The Director

The book is set, for the most part, during the 1930s and 40s. During that tumultuous period, we witness G.W. Pabst experience some extreme highs and lows. We get to know him not just as a film director but also as a son, husband, father and friend. How did your feelings about Pabst shift over the course of the novel and as his circumstances changed?

In an interview with the Booker Prizes, author Daniel Kehlmann said he was interested in portraying ‘everyday complicities: the small workplace bargains, the club meetings, the casual blindness’, while translator Ross Benjamin said The Director explores ‘how complicity happens – not in one grand betrayal, but through a series of smaller moves’. How complicit with the Nazi regime do you think Pabst is? Is there a specific moment when he becomes morally compromised in your view?

Kehlmann has also talked about ‘the delicious novelistic temptation of a vanished film: to “shoot” it on paper, and let the reader watch’. What did you think of the language used in the filming scenes? Could you picture the different movies as they were being shot?

Benjamin has said, ‘As a reader and translator, I was particularly drawn to the mix of propulsion and unease, nightmare and slapstick, evil and absurdity, history and hallucination.’ Did you enjoy these aspects of the novel, too? What kind of atmosphere do Kehlmann and Benjamin ultimately create?

The International Booker Prize 2026 judges said, ‘To employ sparklingly comic writing to tell such a dark story is an audacious and yet fantastically successful achievement.’ Do you agree? What impact does humour have within the novel?

In an ‘Author’s Note’ at the end of the book, Kehlmann says, ‘Although this novel is largely inspired by the life stories of the historical G.W. Pabst and his family, it is a work of fiction; for instance, there was no son named Jakob.’ How do you feel about the mixing up of the real and the fictional? Did you discover anything new about the Nazi period from reading this book?

The novel is split into three parts, ‘Outside’, ‘Inside’ and ‘After’, and it’s written from multiple viewpoints. It’s framed by an incident involving Franz Wilzek some years after Pabst’s death. What did you think of the structure of the novel? Did you like the way it begins and ends? How did your feelings about Franz change, considering his behaviour as an old man?