Excellence - celebrating 60 years
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Oscar winning director of the film "The Lives of Others"
Academy Award winning writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck tells the tale of how he managed to recruit the greatest German actors and the leading film talent in Europe to make what was only his first feature film „The Lives of Others“. He talks about how he kept himself and his team motivated, even when every distributor in Germany passed on the film, deeming it „too dark“ and „too intellectual“. In the end it was the identification of the proper market segment that turned "Lives" into the most successful non-English language film of the year.
Listen to Florian explain what he'll be covering (4:34):
Podcast from ResearchTalk
"I owe a great deal to market research. I probably would not have an Oscar to show off if there was no such profession."
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (born 1973 in Cologne) studied fiction direction at Munich Film Academy, where he wrote and directed the award-winning short film „Dobermann“.
He went on to write and direct „The Lives of Others“, for which he won the European Film Awards for Best Picture and Best Screenplay, was nominated for a Golden Globe and won the Oscar for „Best Foreign Language Film“.
Florian holds an M.A. from Oxford University and is a Soviet State-certified Teacher of Russian as a Foreign Language.
His extra-curricular interests include Tennis, Scholastic Philosophy, Russian literature and African Tribal Art.