the wheel. ” while the Buick itself required preparation: it was “a difficult car to drive. ” “really heavy. ” with “gears [that] are tricky. ” so Hüller had “to really practice a lot. ” though Pawlikowski insists she “is a really good driver herself.”

Visually, the film leans into controlled movement rather than spectacle for its own sake.. Pawlikowski says cinematographer Łukasz Żal returns “bringing far more camera movement than before.” He frames the choice as a response to the material: “Everything results from the material. it’s not like I’m imposing this style.” Pawlikowski adds that he prefers photography “strong and concentrated. ” and argues the camera moves because it has to: “It’s a road movie. but the camera moves when it has to move. but it doesn’t move just to have a bit of cinematic gesture.” He compares the approach to something older—“super primitive and simple. like in silent movies.”

Early in the film, Pawlikowski also describes a sequence built to capture war’s aftermath without using archives.. “We needed to have an archival moment without using archives,” he said.. “We found a street. which was pretty damaged. in a part of Poland which used to belong to Germany.” Pawlikowski says the production built ruins in the foreground—“but they’re not painted in. they’re really there”—and used digital work to erase satellite dishes and modern windows.. The goal. he says. was to establish “this basic principle where you have an intimate relationship at the center. father-daughter in a capsule. they’re protected from the world.” He calls the whole film “about a big vista and a small relationship.”

That inward circle—and its fragile protection—keeps returning to the film’s biggest private stakes: Klaus’s disappearance and death feed the phone call and the ghost-like presence. while Mann’s “one-man operation” to transcend ideological division runs alongside Erika’s mission to rescue diaries from the Nazis. turning family grief and political pressure into the same road through history.

[Editor’s note: Spoilers for the conclusion of the film follow.]

At the end of “Fatherland. ” as the Manns leave Weimar to go back West. they see a ruin of an old church.. They skip their escort and enter.. Pawlikowski describes it as a shared impulse: “It’s a mutual understanding and urge to see something that’s not official. that’s not part of the official program.” Inside. they tune a damaged organ.. They play a Bach chorale “play it badly, but still strong enough for us to be moved,” he says.. For Pawlikowski, the brokenness matters: “it’s only more moving because it’s a broken organ, and it’s bad.. But it still works.”

Music. he adds. is how the audience is meant to mourn Klaus and feel the “elegy for everything that’s lost.” “You don’t know how to achieve it. ” Pawlikowski said.. He explains the practical challenge of staging emotion that arrives “accidental organic way. ” describing how the scene required finding a church. then finding “an organ to put in that church. ” and building atmosphere so the actors could play without it feeling engineered.. “By the time we shot the scene. they were really close. Sandra and Hanns. ” he said. adding that “Hanns had some personal grief that he was working through. ” and that “the first take. it worked.”

Pawlikowski ends by returning to the filmmaking magic that surprised him even in rehearsal. “She takes his hand,” he said. “That’s the beauty of cinema, when you have good photography and within it you have things that seem to unfold mysteriously rather than like pressing buttons.”

“Fatherland” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, and MUBI will release it at a later date.

Pawel Pawlikowski Fatherland Cannes 2026 Sandra Hüller Hanns Zischler August Diehl Thomas Mann Erika Mann Klaus Mann black-and-white Academy ratio interview MUBI