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Interview with Hanna Schygulla 
People and your biographies speak about your differences with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, what is your view on that after so many years have passed?
He had a rare creativity and was a real genius. It is so unusual that he ended up destroying himself at 37 year old after giving birth to more than 50 productions including 2 TV series, a dozen theater plays, as well as essays and poems - all in just 13 years of creation.
Hanna Schygulla, as an actress, would not have existed without him. We met by chance in a course of drama. I gave up after that course thinking that acting was not for me. However Fassbinder saw something I had not. He was convinced that I would become a star or a pillar in his films.
Where did your "connection" with Latin America started?
Gabriel Garcia Marquez saw me in a cafe in Paris. He remembered the protagonist of a film he planned based in one of his stories: Miss Forbes's summer of happiness. He wanted me to be Miss Forbes in the movie.
The director was the Mexican Humberto Hermosillo. He chose me to be the protagonist of a television series in the spirit of "real maravilloso" reversing "his short story" in the basis of these six chapters of the soap opera produced by the Brazilian Ruy Guerra. Now it was not a Colombian woman who knocked the door of a house in Vienna offering her services for I Sell My Dreams (series title) but me, a German who had been wandering around Havana. During the six months of my stay in Cuba, the connection with Latin America was born. I have enjoyed its literature, music, cinema, and especially, its people. And the fetish Cuban actress Alicia Bustamante, who participated in the same film, has become my closest friend for twenty years already. 
You mentioned the "real maravilloso" as an influence for you, what kind of impact did it have in you as an artist?
I could sum it up with the sentence: I see reality as if it was a dream and dreams as if theywere reality.
If you could do another documentary about some arts personality who would he or he be?
Alongside the students of the Centre for Contemporary Creation in Geneva, I will make a documentary about another way to see the work of EugenBavcar, a blind photographer who is already present in my documentaryAlicia Bustamante. A meeting with him is always a precious and unforgettable moment. EugenBavcar transforms its images obtained by mechanically invisible images using photomontage. For example, in the first picture he took from me when we first met, he added an owl on my shoulder without knowing that my mother called me "my little owl" because I did not want to sleep at night when I was a child. I think this is a modern example of an old subject, the blind psychic reader.
After your documentary about Alicia Bustamante, is there any other Latin American that you would like to do a film about?
The Mexican Carlos Reygados; the Argentine Carlos Sorin, the Chilean Alejandro Jodorowski, and the Brazilian, BiaLessa.
You're writing a book, could you tell us a bit about it?
It is my autobiography. Firstly, I had to write it to prevent others (who have actually offered to do it) not write it. I know I have a special way to see things and to write. Finally, I feel a very special sensation while writing about my life in the same way that I feel interested by what people tell me about their lives.
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