‘Voyager’: A Cathartic Journey

There’s no question that “Voyager” is director Volker Schlondorff’s most personal, unabashedly romantic film. An adaptation of the late Swiss novelist Max Frisch’s “Homo Faber,” it stars Sam Shepard in what is his most open and vulnerable performance on screen.

Shepard plays a peripatetic, emotionally detached engineer who through a series of coincidences unexpectedly experiences both love and tragedy. Having decided to do the film he had first been offered 15 years earlier, Schlondorff found himself all to easily identifying with Shepard’s Dr. Walter Faber.

“I was in a deep, deep depression,” Schlondorff said, sitting in a publicist’s Wilshire Boulevard office recently. He and actress-turned-director Margarethe von Trotta had just been divorced after being several years apart; Von Trotta has been living in Italy while Schlondorff has been based in New York since directing Dustin Hoffman in a TV film production of “Death of a Salesman.”

“For 20 years I had a working and living relationship that now seemed beyond fixing. I had a passionate love affair in New York, but I was still too taken with Margarethe. I was making ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ and I was pretty unhappy with it. A picture I was developing didn’t work out. I was beginning to wonder what I had done with my life. This is where this project comes from: I had to do this film whether anyone sees it or not.”

After “Voyager” finished shooting, Schlondorff’s life began to look up. He began an affair with Angelika Gruber, a film editor 15 years his junior whom he had known for 10 years, and on Jan. 6, when Gruber gave birth to their daughter, Elena, he became a father for the first time at age 52. (He became a stepfather to Von Trotta’s son Felix when the boy was 4.)

“It’s like a fairy tale,” said Schlondorff, a stocky, compact man who looks very much as he did when he first came to Hollywood from Munich for the premiere of “The Tin Drum” in 1979. “I’m a smiling, happy man through telling another man’s tragedy.

“Working with Sam, who’d been through quite a few things before he settled down, was a big help. Everybody involved put a lot of themselves into the film. After we rehearsed--not formally, no blocking anything out--our writer Rudy Wurlitzer and I did lots of rewriting. There was a very strong bond among all of us. Sam had a level of involvement that was not in the character but in his own persona. Once Sam started to weep and explained, ‘I just realized I cannot tolerate another separation in my life.’ Yet the particular scene didn’t call for this much emotion.

“ ‘Voyager’ is mainly about a love affair. Faber’s life is empty and routine when suddenly everything has a meaning again when he meets Sabeth (a 21-year-old beauty played by French actress Julie Delpy). In a way, this was like the experience I had in New York. ‘Voyager’ is like two movies: an adaptation of the novel to the screen more or less faithfully and as a parallel in some ways to my own experience.”

At this point in his career Schlondorff, who was born in Wiesbaden and still maintains an apartment in Munich, accepts that he probably will always go where work takes him. Yet, he presently finds himself at a crossroads: In the works is a film about Rimbaud and Verlaine currently being written by Christopher Hampton and with his close friend John Malkovich to play Verlaine. Also, he has been asked to participate in the modernizing of the UFA studios in what was East Germany near Potsdam.

“They’re in terrible shape, they’re still using the stages built for (Fritz Lang’s 1926) ‘Metropolis.’ It’s a call you can’t ignore, but I have an offer here in Hollywood. What do you do: try to build up some kind of industry or take a nice offer here?”