Interview: Fatih Akin on the Visual Language of In the Fade

The idea for  In The Fade came to Fatih Akin in 2011 when a news story broke and angered him. The film looks at the rise of neo-Nazi as immigrants strive to integrate into society. Diane Kruger is excellent as the mother who goes after the of white nationalists when her husband and son are murdered after a terror attack occurs.

The film is an incredibly powerful look at racism, hatred and terror. Fatih and I had a chance to catch up while he was in L.A. We discussed his casting decisions and how events that happened in 2011 triggered his creative process.

I do remember the turmoil that erupted in Germany back in 2010 and 2011 because I was living in London and read about them. What was the genesis for your film?

It was in 2011 around November and I was so mad and angry about the whole thing. I knew about the killings. I read about the investigation theories and the media theories about how the killings were done by the Kurdish or Turkish mafia — just because the victims were foreigners and there was racism from the mainstream. As it turns out, they were all wrong and so it made me mad. I sat down and started writing.

What made you choose to make the lead a woman?

When I started writing this with my political motivations, I reached a lot of dead ends in the structure and it was boring. At that time, the hero of the film was a male character. When I kept hitting these dead ends, I started thinking about what if this happened to a mother, what would happen then? Immediately the dead ends were resolved. The advantage of changing it was that it then became less political. By saying that, the mother is such a character who so many people can identify with. The manner of the terror attacks didn’t matter, it could be jihadists and the motivation became more in the fade. I liked that, to be honest.

Your casting is outstanding. How did you come across the idea of casting Diane?

Once I had decided that this was going to be done by a woman and a German female actress, the usual suspects came to mind, but none really felt right. It wasn’t spectacular enough and then I remembered I met Diane back in 2012 at the Cannes Film Festival and we had a nice chat that night. She said back then that she wanted to work with me and I remembered that chat so I thought it would be different. She usually doesn’t work in Germany so I sent her the treatment. She responded immediately and she liked it. We met and the moment we met, I felt she was the right one.

There’s such great visual language in the film. One scene that pops into mind is the bathtub scene. Talk about what you wanted to create with the language there.

When the structure was set up in the screenplay, it’s three parts. It’s this one woman going through three different stages. I felt like I wanted to help the audience to accept these stages. I came up with the idea of shooting the film in three different parts and to confirm that it would look like three different styles.

In the first part of the film, she’s very hurt. She’s not in focus and she’s not in the middle of the framing. I shot her to confirm that she wasn’t very steady. I’m a pop culture kid, I know I do this auteur stuff, but I always do genres.

At that time, I discovered Arkham Asylum, a graphic novel. It belongs to the Batman series and is where all the bad guys go. Those comics are painted and not done on computers. The lighting is in the background so you’ll see how bright the background is. I showed it to my DP and said I wanted some of it to look like that. He’s not a big comic reader, but he knew what I was talking about.

The middle part, I felt she was steady. It’s about justice. She was shot in the center and everyone is in the center. I can talk for hours about the visuals.

What conversations do you want to start because you were driven by a story that was happening?

First of all, it’s about racism and that’s a global issue. It’s uncomfortable but because it’s uncomfortable, it doesn’t help if we avoid a conversation about it. I want to keep the dialogue about racism open and alive. To make it attractive to the audience, I tried to make this film as entertaining as possible. It’s an entertaining film with an issue you can talk about. Once they talk about the film, they can reflect the world in which they live in.