Fresh Face: ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’ star Felix Kammerer on breakout role: ‘I really liked not being able to see myself on screen’

WHO

Felix Kammerer

Age: 27

Residence: Vienna, Austria

WHAT

In his film debut, the Austrian theater actor Felix Kammerer delivers a chilling lead role in Edward Berger’s German-language production of No news from the western front. The anti-war drama, based on the 1929 novel of the same name by Erich Maria Remarque, follows a German battalion of lively young men as they experience the atrocities of war as they fight on the front lines against the French. More specifically, the path of the soldiers’ disillusionment is seen through the eyes of the courageous Paul Bäumer (Kammerer), as the devastating psychological effects of the First World War shatter what remains of his innocence.

For Kammerer, a veteran of the stage but a newcomer to the world of film, it was a huge realization to see himself on the big screen for the first time. Kammerer saw the raw expression of trauma and humanity in his actions and decided he was on the right track. “I really liked not being able to see myself on the screen,” says Kammerer. “I had nothing to do with that person. It felt like Paul was on the screen and I was looking at that person. For me, it is a great sign that I have so clearly detached myself from this role. I’m completely fine with what I see and do, but at the same time I don’t feel like that, that’s a very important factor, so I know I’ve done a good job.”

WHY

Born to leading opera singers, Kammerer’s career choice seemed almost inevitable, as he describes it. “Because of my parents, I grew up on stage, in dressing rooms and theaters,” Kammerer recalls. “At the beginning I wanted to be a director, a cameraman or even a physicist, even though I’m bad at maths. But then I started playing in youth theater companies and when I was 17 I realized I wanted to study acting.”

After four years at the Ernst Busch Academy for Dramatic Arts in Berlin, Kammerer was hired by playwright Sabrina Zwach at the famous Burgtheater in Vienna. There, Kammerer traded monologues for marching orders. On behalf of Zwach, her husband, No news from the western front Producer Malte Grunert saw Kammerer in one of his first plays. Grunert was so impressed by his performance on stage that he offered Kammerer an on-the-spot audition after the show and personally recommended him to Berger for consideration. “Include me [Zwach] that I am where I am now,” says Kammerer. “Her husband came to see a play, saw me on stage and really liked what I was doing. This is how it all started. It was an accident.”

Kammerer was not deterred by the move from stage to screen. During his six-month preparation period, he threw himself into research to help him capture the essence of an early 20th-century soldier. As well as watching movies and accessing rare photos and audio files from the early 20s^e At the beginning of the 20th century, Kammerer’s biggest challenge was searching through war letters in the British National Archives’ collection of First World War letters. “I kept track of everything I could find and read about 2,500 letters from cover to cover,” he says. “It is so interesting and heartbreaking to read these letters because they are censored. People won’t tell their families [about the difficulties] of what was really going on. And these letters are her personal thoughts. Seeing that really helped me prepare for this role.”

WHEN WHERE

As for where we’ll see the rising star pop up next, Kammerer jokes that he can’t share that secret information just yet. But when he thinks about the roles he will fulfill in the future, he says: “I would like to have a project that is important in a more universal way. Not just a happy story, but something that tells us something about humanity, about history, something that has layers and can tell us something about the things we don’t understand about ourselves. Something that makes you think, ‘Oh, we needed this movie’.”