Image: Barb D-Man
For millions of people in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, the TV highlight of the weekend will begin at 8:15 p.m. on Whit Monday – the new “Tatort” (more below).
On a Viennese couch, on the other hand, a woman will hide under a blanket and occasionally whimper softly, as she says jokingly.
Sarah Wassermair has established herself as a successful screenwriter and as such is now celebrating her “Tatort” debut. The 35-year-old, who was responsible for the screenplay for a big cinema hit in 2022 (95,000 visitors) with “Stories from Franz”, is always afraid of the resonance of a project.
“But at the end of the day it’s like this: If I start writing in a way that pleases as many people as possible, I would become arbitrary, interchangeable. I can only find the best book with my limited resources and talent and say with a certain humility: Here is my story.” If she likes it, it is the ideal case. “If not, I’ll have to live with it.”
“This term is terrible”
Do you have to get yourself involved for a “Tatort” engagement? Usually yes, she says. “Or you’ve been in the business as long as I have, until the ‘Tatort’ team gives up in frustration and comes by themselves,” says Wassermair and laughs. A responsible editor, whom she has known for a long time, asked her for coffee to ask one thing: “Why don’t you even ask?” Wassermair was “simply too shy for it”.
The literary journey to the new episode “Azra” finally began in the very first lockdown of 2020. Wassermair describes finding an idea, working out a story as slowly working towards it with a feedback loop between her and those responsible. Do you have a free literary hand? “That’s basically never the case in TV format.”
Because if you write for a “crime scene”, a relationship that has often existed for decades must be well told – that of the investigators as with Eisner and Fellner. Wassermair “payed very close attention” to this friendship because it was central and wonderfully played for “the Viennese”.
When it came to details, “the editors received questions by e-mail at 4 a.m.: Tell me, if one of the two drove fast, who would it be?”
The idea of letting the case play out in the mafia milieu came up quickly. “But for the record, I haven’t talked to anyone about the mafia. This is just book research. I thought about it for a moment, but my best friend said: I forbid you to do that now.” Wassermair does not look for authenticity in her imagination, but in life – through research. “I’m a doctor’s kid from a small community. I have to get the realities of life that I lack. And there are stories and situations that are much more exciting than anything I could think of.”
Azra, the main character of the episode, is a young woman from a difficult background. She is a so-called informant, an informant who reports secretly to the police. How do you research that? “Let’s put it this way: Our Federal Criminal Police Office was of course not very enthusiastic about my inquiry about how it works,” says Wassermair. So she went to Germany. When designing female characters, Wassermair takes inspiration from Game of Thrones author George RR Martin: “I write about people.”
Half of the world’s population are women, says Wassermair, “so I make sure that half of my characters are women and they do everything that women do in the real world.
She finds “battle terms” such as those of the “strong female protagonist” terrible. That only draws attention to unrealistic, because perfect multiple performers. “Women are just as dysfunctional, weak and broken, they investigate just as much as they are criminals.”
the episode Azra is Eisner and Fellner’s 31st case. Styrian Dominik Hartl directed it. Mon., 8.15 p.m., ORF 2.
Sarah Wassermair wrote for the series “Janus” and the ORF crime thriller “Flamengirl”. “New Stories from Franz” based on her screenplay will be released in cinemas in autumn
Source: Nachrichten
