Daniel Kehlmann, Volker Schlöndorff
Charisma in Film: Found or Created?
Volker Schlöndorff (Berlin) in conversation with Daniel Kehlmann (Berlin/New York)
Can a director sense an actor’s magnetism before the camera rolls, or does it only appear in the work? Why is presence in a room so often different from presence on screen? How much of directing is imposing a vision, and how much is making others want to follow? Is the quality that makes a performer compelling related to what makes a demagogue compelling? Did the New German Cinema demand charisma of its directors, or is that a myth built in hindsight? And after sixty years behind the lens, does the camera discover charisma, or create it?
Daniel Kehlmann is a novelist, playwright and essayist, whose novels have become the most successful in the postwar German world. His work has been translated into more than 40 languages. He has been awarded the Candide Prize, the Per Olov Enquist Prize, the Thomas Mann Prize, and the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize, and two of his novels were shortlisted for the International Booker Prize (Tyll, 2020, and The Director, 2024) He is a member of the German Academy for Language and Literature and the Advisory Board of the Einstein Forum.
Volker Schlöndorff is a German film director, screenwriter, and producer best known for his film adaptations of literary works. In 1980, his feature film Die Blechtrommel, based on Günter Grass’ famous postwar novel, won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1979. Schlöndorff has been a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin since 1993. He is also a founding member of the Friends of the Murnau Foundation, and his works have been honored with numerous awards. His latest film Heimsuchung, based on the novel of the same name by Jenny Erpenbeck, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2026.