Renowned German new wave artist and filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger returns to the Berlin International Film Festival, where she won an honorary Golden Bear in 2020, with a film that took decades to make.
The Bloody Countess, premiering at the special gala section of the Berlinale, is a baroque vampire mystery starring Isabelle Huppert as Countess Elisabeth Báthory, a 16th century Hungarian aristocrat who is branded a serial killer and immortalized in Gothic folklore.
The film, inspired by the life and legend of Bartley, was co-written by Oettinger and Nobel Prize in Literature winner Elfriede Jellinek, author of The Piano Teacher. In an interview with Variety, Ottinger, whose credits include “Madame
“I wrote the script last century in 1998, which sounds crazy now,” the filmmaker says with a laugh. “I’ve wanted to make this movie for a long time.”
She had Huppert in mind from the beginning as the lead role. “I’ve been talking to Isabelle for almost 20 years. I thought several times that it might finally happen, but financing was always difficult. This film costs money,” she says. Once the financing was finally arranged, Huppert “joined the team right away.”
In Oettinger’s reimagining, the Countess awakens from a centuries-long beauty slumber, awakens from the underworld, and embarks on a stylized journey through Vienna in search of blood. Accompanied by a devoted maid played by Birgit Minichmeier, she must protect a mysterious book that could threaten the vampire species. In her footsteps are Bathory’s vegetarian relative (Thomas Schubert), his psychotherapist (Lars Eidinger), two vampirologists, an inspector, and a bunch of eccentrics.
These colorful characters bring burlesque comic relief to the film. In The Bloody Countess, Ettinger says, “Everything is in pairs.” “The Countess and her maid, the rebel of the Bathory family, a vegetarian who wants nothing to do with blood, and his terrible therapist, played by Lars. The two pseudoscientific vampire experts function as a comedic duo,” she says. The director says she sees humor everywhere in everyday life, but that it “cannot remain naturalistic” in her films. “You have to structure it carefully,” she says.
The role given to Huppert is radically different from her previous films. “What’s interesting about Isabel is that she’s usually associated with very psychological, carefully constructed roles. The Countess is symbolic here. It’s not a psychological role,” Ettinger says. “She was autocratic and in complete control of her surroundings,” Huppert added, “bringing charm and grace to her authority.”
Huppert, who has worked in a variety of languages including English, Italian and Russian, speaks in both French and German in the film. “Huppert studied German and Minichmeyer studied French. Their dialogue naturally occurs between German and French, just as people live between cultures.”
The film, which had a budget of 8 million euros and was made with major support from Austria and Luxembourg, was shot in just 30 days. “I wish we had more time,” Oettinger admits. “We rehearsed at night and worked all the time when we weren’t filming. Everyone was very dedicated.”
Vienna is also a character in the movie, Ottinger said. The idea to set the vampire myth in Vienna dates back to a trip in 1998. Driving from Prague through Bohemia to Vienna, she visited cities that captured her imagination. “That journey inspired the vampire genre in my head,” she says. “Vienna’s history is layered and often grotesque. The depth of this history was very inspirational for the writing.”
Like many genre films, the film has contemporary political resonance. “If you look at the world today, you see very wealthy people investing huge sums of money to live forever,” Ettinger says. “It feels like vampires to refuse to accept our human destiny. We are born and we die. It is arrogant to deny that.”
Despite the resurgence of vampire movies and TV series in recent years, Ottinger says he hasn’t tried to update his scripts to keep up with the trend. “I didn’t follow genre norms. I used the vampire genre in a non-traditional way and used it freely and artistically,” she said of the film, which is represented internationally by Magnify in the European film market.
As for what’s next, the director is already eyeing an “ambitious and expensive” project set in the diamond business, with Anjelica Huston and others in talks.
