Hans Steinbichler

He was being very honest when introducing the topic of his Master Class: having seen so many bad movies at the festival, Hans Steinbichler said he thought it was necessary to talk about failure in filmmaking – and its importance for a career as a director.

It is a big step forward from failure to success, and this is why failure is so important for the development of a successful filmmaker – “successful” not referring to a person raking in money but to someone being capable to tell a deep and round story using the means of film. Hans Steinbichler made a very open statement saying that there were three categories of movies he’d seen at the festival:

1. very well made films that make the spectator ask: “Where does the inspiration come from?” (roughly 8%)

2. films in which there are a lot of things really wrong, but they’ve got still a very unique style and show that there’s a lot of potential (15-20%)

3. movies, be they well done or not, which are dead, don’t have any power, nothing to say (the rest)

That he is not stating that out of arrogancy but rather because he had gone through this important process himself illustrates Steinbichler by telling his own life story and showing his first short as well as an excerpt from his first feature “Hierankl”. After having studied law for four years and failing in the final exam he had to realise that he had been fatally wrong about his previous concept of life. He had tried to live an idea of his life as he had thought it should be like rather than choosing his way according to his own talents and passions.

Steinbichler highly recommended the students to see their failures as an immense source of power for a new trial, without a guarantee that the next try wouldn’t end up in a failure again. The worst thing for a young filmmker was to think that only being accepted at a filmschool would mean they had made it and to close themselves for the chance to further improvement. He offered the directors to get together and talk about some of their films in a meeting closed to the public.

These were hard words, but in large part the students appreciated Steinbichler’s openness and thought it was justified.