„Vampire couples fight just like normal people” – interview with David Rühm

Director of Vampire on the couch David Rühm has been the guest of this year’s Szemrevaló film festival. After having watched the movie, we were very curious, how vampires, relationship issues and Freud can be put together into a movie – so that it will be, as an addition, extremely hilarious. So we interviewed him – see the result below!

DailyNewsHungary: How do you like it here in Hungary?

David Rühm: It is not my first time actually, but tomorrow I will already be leaving. Today is the screening of my movie, that’s why I’m here. After the screening I will also meet the audience.

DailyNewsHungary: I really liked your movie. It’s a very complicated movie – there are two pairs, one of them are vampires, the other ones „normal people”, plus Freud „personally”, and all these caracters have different motivations, there are a lot of conflicts of their interests. So there is this vampire-thing, the Freud-thing, the things couples usually have… How did all these come together to be a movie?

David Rühm: It started very simply. I had a simple thought in the nineties, that it must be terrible for the vampires not being able to see themselves in the mirror, and I’ve even seen a movie about it. So it made me thinking: vampires live for hundreds of years, so if you never see yourself in hundreds of years, what happenes to you personality? From this idea I came to the mirror-theory of Jacques Lacan. He was a psychologist in the 1930’s. According to his theory, when a child recognizes him- or herself in the mirror, that is when he or she becomes a person – when they realize it is them and their reflections. From this theory I got to Freud, which I thought was funny, I mean, the psychoanalysis of a vampire… Plus, vampires have a lot of freudian things: they can fly, which Freud thought was an erotic thing – when a human dreams about flying – and a lot of other things. For example, the must of counting objects: the vampires have this tick to count objects. I was wondering why nobody ever made a movie about that, because I found it so obvious. So the whole concept started with these thoughts, but the main theme of the story is projections. The vampire woman cannot see herself in the mirror so she depends on her husband, he has to describe how she looks. What happenes: when he describes her the way he wants her to look, she becomes a person he wants her to be. That’s why there is the other couple, the painter who paints her girlfriend the way he wants her to look. So I was playing with these projections – in relationships and in situations when you change because of someone else. In the beginning of the movie, Lucy, the painter’s girlfriend is the only normal person who likes herself. And in the end she also have a tick with her haircut…

DailyNewsHungary: In these relationships of the two couples, the issues are still very everyday issues.

David Rühm: Yes, the vampires fight just like any other couple, only they have superpowers which they can use against each other – althought they are also thrownig glasses against each other… And I also like comedies from the 30’s – a lot of them are about couples fighting. And of course there are a lot of personal experienc. People want to change each other.

DailyNewsHungary: So how long did it take for you to develop this script?

David Rühm: It took very long, seven years, but I was not writing every day. When I started up with it, it was very difficult to raise money for a vampire-movie. It is now already over again, there have been too many vampire-movies and it killed the genre. And I know it was going to be an expensive movie concerning austrian budget, so we cooperated with Switzerland. So it also took time to get the money that was needed.

DailyNewsHungary: Well, it can be seen that there is some VFX, but other than that, I wouldn’t think it was an extremely expensive movie…

David Rühm: But there are hidden things as well. First I wanted to shoot the whole movie in studios, the same exact way the movies in the 1930’s were shot. But it would have been too expensive, therefore, we couldn’t do it, only partially. The scenes we shot on the streets of Vienna, I tried to make them look like as if they were shot in the studio: a few passangers walking by, and so on, a little artificial. So I can say, almost every shot have special effects on them. Sometimes you don’t even see it, sometimes something has just been taken away, so you don’t miss it, because you don’t know something more was there.