We haven’t heard much from Michael Haneke since 2017’s “Happy End”. He turned 81 years old in the summer. The man is a filmmaking legend.
IndieWire recently spoke to Isabelle Huppert, who has starred in four Haneke films — maybe she would know what’s going on with the reclusive filmmaker …
He’s doing OK. We are in touch, yes, we are in touch, but you can’t have Michael Haneke doing anything he doesn’t want to do. Obviously, he’s been not busy for the past six years, as you say, and I don’t know. I have no idea if he will work again, if we will work together again. He’s been through a difficult time after COVID. I don’t know enough. He’s in good shape. I can only make wishes that he will be working again.
Haneke’s style can still be seen everywhere in today’s modern-day moviemaking. His provocative films, filled with the utmost of cynicism, come to us in the form of an almost staged realism. Jonathan Glazer’s upcoming “The Zone of Interest” could have easily been directed by Haneke himself, and that’s the influence he’s had on cinema.
Despite the morbid subject matters he tackles, there’s always a witty irony behind the darkness — a sort of wink and a nod to the audience that what they are watching is very much a cinematic construction.
It’s an understatement to say that I’m a fan of his work — “Cache,” “The Piano Teacher,” “Funny Games” and “Amour” are some of the peaks of European cinema that we’ve gotten in the 21st century.
Earlier in the year, the Austrian Film Museum celebrated Haneke’s birthday with a career retrospective and that’s where we learned that the latest project he was working on, a TV series, in English, titled “Kelvin’s Book,” had been shelved.
“Kelvin's Book” was supposed to be a nine-episode miniseries in English. The plot was “set in a dystopian world and tells the adventurous story of a group of young people in a not too distant future. During a flight, they are forced to make an emergency landing outside of their home and are confronted with the actual face of their home country for the first time.”
However, it appears as though the project had been fully developed and mostly funded, with his own money, but the reason for the shelving wasn’t made quite clear, aside from blaming the pandemic for the delays.
When asked if he’ll ever make another film, Haneke replied "Lassen wir uns überraschen..." which, when translated, means “Let’s be surprised.”
Although notoriously press shy, I had the immense pleasure of interviewing Haneke back in 2017 for “Happy End.” I vividly remember his comparison of social media as a “Machiavellian chain of horror.”
Happy End” proved to be very divisive, but it’s also the film that he needed to make. It was a sort of reinvention for Haneke, one that tackled his obsessive, familiar themes, but felt purposely polarizing and creatively freeing in its lack of a narrative structure. “Happy End” even had comedic moments, a rarity for the venerable Austrian filmmaker whose reputation has been that of heavy, morosely-driven dramas.
Now that I think about it, “Happy End” is an absolute perfect career capper for Haneke — his most meta-movie, a self-referential farce about all the themes that he’s tackled in his illustrious career. If he has retired, this was kind of a perfect film to go out on.
And just like that, after Venice and Telluride, the Best Actor race is taking shape, with Andrew Scott (“Elsinore”) and John Malkovich (“Wild Horse Nine”) emerging as major contenders.