Sebastian Schipper trained as an actor and is best known for what he did behind the camera: Victoria, 138 minutes of a Berlin night shot without a cut. It is a real achievement with a padded first hour, and the rest of his work is quieter and smaller.
Fi1m perspective
The camera goes into the club with Laia Costa and does not come out for 138 minutes. That is the whole idea of Victoria (2015), and it is Sebastian Schipper's: one Berlin night, dance floor to getaway car, with Sturla Brandth Grøvlen's camera never switched off. It is a stunt and it is more than a stunt, because the take does something a cut could not, which is make us feel the hours pass. It also shows what the method costs. The first hour rambles because nobody can trim it, and the last half hour is a crime film we have seen before, with the panic and the wrong decisions made in a hurry.
Schipper came to directing from acting. He trained at the Otto-Falckenberg-Schule in Munich in the early 1990s, worked at the Münchner Kammerspiele, and took supporting parts through the decade, in The English Patient (1996) and as Mike in Run Lola Run (1998). He has stayed close to Tom Tykwer ever since, first as an actor in his films and later with Tykwer producing his; they have worked together five times. His first film as writer and director, Absolute Giganten (1999), set the pattern he has kept to: men, friendship, a city, one stretch of time in which everything changes. Ein Freund von mir (2006) and Mitte Ende August (2009) followed the same lines, and Roads (2019) took the journey out across Europe.
What he does well is trust the people in front of the camera. He has said, "I don't believe in rehearsing with actors on a film," and Victoria is what that looks like: the club and street talk is loose and half-heard, and Costa's performance grows out of it rather than being fitted to it. The discipline went elsewhere. Olivia Neergaard-Holm is credited as editor on a film with no cuts, and the editing was done beforehand, on paper, with Schipper and his co-writer Eike Frederik Schulz, who also turns up behind the bar. Somewhere after the first hour, when we understood what the men wanted Victoria for, we stopped watching for a join and started dreading the sunrise. That is the take earning its keep, and it is the thing no other film of his has managed.
As an actor he is a useful presence in other people's films rather than a reason to see them. Mike in Run Lola Run is a part we did not single out when we reviewed it, and that is fair to the film and to him; his stage training shows more in how he lets his own casts run than in anything he does on screen himself.
He has made one film that is hard to forget and several that are easy to miss. If he finds another idea as large as one night without a cut, we will be there for it. Until then, watch Victoria in one sitting, late, with the phone in another room.
Biography
Sebastian Schipper is a German actor and director. He was born on 8 May 1968 in Hannover and studied acting at the Otto Falckenberg Schule in Munich from 1992 to 1995. He performed with the Münchner Kammerspiele and made his screen debut in the 1992 comedy Kleine Haie.
As an actor, Schipper appeared in supporting roles including in The English Patient (1996), Winter Sleepers (1997) and as Mike in Run Lola Run (1998). He later took lead roles such as Simon in Three (2010). Schipper has also directed films including Absolute Giganten (1999), A Friend of Mine (2006) and Victoria (2015).
