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“All Quiet on the Western Front” director Edward Berger gave a brief update on “The Riders,” his upcoming A24 film starring Brad Pitt. Speaking at Evolution Mallorca, where he is the recipient of this year’s Evolution Vision
Award, the filmmaker confirmed they have already shot the film, which he calls a “singular perspective story told through the eyes of Brad Pitt.”
“It’s a story of a man who’s renovating a cottage in the ’80s, in Ireland, waiting for his daughter and wife to show up,” he said of the story, which is adapted from the eponymous novel by Tim Winton. “Only the daughter shows up, and then they go on a European Odyssey to find [the wife.] [They go] to Greece, Brussels, Amsterdam… I won’t tell you what happens or if he finds her [laughs].”
A24 financed and will distribute the upcoming film. Frequent Luca Guadagnino collaborator David Kajganich (“Bones and All,” “Suspiria”) penned the screenplay, and producers include Ridley Scott’s Scott Free, Berger’s Nine Hours, Pitt’s Plan B, and Kajganich. Further cast includes Julianne Nicholson, Danny Huston, Camille Cottin, Michael Smiley, and Lara Pulver.
The director also briefly mentioned “The Riders” when speaking about one of his earlier films, the Berlinale breakout “Jack.” Both films have seen Berger work with children, with “Jack” starring then 12-year-old Ivo Pietzcker and “The Riders” starring seven-year-old Coco Greenstone as Pitt’s on-screen daughter.
“You have too many needs,” he recalled of shooting with a child star for “Jack.” “[Pietzcker] was shooting for six or eight weeks, so he needs a tutor for school, he needs someone to prep him […] The hard thing is the clock is running. We had an exemption from the city where we could shoot with him for six hours, and usually it’s five hours. Every day I literally got the shot one minute before the six hours. It’s really stressful.”
“And we just made a film with another kid,” he added of “The Riders.” “It was the same thing. It’s like every day you just get it just before they take them.”
Elsewhere in the career-spanning conversation at the leading Mallorcan festival, Berger spoke about some of his most successful films, including the four-time-Oscar-winning war drama “All Quiet on the Western Front.” The director recalled being offered the project by a longtime producer friend and having an immediate negative reaction because he was at a point in his career where he “wanted to make an English-language film.”
“‘Conclave’ was in the works already and was percolating,” he added. “But in the back of my mind, or actually in the front of my mind, I thought: I can’t escape this. It’s something that I am going to have to do.”
The Austrian-Swiss helmer said he felt “we were at a time where, and it’s only gotten worse, where international institutions that had brought us peace for a long time were being questioned. Nationalism was on the rise.”
“You know, a hundred years ago, life seemed glorious too,” he continued. “We seemed to be at a similar point and it felt like something that international audiences could also be interested in because we don’t usually see these films from the country [that] had actually originated those wars,” he added of Germany, the country where he was born. “To bring the feeling of weight that I grew up with—or responsibility or shame—into that movie seemed to be interesting to me, and to share that with people from around the world.”
As for his follow-up, the also Oscar-winning “Conclave,” Berger said it took him “two, three months to wash off” “All Quiet.” “It was almost traumatic afterwards.”
“Every day I came home from the edit, went swimming in the lake and tried to wash it off,” he added. “It felt like so much stress, so much chaos, so much destruction, and I kind of wanted order.”
“‘Conclave’ was very much inspired by 1970s films, Alan J. Pakula, political conspiracy thrillers like ‘All the President’s Men,’ ‘Klute,’ ‘The Parallax View,’” he noted of his creative process. “Those three films were the example for it. They have great editing rhythm and framing [of] people within the architecture.”
Berger felt that precise rhythm was “fitting” for a story that started from the image of several older men sitting in a room for long stretches of time. “I was scared that people wouldn’t be interested in watching a bunch of people vote for one Catholic [laughs]. So how do I make that interesting, you know?”
The director said he would make new cuts of the film every week and show it to his friends during the edit. “And they’d tear it apart,” he said. “They just go like, ‘Yeah, this was boring, this was great. You gotta go faster through this.’ I don’t want to get that after the premiere. I try to get it as good as possible, and you just don’t know because you lose perspective.”
