Diane Kruger on Fatih Akin, ‘Amrum’ in Cannes

Their meet cute was 2012 in Cannes. Diane Kruger — Hollywood star of Troy, National Treasure and Inglourious Basterds — was on the jury. German director Fatih Akin had a documentary screening at the festival. Kruger had been an Akin superfan ever since his breakout Head-On — a gritty, violent love story about a young German-Turkish woman trying to break free of her religious, restrictive family — which won Berlin’s Golden Bear in 2004. “Fatih for me is the best German director we have, the most modern,” says Kruger, who was born and raised in Germany but began acting in French and then American movies. “I had to meet him, so I sort of invited myself to the afterparty for his film, where he was DJ-ing. I went up and said: ‘I’m a fan. If you ever have a role for me, it would be a dream to work together.’ ” 

“I never forgot,” says Akin, speaking on a joint Zoom with Kruger, he in Hamburg, she in L.A. Five years later, Akin sent Kruger the script for In the Fade, a thriller inspired by series of real-world attacks by right-wing terrorists on immigrants in Germany. Kruger was to play Katja, the hard-drinking, tatted-up wife of a Kurdish drug dealer gone straight who turns avenging angel after her man and their young son are murdered in a neo-Nazi bombing. It was unlike anything Kruger had played before. 

“The first time I read it, I knew this could be the role of my life,” she remembers. 

She wasn’t wrong. In the Fade premiered at Cannes in 2017. Kruger won the Palme for best actress. The film went on to win the Golden Globe for best international feature and was Germany’s entry for the Oscars. Kruger and Akin got some of the best reviews of their careers. 

“After that, I told Fatih: ‘If you need me for anything, for one day, as an extra to stand in the background, I’m there,’ ” says Kruger. 

It’s taken another eight years, but Akin and Kruger are back together, and back in Cannes, with their new collaboration, Amrum. 

This time it’s Akin who is moving out of his comfort zone. The 1940s period drama, about a young boy growing up in the final days of World War II, in a family with a lot of dark secrets, isn’t, in fact, Akin’s story. It’s Hark Bohm’s, Akin’s co-screenwriter on In the Fade and 2016 German hit Goodbye Berlin. 

“Hark told me about his childhood in [the North Frisian Island] Amrum, about having nothing to eat at the end of the war, about his mother, who was a Nazi, and I said, ‘You have to make that movie!’ ” Akin recalls. “I just planned to produce it. But then Hark got sick and he asked me to take over directing.”

Casting Kruger in a supporting role as Tessa, a potato farmer and the one anti-fascist on the island, was Bohm’s idea. Initially, Akin thought she was “maybe too glamorous” to play the role. To deflect from her distracting beauty, he outfitted Tessa with a pair of jug ears. 

“I get that all the time from directors, everyone sees me as a Hollywood actress, even though I’m not from Hollywood,” says Kruger. “Directors are always trying to put me in wigs and costumes, to make me fatter or use makeup to get a rougher look. I always tell them: I’d rather act the role than glue it on.”

When it came to Tessa, Kruger already had a way in. 

“I grew up in the countryside. I know these women, who have this energy, this vitality, but are also incredibly tough. I based her on my grandmother, Angela, who I grew up with. She’d wake up at sunrise every morning and was in the fields, picking strawberries, pickling cabbage.”

For Akin, finding the key to telling Bohm’s story was more challenging. 

“I’m German, sure, I was born here, but I didn’t grow up like this, I didn’t have a Nazi mother. I’m a big city kid,” he explains. “I can sit a bunch of gangsters around a table, Turkish gangsters, Albanian gangsters, Arab gangsters, and I know what they’re going to say, how they’re going to act. But a bunch of Germans sitting down to have dinner — how does that work?”

Akin watched Edgar Reitz’s epic Heimat film cycle — which traces the life of a German family from the 1840s through the 2000s — for clues on how to “with precision, but without cliché, capture the German soul.”

The German soul has been much on Akin’s mind of late. While Amrum is set in the late 1940s, its theme of confronting Germany’s Nazi past feels frighteningly relevant. At German elections in February, the far-right AfD party, which Germany’s own security forces have certified as extremist, won 20 percent of the vote.

“If you have 12 million people who vote for a right-wing extremist party, then, automatically, someone you know is related to them. A brother-in-law, a niece. You have people in your family or your circle that are voting far-right,” he says. “And that’s the story of the film. Because that is my home.”

Both Kruger and Akin hope they won’t have to wait another eight years for their next collaboration. Plans for a Marlene Dietrich biopic are on ice — “We’ll see if that happens,” says Kruger, “but I think we’ll have something else we’ll do together first.” 

“Everything I write, every film I do now, I think: ‘Can Diane play this?’ ” adds Akin. “Even if it’s a film with just men and gangsters, I think, ‘Maybe Diane could play one of the gangsters, with a mustache? Could she play an Arab?’ If I were to make a film just with animals, I’d try to cast her. I just love working with her. We bring out the best in each other.” 

Anrum bowed as a Cannes Premiere out of competition on May 15. Beta Cinema is handling world sales.