Director's Portrait:

Winning an OSCAR has to be a life-changing experience. At the very least it must mean all sorts of mind-boggling offers blocking the in-box, surely? So Ulrike Grote's reply came as a surprise.

"No, life didn't change," she says between sips of coffee and bites of her jam sandwich. No Hollywood histrionics? No super agents fighting in the shrubbery to sign her up? "No. But it certainly helped me get money for my feature!"

In 2004 Grote won the MPAA Student Academy Award for her graduation film, The Runaway, a twenty-minute father-son story. "It's a drama with a bit of The Sixth Sense," she explains. "It's a bit spooky and also amusing." Entered by her teachers, The Runaway then became eligible for automatic submission for, says Grote, "the real OSCAR, in the short film category." While that award escaped her grasp it was still a superb triumph for a woman who originally lacked the confidence to enter the film business.

"I wanted to," says Grote, "but didn't trust myself. So I became an actress instead." The next eleven years she trod the boards, mostly at the Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, before she moved into directing. "After a while," she says, "a friend suggested I go to film school." From 2002 to 2004 she studied in the film department of the University of Hamburg under Hark Bohm.

Grote is now working on her debut feature, Herzschlag (WT, translation: "Heartbeat"). "It's a drama-comedy," she explains, "a series of episodes about death, how people are confronted by it and how they deal with it, with a group of characters aged end-thirty, early forties."

"I wrote the script together with my producer, Ilona Schulz," she says. "We studied together and always wanted to work together but we never managed it until now. We're a good team and it's working well."

As a director, Grote is "interested in daily life, its humor, its brutality, its hopes." But there's also a strongly romantic vein in the woman's body as she admits, citing Ang Lee and Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility. "I love love-stories, but serious ones. Not the superficial kind! I'd love to make something historical, along English lines, such as Jane Austen with all that mud and mess, when life was hard, but that still plays very modern."

How does it feel to be making her first feature? "Exciting," Grote replies. "We have a lot to do. And since it plays in a hospital I'm visiting a nightshift soon to make sure I get it right. I also soon have to cast children, which is very difficult."

Talking of casting, as befits an actors' director, Grote writes with specific thespians in mind. "With this material I wanted to write about women," she says, "and my son accused me of stealing his best lines! There's one role for Monica Bleibtreu, another for Victoria Trautmannsdorf and one for Peter Jordan."

Grote doesn't hide her enthusiasm for stage actor Jordan, calling him "my favorite, favorite, favorite actor. He was in my short. He's the reincarnation of Hanns Lothar, the comic heel-clicker in Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three."

Other actors who tick Grote's boxes are Sean Penn ("He's great, has such a range") and Benicio del Toro, while of the women "Nicole Kidman is glorious, she's always very different. Naomi Watts is unbelievable, 21 Grams is one of my favorite films, and also Charlotte Gainsbourg who plays Sean Penn's wife."

Ask Grote about her favorite directors and it's obvious where her (sense and) sensibility lies. "Ang Lee is unbelievable with actors; Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, Brokeback Mountain. I see simplicity of composition, beauty. He really gets into the story to bring it to the fore. He's different every time and he never lets himself get typecast. That's what I want to do."

"I love Billy Wilder," Grote continues. "And Clint Eastwood, who also started as an actor. Look how he's developed from Play Misty for Me, his first film, and now look at Million Dollar Baby. That is so pure."

Among her local heroes are Fatih Akin ("He stays true to himself and won't sell out"), Tom Tykwer ("Wonderful"), Detlev Buck ("great"), Andreas Dresen ("also great") while Nicolai Albrecht, with whom Grote has worked as an actor, is "exact, he has pure understanding, he's conscientious, a great actor's director."

As for her plans beyond Herzschlag, Grote wants "to make something international. I'm writing a script for an international actor I know and want to do it with him. He wants to do it with me, too!"

And who might that be? "I can't name the country," she replies, "or you'll guess!" Despite my employing every trick learned in many years of interviewing, despite resorting to the ultimate fallback, begging, Grote remained firm. It looks like we're just going to have to wait and see!