Matthias Schweighöfer moves playfully between Oppenheimer, Zack Snyder’s Netflix empire and the German provinces. In this interview, he talks about Girl You Know It’s True, Hollywood and Emily Blunt’s humor
Matthias Schweighöfer is the modern Marilyn Monroe: everyone wants a piece of him. In Army of the Dead, he became such good friends with star director Zack Snyder that he immediately directed the spin-off Army of Thieves for Netflix. In Oppenheimer, he played a German physicist. And now, with Girl You Know It’s True, he is revisiting perhaps the biggest scandal in German music history.
After Zack Snyder and Oppenheimer to Girl You Know It’s True: Matthias Schweighöfer in an interview
Girl You Know It’s True revolves around the career of the duo Milli Vanilli. At the end of the 1980s, Fab Morvan (Elan Ben Ali) and Rob Pilatus (Tijan Njie) became international superstars under the leadership of legendary producer Frank Farian (played by Schweighöfer) and even won a Grammy. When it emerged shortly afterwards that they didn’t actually sing their songs themselves, their success ended in a storm of public ridicule, disappointed fans and lawsuits.
Watch the trailer for Girl You Know It’s True here:
The film opens in German cinemas on December 21. In the Moviepilot interview, Schweighöfer talks about why the scandal would be very different today, what makes Hollywood so different from Germany and why he had to laugh a lot when he met actress Emily Blunt for the first time.
Moviepilot: You were nine years old at the time of the Milli Vanilli scandal. Did you notice that as a child?
Matthias Schweighöfer: Milli Vanilli didn’t exist in this dimension in the East, it only came later. When I was nine years old, the Wall came down. The West simply rolled over the East for a short time and reunification was the number one topic. But when I was older, at 14 or 15, I started to think about it. I asked myself: What were they actually doing back then? The music is actually really good.
You make music yourself. How would you have reacted if you were Rob and Fab? Would you have exposed everything and reaped the hatred of the fans or would you have preferred to live a comfortable and dangerous lie?
Frank Farian developed a product that was incredibly good. But I wouldn’t have put myself in that position in the first place, having to be so dependent on someone. Everyone writes their own story. Luckily, I’ve always met people who have given me the opportunity to be independent in my job.
(Matthias Schweighöfer and Bella Dayne in Girl You Know It’s True)
Farian is a controversial figure: a fraud to some, a musical genius to others. Can you understand him?
I can understand them all. For Rob and Fab, it was terrible to have to keep saying: “We want to do our own thing, we want to be us.” But there were all these people who thought: “What’s the most extreme marketing we can do to create a successful product?” Nobody develops something and then doesn’t become successful with it. It probably failed because not everyone sat around a table and decided together what the goal should be. What would have happened if they had said: “We have a product here, but they don’t really sing. But the music is really good. And that’s exactly how we sell it”? Today, someone has 100 million followers on TikTok who dubs videos all the time and doesn’t portray themselves, but lends their face to a voice. But you know that right from the start.
You really freak out in some scenes. Did you enjoy that?
Last week I met Emily Blunt. That made me laugh a lot, because you see her and you immediately know exactly how she’s going to respond to a joke. You realize how fast she is. You play a ball and you get it right back. Michael Mertens, my partner in the scene, is also extremely good at this. You shoot something out, shout, take space and immediately see how your colleague deals with it. Maybe he hangs a bit, while you know that you could immediately jump into high status. You think to yourself: “I’ll tickle him some more. When will he follow?” Or he’s already on high status and you’re on low status. When there’s that kind of energy and I can take an aggressive approach to the character, it’s really good.
As an actor and singer, what is your favorite biopic about a musician?
I don’t make that much music anymore. Music was interesting for me in a phase in which I asked myself what my heart still beats for. I wanted to know what it feels like to move people with music. How does a live evening work musically? That was interesting because sometimes film is something very anonymous or happens in such a small bubble that it no longer has anything to do with the real world. But I’ve never been a big fan of music biopics
(Elan Ben Ali and Tijan Njie in Girl You Know It’s True)
Did you still watch movies like Rocketman or Bohemian Rhapsody to prepare for the role?
I first got to grips with Frank Farian through the dialect. I also spent a lot of time with a coach. I also asked Frank how meticulously he worked. There’s this scene where he’s trying to find the right sound for a snare [a snare drum]. He’s tried hundreds of snares to see if it’s right for the song. I didn’t watch Bohemian Rhapsody or Rocketman because the budgets for those movies were so huge. So many times in my life I’ve seen movies like that and built up an expectation of what my movie should look like, only to fall flat on my face because it didn’t look like that. So I thought to myself: I simply have no expectations at all and just let Simon Verhoeven do his thing. I also don’t look at any counterexamples so that I don’t have a comparison in front of me. We shot in a little house in the sticks, where the music was also created. I was very excited to see what the movie would look like in the end.
You’ve been shooting a lot internationally recently and became friends with Zack Snyder while working on Army of the Dead and Army of Thieves. What does Zack Snyder tell you over a beer?
Over a beer, we would talk about raising children. About what it’s like to be seen. Or about good lenses for Leica cameras from the 1960s and where to rebuild them. We talked a lot about this topic because Zack is a very visual thinker. As it turns out, he comes up with certain looks through architecture. Then he asked me what fascinates me about playing, and for me it’s rhythmic choreography. Hitting timings like a drummer. I was always trying to figure that out with Army of Thieves, for example: Five people in a room, is that a four-four beat? Where do you play offbeat? Where do you bring everyone together again?
(Matthias Schweighöfer in Army of Thieves)
I have a drummer’s heart and with Zack these things come to the surface. It doesn’t matter how you find him. What Zack comes up with, what his ideas for a movie look like, it makes you wonder, “How do you come up with pictures like that?” I was also thinking with my friend Ruby [O. Fee] the other day about what Army of Thieves 2 could look like. Then we started working on choreography with Zack’s stunt guys. What we filmed was completely crazy.
On the subject: Zack Snyder on Matthias Schweighöfer and his Netflix plans
What’s different on the big movie sets?
With films like this, there are no limits to the imagination. There is simply no “no”. If you ask “Can we do it this way and that way?”, the answer is “Yes!”. Working with Chris [topher Nolan] was also incredible. In Germany, you often have a limit and you’re not used to entering such a big world. You’re often told: “Make it smaller, otherwise it’s not tangible enough.” This is also because we are brought up differently. Over there, you’re invited into a world that you have to make a real effort for, because you’re supposed to make it even bigger.
