All About Me

Finally, another screenplay by Ruth Toma, almost twenty years after ‘Gloomy Sunday’. Hape Kerkeling’s childhood and youth in Recklinghausen and the surrounding area. Just seven years older, having grown up in Herne, barely twenty minutes away by car, the time and milieu of the narrative were very familiar to me. In general, ‘Der Junge muss an die frische Luft’ was, in a way, a ‘home movie’ for many of the people involved. The great cast, among others with Sönke Möhring, Hedi Kriegeskotte, Rudolf Kowalski, Katharina Hinzen, and myself, had brought together actors and actresses from the region, which was not insignificant for the authentic tone of the production. The choice of film locations and the fantastic set invited us all to remember and rave about it again and again. Although director Caroline Link, whose directing performance cannot be rated highly enough, was not concerned with precisely that. She was interested in the remarkable story of the development of a very young person in an environment she wanted to tell. An environment with all its tragedy and comedy. And this is where the leading actor Julius Weckauf comes into play. Finding this young man can perhaps be described as the greatest stroke of luck in recent film history. What he has achieved, always in the closest collaboration with Caroline Link, of course, is simply remarkable to a high degree. For a while I ‘faltered’ at the thought of taking on a grandfather figure for the first time. When Caroline Link heard about it, she is said to have said at a production meeting: ‘What can I do, I can’t offer him a youthful lover!’ Where she is right, she is right. In the meantime, Grandpa Willi is one of my favorites, and the days with Caroline and Julius and all the others are a particularly fond memory.”