Matthias Schweighöfer about Girl You Know It’s True, Oppenheimer and what Zack Snyder says over a beer

Matthias Schweighöfer is the modern Marilyn Monroe: everyone wants a piece of him. In Army of the Dead he became so good friends with star director Zack Snyder that that he immediately directed the spin-off Army of Thieves for Netflix. In Oppenheimer he appeared as a German physicist. And now with Girl You Know It’s True he’s unraveling perhaps the biggest scandal in German music history.

After Zack Snyder and Oppenheimer on Girl You Know It’s True: Matthias Schweighöfer in an interview

Girl You Know It’s True revolves around the career of the duo Milli Vanilli. At the end of the 1980s, Fab Morvan (Elan Ben Ali) and Rob Pilatus (Tijan Njie) became international under the leadership of producer legend Frank Farian (played by Schweighöfer). Superstars who even won a Grammy. When it emerged shortly afterwards that they didn’t actually sing their own songs, their success ended in a storm of public ridicule, disappointed fans and lawsuits.

Check out the trailer for Girl You Know It’s True here:

The film opens in German cinemas on December 21st. In the Moviepilot interview, Schweighöfer talks about why the scandal would be completely different today, what makes Hollywood so different from Germany and why he laughed so hard when he met actress Emily Blunt for the first time.

Moviepilot: You were nine years old at the time of the Milli Vanilli scandal. Did you notice that as a child?

Matthias Schweighofer: In the East there was no Milli Vanilli in this dimension; that came later. When I was nine years old, the wall came down. The West simply rolled over the East for a moment and reunification was the number one topic. But when I was older, around 14 or 15, I got into it. So I asked myself: What were they actually doing back then? The music is actually really good.

You make music yourself. How would you have reacted if you were Rob and Fab? Would you have revealed everything and earned the hatred of fans, or would you have preferred to live a convenient and dangerous lie?

Frank Farian created a product that was incredibly good. But I wouldn’t have put myself in this position of having to depend so heavily on someone. Everyone writes their story. Luckily, I have always met people who gave me the opportunity to be independent in my career.

Farian is a controversial figure: to some a fraud, to others a musical genius. Can you understand him?

I can understand them all. It was terrible for Rob and Fab to have to keep saying: “We want to do our own thing, we want to be us.” But there were all those people who were like, “What is the most extreme marketing thing we can do to create a successful product?” Nobody develops something only to not be successful with it. It probably failed because not everyone sat at the same table and decided together what the goal should be. What if they had said: “We have a product here, but they don’t really sing. But the music is crazy good. And that’s how we sell it”? Today someone has 100 million followers on TikTok who synchronizes videos all the time and doesn’t represent himself, but gives the face to a voice. But you know that from the start.

You really freak out in some scenes. Did you enjoy that?

Last week I met Emily Blunt. I had to laugh a lot because you see her and you immediately know exactly how she responds to a joke. You notice how fast she is. You play a ball and you get it back immediately. Michael Mertens, my partner in the scene, is also extremely good. You shoot something out, scream, take your space and immediately see how your colleague deals with it. Maybe it hangs a bit while you know you could jump to high status straight away. You think to yourself: “I tickle him even more. When will he follow suit?” Or he is already at the high status and you yourself are at the low status. When there is such energy and I can approach the character aggressively, it’s really good.

As an actor and singer, what is your favorite biopic about a musician?

I don’t even make that much music anymore. Music was interesting to me at a time when I was wondering what else my heart beats for. I wanted to know what it felt like to move people with music. How does a live evening work musically? That was interesting because sometimes film is something very anonymous or happens in such a small bubble that it no longer has anything to do with the real world. But I’ve never been a big fan of music biopics.

Did you still watch films like Rocketman or Bohemian Rhapsody to prepare for the role?

I first approached Frank Farian through the dialect. I spent a lot of time with a coach. I also once asked Frank how meticulously he worked. There’s this scene where he’s getting the right sound for a snare [eine kleine Trommel] want to find. He tried hundreds of snares to see if they worked for the song. But I didn’t watch Bohemian Rhapsody or Rocketman because the budgets of these films were so huge. So many times in my life I’ve seen films like this and built up an expectation of what my film should look like, only to be blown away because it didn’t look like that. So I thought to myself: I just have no expectations and I’ll just let Simon Verhoeven do it. I also don’t look at counterexamples so that I don’t have a comparison in mind. We shot in a house in the middle of nowhere, where the music was also created. I was very excited to see what the film would look like at the end.

You’ve been filming a lot internationally recently and became friends with Zack Snyder while working on Army of the Dead and Army of Thieves. What does Zack Snyder tell you over a beer?

Over a beer we would talk about raising children. About what it’s like to be seen. Or about good lenses for Leica cameras from the 1960s and where to convert them. We’ve talked a lot about this topic because Zack is a very visual thinker. As it turns out, he comes up with certain looks through architecture. Then he asked me what fascinates me when I play, and for me it is rhythmic choreography. Getting the timing right like a drummer. That’s what I always tried to figure out with, say, Army of Thieves: Five people in a room, is that four-four time? Where do you play offbeat? Where are you going to get everyone together again?

I have a drummer’s heart and with Zack these things come to the surface. It doesn’t matter how you find him. What Zack develops, what his ideas for a film look like, you ask yourself: “How do you get such images?” I have with my friend Ruby [O. Fee] recently thought about what Army of Thieves 2 could look like. Then we started working on choreography with Zack’s stunt people. What we filmed was completely crazy.

What’s different about the big film sets?

When it comes to films like this: there are no limits to your imagination. There is simply no “No“. If you ask”Can we do it this way and that?“, is the answer “Yes!“. Also working with Chris[topher Nolan] Was incredible. In Germany you often have a limit and are not used to being in such a big world. You are often told: “Make it smaller, otherwise it won’t be tangible enough.” This is also because we were brought up differently. Over there you are invited into a world that you have to put in a lot of effort to make it even bigger.

To come back to Girl You Know It’s True: If you sell it differently and the question “Is it true?” would have answered clearly? Then people might have said: “The product is dope, the music is cool, we know it’s not entirely real, but it’s incredibly fun! Fuck the Grammy and the awards, the world celebrates it anyway.”

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