Getting Hard On A Budget

German filmmaker Till Kleinert won Cardiff’s prestigious Iris Prize with his LGBT short film Cowboy back in 2008, and has just unleashed his fierce feature The Samurai, about a small-town German cop confronting his own repressed sexuality. JACK LEGER spoke to him about the challenges of swordplay, low budgets and getting an erection on cue.

 


The Samurai starts as one film and takes us somewhere unexpected.

That’s what I’m hoping! I try to give the audience that sense that the journey is not quite going where they think. And you end up in a place where you feel like, “How the hell did I get here?” I just love that feeling myself.

Where did the idea come from?

For me it always starts with one image that pops into my mind. I was travelling by train through the German countryside and I saw these houses looking like they were huddled together, bracing against some kind of threat from the surrounding forest. I imagined this alluring but destructive man in a dress rattling a sword along the fence in those empty streets.

The lead actor, Pit Bukowski, also played the provocateur in Cowboy.

Yeah, he’s sexually charged and quite frightening to a square, uptight person who needs to be liberated! Pit has this cleft upper lip which makes him very wolfish, and I just love to have him play these rock star-like mythical creatures.

Well, he’s essentially playing raw sexuality.

Yeah, definitely! And I think he does a tremendous job. He took a lot of sword training, but funnily enough there’s only one scene where he had to put it to use. The most difficult scene was the nudity at the end. But that’s all him, obviously.

That hard-on isn’t a prosthetic?

No, and it was important to him. But the mood has to be right. Actually, we had to try it three times. We used chemical help, not Viagra because we were a low-budget film. It was bootleg viagra!

Did he have a fluffer?

No, he didn’t want anything like that. But it’s not a situation where it’s easy to be aroused, and the more you talk about it and think about it the less comfortable you are that everyone around you is thinking, “Oh God, how can we get it up?” So that was definitely the most challenging thing for Pit!

And that erection got a 15 certificate.

Yes, take your whole family to see The Samurai! But it fits, because even though there’s bloodletting and sex, eventually the film is tender and sweet. It’s about a man who’s forced to come out of his shell and liberate himself from the background noise and expectations of hetero-normative society. That’s why I think it may be good for teenagers.

 


• The Samurai is out now on Peccadillo DVD and VOD.

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