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Isabelle Huppert vampire film “The Blood Countess” lost as much as 20 minutes against the wishes of its director, Ulrike Ottinger, the veteran German filmmaker said at the Tokyo International Film Festival, which is hosting
a retrospective of her work.
In “The Blood Countess” (“Die Blutgräfin”), Huppert plays a vampire countess who resurfaces in present-day Vienna. Lars Eidinger and Burgtheater actor Birgit Minichmayr co-star. The film world-premiered at the Berlinale in February.
Ottinger said her preferred version ran 15 to 20 minutes longer. “The film originally had a wonderful rhythm, exactly as it was. Then I began cutting it because everyone was forcing me to. Once I started shortening it, the rhythm no longer worked,” she said at a German cinema evening at the festival.
She then had to recut the whole film to restore its balance at the shorter length. “From my point of view, it’s perfect now, but it was a big job to rework it again,” Ottinger said.
“This was indeed the most expensive film I’ve ever made,” Ottinger said. She had wanted 40 shooting days but the production gave her 30, and her crew topped 100 people. She said she would rather have worked with half that number, more closely together, and had more days in return.
“What makes it so expensive today are these extremely extensive safety measures. Some of them are very important, but a great many are completely excessive, senseless and bureaucratic,” Ottinger said.
When she produced her own films, she could make them at high quality for €2.5 million–€3 million ($2.9 million–$3.5 million). Today, she said, meeting all the requirements means a budget of no less than €7 million–€8 million ($8 million–$9.2 million). “That’s also why I no longer produce my own films,” she said.
The principal cast were all her own picks. Ottinger said Huppert had stayed with the project for 20 years, while Eidinger was very enthusiastic about taking part. “What I need in my film are actors who can always play something different,” she said.
Vienna supplied much of the inspiration, from the Narrenturm and an underground lake to the Habsburg burial sites and the dynasty’s practice of triple burial. “All these things inspired me very much. That’s also why I chose the vampire genre,” Ottinger said. Nihon University German film professor Shibuya Tetsuya, who gave an introductory lecture on German cinema, noted that the film even features a vegetarian vampire.
Ottinger, who came to filmmaking from the visual arts, described herself as an outsider in German cinema, making image-driven films rather than psychological dramas. “Perhaps when you get older, critics no longer dare to attack you quite so readily,” she said.
The Tokyo retrospective also includes “Ticket of No Return,” the first part of her Berlin Trilogy, and “Under Snow” (2011), shot in Niigata’s snow country and on Sado Island.
Barbara Wurm, the Austrian head of the Berlinale’s Forum section, appeared later at the same event in a discussion of contemporary German cinema. “It probably sounds as though German film funding is absolutely wonderful. That impression would only be half right,” she said.
Since Jan. 1, 2025, production support from Germany’s federal film board, the FFA, has been allocated automatically on the basis of a film’s admissions and festival success, replacing the board’s own jury selection. Wurm said that, where juries once evaluated screenplays and applications, producers now receive money for their next project only if a previous film screened at particular festivals or reached a set number of viewers, and must also make audience projections.
“This is a funding model geared toward a small number of films receiving large amounts of money. That’s not beneficial for the breadth of the film landscape,” she said, adding that smaller films and documentaries lose out.
“At present, we’re not on this reference list. That means the films that screen with us don’t get this funding,” Wurm said of the Forum.
The FFA’s current festival list awards points to German films selected for the Berlinale’s Competition, Panorama, Generation and Perspectives sections, as well as to Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight and Venice’s Orizzonti and Critics’ Week. The Forum, which is curated independently by the Arsenal film institute, is not included.
“For the diversity of the film landscape, I would always argue for the opposite, namely funding many films, including small and unseen ones,” Wurm said.
Federal funding has also swung sharply. Culture minister Wolfram Weimer nearly doubled the government’s economic film funding to €250 million ($288 million) for 2026, money that has already been used up, while the 2027 budget draft plans about €200 million ($230 million), subject to parliamentary approval. Jury-based cultural film funding continues alongside the automatic system.
“What’s important isn’t your passport. What’s important is that you’re working predominantly with a German production company,” Wurm said of filmmakers from abroad. She added that film schools are now so mixed that one can no longer speak of a majority of German filmmakers.
