Is there anything left that passes for normality in today's reality? And if so, who is qualified to say what is normal? Or
to put the question at a more fundamental level: does something like reality even exist? In his first feature film HOW TO BE NORMAL AND THE ODDNESS OF THE OTHER WORLD, Florian Pochlatko simply dismantles the boundaries of the levels of perception. He takes the thoughts of his protagonist
Pia, who is trying to reconnect with the outside world after a stay in a psychiatric hospital, and creates a profound kaleidoscope
packed with wit and references, against the backdrop of a crumbling world.
HOW TO BE NORMAL AND THE ODDNESS OF THE OTHER WORLD is your feature film debut. You rise to this challenge by employing a
very wide range of approaches. Rather than narrating a plot, your film depicts inner states which you make visible with innumerable
brief images. What did that mean for the writing process?
FLORIAN POCHLATKO: My background is in improvisational work within a collective. I couldn’t make a feature film that way, which is one of the
obstacles I faced; I had to have a script prepared in advance. So I tried to incorporate the improvisational and collective
work in the script. There was a very intense period of 20 months when I was weaving the research material into a screenplay.
Before that, I had immersed myself in the subject matter by means of countless interviews and accounts of personal experiences,
and I went through the material and the storyline with a lot of people.
How early was humour a dominant factor?
FLORIAN POCHLATKO: Humour is a matter of attitude. You can't force it. We tend to think of mental illness as a worrying subject, or as a classic
horror genre. And clearly always an incredibly difficult topic. That's why I felt it was important to create something that
people can laugh about together – and laugh about themselves, too.
Your protagonist, Pia, has a mental illness that isn’t clearly identified. Did you deliberately not want to place her within
a specific diagnosis?
FLORIAN POCHLATKO: Psychiatric patients will tell you that many of them are diagnosed with different conditions during the course of their lives.
It also depends on cultural factors. Gender and skin colour often play a role, too. The European catalogue of mental illnesses
differs from that in the USA. It’s a spectrum without any clear lines of demarcation. By not naming her illness, I’m refusing
to frame the character within a clinical description. These days in particular we are quick to label people with a diagnosis
when we find their behaviour puzzling or disturbing. But it's not that simple.
Framing is an important keyword here. In HOW TO BE NORMAL AND THE ODDNESS OF THE OTHER WORLD, you play with various formats:
are these concrete references to certain media?
FLORIAN POCHLATKO: If you talk to younger people, they see strong connotations between formats and Internet language. The first filmmaker to
consciously work with 4:4, which was certainly influenced by Instagram, was Xavier Dolan with Mommy in 2014, and this format very quickly established itself in the grammar of film language as a universal image of being constricted.
I wondered how I could continue to tell a story based on this grammar. HOW TO BE NORMAL AND THE ODDNESS OF THE OTHER WORLD
is very much about the way different models of reality intersect. The rounded window was an important tool for me, because
on the one hand it makes the framing aesthetically very concretely visible, while at the same time it’s immediately associated
with Internet aesthetics. That led to the conclusion that leaps between formats should determine the visual language, as a
way of corresponding visually with the different worlds that comprise people’s perception these days.
You juxtapose two worlds – the psychiatric hospital and the world of work – without adopting a position on which is the less
free ...
FLORIAN POCHLATKO: I felt that these contrasts, and the mutual undermining of different models of reality, was appropriate. The Matrix is now 25 years old. It has become one of the emblematic films about our present world of capitalism and the Internet society.
The punchline of The Matrix was the question What is real? In a recent interview, Keanu Reeves tried to explain the theme of The Matrix to a Generation Alpha teenager, whose response was that living in a simulation wouldn’t bother him, as long as it felt real.
That prompted me to develop a narrative where it’s essentially irrelevant what the dream level is and what the supposed real
level is. In recent years, an aesthetic of hyperrealism has developed. In design, for example, you see things pop up that
look as if they come from secondary media reality like graphic novels, anime or computer games. For me, that’s aesthetic evidence
that a psychotic outlook and the general perception of the world are suddenly no longer so dissimilar. One new plot twist
follows the next, and nothing surprises you anymore. What's next? Jeff Bezos is building a huge phallic rocket to fly into
space? Elon Musk rides into the White House astride Donald Trump with his arm outstretched in a Nazi salute, to the soundtrack
of YMCA? A far right politician Austrian Chancellor? Climate change: fake news? Oh, everything really is happening right now.
Collective psychosis: the world.
HOW TO BE NORMAL AND THE ODDNESS OF THE OTHER WORLD also strikes me as quite simply the story of a conflict between generations.
FLORIAN POCHLATKO: Yes, absolutely. The very first starting point for HOW TO BE NORMAL AND THE ODDNESS OF THE OTHER WORLD was the generation
conflict. How has an older generation defined itself socially, and how has a younger generation responded? In Austria, the
post-war generation grew up lacking the power of speech. Everything was swallowed back. Problems ignored until they blow up
in your face. This was followed by a generation with an extreme need to scream out all these suppressed emotions. That's how
my characters were formed. I wanted to force these generations to get along under the same roof again.
How did you discover Luisa-Céline Garron for the role of Pia?
FLORIAN POCHLATKO: When I met Luisa, the script only existed as a rough sketch. We met in her apartment in Prenzlauer Berg and ended up perched
on removal boxes, exchanging ideas about attitude and concepts of filmmaking. It was immediately clear to me that I wanted
to work with her, and I wrote the script with Luisa in mind. We just tuned in to each other for two years, came on set and
were completely on the same page as far as our narrative was concerned. Cinematographer Adrian Bidron hadn't even made a short
film before HOW TO BE NORMAL AND THE ODDNESS OF THE OTHER WORLD, but with his sensitive nature and romantic penchant for magical
realism, I didn't doubt for a second that he was simply the right person for this project. After all, my background is strict
Austrian social realism. But now I wanted to make an Austrian graphic novel, to create an artificiality that entails a dissociative
approach to life.
The ever-present question relates to the self, the other and the alien.
FLORIAN POCHLATKO: The disintegration of the sense of self is a powerful theme. It's very difficult to generalise about mental illness, but
a friend of mine who is a psychiatric doctor once said that the feeling underpinning all manifestations is fear. And I also
believe that anxiety has become the background noise in our society. That's why I chose humour as a means of expression: I
felt it was crucial to learn to laugh at anxiety, because if you can laugh at it, you have learned to name it – and that makes
it smaller, more tangible and more vulnerable. I myself had an extreme anxiety disorder for ten years. And maybe that was
what originally prompted me to make a film like this.
There are TV bulletins off-screen featuring natural disasters, there’s the collapse of the family business where Pia's father
had his career... How did the general fragility of the world become the background noise of HOW TO BE NORMAL AND THE ODDNESS
OF THE OTHER WORLD?
FLORIAN POCHLATKO: I studied with Michael Haneke for a long time, and it's a relic from the old school approach to write down what TV news sounds
like. To capture the current state of the world. I just wanted to work with the form of the graphic novel or on a magic realist
fairy tale level. The reports I put into the script are two years old now, but they could have been recorded yesterday. Since
then, a lot of companies have gone out of business, there was inflation – which unsettled everyone – and since then fascism
has been able to spread. The world does something to you emotionally. A lot of people sense that and wonder how to deal with
being so overwhelmed that they can’t escape just with their mobile phones. I wanted to make a film for the whole broken family.
But the last sentence is... "The future is bright."
FLORIAN POCHLATKO: I don't think I'm a cultural pessimist. If the world can be ruined in two generations, I believe it will also be possible
to rebuild it in two generations. At the moment, however, the world feels really quite wild.
Editing also seems to have played a particularly important role in this film?
FLORIAN POCHLATKO: It was a huge risk, making a film that ventured so far from the beaten track without playing it safe. Just a lot of hard
work. Not least during the months of editing, together with Julia Drack. She carried me through the process, and it was important
to have someone who was so experienced, sensitive and patient. The fact that this balancing act has worked out is mainly thanks
to the editing work. It was really tricky, because the film was permanently on the verge of collapsing. For us, the script
was fragmentary, the shooting very classic, and the editing was something between emotional feeling and rational balance.
I had brought people on board whose talent I valued but who didn't have any feature film experience. But then you also need
a few key positions with a lot of experience to carry things through; in my case it was the production company, Golden Girls
Film, and the editor, Julia Drack. You need a backbone. People on your side as assistant directors or production management,
people with a black belt in karate.
Interview: Karin Schiefer
January 2025
Translation: Charles Osborne
