『ネクロマンティック』のDVDのオマケ映像の紹介

"NEKROMANTIK Featurette" transcript
from the DVD of "Nekromantik" (US release version)

Jörg Buttgereit:

Well, it may have been in late 1986. I was 23 or so and with Daktari Lorenz, with whom I had just made the short "Hot Love". I started to build this corpse for "Nekromantik" because it all hinges on this corpse. If we don't succeed with it, we can forget about the whole film because then it's just not convincing. And then we built the corpse. It surely took until January, February.. well, a few weeks. At the time, the corpse cost us about $200 for the materials. It was not very expensive. and we then happily realized that someone would give us money to make this film.

Manfred O. Jelinski:

If I remember correctly, I did give money to people. One has to be careful with directors. I met Jörg for the first time when he came to my film lab and he wanted me to copy some dirty things for him, like Bloody Excesses in the Führer's Bunker and "Hot Love" and that's when I first took note of him. It showed me that the kid has talent and stamina. After all, previously he had completed movies all by himself which is important before one invests in soomebody.

Jörg Buttgereit:

After that, I got together with Franz Rodenkirchen whom I had just met and we wrote something like a script that is, what we imagined the script to be. It was more or less a loose-leaf collection which we just stapled together. This loose-leaf collection, which we later referred to as a script naturally changed here and there during the year of shooting. For example when we started shooting the film, we didn't have the ending yet. The ending really evolved as we were shooting. Daktari started distancing himself more and more from the film, the further we progressed and in the end, we almost had to kick him to get him to finish the film which really wasn't all that easy.

Okay, now we faced the problem of finding a lead actress willing to frolic in bed with our plastic corpse. And that really wasn't easy. We actually conducted a casting call as is customary in the film industry but, of course, we didn't find anybody. Instead, we asked Beatrice whom we had observed in the "scene" a few times wheter she would do it, and she had no problem with that. It was my misfortune to find out during the shoot that Daktari and Beatrice couldn't stand each other. Initially that caused me enormous headaches but somehow we got a handle on it.

On the day when we were to shoot the bed scene, they suddenly started fighting like crazy, to the point of almost exchanging blows. We barely managed to turn things around by simply shooting this fight scene and so we could, so to speak, use the negative vibrations that existed on the set for our film. How far can you go if you produce your film yourself and set absolutely no limits both in visuals and content and hen market the film yourself, evaluate it and then bring it into the movie theaters, and so on? Then, for reasons of cost, we often had to do without real intestines genuine pig eyes, that is, the eyes that are in the corpse, those are real pig eyes. We simply got those from the slaughterhouse. That was very cheap. I pretented to be a medical student who needed the eyes and I think that it's this awkwardness with which we proceeded at the time that today accounts for some of the film's charm. One could almost say that it was in part made by ducumentary filmmakers. When the film was finished, the rumors started, especially coming from America, that it's a film where genuine corpses were used, that it's obvious and... I was pretty obscure. So all the things that might backfire with other films suddenly seemed to speak in favor of our movie.

The film premiere was in January '88 at the Sputnik cinema in Berlin and we had one or two copies. No, we had one copy which ran in three theaters consecutively, of course. Slowly but surely we had to make more and more copies to satisfy the growing demand because somehow word seemed to get around about it. The first serious problems surfaced for example in Oslo, Norway, at a screening of "Nekromantik", "Nekromantik" was running with "Todesking". It was supposed to screen in a huge concert hall where normally rock bands appear. The club's name was Rockfeller or something like that. Two minutes before the start of the screening, seven or eight hundred people were already in the hall. The police stormed this entire building and they wanted to confiscate the copy of the film on the grounds that necrophilia was prohibited in Norway. I wanted to discuss this with the officers since their reasoning seemed interesting because I assume that in Norway, it's prohibited to shoot people, yet you can see it in any film. Be that as it may... I was able to convince these people that the entire evening was supposed to be a video screening event and they disappeared with two video cassettes. With my two film copies, which aren't exactly cheap. I promptly returned to Berlin the next day.

We never had to cut the film on video. It was released uncut in France, in Spain, in America. In Japan an edited version has just come out. The japanese were pretty brazen. They bought "Nekromantik" I and II, and pasted the two together into one film, probably to make it a bit more dramatic and also to make few cuts which really irritated me somewhat. For example, they removed a pissing scene from "Nekromantik" I and they have -- because public hair seems to be dirty apparently it cannot be shown in Japan -- they simply digitally distorted every penis seen in the picture including the public hair. Let's look at that.

(The ending of Japanese "ugly" version shown up)

In the meantime, Daktari has emigrated to Japan. He has little to do with film but he regularly did the music for my films. He of course made the music in "Nekromantik", wonderful! He made the music for "Todesking", the second film after "Nekromantik". For "Nekromantik II", we had his music remastered. He was still pretty actively involved without actually wanting to be. Beatrice can occasionally be seen flashing naked across the screen at RTL. Right after "Nekromantik", she starred in Wings of Desire by Wim Wnders. And my co-author, Franz Rodenkirchen, ended up in Finland but all the subsequent films that have appeared since I have written with him. And when we shoot, he's actively involved. All this is in the wonderful book, "Sex, Murder, Art - The film of Jörg Buttgereit". Shit! <grin>