The latest Netflix original series is Oktoberfest: Beer & Blood, exploring the surprisingly violent history of the renowned German folk festival being catapulted into the public conscience beyond the confines of Munich in 1900. Grounded and gritty, the historical drama follows brewer Curt Prank as he arrives in Munich to capitalize on the lucrative beer industry with a colorful vision of what the cultural hallmark could and should be.
Series director Hannu Salonen and cinematographer Felix Cramer discuss the secrets behind the series in full, including how they sought to avoid common tropes in other historical dramas, the show's underlying dark sense of humor and the innovative filming techniques they employed to bring audiences right into the lively fun of the folk festival.
Gentlemen, how did this project all come about?
Hannu Salonen: A couple of years ago -- I wasn't on the project yet -- but both my producers are from Munich and realized that nobody had really done anything about the biggest folk festival in the whole world. And they started researching for intriguing characters, first and foremost, and there was a really intriguing character called Georg "Crocodile" Lang. He was called Crocodile because he was wearing boots out of crocodile leather, and he came out of Nuremberg in Northern Bavaria and moved to Munich to operate there and was not allowed because he was an outsider and outsiders weren't allowed there, it had to be Munich beer.
But he had this big dream of a big, big tent and he was an entertainer that composed this big drinking song and had this idea of a big band coming there. Until then, they would have this little guy fiddling on the stage and it was more of a farmers' show; they brought their cows with them to watch the horserace, it was for like 50 people. He really wanted to revolutionize the whole thing and that's what he did. And the producers hadn't heard about this guy ever because there probably is a hush-up about this man in Munich because he's an outsider and he changed it forever. It's great that they found him because that's who Curt Prank is in the series, in that sense.
Felix Cramer: Hannu approached me six months before we started shooting and sent me the script. And when I read the script I was just so overwhelmed because I thought it was like a history piece and then I saw all the dimensions; these Shakespearean characters and the story that really blew me away. I liked that it was so dark, with power and energy, and, of course, I like to drink beer by myself and I thought "Oh my God, this is a big story about beer and all the background behind making it!" So I said yes right away because I had to do it. I like it because it's so modern; there are so many period pieces out but Oktoberfest is different. To me, it feels like a place today even though they are in another time; that's the kind of feeling we were trying for in our series.
Like you were saying, Oktoberfest is the biggest folk festival in the world, beyond Munich and Bavaria. What made it ripe to set this series in and explore?
Cramer: I would say there are two topics in Germany, really, important for other countries: One, of course, is the darkest part of our history but the other one is Oktoberfest. There aren't many movies about Oktoberfest and so it absolutely makes sense to make a series about it, starting here and hopefully, we have six or seven seasons; we have a lot to tell about Oktoberfest but we have to start at the beginning!
Salonen: Internally, as we started researching this era, I found that the year 1900 is really like the Roaring Twenties in the U.S.; there was so much there. There was an economic revolution about ten years before, in 1890. There were 150 private breweries in Munich; fifteen years later, only ten. So figures like Curt Prank came over, started a revolution and just wiped them all out. And today in Munich, there is only one private brewer and the rest belong to big companies like Anheuser-Busch or whatever. So the 1900s really changed everything and there was a great art scene with artists, writers and politicians like Lenin, Thomas Mann, they were all there and it was a strange time, in that sense. Munich wasn't as conservative as we might have [thought], it really wasn't that, it was a really colorful place.
Like what Felix was saying about the dark side of German history, it's really interconnected with the beer halls. Hitler came to Munich thirteen years later and he abused this whole beer hall culture totally. Like Prank, he also loved Wagner and all that. This doesn't have anything directly to do with Hitler or anything but it has to do with the city at that time. I do think that it was really ripe because all these topics, it was more than ripe to get picked up by someone, we just happened to be the ones to pick it up.
Speaking of the art scene and it being colorful, there is a lot of classic art influence in this series with the art design and cinematography. How did you want to realize this on the screen?
Cramer: For me, it was really important not to have this common type of history look: Desaturate everything and add sepia or bluish tones or something like that. Of course, we watched period pieces like Peaky Blinders, The Knick and Godless but we couldn't really use them as a guideline for our show so we looked to see what the art at that time was doing. The late-Romantic artists like Anselm Feuerbach, and Impressionist artists were, for me, more inspiring. I picked several of these paintings, talked about the color palette and adjusted our color palette to match these kind of paintings and get inspiration from the music. Hannu talked about Richard Wagner, [whose work] is in our series several times, and all the transition of late Romantic to Impressionism was really inspiring for us and we wanted to show that.
We started more in this late-Romantic time, even though we tell a story only over several months, things change. It gets more modern, more colorful throughout the series and that was, of course, on purpose. And these two worlds that we see, you see the more traditional world of breweries that are more desaturated and less colorful and, on the other side, you see the world of Prank, he's more colorful, more saturated and on the more warmish side of the color palette. That was all inspired by the artists of that time.
Salonen: I would like to stress one thing, that isn't as much about the artist influence, but the camera becomes one of the characters. It's really actively part of the storytelling, not documenting events from a distance. That, I didn't want because, if you're making a show about beer, I wanted to take the audience in there so they could feel it. It was important to move the camera like that, first and foremost -- not so much in the beginning because it changes a little bit -- but when the ladies open the doors to Oktoberfest, you've got to be feeling it. And, of course, Oktoberfest is not taking place this year so as the only Oktoberfest available, it should be felt by the audience. That was really an important thing to combine the aesthetics on the one side and then to take the audience by the hand and get in there.
You used drones to capture a lot of the interior shots to make it more dynamic and immersive. How was it staging all that? It has to be a very ambitious filming technique to pull that all off!
Cramer: Absolutely! For me, the interesting thing is it's got this God's eye perspective on Oktoberfest and all the locations and it was already written in the script because, to get this huge view of Oktoberfest, you have to see it from the air, definitely. To have this drone perspective and cut it into the crowd, it wouldn't be satisfying to me at all. So I wanted to combine it and the combination was to fly it around, catch the drone, turn it off and walk around with drone's camera like a Steadicam through this crowd. And it was interesting because had a great intern and we asked him to do this and, at first, it didn't work at all but he developed this special kind of walking technique and it was so great that we could do this.
Salonen: I have to mention, Felix almost lost one of his fingers taking that thing down.
Cramer: [Laughs] Yeah, we learned it was better to have safety gloves on when taking this down. It was really an accident, it was not my plan, I cut my fingers.
Salonen: You're right, we are really elaborate with it. One of the shots, I think in the fourth episode, we fly over Oktoberfest and into one of the cottages. The audience might not notice it, it may have been more of a gimmick for our kind of people, but we really liked it and flying in was really, really difficult and we didn't have that much time, it had to work somehow. And it obviously did!
Cramer: When we first tried it, I thought maybe we could do it one or two times and then we realized we're so good at this technique that we could do a lot of these shots. And it worked really well because we practiced it and it really is very easy. It's a simple drone caught by a person and walked around, that's all, it's not very complicated.
For as dark as the show can get, there is a sense of humor to it. How important was it to bring that comedy and sense of levity to a show about murder and intrigue surrounding Oktoberfest?
Salonen: Sam, this is really, really funny and I'm happy you guys are mentioning this because this one the things in the German reviews and understanding of it, there is absolutely no mention of any kind of humor. Felix and the writer who had this in the outlines, so obviously it was there, but of course, you see it. My friends here never saw it but you did and you're not the only American that's mentioned it. I did not want to be awestruck by the setting and go "Oh, it's Germany! Holy fucking cow!" Making movies about cars or Oktoberfest or Hitler, you have to be awestruck by the setting but I wanted to be free and to have this energy level that Prank had, that was really important.
And it had this powerful tonality, a different genre and template that was core to the scene, also because this guy is so crazy. And speaking of the God's eye perspective, it's really funny as if God would laugh at it because all these ideas turn out to be something else at the end. So for me, personally, it was really important and because, of that, I'm really glad somebody noticing. Obviously, there isn't funny jokes or something like that but it's the tonality that I like very much and would love to keep on cultivating in the future.
You were mentioning other influences, visually. How did you want to set out to make this its own thing?
Cramer: For me, it was absolutely important that was modern and not rusty. I wanted to keep it as modern as possible, it could take place as a show today. I used modern elements and make a difference to all these other period pieces where the camera is not moving at all or very slowly like the camera is also in a historical mood. What I really feel like is some period pieces feel dusty or frosted and I didn't want to do that. I wanted to be really modern and really fresh and use all kinds of genre elements that we can use because this is lively.
There are so many different elements to this story I wanted it to be entertaining with the camerawork. We had genre elements with low angles or high angles that are very specific shots for specific characters and our murderer is characterized by visual angles but also the moodiness and smooth camera movements; elements that you see in horror movies that we've implemented in our show. Oktoberfest isn't just a period piece, it's a story that takes place 120 years ago but has completely modern elements and that was my visual approach to that show because when you see it, it feels like it could take place today. For me, that was very important as well as the colors and the lighting. When I do period pieces, I do a lot of pre-viz that's just light and color that are available in that time but we're totally free with LED techniques and we changed the color to get this painting look that talked about. I just freed myself and opened to all possibilities available today.
Salonen: And this is really about realism vs. non-realism because the thing was we have two characters that are basically based off true characters but it was very fictional because the real Georg "Crocodile" Lang didn't murder people. Of course, it's totally fictional and, because we're basically making a fairytale, we took the liberties to do that and I didn't have the feeling that we had to stick to realism to make it work and be strong and juicy rather than try to somehow picture what it looked like; it didn't really interest me or Felix either.
I'm repeating myself about it not being realistic but one thing I have to say is the production design and costumes are two things that are very much real and well-researched and well-done for our small budget in comparison to American shows. It was a really great achievement of the whole production design part that made that possible, it's very well-done. I felt secure and in a very great position to make a quite real-world and that was a great thing.
Cramer: And like Hannu said, the camera really is its own character; not me, the camera itself. As you talked to your actors, I talked to the camera and asked it to do this. The camera really got to be its own character and sometimes the camera wanted to be very close to the characters, especially for the toothache sequence in Episode 4, and the camera found the right [approach].
Salonen: That's a very good example because we didn't want to have a scene just about a toothache but really make you feel the toothache, that's the idea of the whole thing. That's also on the sound design and the music for the whole thing but, visually, we wanted to feel the pain just by causing more pain if that makes any sense.
Cramer: And the physicality of the camera and gets so close, I doubt you'll find in many period pieces; that we are so close and we are not looking through the window but close as possible to our characters.
What are you really hoping audiences take away from viewing this?
Salonen: I would love for the audience, first and foremost, to be well-entertained. There might be a chance that it start them thinking about the whole thing a little bit. All of these characters take a step on the dark side and I would start to think about the morals and ethics on society that are eradicated when you start to pursue your own benefit; what does that mean in this context? It wouldn't be until Season 2 or 3 and I'm not the moral guy here, I'm not a priest, but it would be great. But first and foremost, it would be great if people said there was something fresh about this and the energy conveyed when Prank is there and entertaining people. I want people to derive that energy watching the show and get it.
Cramer: For me, it's really entertaining and I don't think this series isn't to show exactly what happened there history-wise but maybe that's more boring. We have the history Oktoberfest that's may not be as strong and powerful and so we want to show it in a way that people are entertained while we emphasize the drama and fun and comedic parts and bring something new to Oktoberfest.
Created by Christian Limmer, Ronny Schalk and Alexis Wittengenstein, Oktoberfest: Beer & Blood stars Misel Maticevic, Martina Gedeck, Mercedes Müller and Klaus Steinbacher. The first season is available to stream on Netflix.