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HEAVENLY BODIESDirector Christian Alvart chats to Jason Arnopp about his controversial movie Antibodies and who the best Hannibal Lecter was...
Christian Alvart is the director of Antibodies, known in his native Germany as Antikorper. A young fella, somewhat resembling Korn frontman Jonathan Davis, he's a pleasure to chat to him in this central London hotel room.Antibodies is the story of smalltown cop Michael Martens (Wotan Wilke Mohring), who is assigned the unenviable task of interviewing serial killer Gabriel Engel (Andre Hennicke) in jail. A depraved child killer/rapist, Engel takes a Hannibal Lecter-esque glee in toying with Martens' mind. As the film progresses, and the cop's worldview seems to distort, we start to wonder: can evil really spread, like a virus? Hello Sir! So can evil be caught like a cold? Christian: "No. I was using this whole idea, to underline a point. But I certainly think that everything we do has a moral consequence. We can influence each other too, in a certain way - our friends, our sons, our parents. We have a moral responsibility to bring good into the world and not evil. I exaggerated this a little bit, and made evil into a virus." Antibodies pulls few punches when it comes to discussing such taboo topics as paedophilia, in particular. Were your producers at all nervous about this? Christian: "No, if they'd been nervous I'd have seen a lot of warning signs along the line! Antibodies is my first film to get a wide release, too, but I met no resistance in making it." Did your first film, Curiosity & The Cat (1999), have much in common with Antibodies? Christian: “Well, I'm interested in moral issues, so they always seem to appear in my work. The story was about a guy who spies on his neighbour. It was more self-contained, because I couldn't afford a big budget: we rented out an empty warehouse and built two apartments in it." 
Antibodies inevitably draws comparisons with Silence Of The Lambs. You even make a reference to Hannibal Lecter in your movie itself!Christian: “Sure. I've got a killer talking through prison bars in Antibodies, so I really had to reference it before anyone did! I was aware of the danger of being compared to it, so I went to great lengths to set myself apart from that movie - right down to how I designed Engel's cell. Maybe my cell would be more like Silence Of The Lambs' if that movie hadn't existed! My whole story is very different from Silence and how it plays out is different. What I was trying to do with Antibodies was make the opening sequence like a classic serial killer movie ending, with the big showdown. My movie opens from that point. I'm also proud to say that we achieved a dark tone without resorting to rain and darkness and flashy stuff. It's the story that's disturbing." I guess you can't be too worried about comparisons, or you'd never repeat certain situations. After Silence Of The Lambs, does that mean no-one can ever have a cop interviewing a jailed killer again? “Exactly. But that wasn't the starting point. It's not like I was inspired by Silence Of The Lambs to make this film. When I was developing the story, I realised that there were certain similarities and had to decide whether I would still make this film. I thought, 'What the hell'." Who's your favourite Hannibal Lecter; Brian Cox in xxxx's Manhunter, or good ol' Anthony Hopkins? “I loved Brian Cox, and I think Manhunter is the best film with Hannibal Lecter in it, but Anthony Hopkins was great too." Andre Hennicke is chilling as Gabriel Engel. What's he like as a person? “He's a very nice guy. Obviously, the structure and whole story is different from Silence Of The Lambs, but we knew that Engel wasn't anything like Hannibal Lecter. And I didn't want that, because the story deals with subjects like paedophilia. To have a pop culture feel, with everyone admiring Engel would spoil the movie's intentions. So we decided to have an evil, believable guy, instead of some great hero." I'm getting tired of movies with pseudo-evil characters, who don't seem so bad when you learn about their pasts. “Yeah, that's what I hate. 'Someone stole my breakfast when I was six, so I've become a mass murderer!'. It's kinda silly." It's like with the Ringu/Ring movies: the more you learn about Sadako (or Samara), the less scary she becomes. “Yeah. You feel pity. And it makes no sense for the sequel, because you felt pity in the first one and now she's supposed to be scary and evil again." One of the most disquieting things about Engel is his pitch-black humour - the viewer has to decide whether or not to laugh. “Yeah. That's meant to make the audience feel uneasy. They're laughing and then the next second they're like, 'Oh, what am I laughing at?'. But if you walk through real life you realise that most of the time the most wicked people have that sense of humour. They're so outside society that they can judge it. There's one joke which starts fights in Germany: when the warden gets asked if he fucks his own children. It's the most uneasy joke there. People crucify me for saying that I think it's a joke. I don't. It's Engel's humour. It's not unthinkable to him, but it is to us. A lot of people laugh at it." There's a horrible scene in which a bedridden Engel describes what he did to one boy. Was that difficult for Andre to play? “No, not at all. He's fascinated by the subject matter and did a lot of research himself. When we met the first time, to speak about the part, he said, 'We're not just talking about any movie, we're talking about the truth'. That scared me! He told me about how he had to kill an animal once, when he was 16. I thought, 'This guy's really weird, but he's perfect for the movie'. Thankfully, that turned out to be his weirdest day. Whenever I met him after that, he was a totally nice guy. As it turned out, he'd always wanted to play a part like this. In his eyes, this was the perfect screenplay for him. A good match." The opening sequence must've been fun to film. “It was a fun sequence to conceptualise, but not a fun one to film. We shot for seven weeks, and that was one week. The film is 127 minutes long - and there'll be a longer version released in Germany - so I had to come up with a schedule which allowed me to shoot five minutes a day, which is a lot. Shooting the final sequence, I was cut down to one minute a day: you're suddenly waiting for explosions and things to be set up, which is boring. On one record-breaking day, we shot nine minutes of 'cell footage'." The remarkable final sequence, involving deer, is presumably open to various interpretations... "Yes, and this was intentional. I'm still... amazed how many interpretations there have been! At least three of them were intended, and I've since heard some which make me go, 'Oh, I don't mind that!'. When I was in the middle of the second draft, I hated the original intended ending, and changed it. The original ending never really appeared on paper. The final ending just felt right: it's very close to my heart and personal." Are the deer CGI? I couldn't tell. "Yeah, they were. It's funny. Some people come out of the movie saying, 'Oh, they're so obviously CGI' and others say, 'How did you get the deer to do that?'. So there's a vast variety of receptions! That scene took six months of work. I'm still not entirely satisfied, but we were in post-production and had to finish it. Nature is so complex and you always have to simplify stuff." Your deer are as good as any other CGI animals, such as the ones in The Ring. "Yes, those were worse. They all looked the same! I was very proud." Antibodies hits UK Region 2 DVD on January 29, 2007 through Tartan Video. 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