Often when I interview people for this project, I have to do some research to find the accurate profession of the artist. In your case though, I am fairly confident to assume your title is “animator”, am I right?

Yes, “animator” or “animation director” is fine, but I have no title really… I studied in Germany and it’s not so common there as in Austria that you get a title for everything you study. I’ve got a diploma in animation, but no Magister or Doktor or Master or whatever (laughs). Mostly, I’m a filmmaker in the broadest sense.

If I look at the body of work you have produced, and for each film, you are listed for several separate titles; for example editor, director or writer. Is this how you want it to be, or would you prefer to narrow it down a bit?

Actually, I have no problem with doing all of those things. It always depends on the scale of the project. For bigger projects it’s better if you just have one role, like director, and you have other people doing the designs or animations, for example. For small projects it often makes no sense to work in a bigger team then ten persons, it’s better if you do it all by yourself then. You’re also more flexible when you do it all by your own.

Mostly, I don’t work completely alone. But I also don’t mind working with other projects in a “lower” kind of department, like background design or storyboard or so. When the project is interesting, the work is also interesting. I don’t have a problem with that.

You are a multi-talent, then.

I don’t think so (laughs). For example with 3D-animation, I know how the basics work, but have no fun in doing it, so I try to have other people do it. I’m also not an educated illustrator, I didn’t take any drawing classes or so, just the film school. I studied journalism before that. So I can’t really draw according to the book, I just draw how I feel like I want it to be. And I think this approach works for most of the work I’ve done so far. People haven’t noticed so far that I didn’t learn it (laughs).

You started with animations at a quite early age, only 12 years old.

Yes. I always drew, since I can remember. That’s also because my whole family does it. My sister Nana, she’s 13 years older than me, she always were making animation films. She studied animation in Vienna, now she’s doing illustrations and teaching it. Also my father, mother and brother were drawing. That’s where it comes from.

In the last year of primary school there was an animation project, the kids were supposed to do an animated film together. I was always totally fascinated by animations and wanted to know how it was done. My parents couldn’t answer me exactly what I wanted to know, so I was happy about this project. After this I started to do my own animated movie, Max Monkey. I started it when I was going through the first year of high school. I was very unhappy at the school because of the big change it meant, I didn’t have many friends. I think that’s why I started to draw in my children’s room, for probably two years onward. Without any storyboard, I just made it frame by frame spontaneously. The first frame was with the monkey… and then I knew that twelve images is one second of real time… and so it went on.

I had a very small light table; it was the dot of an “i” from an advertising letter sign. It was a gift from my sister (laughs). On this dot I drew for two years without any concept. Then we went secretly to the Angewandte — the University of Applied Arts in Vienna — where my sister studied, to record it.

It wasn’t allowed to use the equipment so we went there by night. The recorder was called U-matic , a videotape format, I think from the 70’s or 80’s… there was some kind of a shooter there to shoot the animation from a paper. One of us was always shooting and changing the paper, while the other was watching the door that nobody was coming… (laughs).

Why were you not allowed to be there?

I don’t know, it was very strange. There were some rules, that students have to get permission to use this big camera. The system was very complicated, already old for the 90’s when we were there. As I remember it, it was a huge machine (laughs)… very impressive.

I think I could’ve started the Max Monkey-animation when I was nine or ten. I went home after school and drew some frames, then it could be months without anything, and then a few more frames. I remember when I was almost finished, somebody told me that you have to make a storyboard, a concept and so on.. so I did make a storyboard at the end just to make it look more professional (laughs). I drew it completely chronological, frame by frame but for the last ten shots I made some kind of a concept.

So from then on, you knew exactly that this is what you will continue to do?

Yes, yes. First, I wanted to do become a comic book artist, and then work with film. After the first movie, I made some more animations, also alone and then later together with others. Then, after my time doing civil service, I thought I should go more into the direction of live action filmmaking, so I tried to become a director. I tried twice to get into the Filmakademie in Vienna, and failed terrible both times (laughs). Besides that, I studied journalism and also theater sciences.

Then I started to get some small jobs, first at the ATV, a kind of trashy private network in Vienna. There I did quality control of the programming they had. I watched all of their programs all day and made notes of all the errors, drop-out-frames, pitched sounds and such. It was terrible quality back then. I then worked as an editor at Puls TV, now Puls 4, in the news room. I edited the daily news for two years. While it’s kind of trashy “boulevard” news, it was still very interesting to me; you had to make three newsclips on several topics each day… one clip is supposed to be between 45–60 seconds long and in this time you have to tell the whole story.

What was also interesting was how real life differed to what I learned in the university, where we learned about ethics, that you had to be very objective… while at work I was told to put in some music for extra emotions, put a “bad guy and good guy” in the same story… I should stop talking about this now (laughs)…

I made this for two years, then I thought I can stay there and climb the job hierarchy, become a chief editor or whatever. Then I applied once more to a film school, the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in Germany, I sent in some shabby films I made at the time, and surprisingly they took me. I went to school there for nearly five years, and after that I’m doing nothing else but animation.

The first two years they bundled you together with the other film students, so you had to learn camera, editing, directing, mixing sounds… everybody had to do everybody else’s work so that you get respect for each other. I think that was very important.

There I also met Johannes and Conrad, also from Austria, and after school we decided to found a kind of studio together, Neuer Österreichischer Trickfilm, and try to make narrative animation in Austria.

Could you please define “narrative animation”?

I think that most animated movies that you maybe know are narrative animations. But this was not the case in Austria at that point in time, or at least we thought so, because Austria has a very long tradition in animated films but more in experimental animation. This has to do with the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, I think Maria Lassnig founded it. It made very interesting animated movies until this day but not so much in the direction where we wanted to go; commercially narrated animations that are more understandable for a broader audience.

Now I think there are more studios than it used to be. It used to be almost nothing. And I think the film industry in Austria needs it, for example for advertising, for bigger advertising animations companies now search outside of Austria, most of the time. Of course you have companies that are about making pure visual effects, but this is not the same as the cartoon-style animations we make. That was the basic idea we had: to make commercial movies which at the same time are not totally “stupid”, that they have a soul and ambition. And they should be “consumable” for both adults and children.

So we finished our diploma films, then we had a big premiere at the Filmcasino and invited all the press, television and radio. Surprisingly it was a big success, we got into the late edition of Zeit im Bild, also in radio Ö1, as well as other newspaper articles. We were surprised of how many people came. Also people from Dominic Heinzl’s Chili TV were there. Normally Heinzl made reports about “high society events”, but surprisingly he also came to our premiere. I think it was because in Conrad’s film he were having some well-known Austrian actors’ voices.

This was kind of a trick we used, that we could offer something that people already knew something about in a context that the cultural press didn’t know anything about: animation. So we gave them a connection point with the famous actors. “Ah, I don’t know anything about animation, but I know about Erwin Steinhauer” (der Besuch).

So that was the start of our project together. After that, we got offered to direct a children’s television show (Hexe Lilli), which will be aired the first time on Friday 26/9. We worked mostly on it in Berlin, it was a co-production between Austria, Germany, Belgium, Canada and China. It was great because it was the first offer we got after school — already directing television series for public television!

I think it will be aired every week and for 26 episodes, each one is 22 minutes long. Originally it was planned to be finished in two years, but it ended up being three years. When you count it all together, the 2D-animations, the amount of time, just the airing time is about 4 or 5 feature-length films.

That’s quite a lot!

Yes quite much (laughs). For two years… So they wanted three directors for this project, but that’s impossible to do in two years time. Firstly, it’s too complicated, and secondly, you don’t have time for anything else. The advantage of being three persons is that not everybody has to work on the same thing all the time, you can have a broader volume of work then.

The first year it didn’t work out because the three of us was working on the same thing, there was no time for anything else! There were other offers and we couldn’t do anything then. So we kind of split the work. Two directors were working on the series and one was free to do other stuff. So in the end, Conrad finished the direction of the series and Johannes and me were switching doing other stuff, in Vienna mostly. For feature films, effects, commercials, music videos and so.

I really like your animation Heldenkanzler, not only because it looks good, I’m also really fond of the genre-mix. You mixed here the cartoon-style with traditional documentary footage and narrative. Do you think you will go back to this type of stories in the future?

Yeah, I love films like that. We always also split our projects in some certain pieces; films that we just want to do from an artistic standpoint, and then films that we have to do, where somebody else has the last word.

I also love this hybrid; bringing together two film genres which are completely opposite: the documentary where you have no clear plan first, it gets mostly done in the editing process. And on the other hand you have animation where you plan every little thing, mostly, with storyboards and such, no place for spontaneity. That’s what I like with films like Waltz with Bashir, or other fictional films that have a documentary feel, like Persepolis. So I had that kind of idea for this film.

I had a special kind of thesis for my final school exam – it was about Austria between the two wars and about dictatorship, that it was in place already before Hitler’s “invasion”, the Anschluss. I was really surprised what I found out, because we didn’t learn it at school and most people I know didn’t learn anything about it. In Austria and Germany you have to learn about the Nazi regime, the holocaust and all that, you also learn about the conditions of the Anschluss. But you don’t learn anything about the time before that. You may think that the time before 1938 Austria was a democracy, when in fact it was a dictatorship since 1933, just like Germany. The only difference is that we had a “lighter” fascism. We had less money and there were less “professionals” here. It’s really crazy when you look at it… it looks like we had a rip-off Nazi-regime, the logotype looks nearly the same. Everything is there, just copied in a very cheap way. There were maybe not as much racists and anti-semites, but it was starting to come along, too.

I noticed that there is no film about it in Austria, there’s just some film that was made in the 70’s for the public Austrian network, it was called die Staatsoperette. Back then, it was aired one time, I think in 1977, and immediately banned.

Now you can of course buy the DVD, but technically, storytelling- and cinematography-wise, you can’t really watch it nowadays. But back then the situation was still so heated because people still had memories from the Austrian civil war from 1934. This is sensitive because the conflict was between the government party, the Christian Social Party on the one side, and on the other side there was the revolutionaries, the Socialist Democratic Party. They fought each other and shot the Gemeindebauten, that’s why nobody wanted to talk about this in Austria after the second world war. They had the advantage that after Dollfuß, something much more terrible came, so you can’t really compare those two.

This regime (during Dollfuß) was based on the fascistic state that Mussolini built. That was what interested me.

I imagine when you dig into the research for a story like this, it must be really difficult to compress it into a short animation. How did you manage to get it down to the essentials?

I started to read books to get down all the facts in the most accurate way possible. Then I noticed it’s not really an interesting story, it’s too complicated. Also with die Staatsoperette, the problem is all the characters. I wanted to make a short film, and make sure that everybody could understand it, even if you know nothing about the topic beforehand. Then I found a book in a used bookstore, in which they had collected letters between Engelbert Dollfuß and Benito Mussolini.

And it wasn’t so terrible and sad, it was really funny to read, more like stand-up comedy (laughs). Dollfuß always wrote tons of pages… the first part of the letter is always in the style of a sycophant, a real Schleimer, how he adores his majesty… and after ten pages he comes to the point, and Mussolini then normally would answer with three lines; “do this, do that”. In the animated movie, there is this list: the deal was that Dollfuß/Austria has to adapt all the Italian rules, therefore Italy will protect “small, poor Austria” from Nazi Germany. The deal didn’t work out at all, because at the same time Mussolini was meeting with Hitler, and they were making pacts together as well.

There was a big difference between the Dollfuß and Hitler — Dollfuß absolutely hated Hitler: he was against Germany, but for completely different reasons that maybe a normal human being would think. Dollfuß was a strict catholic, Mussolini was a catholic when he needed it (laughs). So Dollfuß kind of saw Hitler for what he was, some kind of anti-christ.

So the system was then the same kind that was used in Italy, a Klerikalfaschismus, and always before he was able to implement new rules he had to get approval from the pope. There is this scene in the movie, where he goes to see Pope Pius XI, to get the acceptance, a kind of contract, a blessing from the church to build up the state. The same thing happened ten years earlier in Italy between the same Pope Pius XI and Mussolini, because Mussolini was the first statesman who accepted the Vatican as a separate state and the Vatican then accepted Mussolini’s regime as legal. So this is one of the things I found out about the church and the fascism in Austria that seemed interesting.

And they went on to divide different public sectors of interest between the church and the state; the church was to rule over education and cultural questions, the other parts to be ruled by the dictator. These were some parts of the deal they’ve formed.

So you found this book and you understood how you could make the movie. The story about Dollfuß was completely unknown to me before as well.

I always wanted to make a film about this topic but I thought it then had to be a 90-minute film to be able to tell the story, with millions of dollars, live action, the greatest star performing in it, rebuild 1930’s Vienna, etc. Then I realized you have to make a dramatic short-form out of it and leave out many, many things. No historian will like that, they will think that other parts are way more important in the history.

Live action was not possible, because everything has to be live, with real actors, it has to look as real as possible. But with drawn animation it will always be an interpretation — obviously not real. You can caricature or exaggerate parts… also make the opposite, hopefully without people getting to mad at you (laughs).

You can tell things in a much shorter time than with an actor. You can also use many metaphors without making them look cheesy, banal and so on, which is not possible in live action, so you can get away with many things when doing animation.

Are you planning on doing more animations in this mix/hybrid-style?

Yes. When we founded Neuer Trickfilm, all the three of us had a meeting where everybody had to come up with an idea for a feature-length animation film. Mine was/is also about an existing Austrian personality, the first filmmaker in Austria.

The project status is still in its infancy, but it’s a fascinating story. Until WWI there were films being produced, but the only professional films that were being made were erotic and pornographic movies (laughs). And of course they were amateur movies. I think the first amateur film was from a royal guy filming Emperor Franz Joseph. But the first produced movie is made by Saturn Film, they made kind of erotic, cheesy movies. So this is the basic idea for this guy.

The funny thing is that he started with these cheap films but then discovered by himself the possibilities and power of cinema and eventually wanted to tell more real stories and make drama films, but at the same time he had to satisfy the audience with naked people (laughs). All of this happens within the Austrian-Hungarian empire, but still there is very little known about the guy, he wasn’t a celebrity in that sense. He wasn’t seen as a cultural figure.

His studio was then destroyed before the first world war, by soldiers of the emperor. Because in the first ten years or so, when the moving images came to Austria, it was like when the Internet came — there were no rules for it. Then they realized they wanted to regulate it and suddenly it was banned. He was then sent to the front trenches of the war and got killed during the first week of the war. That’s the basic premise of the new film. Let’s see if I will ever make it (laughs). But it’s the same impulse that I had when I started to work with the Heldenkanzler.

So you have the idea in your head. What is the next stage in your working process in the steps forward to realize a movie idea?

The next steps would be to apply for film funding, to fund the screenplay. There is a fixed sum to apply for, I think it is 15.000 €. You get the money to have time to develop the script. After a year or so you have to give them a script for a 90 minute feature film. Then to have it made, ideally two or more European countries should be in the project to co-produce it. Because Austria alone doesn’t have the infrastructure for such a big movie. It’s the same in all European countries, there is not enough money in one country so you have to co-produce. It’s called “country-effect” — they always give you funding when the money somehow gets back into the same country where the funding came from.

It’s a long story. So for now we are doing work for others, commissioned work, basically. Sometimes more, sometimes less creative work.

Judging from the style of your work, it mostly has the style of hand-drawn illustrations. As technology keeps improving and computer animations are becoming more realistic, anything seems possible. Do you think you will keep your distinct style or are you also tempted to go “pure digital”?

I did already films in 3D, I think it always depends on which technique fits the story best. Personally, I like 2D-animation best. I don’t see so much meaning in re-creating the reality in animation because you already have live-action films. I like it more abstract and that you can see that it’s an interpretation of life. For the sake of the look, I think it’s more interesting to keep it more separated from live action. For some films, like this (shows poster of Iron Man), of course you have to do 3D-animation.

It depends on the story. If you want to make a film like Conrads film der Besuch, with the old lady which basically takes place in one room to give place for as much mood as possible, then I think it makes sense to have it in 3D, with textures and such.

Besides that, I can’t really do 3D animation so well. The main difference between 2D and 3D animation is that when you do 3D cheap, it looks absolutely terrible. It looks so lifeless, like much of the children TV nowadays, it looks heartless and soulless.

But with bad 2D, it always has an appeal. That’s why I’m not doing so much 3D-animations, I’m afraid that when it’s not top-notch it will look like shit (laughs).

The guys behind South Park started out with cheap cut-out animations, then they invested in super-expensive computers to be able to reproduce the cheap look from then on.

Yeah, I think it’s done in 3D software (laughs). It’s amazing what they do. They are able to react to daily-life politics and have it one week later in the series. Obama says something, one week later it’s in South Park. I think they also have automated mouth-animations… you load the voice track and the lip-synch comes on.

I think it can be possible to make 3D with a soul. For example David O’Reilly, a British animator, he leaves out the textures so it nearly looks like 2D. Black & white, high-contrast stuff. Sometimes it can be appealing, but I still think it’s not really that appealing.

What I always love about 2D is that you can bring your own drawings to life, as simple as that, and it’s magic. From your brain, to your hand and over the paper. It’s less stuff between your idea and the result. If your drawing is bad, it’s your fault. You can’t say: “ahh, it’s Autodesk Maya’s fault” (laughs). In 3D, there are so many elements in there that are not created by you. When you want to control it, it’s really much more work to put in.

Also in 3D, for a long time during the process, the work looks very abstract and boring. It’s these wire-frames and textures. In 2D there’s always a sketch first, but it’s already appealing then, sometimes more appealing than the final drawing. And you can always imagine how it will look like in the end. For me it’s more fun.

The last animated movie I saw was “The LEGO Movie” and I thought it was great (laughs)! I couldn’t tell if it was animated or not.

Yes, it was super! It was good 3D because it looked like 2D. Also the animation was done like it’s Lego figures moving around, not made to look like human movements.

I was afraid that the story would be really mainstream and so stupid that it hurts. But to my surprise it was really clever.

I also thought for a long time if I should see it or not, a huge film with a company name and so, that it has to be shit, but it was actually quite funny. I also love a many of the Pixar movies, but it always has to be high-end 3D. It’s always the problem with 3D: 2D is 2D and everybody sees it as a drawing put to life. With stop-motion, people see that it’s puppets that are moving around. 3D always has to pretend that it’s another technique. With the Lego movie, it has to pretend that it’s stop-motion animation. Or when it’s a realistic like this (Iron Man), it has to pretend like it’s a live-action movie. Sometimes, not very often, it has to pretend it’s a 2D animation. It’s never something of its own. But for the Lego movie it worked, it was a good cheat (laughs).

So let’s say you have decided on making an animated movie. I guess that you have to be 100% sure that “I am going to do it exactly like this”. Not like many directors who just go out and shoot a lot of scenes and decide later in the editing room what to do with the material. I imagine that with animation, you can’t decide half ways that “I better do it like this instead”.

Yes, most of it is in the storyboard, because there you are editing the movie. First the storyboard and then the single panels. Then you edit in the tracks with a voice-over to get the time right. Then it’s like a dia-show, a very cheap animation film. Then you have to lock it and work on the single shots. It is strange, you really have to edit it before making the film. Of course, you can still edit it afterwards, but since it’s 24 frames per second, you don’t want to have drawn 24 frames for nothing.

So when you are on a tight budget you have to plan it as precisely as possible in the animation frame and then work it out. Sometimes it’s a bit depressing because there is not much room for spontaneity, but in the animation process you always try to record the voices of the actors first, and you try to improvise a lot with the actor.

With Heldenkanzler, Erwin Leder, mainly spoke off-text and that was very funny. He always had ideas and I filmed him all the time to get a feeling for the person. He had the idea that I should hang the microphone high up from him so he had to speak upwards, because Dollfuß really was just 1,45 meters, really small (laughs). I always try at some point in the production to get free space to improvise… and the best things happens when it’s not coming from the computer. When I work with the actors I tell them to not read it exactly word-from-word as it is written in the script.

Another example is with the music clip we made for the reggae band Sisyphos. We filmed the whole film first, just two of us. We filmed it really cheap, then we edited the live action with a photo camera and with recordings from inside a car that we found on the Internet. When the editing is finished we re-draw these parts. That way, we also had some free space on another level. We could try things out with the acting. The problem with animation is that it’s so planned, and it shouldn’t look so planned, it should look lively and free.

You have to plan the spontaneity.

(laughs) Yeah. And sometimes everything just is planned. But you should keep the opportunities open at least.

I guess there goes even more planning into a feature animation movie then.

Yes, this was also the idea to make the whole film in a cheap live-action-film, with some lighting and actors, because an actor transports a character better through the whole film. In animation you have the problem that for every shot there is a different animator, and to get just one character across you have to have a real cast on the set and some cheesy costumes from the costume store and so, that you get the movement and film it like a normal film as cheap as possible. Then you edit it. When it’s right the film works, but it looks terrible. But you can then re-draw the parts. In a way, it’s another way of doing a motion-capture process, like they would do it on Planet of the Apes or such. Or in Tintin, where you kind of film it with real actors and then put another layer on top of it.

The story behind Waltz with Bashir is very funny. There is a Youtube video where Ari Folman show how they did it. Instead of guns they have pipes of vacuum cleaners in their hands when they play the soldiers (laughs). Unfortunately, it’s not on Youtube anymore.

It’s a great movie.

Yes, it is really great. And it was really cheap made for a movie like this. About one million dollars. That’s not even one million Euro!

Related links

Benjamin Swiczinsky on IMDb / Wikipedia / Blogspot
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