Julia von Heinz on How She Landed Her Dream Cast of Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry for Holocaust Drama ‘Treasure’

Clint Eastwood is credited with the “one for me, one for you” rule of directing, the model of alternating between mainstream commercial productions, sometimes as an actor, and helming more personal or political fare. No one would confuse Julia von Heinz’s more commercial work with Eastwood’s Spaghetti Western performances, but the German director has taken a roughly similar path in her career, moving between popular German family films — kids’ adventure film Hanni and Nanni 2 (2012), coming-of-age comedy I’m Off Then (2015) — and more serious subjects where the subtext is politics, specifically German history and the legacy of the Holocaust.

Her 2013 feature Hanna’s Journey follows a German girl who travels to Israel and is confronted with her grandparents’ past during World War II. In And Tomorrow the Entire World, which premiered in competition in Venice in 2020 and was Germany’s official Oscar contender for best international feature, a young German law student leaves her wealthy family to live in an antifa commune and fight fascism. Treasure, von Heinz’s English-language debut, is a 1990s-set story about successful 30-something Rolling Stone journalist Ruth, played by Lena Dunham, who travels to Auschwitz with her Holocaust survivor father, Edek (Stephen Fry), and uncovers the secrets of their family’s long-hidden trauma.

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“As as a third-generation German woman and filmmaker, I feel the responsibility, the need, to work toward and through this history,” von Heinz says. “For this trilogy of films, I feel it was always the same books, the same articles, the same people I talked to for research. The subjects are very similar: What did the Holocaust do to us, how did it shape the following generations, what do we do with this trauma?”

Von Heinz has been working on Treasure — an adaptation of the novel Too Many Men by Australian author Lily Brett — for a decade before its premiere in Berlin, where it will screen as a Berlinale Special Gala. The film is particularly timely: The success of the far-right AfD in Germany and a rise in public antisemitism is certain to focus media attention on the film’s world premiere on Feb. 17. FilmNation is handling world sales, and FilmNation and Bleecker Street are releasing the film in the US on June 14.

Why did you want to tell this story as your English-language debut? And why now?

Well, I started this project a long time ago. It was 10 years ago that I reached out to Lily Brett on Facebook. It was March 2013. I know that exactly because it popped back up on my timeline. I’d been reading her novels since I was 15 or 16. She’s very famous in Germany. She has a huge readership, I think because she’s the only writer to give a voice, a strong literary voice, to that generation, the second generation of Holocaust survivors, the children of survivors. And there was a strong personal connection. Because like my mother, Lily Brett was born in Bavaria. She was born in a camp for displaced persons that Jewish survivors from Auschwitz had been force-marched to. Her parents, miraculously, both survived Auschwitz in different parts of the camp, and then they found each other again at this camp in Bavaria. Really a miracle. They left Germany for Australia, where Lily started to write books in the late 1980s. I read all her books, I have a whole bookshelf full. What I love is that she always has a strong female character — basically the same character, Ruth Rothwax, in every book, who is strong but also funny.

When you dropped into Lily Brett’s DMs, what was your pitch?

I read Too Many Men and thought it could be a strong film because it was one of her more simple stories. It had a plot I thought I could translate into a movie script. I didn’t think I could dare to reach out: She was this big writer living in New York, I was just a little filmmaker from Germany. But I tried it. I said: ‘Sorry to bother you. I’m a big fan. I’m also a filmmaker. This is my filmography. I think Too Many Men would make a great movie. Are the rights still available?’ She put me in contact with her agent. Then I had the chance to visit New York because my film Hanna’s Journey was picked to screen at a German film festival at MoMA. So I reached out again and asked the agent if Lily would come and watch my film. They came, they loved the film, and it went from there.

And how did you get your incredible cast — Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry?

That came from And Tomorrow the Entire World. I was doing an interview on the night of the premiere in Venice. [The interviewer was] in Los Angeles, and it was something like 3 a.m. in Venice. They asked me what I was doing next, and I said: “I have a great script and I envision Lena Dunham in the lead. Can you please put that in your article?” They did. And the next day, literally the next day, she reached out to my company for the script. If you are from my generation and you think of a cool woman from New York, what a music journalist from that time would represent, Lena is the perfect match. And the sort of things Lily Brett writes about, how her female characters are outspoken and funny but complicated and dealing with a lot of issues — well, those are the same things Lena deals [with] and talks about in her work.

It was my producer’s idea to approach Stephen Fry. He pointed me at a documentary Stephen did where he does the same journey as Edek. His family comes from Eastern Europe, from Slovakia, and many of his family members were murdered in Auschwitz. He visited many of the same places, and in the documentary, you can see him crying as he describes his grandfather, who emigrated to the U.K. Even when he imitates his grandfather in the documentary, it’s so sweet, he’s almost already doing Edek, maybe a slightly more British version of Edek. So he was perfect.

You’ve been working on this film for a decade, but do you see a connection between it and your other work? Because it seems to have a political connection to And Tomorrow the Entire World and Hanna’s Journey.

Yes, those three films are connected, they’re a bit of a trilogy. All are very personal to me. As a third-generation German woman and filmmaker, I feel the responsibility, the need, to work toward and through this history. For this trilogy of films, I feel it was always the same books, the same articles, the same people I talked to for research. The subjects are very similar: What did the Holocaust do to us? How did it shape the following generations? What do we do with this trauma? I write and produce together with John Quester, my husband, and we’ve been developing all three films at the same time over the past 15 years. We didn’t plan which film would be financed when or when each would come out. But it was always clear to me that Treasure had to star major English-language actors, and not be done in German with German actors, because it takes place in New York and Poland. And I needed to get in a position where someone like Stephen Fry or Lena would even read a script of mine. Venice made that possible. Before that, I hesitated to send the script out to anyone.

Did you shoot on location in Auschwitz?

Most of the film is on location. The car driving is in the studio, since these days you do that with LED screens and such. That was two, three studio days at the end. You can’t shoot in the camp in Auschwitz, in the memorial, out of respect for the site. And rightly so. But we worked closely with people from the memorial site, and they supported us. We were able to shoot just outside, along the fence. The scene where they drive by the camp is the actual location. For the camp scenes we shot on a football field very near the camps where we built up the remnants of the barracks and used a huge greenscreen and used photographs the memorial people let us take inside so we could re-create it with VFX. I just saw the final version yesterday on the big screen, and it looks just like we’re there.

How does it feel to have this movie premiering in Berlin at this moment in time, when we are seeing antisemitism rising and the far right gaining strength in the country?

I think it was the right decision, from FilmNation, to say this is the moment, this is the place we want to show it. To not wait but to get it out now. Antisemitism is still a big issue, especially here in Germany. But as we can see, it’s rising worldwide, and we have to make films that show that. Of course this film is about a singular historic event, but it’s also a film about the pain that travels through families, the trauma that continues until someone is ready or able to confront it, to feel it. And that story is universal. This isn’t only a story of Jewish Holocaust survivors and their children, it’s about every cruelty that happens in the world. I know you have some voices that say we’ve had so many films about the Holocaust, but this was such a huge crime, a crime against humanity, that I think it will take generations to tell the stories just to get a sense of what even happened. We will always find new stories to tell.

Given that this film came about through an interview, I have to ask: Who is the dream cast for your next project?

My new project is probably one of the funniest scripts I’ve read in the past 10 years. It is about a young woman between two mothers: her adopted mother and her biological mother, who shows up just weeks before she’s set to get married. Jamie Lee Curtis has it on her desk — I really hope she will be my next leading actress.

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