In ‘The Signal’, Florian David Fitz tries to find out what happened to his serial wife after she suddenly disappears without a trace following a fact-finding mission in space. And he and we as viewers don’t have to wait too long for the answers. The German Netflix production, originally intended as a cinema film, has already ended after four episodes and a second season is not planned.
And that is exactly what main actor and co-author Fitz sees as a major advantage, he explains FILMSTARTS interview reveals. We also talk about Germany’s troubled relationship with genre material, the benefits of streaming versus theatrical release, and the previous title of its miniseries…
Florian David Fitz: (after looking at an older notebook of upcoming Netflix highlights where ‘The Signal’ still had the working title of ‘Hello’). We actually considered keeping “Hello” as the title, but weren’t sure if we could imagine something like that. Now that I’ve seen the teaser trailer, it might have been pretty good after all. But we are also very happy with ‘The Signal’ as the title.
Florian David Fitz: (laughs) Normally you have to ignore these kinds of public things while you’re working. But now, when you ask questions like that, I suddenly ask myself too. Nice, thanks for asking me about it.
Florian David Fitz: But I think it’s important that Netflix works locally. But as valuable as it is, it looks quite international. Personally, I love it because for me it’s just a different genre and you couldn’t actually do something like that in our cinema. That’s the great thing about streamers. That something like this can be achieved there.
‘The Signal’ was initially intended as a feature film
Florian David Fitz: No, that was a very long journey. [Showrunner] Sebastian Hilger actually wanted to make a movie of it. And I said, that’s incredibly expensive what you want to do. It will be difficult to raise the necessary money for this, especially in the cinema. And second, do you care if an audience sees it? It’s not that people flock to German genre films.
It’s different with streamers. Strangely enough, we all tune in to different things than what we watch in the cinemas. We have certain preferences about what we watch and where. And the streamers have given people opportunities to suddenly watch things that weren’t traditionally viewed that way. This gave rise to the idea of turning ‘The Signal’ into a streaming series. But in general it also became clear that a miniseries might be better for the material than a movie. And with that, of course, comes completely different challenges. What exactly is happening here? How is everything developing? What’s the secret behind it? How do we ensure that the viewer does not click on the next tile after five minutes, but actually wants to know what happens next?
Florian David Fitz: It’s not up to us, of course we want to do everything. But we also have to reach the public somehow. And I think the threshold for genre in cinema is so much higher for us. In other countries, people traditionally go to the cinema differently. For us, we all have a full life and then have to decide in the evening whether to drive into the city or take the S-Bahn and go to the cinema. And then it needs some kind of hook.
Florian David Fitz: But there are always genre films, although they usually can’t be super expensive. But they can be smart. It’s just that people don’t necessarily go inside. We as an audience need to take a look at ourselves. Like I said, with streamers anything is possible. There’s also some incredibly great German genre stuff. So it is not the case that nothing at all could be done.
Florian David Fitz: Of course I would find that very interesting. Directing is just not my thing at the moment, for family reasons. It’s just not available in terms of time. It takes so incredibly long to write. Then I play too. And if I were to direct and release the film too… I’d rather try to live three hours a day longer. (laughs)
Florian David Fitz: No! The idea for the series came from Nadine anyway [Gottmann] and Sebastian, it’s her baby.
Florian David Fitz: When I take notes, I always write down quite hesitantly, because I don’t necessarily have to. The most important thing here was to achieve the things we wanted to do. And that was really complicated. You have different time levels, you have a whodunnit element, you have something philosophical and something emotional between the characters. That’s a tricky plan in terms of plot. And with my experience I can try to bring together what you want to bring together. This is also technically demanding.
“I love miniseries”
Florian David Fitz: I like miniseries. Because at some point I get angry when I realize that you have a great premise, but you don’t want to finish it at the end of a season and you really just need to be kept on track. But with a miniseries you can tell a completely different story because you have an ending. That makes it valuable. Endings are great.
Florian David Fitz: But it could really start now. The end can also be a beginning. But you don’t always have to write everything out. By the way, the beginning and the end have always existed that way, even if it was supposed to be a movie.
Florian David Fitz: That’s more because of the characters. We put this character who is a history teacher and knows exactly what people have done. Therefore, he is not convinced that we are at the end of evolution. (laughs) And we contrast that with his wife, who does not believe in good things out of naivety, but precisely because she is super smart, even though you can of course wonder whether it is all good. I thought that was exciting. Ultimately, it’s not cynical at all.
Florian David Fitz: I loved it because it leaves so much open. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how philosophically charged or complex it is. All the experts we spoke to, including those from the European Space Agency, wish everyone could look down from above, because that automatically affects them. It always sounds very banal, but it puts everything into perspective because you see reality. You see what it really is like. We think our reality is all of this. But then zoom in three levels higher and you see: that’s really how it is, all the time. You’re sitting on a marble in space, that’s reality. And that makes 98 percent of everything we do here seem completely absurd.