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What inspired you to make this piece?
I drew my inspiration from an article I read, which stated that one-third of all homeless youth in New York City are lesbian, gay, or transgender, and also that out of all the teenage suicides an extremely high percentage are young gays, lesbians, or transgender kids. We live at the beginning of the 21st century in the queer capital of the world. If this is the reality in New York City, what does it look like in other states and countries.
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| From RULES OF THE GAME. |
Tell us a little about the process involved in making this work.
From the initial idea to make a film about queer youth to the first filmprint, it took about two and a half years. Most of this time I spent getting to know the young people by volunteering at the Hetrick-Martin Institute as an assistant in the video workshop.
Those parts of the film which are on 16mm, Super8, and the interviews on Beta SP were shot in just one weekend. The rest, on Hi-8, was taped over the course of several months. RULES OF THE GAME was scripted almost like a fiction film. Since I had known the protagonists for quite a while before I started shooting, I could pretty much predict what they were going to answer to certain questions. The script intended to give the film a certain structure, and the final product is pretty close to this script.
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| From RULES OF THE GAME. |
Is there a relationship between your work as a video/filmmaker and life in the New York metropolitan area?
I was born in Hamburg, Germany, went to film school in Munich, Germany, and lived in Berlin and Amsterdam for a while. For over three years now I have lived here in New York, and although finding work would be much easier for me in Europe, I don't want to go back. I cannot imagine being able to make my kind of movies and to get the kind of inspiration this city gives me anywhere else. I find myself fascinated by questions of gender, sexuality, and race; never before have I felt that a city magnifies the issues that go with these subject matters as much as New York does.
How has the burgeoning independent movement affected your life and work as a video/filmmaker?
Although I still get a lot of support from my film school in Germany, the films I shot in this city -- so far there are three -- would never have been possible without the independent movement. From questions of inspiration through other filmmakers' work -- most of the important ones independents -- to the infrastructure of independent film production in this city, my work is literally unimaginable without independent filmmaking.
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