Maren Ade: Screenwriters’ Lecture

Maren Ade, writer and director  behind films including Toni Erdmann and Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen, has shared how she feels like “writing is a process that never stops for me”.

Speaking as part of BAFTA’s 2016 Screenwriters’ Lecture series Ade explored her journey into making films and her process.

• Read a full transcript of the event

Perhaps what is so attractive and engaging about Ade’s films is that it is almost as if there is no authored voice behind them. An honest examination of the relationships between ordinary people seems to be at the heart of her work, all dealt with compassionately and through an unfettered window of truth. Ade does not pretend to have any answers but invites her audience to form their own opinions and judgements.

The screenwriter’s  first full feature Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen (The Forest for the Trees, 2003) focused on a lonely, young teacher who moves to an urban school with unrealistic ambitions of changing the lives of her new pupils. She followed this up with Alle Anderen (Everyone Else, 2009) which was a sun-kissed portrait of love, sex and romance with a story that follows a young German couple who find their seemingly unbreakable relationship severely tested while holidaying in the Mediterranean. And now her most recent work, Toni Erdmann, is a fascinating depiction of an estranged father and his emotionally repressed adult daughter as he tries to re-forge their relationship, in the most unique and comic way.

Talking about her process Ade says: “You know there’s always one phase where I try to not censor myself. Just brainstorm, just follow my fantasy, no art police allowed or anything, just to write down, to be emotionally open to the topic and also to like yeah try to follow everything that comes into my mind, like to be in a creative mood…In some stage of the process it was about finding ideas, and in another phase it was about just writing really on the script.”