Jan Schomburg

Screenwriter and Director (Germany) who took part in the conference 04: Storytelling: the Business of All? https://youtu.be/YuJUBSe2u90 en français Jan Schomburg, *1976 wrote and directed movies (« Above us only sky » 2011, « Forget my Self » 2014, « Divine » 2020), wrote screenplays together with Maria Schrader (« Stefan Zweig – Farewell to Europe », « I’m your man ») and wrote two novels (« Das Licht und die Geräusche », 2017, « Die Möglichkeit eines Wunders », 2024). Secretly he even wrote and directed sketch comedy for German Television. His films were shown at Berlinale, Locarno, Rotterdam, New York, among others. He was awarded the German Film Prize for the screenplay for « I’m your man », the film « Stefan Zweig – Farewell to Europe » won the Audience Award of the European Film Academy. In 2024, he is the head author and showrunner of « Other people’s money » (WT), an eight-part international TV series for ZDF and DR airing in March 25. — an interview by Guillaume Desjardins, Writer-director, member of Les Parasites, recorded at Les Champs Libres (Rennes) in December 2023 in the framework of the serie "What stories for our time?". Jan Schomburg The story: its responsibility to art « We learned just to listen to detail and let it grow on itself somehow. » Break down the writing process: from details to general. I've been writing a few screenplays and a few novels. I've directed a few films and now there's a new position coming up which is called "showrunner". I wrote a series that will be shot in January 2024 and I will be the showrunner, whatever that means, because in the European context there's, I think, a very different interpretation of this job. I took part in a workshop organized by a few European producers called "The Creatives" and they asked themselves: "What is the story again? Why are we here? What's the series? How could a European network look like? How could European storytelling in terms of a series look like?" Each of those producers asked one screenwriter from these different countries to come together without any task except thinking, listening, developing a little bit. This week somehow revolutionized my brain in terms of what an idea is and how you can invite chance and also the collective into this process. And how after some time when you become a professional, you just develop in a sense that you already know what it will be and so on. It's very structural, it's very from the general into the details. So first you have the general structure, then you work on the details. We learned just to listen to detail and let it grow on itself somehow. For me that was really a very beautiful process because I was stuck a little bit in this, "I have to write eight episodes about a financial scandal". It's just an industrial process of writing. So that really inspired me a lot. « I have the feeling, this idea of storytelling is part of why our planet is where it is right now. In that that the individual is valued very highly and the collective is not valued very highly. »  The classical and narcissistic dramatic structure of the narrative. Generally, I would say a story in film is mostly seen as something that is told of a protagonist, and the identification of the audience with a character that has some kind of a problem. Mostly it's binary problems: so there are different concepts in dramatic structure and there's one called "want and need". There's something that the character's aiming for but then there's a real / deeper truth in his character that wants something else. In different ways, this is for me a weird thing to see a human being. First, because I don't think there's one deeper truth. And also, that you have to decide between these things. It's a weird concept I would say. This is what a film story is: a problem has a character and we follow a character anticipating this problem. And somehow, in most of the movies,