A few years ago German writer-director Felix Randau (Iceman) got what sounded like an interesting proposal from France: to direct episodes of a miniseries about Felix Kersten, the former massage therapist of Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler.
“When I got back to Berlin and read their concept, I really liked it,” he recalls. “But there was this one special sentence in it that said, ‘If Steven Spielberg had known about Felix Kersten, he would have shot a film about Felix Kersten and not about Oskar Schindler.’ I knew that Steven Spielberg struggled for, I don’t know, about 10 years before he started shooting Schindler’s List, and he’s a smart guy who has a lot of assistance. So I became suspicious and started my own research, going to the archives and reading a lot of books and stuff.”
In the process, he realized that Kersten’s legacy is much less clear-cut. “I figured out that the story the French guys wanted to shoot was a hero story, a superhero story,” Randau tells THR. “But I felt you simply cannot do it.” He soon started focusing his work energy elsewhere.
The result is his new film, I Is Another (Ich Ist ein Anderer), which world premieres on Friday, Aug. 7 in the Piazza Grande program of the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. Set in 1952, the film sees a journalist ambush Kersten and his wife on a train because she has doubts about the heroic narrative that he has been presenting about himself — one that might even get him the Nobel Peace Prize. What starts as a normal interview quickly turns into a psychological cat-and-mouse game. Is Kersten a hero or an impostor? Or could he maybe be both?
“Every story has three sides,” Randau says in a director’s note. “Yours. Mine. And the truth…”
To explore all these complex themes, I Is Another features a cast of big European names, led by Danish star Claes Bang (The Square, Bad Sisters, Home) as Felix Kersten, Austria’s Valerie Pachner (The Stories, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, Four Minus Three) as journalist Hedda, fellow Austrian Susanne Wuest (Sound of Falling) as Kersten’s wife Irmgard, German actor Timocin Ziegler as Hedda’s husband Winfried, and Germany’s Martin Müller as Himmler.
Felix Randau, courtesy of Felix Randau
The film, whose cinematographer was Sebastian Thaler, was edited by Joana Scrinzi. Beta Cinema is handling international sales.
For writer-director Randau, I Is Another is much more than a post-war film — and much more timely. “Of course, it’s a period movie, but it has a lot to do with our present time,” he tells THR. “It’s about truth and the question: what is truth? Nowadays, there are no more fundamental agreements about anything, so truth has become quite a flexible thing. And that’s very dangerous, as we all can see. So, I Is Another is a movie about that.”
Indeed, the themes of truth and image that the movie explores seem tailor-made for the social media age. “If Felix Kersten was alive today, he would be deep into all this social media shit, I’m pretty sure,” Randau acknowledges.
But he highlights the ambiguities and shades of gray that he sees in Kersten that the writer-director wanted to also showcase in I Is Another. “He was a narcissist. He was an opportunist,” says Randau. “But I think he also was a hero somehow because he saved some lives. Not thousands, as he said, but he saved some lives. And I think he saved lives not for good reasons. He wanted to save his own ass, I think.”
Where in the film’s facts turn to fiction doesn’t really matter much, according to the filmmaker, because much of how people feel about Kersten depends on whether they focus on his autobiography or facts and stories told by others. “All the scenes with Himmler and Kersten are from Kersten’s autobiography,” Randau explains. “So they are, I think, all fake, but it is his truth. All the other stuff, the journalist and the train ride and stuff like that, is invented. It’s fiction. But somehow it’s also true.”
Director Felix Randau and stars Claes Bang and Valerie Pachner during the shoot for ‘I Is Another,’ courtesy of Anke Neugebauer/ostlicht/Wega
Of course, to bring the story of Kersten and the themes that I Is Another explores to life, Randau needed a strong cast. “I’m really proud of our casting,” he tells THR. “They all were great and added so much.”
Randau reached out to Bang first to cast him as Kersten. The Danish star had never heard about the massage therapist. “I did not know about any of this until Felix brought it to me, and it’s quite interesting because it seems to be a story that everybody’s quite fascinated by when you retell it,” the star tells THR in a Zoom chat during a break from filming the Netflix series Assassin’s Creed. “It’s a story that’s really gone under the radar, even if it’s a quite crazy one.”
The team may have spent quite a few years getting the financing for the movie together, but the actor remained up for it throughout. “Ever since he brought it to me, I’ve been really into it and really wanted to do it,” Bang recalls. “I really felt strongly about this. So I stayed with it, and we managed to make it last summer. We had to do it quite fast because there wasn’t a massive budget. I think we had 24 shooting days altogether, which is a stretch for something like this. Everybody really put in a massive effort. Everybody was so devoted to it, and that is something that I will carry with me.”
How did he think about Kersten and what was key for portraying the character? “It’s really hard to find out what is actually the truth here,” Bang observes. “But what’s interesting is that if this guy hadn’t been so preoccupied with his legacy, then we would have had no story to tell. It’s only because it seems that after the war, he was not quite content with the credit he was given for what he had done, and therefore he started perhaps exaggerating.”
For the Danish star, Kersten’s story is about the human need for validation: “Ultimately, Kersten wants the Nobel Peace Prize because that would validate him. That whole thing of not being able to just trust yourself and knowing that you have done your bit seems weird and wild.”
Claes Bang as Felix Kersten and Martin Müller as Heinrich Himmler in ‘I Is Another,’ courtesy of Anke Neugebauer/ostlicht/Wega
Courtesy of Anke Neugebauer/Ostlicht Filmproduktion/Wega Filmproduktion
The fact that a prominent world leader has been desperately hoping (some might say whining) for a Nobel Peace Prize is not lost on Bang. “Obviously, we have Trump at the moment who is seeking the exact same validation. I mean, he also so desperately wants the Nobel Peace Prize. I know that the parallel is too much. But actually it’s more about … when can we just trust ourselves and know in our hearts ‘I have done my bit.’ Why can’t we just find our inner peace?”
Adds Bang: “What intrigued me, and that’s probably also something that I can really relate to and recognize in myself because I really very often wonder, ‘Why do I need that bloody validation from everywhere else? Why do I need the reviews to say that I’m great? Why do I need people to come up to me and say, Wow, that was a great movie.’ Why isn’t it just enough for me just to be whatever I am?”
In case you wonder: Bang and his director on I Is Another weren’t at all concerned with him trying to look like the real-life Kersten, which he doesn’t — at all. “That is not the story we’re trying to tell here. We’re trying to tell a story of the journey of a soul,” the star emphasizes. “This is not the wax museum of Madame Tussauds. So that was never important.”
Pachner was game for the role of the journalist immediately. “I loved the title, and the film’s themes were something I felt I could really connect with,” she tells THR. “It’s this idea of what you tell yourself and others about yourself, and how that can be very far from the truth. And what is the truth? Felix Randau also plays with our own idea of what’s true and right. And there is this autobiography that Felix Kersten wrote and how people took it as fact just because he wrote it. So, yes, the film is set after the Second World War, but with talk about fake news, it also feels very modern.”
Valerie Pachner as journalist Hedda and Claes Bang as Felix Kersten in ‘I Is Another’
Courtesy of Anke Neugebauer/Ostlicht Filmproduktion/Wega Filmproduktion
She adds that the character of Hedda is more complex than she may appear. “I was really happy to explore that because it felt so rich,” says Pachner. “It’s not this young journalist who is just this good girl who wants to get to the bad guy. She has her own very twisted and dark story. I’m so happy when I get to play a woman where not everyone says, ‘Oh, she’s so nice.’”
In fact, Pachner enjoyed teasing that her character isn’t sure who she is or wants to project to be either, very much like Kersten. “As Hedda, I didn’t know who I was,” she shares. “Is me another? Who is I? Or maybe I just want to be different. And I think she really wants to be. That struggle tells us that maybe she and Kersten are not that different.”
Pachner had never met any of the other cast members, but she felt a natural chemistry with them once shooting got underway. “We all enjoyed doing the scenes with the four of us, the two couples,” she says. “It just flowed. These weird relationships were kind of there, and there was such a rich history behind Hedda’s relationship with her husband. The Kerstens play these weird mind games with the younger people. I enjoyed working with all of them so much. They’re all really, really great actors.”
Wuest was also fascinated by the themes explored by the film, and couldn’t help but notice parallels to our current moment. “I feel that the timing of the film is so spot on for so many reasons,” she says. “First of all, it’s all about the image you create of yourself, and how manipulative that is. It’s like on social media where it’s not only about the ego; it’s about selling something all the time. And the film is about the questions of who do we want to be and how do we want to be perceived from the outside. That has become more important than creating a community, which I think is very toxic. I think it is a dead end.”
Director Felix Randau and stars Claes Bang and Valerie Pachner during the shoot for ‘I Is Another,’ courtesy of Anke Neugebauer/ostlicht/Wega
She adds that the movie also ties in with a troubling political trend that’s been on the rise throughout the world: “The second thing is the rise of all the right-wing radical politicians and ideologies again, which I think go hand-in-hand with this me, me, me culture. The film tells a story about that and perspective. You have at least three, if not four or five, different perspectives. You have the perspective of Felix Kersten. You have the perspective of the journalist who’s trying to get to him. You have the perspective of his wife. You have the perspective of the poor journalist’s husband. And then you have the perspective of the audience who also has a take on it. Plus, then you have the perspective of the person who tells the story, which is the director. So there are a lot of layers.”
Wuest concludes that I Is Another is much more timely than audiences may at first expect: “We live in very strange times, and I think the film covers and mirrors that.”
As mentioned before, the Kerstens of I Is Another look nothing like the real-life couple, and Wuest lauds director Randau for “allowing different ideas to happen.” Such as when they were trying out different looks for Irmgard.
Says Wuest: “I was putting on makeup, and we were discussing what she could look like. I thought her prime was in the 1930s, maybe in the 1940s even. And people tend not to change hairstyles every decade. We keep the hairstyles we grow up with. And because this story is being told by Felix Karsten, we get to see his memory and his idea of everything. So, Felix Karsten and his wife don’t see each other the way they really look, but more like this Hollywood couple. I really love that the film twists these things and ideas.”
