![]() ![]() ![]() Schmied had similar fortune with Valerie Huber, who plays Eva. “He’s a classically trained actor, he’s from Carinthia, he’s the right age and he can ski really, really well. “It was really invigorating for me,” he adds.įor the lead role, Schmied found the ideal young actor in Julian Waldner, who, like Klammer, hails from the Alpine state of Carinthia. ![]() Maybe I should do this movie from my gut because he does everything from his gut.” “Everything else, I tried to do from my gut, because I thought, Franz – I have to honor him in that way. To that end, he limited his shot list to action scenes and a couple of sequences. I wanted to find my own line, for lack of a better word.” I wanted to feel like him, so I didn’t prepare all that much. Schmied also found inspiration in Klammer’s own instinctive style while shooting the film. In capturing the look of 1976 Austria, Schmied worked with cinematographers Xiaosu Han and Andreas Thalhammer to give the film a gritty vintage feel. Even people who weren’t interested watched it.” “This was when there were only three networks in America and everybody watched it. Klammer’s immediate stardom occurred in a very different time, when the Olympics were a much bigger television event than they are today, Schmied notes. They liked his approachable quality, they liked his boyish looks and they liked his spirit.” Klammer’s astonishing achievement made him an international superstar, Schmied adds. They were very positive about our approach to the story.” Recalling his initial pitch to Klammer and his wife, Schmied said, “We will tell the story of Franz Klammer we will shine a light on this character and tell the audience who he is, but we will do all of that in a time span of five days.” And not only did we have love in there, we had this very fragile, very romantic new love story of two young people almost from opposite worlds: he’s a boy from the mountains in Carinthia and she’s the daughter of a rich industrialist in Vienna.” “If you do a big epic sports bio, you have to have love in there somewhere. “We discovered this very romantic, great love story,” says Schmied. The story also revolves around Klammer’s burgeoning romance with girlfriend (and later wife) Eva and his professional rivalry with Swiss downhill legend Bernhard Russi. The Schmieds instead focused on Klammer’s biggest success – his Olympic victory that won him gold in the downhill and the days leading up to the event. “There are not as many good biopics as one would imagine because of the formula.” “We’re both not huge fans of generic biopics because they’re almost like a passion play – station after station after station,” Schmied adds. Schmied and his wife and writing partner Elisabeth Schmied met with Klammer and won him over with their take on his story. “I grew up with Franz Klammer – everybody in Austria did,” Schmied says, stressing Klammer’s enduring popularity in the country. When producer Jakob Pochlatko of Vienna-based Epo-Film approached Schmied with the project, the director embraced the opportunity. Other attempts had been made at telling Klammer’s story on film over the years, but none had succeeded. ![]() The movie world premieres at the Zurich Film Festival, which opens Thursday. It was that focus that ultimately convinced Klammer to give the film, “Chasing the Line,” a thumbs up. In telling the story of champion alpine ski racer Franz Klammer, one of Austria’s most revered and beloved sports heroes, director Andreas Schmied forewent the usual biopic tropes, focusing instead on a few fateful days that culminated in his victory at the 1976 Olympics in Innsbruck. ![]()
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