Daily life as a teacher can be quite exhausting. Especially when you fail more and more in your efforts to teach something to the offspring. When the routine gets out of hand. That is why in “Der Rausch” four teacher friends (portrayed by Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Magnus Millang and Lars Ranthe) get together to start a “drinking experiment” out of frustration: The assumption: if each of them always keeps a decent alcohol level, then teaching is fun again, and the kids also remember something of what you say. Of course, that only works at the beginning of the film.
“Der Rausch”, which has not yet been shown in the cinema due to the pandemic, is due to hit the screens in July. The Danish director Thomas Vinterberg (“Das Fest”) already has the chance to win the Academy Award for the best foreign language film at the Academy Awards next Sunday.
“Wiener Zeitung”: You have repeatedly said that “Der Rausch” is an homage to alcohol. What do you mean?
Thomas Vinterberg: Alcohol is generally vilified, and everywhere there is only “political correctness” in this regard. I, on the other hand, show in “Der Rausch” how indispensable alcohol is as a social factor. In fact, my basic idea was to create a cinematic monument to alcohol, but this corset quickly turned out to be too tight. Because alcohol determines many areas of our life, you have to be aware of that first. Think about where alcohol played a role: for example, when you got to know most people! Many a married couple fell in love on a wet and happy evening. But great political figures also made far-reaching decisions when alcohol was involved, and I’m not even talking about the greatest artists of our days or those of the past. That’s the page. But alcohol also kills people, it can ruin entire families. Tobias Lindholm, who wrote the script with me, and I myself have both people around us who are affected by it.
In “Der Rausch” you mix satirical elements in this really serious attempt by these teachers to drink themselves back into life with alcohol.
The concept was to be dutiful, to be accurate, not to take a position, but to plot the plot as a human investigation. You make a study out of it, which of course fails at some point. The film does not demonize the alcohol, but shows light and shadow. We didn’t want to be moralistic, I generally never want that – not in life and not in my films either. But the film is already a reaction to moralizing in society.
What is the basic question you asked yourself about this film?
Why do we like to drink so much? Very easily. I think everyone can see that this is about the destructive power of alcohol, but also about the factors that influence us when we drink. I got a lot of reactions to the film from Alcoholics Anonymous who were really excited that the film was serious about them and recognized the reasons why people pick up the bottle.
Did the actors on set have an obligation to drink alcohol?
No, I didn’t want that! We had an intense preparatory phase during which we practiced how to play drunk people without them appearing like a cartoon.
The shooting of this film was overshadowed by a terrible personal tragedy.
Four days after we started filming, I received news that my 19-year-old daughter Ida had been killed in a car accident on her way back from Paris. My world collapsed, there are no words for it. I even gave her a role in the film. The only reason I could go on was a letter she wrote me from Africa a few months earlier after reading the script. She loved the script, she encouraged me to implement it. I was very close with her and valued her opinion on my work. There was absolutely no point in continuing to shoot the film. At the same time, it made no sense to break it off, because I knew: Ida would absolutely want me to finish the film. So we decided to do the film for you. It was the only way for me to keep working.
Did this tragedy give you another meaning for “Der Rausch”?
I’m not sure because the event is still too fresh to process. At the moment I would perhaps put it this way: The film saved me. The team picked me up and gave me so much compassion, without which I probably wouldn’t have made it through this time.
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