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Stefan Ruzowitzky, who won an Oscar for “The Counterfeiters,” is at the Locarno Film Festival on Friday for the world premiere in the iconic Piazza Grande venue of his crime thriller “Hinterland.” He speaks to Variety about the film, which Beta Cinema is selling worldwide.

“Hinterland” centers on a former Austrian prisoner of war, Peter Perg, who returns home to Vienna in 1920. Everything has changed. The once mighty Austro-Hungarian Empire has crumbled, the imperial dynasty has been replaced by a republic, and myriad artistic, political and intellectual movements are questioning the old certainties. When a serial killer starts to pick off military veterans, Perg, a former detective, is brought in to investigate.

“Hinterland” was shot almost exclusively on blue screen, with the background depicting a distorted vision of Vienna inspired by Expressionist classic “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” reflecting Perg’s jaundiced view of Austrian society. Ruzowitzky comments: “In these new times after the Great War, nothing feels right and straightforward to men like Perg; everything seems deformed and out of kilter.”


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One of the things that attracted Ruzowitzky to the project was the aesthetic approach. “I was tempted to try something completely new and really use VFX – not to mimic reality – but to create a stylized reality,” he says.

Another factor that attracted him was the period. “If you do some research, you find out that the First World War was culturally a much bigger shock for people [in Austria] than the Second World War. And after the First World War, all these new political ideas, National Socialism, Communism… came along as well as new ideas like Dadaism and Surrealism in art and literature. People said, ‘What we’ve seen so far, it’s not true.’ And, ‘We can’t trust in the values and the ways of before the First World War’; whereas after the Second World War, it was the 50s, Doris Day and Marilyn Monroe – everything clean, and ‘Let’s not talk about [the war] anymore.’

“After the First World War, this was super interesting. So much changed. And to have a protagonist who’s faced with these changes, and has to deal with them, and to find out that they are not only a change to the world, but that there’s also something in it for him, I think that was interesting to work with.”

There is a renewed interest in the 1920s in Germany and Austria, Ruzowitzky says, as it is seen as an important period in terms of understanding what happened afterwards.

“In the last 30-40 years, for good reason, we have been obsessed with the Second World War, the Nazis and the Holocaust, because this generation was still alive, and it was absolutely necessary for society to deal with National Socialism while these people were still around, politicians who had a Nazi past, and judges and artists and whatever. And so it was all about that period of time. Because of that, the First World War, and the years right after that were never really an issue here, but in a way, it’s coming back.”