Valerie Pachner was rehearsing a play in Munich when the Austrian actress got a call from a casting agent. The opportunity: an audition for legendary director Terrence Malick’s new movie.
So, at the first opportunity, she went to McDonald’s.
“I had nothing to prepare,” explained Pachner during a November visit to San Francisco. “All I knew was it was for Terrence Malick. I didn’t even know what it was about. But at that time, I just had a new apartment and didn’t have Wi-Fi yet. I was working until 10, 11 p.m. at night. So what I did is I went to McDonald’s that was close to my place and streamed ‘Tree of Life’ sitting in the back of McDonald’s. Sorry, Fox!”
Figure that Fox Searchlight Pictures is in a forgiving mood. Pachner nailed the audition and embarked on a four-year, life-changing cinematic journey to make the studio’s “A Hidden Life,” a three-hour character-driven World War II story aboutFranz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), an Austrian farmer who was a conscientious objector, refusing to fight for Hitler, and his wife Franziska (Pachner), who must carry on the family farm after he’s arrestedand raise their three daughters while being ostracized by their fellow villagers.
The film is based on the letters the Jägerstätters sent to each other during his years of imprisonment before his execution.
像许多马利克的电影——“荒地”,”的一天s of Heaven,” “The Thin Red Line,” “The New World” — the movie’s world is epic in scope but seen through the prism of his characters’ inner thoughts and feelings.
“There is a huge freedom that he gives you in so many ways,” Pachner said. “In the sense of time, because he gives you 20- to 30-minute takes; in the sense of space, because you have those wide angles and you can just move around. You don’t have to land on a specific mark. It was very free. … For me that was wonderful, because I like being as free as possible.
“He encouraged us to improvise and to come up with our own ideas, which was just great because you felt like you were not just an actress. You were also a collaborator.”
It was a wise choice on Malick’s part, as Pachner no doubt brought a lot of herself to the film. Like the Jägerstätters, she was raised in a small Austrian farming village. Her hometown of Bad Schallerbach is not far away from Sankt Radegund, where the Jägerstätters lived.
Pachner said when they were filming in the actual Jägerstätter farmhouse, she experienced a wave of emotions when Franz and Franziska’s daughters, now in their 80s, visited.
“They still live in that area,” Pachner said. “I’m from the area where they grew up, and we speak the same dialect. We were shooting in the bedroom — therealbedroom — and that was really intense. … We just sort of held hands, and we have had a friendship ever since. I had my hair done down for the scene, and (one of the daughters) put it back up the way her mother would wear it. It was just very intense.”
While the Jägerstätter daughters stayed in the area, raising families (two of them married farmers), Pachner — whose mother was a teacher and father the manager of a small food company — couldn’t wait to leave Bad Schallerbach.
“For me there was always a sense of wanting to get out, to get away,” she said. “And that was linked to my wanting to become an actress. … Acting was a way to get to know other worlds, to get to know other people. That was my ticket to the world, to freedom.”
But while she had the urge to act, she didn’t know how to begin a career. Instead, Pachner enrolled in an exchange program and spent a year in Honduras, working as a teacher, physical therapist, translator — even doing some theater with street kids.
“That was very important for me,” Pachner said. “It gave me a sense of injustice in the world. I wanted to change the world. So I studied international development in Vienna. And it was weird because I realized there was this acting thing that is not going away. I was always looking for groups studying theater or auditions.”
At long last, she auditioned to join the famed Max Reinhardt Seminar, a drama school in Vienna, and was admitted as a student. She might not have changed the world, but she changedherworld. Pachner fell in love with the theater, and was an ensemble member of the prestigiousResidenztheaterin Munich when the call came for the Malick audition.
At the time, she had only made one film, a low-budget Austrian ensemble movie (“Bad Luck”), but was not enamored with the movie business. She said she thought films were “superficial” but admitted later during the San Francisco interview that she had a bit of an inferiority complex about them.
“I always felt that I was, I don’t know, not pretty enough or weird,” Pachner said. “I always felt stage was more my world. So this is pretty unexpected.”
The journey with Malick has changed her mind. She was 28 when she was cast in “A Hidden Life,” in 2015. After a year of preparation and rehearsal, the company filmed in 2016, and Malick then spent two years editing the film. Pachner said she visited Malick twice at his home base in Austin, Texas, during the editing process, and she and Diehl recorded voice-overs from different locations as the film was taking shape.
Pachner relocated to Berlin this year and has made more films since wrapping “A Hidden Life.” She plays a villain in the upcoming “The King’s Man,” a prequel to the “Kingsman” series. A German LGBTQ psychological thriller, “The Ground Beneath My Feet,” played at San Francisco’s Frameline festival in June.
The press tour for “A Hidden Life” means she has barely spent time in her new Berlin apartment, which she moved into in August. She fell in love with Berlin, though, during previous visits. So her world has changed again in a city that is ever-changing.
“I love how it’s free, and also how it’s dealing with its history. There’s this huge scar there with the Wall, and I like they don’t try to hide that,” she said. When asked what she was going to do when she finally gets back to her new hometown, she laughed.
“Sleep! And have some good coffee in my neighborhood. And walk. Take long walks.”
“A Hidden Life”周五开始,12月20日,在海湾地区上映。