Why isn't the gangster milieu made to look darker? Despite all the seemingly hard-boiled characters it looks quite cosy really...
Michael Grimm: The gangster milieu is a problem in that no gangster film genre actually exists in Austria. And if you do some research into gangster life in Vienna, you soon land in a really squalid, seedy milieu. You'd have to make it abstract, on the model of Pulp Fiction, but especially with a film like mine this would immediately make it unbelievable. I think that the stark contrasts between Susi's world and that of Horst's provide enough tension without having to include cool orgies of violence in order to underscore it. They both need a basis to encounter each other. If Horst lived in an ultra-brutal world of murderers they would never have met.
The music's also used to make the action even lighter and fluffier so to speak...
Michael Grimm: I asked myself what sort of music Susi would listen to, and eventually decided on this Mallorca club sound. We often used the music deliberately to offset the action, so as to avoid melodrama at all costs. There are several scenes where I asked myself quite deliberately – and not only with regard to the music – how far can I tease this out in the direction of kitsch? We shot several scenes that were a bit over the top in this respect, verging on the ridiculous, which I was concerned to avoid at all costs.
