Old before her time, it is said of Paula Beer, which is meant as a compliment. She is the star of Frantz, from mercurial director François Ozon. It is set in the broken months after the first world war, and Beer plays a sheltered but slowly blooming young German widow. The movies always need new faces, yet more than one observer has remarked that something about Beer – a certain silent expressiveness – makes her look as if she belongs in black and white.
“It’s strange, I agree,” she says. “I don’t look in the mirror and see the 1900s, but on the screen, there is a sense I fit in that time – like history suits my face.”
The 22-year-old Berliner shrugs and sips a tap water: hair tied back, self-possessed, serious-minded. While Frantz’s emotional heft and sleights of hand have brought Ozon’s film a warm reception, Beer has been its great discovery. After the premiere at last year’s Venice film festival, she won the award for best young actor (best actor went to Emma Stone). She took the interviews and chaotic photocalls that followed it in her stride – but her moment of triumph was not, she says, what she expected.
“You see photographs of actors with awards and think: ‘OK, this is the moment their lives change.’ But when it happens to you, it doesn’t feel that way at all. You think: ‘Ah, OK. So I’m still the same person I was this morning.’ It didn’t feel so life-changing after all. I don’t know, maybe I didn’t really want my life to be changed.”
She pauses and frowns, as if some inner dictaphone had just played back her words. Of course, she says, to win the prize was wonderful. She just realised she prefers the actual acting. Then she sits back, satisfied.
Beer met Ozon after she had already made six films in Germany. She starred in her first at 14, a Whistle Down the Wind-ish story called Poll, again set around the first world war, playing an aristocratic girl hiding an Estonian anarchist. “You saw it?” she asks, keenly enough for me to feel bad when I say no.
The daughter of two abstract painters, Beer was educated at a Montessori school, studying drama mostly on the sets of her movies after being spotted by a casting agent. She knew Ozon, she says, for his urbane 2013 piece Jeune et Jolie. Then came a summons to an audition, and a print-out of just two scenes, to be delivered in French. Later, she received a call while on a hectic U-Bahn trip in Berlin, Ozon barely audible, offering her the part.
Beer says she helped develop a sense of the character before filming, poring over the full script once she was given it, and steering clear of overlaps with her own experience. “Once you mix your own life up with the character, you’re being unfair on them. And shooting a film is intense anyway. I don’t want to be worried about my personal stuff, too. I would rather use my – hmm,” she says, searching for the right English word. “Institution? No. Intuition!”
In the course of the story, her character leaves her German village for Paris. But even while shooting in Saxony, Ozon was surrounded by French crew members he had worked with many times before. The mood was convivial. Sometimes, there was even wine at lunch. It felt very different to what she was used to – Ozon apologised for the tight, 39-day shooting schedule, just as Beer was thinking that in Germany they would have to make two films in that time. “But in France, people go to the cinema twice a week, and when they go, they see French films. In Germany, we don’t do that.” (With robotic frequency, the press of both countries have compared Beer to the late Romy Schneider, the luminous German actress with dual French citizenship who starred in films for directors including Visconti, Claude Chabrol and Orson Welles. Beer is flattered, if perplexed. “It’s not as if I actually look like her.”)
If culturally she felt comfortable, the language was harder. “My French was OK. I could be in Paris and order a meal, get through life. But to act, I realised just saying certain German words had an emotional effect on me. My face and body reacted to them automatically. But in French, there were none of those connections. First, it all has to go through the brain.”
Although Frantz is a film about a young woman’s dawning self-awareness, the traumas of the war are more than mere set-dressing. Beer says Ozon had her and the rest of the cast watch Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon as research – a film set in rural Germany just a few years earlier, with the queasy knowledge that its array of sombre children would become the Nazi generation. In Frantz, the local beerhall already seethes with rage.
Beer is a product of another era, one that felt like progress. The Berlin wall came down five years before she was even born. Now, she feels that history is repeating itself.
“Oh yes, all the problems of society after the first world war are back again. The hatred of the foreigner, that awful side of being human, where you see other cultures as not as human. That is definitely back.” Even in Germany, now held up as a beacon for liberal democracy? Ah, she says, but in last year’s Berlin state election, the far-right suddenly broke through.
“They played on all the usual fears. ‘What about my job?’ ‘The immigrants will take my house.’ At least in the south and the east, where I am, there was no way in for [the far-right]. But to see people voting for them elsewhere in the city, it shocked me. You break down what they say – ‘Oh, we simply need to take care of our people’ – and the real message is brutal. In Germany, with our history, we are going to say that?”
Next, Beer will return to Germany to star in Work Without Author, made by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, director of The Lives of Others, himself returning to Berlin after an ill-fated detour to Hollywood. But the mention of America finds Beer wary without ruling anything out. “Not yet,” she says.
She has not yet decided whether to create a social media presence. As an actor, she says, she should probably have some way of letting the world know what she is doing. “But as me, Paula, I hate it. I don’t want people to ask me how I am and then I refer them to Facebook.” She lets out a deep breath, perhaps more at home then than now, after all. “When I’m talking with my friend I want to talk with my friend, not just post a selfie so it looked like we did.”
• Frantz is released 12 May.
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