Michael Herbig Balloon Interview

Based On True Events

Cast: Friedrich Mücke, Karoline Schuch, David Kross, Alicia Von Rittberg, Thomas Kretschmann
Director: Michael Herbig
Rated: M
Running Time: 125 minutes

Synopsis: 1979, East Germany during the height of the Cold War.

Two ordinary families yearning for freedom secretly form a great escape plan to get across to the West. With courage and ingenuity as their main weapons, they build a hot air balloon with small pieces of cloth for their eight family-members to fly over the Iron Curtain. But an initial failure puts their entire plan in jeopardy, setting off a dangerous race against time for a second attempt, with the State Police now hot on their heels…

An incredible and gripping true story of resistance, Balloon flies into cinemas October 31.

Balloon
Release Date: October 31st, 2019

Question: How did the Strelzyk and Wetzel families react when they heard that Michael Bully Herbig wanted to bring their escape from East Germany by balloon back to the big screen? 

Interview with Michael Herbig, Director and Producer

Michael Herbig: My biggest worry, of course, was that they would think: A comedian from Bavaria making a film about us - is he having a laugh? But that was dismissed very quickly. They realised that my primary aim was to tell their story to a modern audience with modern viewing habits. We got to the contents very quickly. It was made this film.

Question: What did you find out about East Germany during your research?

Michael Herbig: It was basically a good thing for the preparations for the film to have taken over five years. Because during this time I was able to occupy myself with life in East Germany in depth. The theme suddenly became omnipresent. When you just see pregnant women everywhere. This is how it was for me with this topic. No matter who I met, wither privately or professionally, we ended up talking about the situation in East Germany at the time and successful and unsuccessful attempts to escape. Everyone was telling me stories they had either heard about or experienced themselves.


Question: You were eleven when the families successfully escaped in 1979.

Michael Herbig: I now literally feel more mature in terms of doing this story than I did 10 or 20 years ago. Becoming a father in the meantime has also helped me. I can better understand what it must mean to take your children up in a self-made hot-air balloon and therefore also risk their lives in order to give them a different future.


Question: A better future?

Michael Herbig: I simply about many people being dissatisfied and unhappy in East Germany. They felt imprisoned, controlled by others and were not allowed to say what they wanted. Accordingly, a lot of attempts were made to escape. For the most varied of reasons.


Question: What was special about the escape in the hot-air balloon?

Michael Herbig: For one thing, this story really did go around the world. This escape was so spectacular that Günter Wetzel is still giving talks on it today. And Peter Strelzyk, who sadly died a year ago, told me at our first meeting that he had even had autograph requests from Asia and America. I generally try to avoid saying that any escape attempts Every escape has its own explosive nature and its causes. But the balloon flight is, especially from a point of view, just incredible and adventurous. Of course I asked myself if there would be any point to tell a story on the big screen that had already been a film at the beginning of the eighties. But the longer I talked to the Strelzyk and Wetzel families and the more details became known from the Stasi files, the more I felt reassured that making the film from Germany for an international audience was the right thing.


 Question: You restrict yourself to the roles of director and producer. Or is there at least a Hitchcock-style cameo in there?
Michael Herbig: No. Out of deep conviction. There will definitely be people who find it hard to believe that Bully has made a thriller about East/West German history. Of course this is an entertaining movie too, but it is a very different genre. I know that with my face it is hard for me to change genres and I also have no ambitions in that respect. But if I am consistent and stay behind the camera and only push my name forward as much as is absolutely necessary, this genre change can work well. The star of the film is the story of the two families. And the balloon, which we have reconstructed in its original size.


Question: What did you attach importance to when assembling the cast and the team?

Michael Herbig: I wanted to have a certain DNA in this production. It was important to me that as many actors as possible, especially those in the minor roles, and as many of the team as possible had a connection to the East. Whether they grew up there or had friends and/or relatives in East Germany. When Nadja Engel, for example, who plays Günter Wetzel s mother in the film, was standing in front of our reconstructed Cooperative store, she said to me: That was proof to me that we were on the right track.


Question: Following on from Buddy and Bullyparade The Movie, you are continuing to work with cameraman Torsten Breuer. What colour concept did you agree on before you started?

Michael Herbig: Fortunately, it is possible to leave something like that open to a certain degree today and postpone the grading until post-production. Torsten Breuer wanted to move toward cyan in the grading and we worked on the patterns accordingly. The most important thing to me was that we should do a lot of work with backlight and strong contracts and not just show East Germany in dismal and colourless pictures.


Question: How did you achieve this aim?

Michael Herbig: Those people who wanted to flee East Germany in particular were, of course, well informed as to what people in the West wore. Our costume designer Lisy Christl implemented this outstandingly. The leading actors wear cool clothes. They may not always have been available in the shops but many people also wore self-made things. In East Germany you made the best of everything you could find. It was always important to me to portray the year 1979 authentically in a historical film without ever subjecting the roles to ridicule. Nobody should say: walking around! Those haircuts! Those clothes! And those funny cars!


Question: You always had a fondness of dialects in previous films. Did you ever think about using the Thüringen dialect in this story, which is, after all, set in Thüringen?

Michael Herbig: I did. But after the first tests we decided not to do it because some of the dialogue took on an involuntarily humorous element because of it. High German either. The sentences could be chucked about a bit so that the dialects could be surmised. With Friedrich Mücke, for instance, his East Berlin twang shows through and with Karoline Schuch this light Thüringen touch.

Balloon
Release Date: October 31st, 2019