Around the same time Bernhard Wenger entered the Vienna Film Academy, he was intrigued with the idea of becoming someone else, not necessarily himself as he had a laser-like focus on forging ahead as a filmmaker, but an idea of what he might pursue as his first feature after reading an article about agencies that deployed actors to play friends and relatives of people that needed them. Over the years, an idea started to coalesce around what life must be like for one such actor named Matthias (Albrecht Schuch), who spends his working hours so immersed in his role play that he doesn’t know who he is when he returns home at the end of the day. With a job that affords him a luxurious house, he leaves behind an unhappy wife Sophia (Julia Franz Richter), who complains of him putting little into their relationship as he serves as the perfect partner for others, and while the work is never dull when it involves a new challenge every day, it doesn’t seem to amount to much in the grand scheme of things if the opportunity to ever be himself is fleeting. However, even if the intimate issues at the heart of “Peacock,” as striking a feature directorial debut as you’ll see, lent itself to a small-scale psychological drama, Wenger saw a grand, exuberant comedy in it with an ambitious production to match when putting the weight of the world on Matthias’ shoulders as he attempts to gain control over his sense of self would entail no less than than 30 locations and 90 speaking parts to deal with during a relatively tight shoot.
“It was, of course, very difficult for a first feature film,” Wenger said recently. “But still, to show a world that big was necessary to tell the story.”
If Matthias lacks an identity of his own, Wenger makes a name for himself with his distinctive debut that begins with a flaming golf cart and even after it’s extinguished, the fire never seems to go out. The film may be less of a surprise to anyone who had seen Wenger’s shorts — gently surreal satires of intense social anxiety with titles direct to the point in ways his characters couldn’t be — “Excuse Me, I’m Looking for the Ping-Pong Room and My Girlfriend” and “Guy Proposes to His Girlfriend on a Mountain” — but the director nonetheless upends any expectations on a scene to scene basis as carefully crafted compositions will give way to chaos. With a marvelous lead performance from Schuch as the great chameleon, the film finds Matthias seamlessly blending into any environment that’s thrown at him, whether it’s a family reunion or an avant garde performance art piece, but actually connecting with anyone beyond the most superficial exchanges proves elusive, though he tries once he’s suddenly single when he finds a free spirit named Ina (Theresa Frostad Eggesbo) reappear in his orbit again and again. As Matthias puts on various disguises – and gradually comes to take them off, Wenger brilliantly holds up a mirror to a society where social media has added a performative sheen that has likely imperiled relationships as much as it has helped foster them and as he’s hired more to improve people’s image rather than to tend to any loneliness, he’s the one who discovers he’s in isolation.
In an ironic twist true to the writer/director’s mischievous sense of humor, “Peacock” has been bringing audiences together with its big laughs since its premiere at the Venice Film Festival last year and instantly put the filmmaker on the map, leading to a Stateside release recently from Oscilloscope and his native Austria to select the film as its official entry to this year’s Oscars for Best International Feature. Graciously enough, he took the time to talk about the meticulous preparation the film required, his collaboration with Schuch and the relief that followed the most difficult day of filming.
How did this take shape as a story?
I read an article in the New Yorker in 2014 about [friend] rental agencies in Japan where you can rent friends because of the [massive feeling of] isolation and loneliness. People who don’t have anybody in their lives can rent someone to talk to, have a coffee with, take a walk together, whatever reason, but they were quickly used for [other reasons such as] better self-presentation, hiding lies, manipulation, and showing power. I went to Japan in 2018 to research these agencies and met people working there and when I was there in person, all these stories I heard were priceless. I did not just learn how employees prepare for an assignment or how these agencies function or what kind of clients they have, but I also met a man working at such an agency who told me that because of his odd job, he doesn’t know how to be himself anymore. That’s what I took for [this lead character of] Matthias and built this satirical story around it. And when I first heard about these rental friend agencies, they only existed in Japan. But by now, we do have one that operates all over Europe and there is also one in the U.S., so I knew this should be a universally pliable story.
I couldn’t help but think about Matthias’ romantic partners in the film as well when they have different desires for companionship. You have Sophia, who’s desperate to have a significant other in her life and Ina, who wants to be unattached. Did they emerge in parallel with one another?
Yes, the thing is that Matthias does not know how to be real and what he wants in life and the women around him do exactly know what they want, so to have this kind of contrast in these roles was interesting and Sophia was existing first [in the script], but what I found interesting about Ina is that she is also lost in life a bit just as Matthias is. She’s been studying these different things and somehow found her place in Vienna where she might not ever really have arrived and Matthias himself is a German growing up in Austria, where it is also difficult to suddenly find friends in school, for example, and to arrive in another country. But on the other side, Ina knows very well what she doesn’t want in one moment, and that’s something Matthias still has to learn for himself. Also the [suspicion] that Ina might be a rented friend or not was also an interesting option that I came across while writing the character.
It was interesting to hear how you actually shoot a dummy version of the film first where you really visualize the film by filming the locations you’ll shoot in, but also act in it to figure out how to position the camera. Does that have any benefits beyond knowing what the film will look like?
Yes, by shooting the whole film once with a small camera as a “test shoot,” and acting in the scenes myself once, I get a way better feeling for the characters and their emotions and needs. By speaking the dialogue, I learn where it might still need improvement or what I should still work on. Even these small things like when a character walks around one side of the table [I have to ask myself] what feels more natural? One side or the other. By having done it myself once, I can already make these decisions in pre-production and this gives me more creative freedom in the end on set because we do not need to find out staging and we do not need to find out how we want to make a shot exactly, as this is all planned already, I do have more time to rehearse on set with the actors and actresses again.
What was the collaboration like with Albrecht in creating the character of Matthias?
When we first met, we were talking about the whole script and it was not that easy to break down who Matthias is exactly. Albrecht told me that it was a horrible casting experience for him because he could not grasp Matthias and throughout many, many conversations in pre-production, we were finding it out together. We were defining this character more and more and to find words for his oddness and passiveness helped a lot in that process. It’s not that Matthias doesn’t have emotions, but it is that they are hidden somewhere beneath and during the preparation for the film, Albrecht and I worked on all these small screws because Matthias does just stare and look [lost] a lot throughout the film. So we wanted to find out what does it mean to be lost in one specific moment. Is he being lost right now because he doesn’t know what is going on? Is he being lost because he doesn’t know what to answer to something? Or is he being lost because he’s already thinking about how to get out of all of that again? These were the small nuances we tried to work on.
You also have a pair of remarkable dog performances in the film – Sophia’s large labrador and a smaller Pomeranian. What were they like to cast?
The casting process of dogs is very different than the casting process with humans because you receive pictures of dogs doing the things you ask for in a script, so you see all the things they’re capable of, but on set, they are somehow often not. So it’s very difficult to shoot with animals. The small dog, for example, was not allowed to jump from a height of someone’s lap to the floor because he would have broken his bones. And the big dog, we were shooting the scene with the dog walking upstairs and everybody was waiting for the dog, [but he didn’t come up] and we didn’t know what is happening. We were told that we’d have to wait for the dog to be brought around the whole house so that he can walk upstairs again because he could not walk downstairs because it’s just too heavy.
I wouldn’t have wanted anything bad to happen to either the dog or Matthias and Sophia’s house, which is quite beautiful and modern. How did you find it?
It started with a search on the Internet where I made a list of 100 houses in and around Vienna that I found on architecture websites and magazines and then the production company tried to contact the owners of these houses. In the end, we were allowed to visit 40 of these houses and made a short list of eight of them, which we again visited by day and night because we have a lot of night scenes as well. The house that made it finally into the film was the most interesting one for us because of its oddness. You enter it from the top, you have this long staircase that also plays a huge part in the thriller elements that happen later in the film. It’s very clean and modern and chic. But it’s also not bigger than we see it on film. There are no extra rooms, so there is no space left for thinking if there might have been a children’s room intended by Sophia and Matthias, for example.
You really do feel by the end as if you could walk around it and know every inch of the place. Was there a particular day of shooting that you were excited to pull off, given the difficulty of it?
The performance artist scene in the theater [that Matthias attends as someone’s date and has an emotional breakdown] was a very difficult scene. We were shooting with many extras [in a theater that was a full house]. We knew that it will be a very emotional and difficult scene to shoot with many different camera angles and Matthias moving throughout the sea [of theatergoers in the aisle], so that’s also technically challenging to film, but while we were on set and Albrecht played this breakdown, we already knew that this is going to be a great scene because it touched us. It all excited us a lot.
It’s a wonderful scene in the movie. What’s it been like getting this film out into the world?
It’s all been very overwhelming and exciting, traveling with the film all over the world. To see how different audiences react to it is something very beautiful because in the end, people laugh at the same moments and felt the same emotions and it made them think about the same problems of our societies. I’m very thankful for this wild journey, of course, and it’s highly motivating for the next projects.
“Peacock” is now available to rent and own on digital platforms including Apple TV, Prime Video and Google Play.