See the trailer for Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: It's crazy that the scenario is exactly flip-flopped — that he plays the Stasi agent here.
FLORIAN HENCKEL VON DONNERSMARCK: It was strange — he was an incredibly courageous man in spirit and in will, but he didn't have the physical constitution of a hero. He was positioned at the Berlin Wall as a sniper during his obligatory military service, and that got to him so much that at age 19, he collapsed on duty with stomach ulcers. He lost half his stomach — that was the origin of the ailment that killed him 35 years later.
So it all comes back full circle...
Sometimes I'd ask him, ''Why does all your anxiety always express itself in illness?'' And he said, ''I tend not to be outward going that much. All my emotions go back in.''
How close did you become with Mühe while working with him?
There's no one except possibly my wife, and my children — well, probably not even my children — that I spent more time with over the past three and half years. We really spent so much time together thinking about the film, making the film, traveling with the film, trying to explain it to people.
After spending so much time with the actor, was there some sort of philosophy that you two shared?
He always had this fear that somehow — this is something that we really saw eye-to-eye with — that somehow he would just create a film that was good entertainment for the two hours that it lasted, but that was somehow gone the moment went out of the theater. He felt that here, through his performance, he really touched people's hearts.
Not many people knew that he had stomach cancer. Why the secrecy?
It was crazy, I had known for a long time that he was very sick, but he kept this completely secret from everyone, because he said that he did not want to be spared out of pity. He just wanted the undiluted truth — when people showed him love for it to be real love, and not something out of pity.
Your film really made Mühe internationally well-known. How do you think he would've liked to be remembered?
This is one thing I think is important: He wanted to be loved as much as every actor does, but at the same time he was willing to take steps that would cost him love just because he knew that they were right.
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