Director’s Statement
I wrote the screenplay for my film V13 based on the play Vienne 1913 by the late renowned French Lacanian psychoanalyst Alain Didier-Weill. He was also a personal friend of mine. He spent his life researching and reflecting on the rise of the Nazi Weltanschaung . The roots of his interest no doubt go back to the experiences of his own Jewish family during the Occupation of France but also because he ultimately felt it was important for humanity to examine this poisonous ideology—just as Freud had felt psychoanalysis was important for all of humanity. I think that Alain felt it was important to show how “Adolf“—the character in my film who becomes Hitler—absorbed the different strains of antisemitism that were current in the society around him and then produced his own form that precipitates the Holocaust. Alain felt it was important to transmit his examination of the Nazi Weltanschaung because he saw that the scapegoating of Jews and other vulnerable minorities to consolidate the power of extreme forms of ethnic nationalism and religious fundamentalism was increasing again and was not just a phenomenon of the past. Alain died in 2018 and since that time the resonances between what he portrays in Vienna just before World War 1 and the present have increased. To portray prejudice is not to condone. To the contrary, it is to better understand and critique.
Despite the seriousness of this subject matter and the overall serious way in which I approach it, I follow Alain’s predilection to use humor at times like many great artists who have approached this same subject, such as Ernst Lubitsch, Charlie Chaplain and Mel Brooks. My choice to film for Vienna before World War 1 contemporary New York City, mainly the Bronx, also contains an element of levity that hopefully is both entertaining and provocative.