The Teachers’ Lounge’: Director Ilker Çatak Reflects On The International Appeal Of His Intense Schoolroom Drama

Of the five international films shortlisted for the Oscars, The Teachers’ Lounge has had the longest legs. Debuting at the 2023 Berlinale — and not even in competition — Ilker Çatak’s provocative thriller has been a fixture on the festival circuit ever since. Channeling the dark spirit of Michael Haneke, it stars Leonie Benesch as Carla Nowak, a teacher at a public school where a series of thefts have been taking place. Non-white students are immediately targeted, and Carla is disgusted by the blatant racism on display. But when she sets a trap to find the real culprit, things don’t go according to plan.

DEADLINE: The Teachers’ Lounge has had an incredible journey. It’s been a year now, so you’re probably tired of talking about it…

ILKER ÇATAK: Yeah, but it’s also been a pleasant journey and I’m glad to answer all the questions. When you start making a film, it’s always a bit of a gamble: Is it going to land with an audience or not? And this one did, which is, of course, the spot that you want to be in as a filmmaker. So yeah, that’s been crazy. And the beauty of it is that it’s all been so unexpected.

DEADLINE:How did it start? What was the original inspiration?

ÇATAK: I started writing this film together with Johannes Duncker, my co-writer. We went to school together, and we experienced a very similar incident to the one at the beginning of the film: we got frisked when we were students. But the difference was, we weren’t aware of our rights back then. We thought this could be a good kickoff for a story, and so we started writing it. We talked about it with some educators we knew, and they said, “Well, this happens on an everyday basis, but the difference is that nowadays you can’t just frisk the staff or the students. You have to say that it’s voluntary.” And we thought, ‘Oh, this is interesting,’ because it reminded us of the kinds of things that politicians say: “If you don’t have anything to hide, you don’t have anything to fear.” Or “Your privacy is in good hands, don’t worry. We’re just having a look.” And so, we started digging.

DEADLINE:Did you workshop it in any way? Or did you just purely write it and then finesse it as you got closer to production? It feels very authentic.

ÇATAK: Well, the script kind of started flying when we decided to just keep it in the school and not go outside of it. That was one of the main rules that we set ourselves. Another rule was, if there’s no conflict in a scene, we probably don’t need it. That alone created a sort of pressure. And we wanted to create pressure, because that’s what most of the teachers told us; that this job is incredibly demanding, and it can really get to you if you don’t set your boundaries. That started us thinking about boundaries, and how a young teacher maybe wants a little too much of what she’s looking for.

The research we did made me just realize how underestimated this job actually is, how overworked these people are and how underpaid they are. For instance, we found out that in Germany they’re down 25,000 teachers, and the numbers are rising because no one wants to take up this profession anymore. People are like, “Why should I do this? Why should I get up at 6am in the morning and start class at 8am when it’s proven that students learn better when you teach them at 10am?” Once you start researching that kind of stuff, you realize how much politics has failed in the past decades. So, it was very interesting to just go there and get to know that world a little better. And I’m really glad that the visibility of the film contributes to the visibility of the job these people are doing.

DEADLINE:What were you looking for when you cast Leonie Benesch? She’s absolutely fantastic. Did you audition her, or did you write the piece for her?

ÇATAK: We basically wrote it for her. I saw her in The White Ribbon by Michael Haneke, and ever since then I kept track of what she was doing. She’s brilliant and she always has been, in each film—even if the film isn’t good, she’s always brilliant. But I never saw her in lead parts, and I thought, ‘Why is that?’ She’s so talented. She’s maybe the most talented actor of her generation, but she’s always in these supporting parts. And so, I asked her to do it. We met in Berlin, we went for a walk, and then she said to me, “I like it, and I’m going to do it, but you’ve got to know—I don’t like children.” [Laughs.]

DEADLINE:What did she mean by that?

ÇATAK: She was like, “I have three little brothers. I’m the oldest of four, and I know that children can be little assholes. I’m sorry.” And I said, “Don’t worry, you don’t need to deal with the kids.” And that’s how we proceeded. We made it a good cop-bad cop situation, in which she was like their mom, and I was their dad. I would start the day with a conversation, get them into a certain temperature, and then I’d say, “All right, now we go into the scene,” and then she would take over. She wanted to keep that authority, that distance. And I do understand that. If I were to be the kind of director who’d just unload the whole responsibility onto her, that would not be good. So, she’s maybe also trying to protect herself, to stop me from telling her, “Yeah, just go with the flow, improvise with the kids.” So, I get it.

DEADLINE:There’s a lot of Haneke in the movie, but your film is a lot warmer than his work. There’s a lot more humanity; you move in close, you go in tight on her face, you follow her. We’re on her side. Was that always a style choice from the beginning?

ÇATAK: It was interesting, because all of a sudden, during pre-production, the YouTube algorithm gave me these videos about Haneke, interviews with him. They were just suggesting them—I didn’t really Google them or search for them—But Haneke was definitely kind of [an influence]. There’s this whole whodunit thing in The White Ribbon, and you have the kids, and you have the adults that are mean to each other. I love Haneke, and I love his films, even though sometimes they are, as you say, a little cold and a little didactic.

So, yeah, I was aware of Haneke, and I was thinking about his films when we did that. Leonie is great friends with him, and there was this moment after the film was finished where she showed it to him, and then she showed me a message that he’d texted to her. That was an incredible feeling, just to see that Haneke saw the film and liked it.

One more thing about Leonie is that she studied acting in London. She went to Guildhall, and she has this kind of British way of approaching things and of trusting me as a director with basically everything. She’d say, “It’s your responsibility. This text is your responsibility. I don’t want to say anything about my costume. This is your responsibility. You guys take care of that.” And that was just really refreshing to me to be working with an actor who’s coming from that kind of school and really just trusting me as the director.

DEADLINE:But did you always intend it to have such a kinetic style? Wherever Carla goes, we follow her. How did you decide on the visual style of the film?

ÇATAK: This film was my third collaboration with my DoP, Judith Kaufmann, who is really a great, great, great person as well as a colleague. And we have this quest with every film, where, for a very long time, we don’t know what we’re going to do. We take photos, we shoot tests, and we spend time with actors. I think Judith had kind of a love for Leonie; she just wanted to be close to that face, and she just wanted to be physically close to her. I think it says a lot about the feeling that you have towards your actors—she as a DP, and, of course, me as a director—and that relationship is very much being translated into an image, I think. You can just see the love that Judith has for Leonie in this film.

DEADLINE:It’s interesting because she doesn’t give away a lot, even though she’s in closeup a lot of the time. You see what she’s feeling, but not necessarily what she’s thinking.

ÇATAK: Yeah. It plays into the whole concept of private life. We don’t see Carla in her private life, and you don’t see her talk about her emotions, really. But I think, to understand a person, it doesn’t matter what they speak about or how they live; it’s really about how they take decisions and how they act. There is a saying. I only know it in German. But it goes something like, “It’s not about what you say, it’s about what you do.” When we wrote the script, that was our mantra. We decided to just exclude that whole private, emotional luggage that you have oftentimes in films, where you actually realize, “Oh, the director is trying to tell me something here.” There were actually some scenes where she was more articulate about her emotions, but they all got deleted,

DEADLINE:Why?

ÇATAK: Because when you write something, you’re always afraid that something might not be conveyed to the audience. But then a great actor like Leonie comes around, and she just has a great facial expression that says it all, and you can actually trust that expression and save time. But, of course, you never know when you’re writing.

DEADLINE:There’s a scene where Carla is talking to another teacher and she says, “Can we speak in German?” What’s going on there? What language were they speaking?

ÇATAK: That’s Polish. [Carla’s surname is Polish.] I once had a moment like this with a colleague of mine. She’s Turkish, and her Turkish is impeccable. But whenever I spoke in Turkish to her, she would always answer in German. At first, I thought, “OK, maybe she doesn’t want to be rude towards the other people around us,” but even when we were alone, she would answer in German. And I was kind of bugged by that. I didn’t really understand why she wouldn’t speak in our own language to me.

And then I thought this could be interesting in the film, because, first of all, there, is a horrible prejudice in Germany that all Polish people are thieves. Maybe she wants to hide that side of her identity. Maybe she’s saying, “Look, I’ve worked my whole life trying to prove to Germans that I’m a German.” Or maybe it’s just something like, “Listen, dude, I’m not going to get personal with you. I don’t know if you’re trying to flirt with me or hitting on me. I just want to keep things on a business level.” So those are the kind of options that one can read into that scene. My job is to create these sorts of moments where the audience can read things in a different way.

DEADLINE:Race is a big part of the movie, but in a very subtle way. It’s arguably more about factionalism than racism. Does that strike a chord with you?

ÇATAK: Yeah, definitely. I mean, the thing is, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the subway in Berlin or in Germany in general, but it’s a bit different than all other cities in the world. If you go to London, you buy a ticket, you go through some sort of gate and you get into the metro. Same in New York, same in Istanbul, same all over the world. In Germany it’s different. In Germany they say, “We trust you to buy a ticket. We are not controlling you.” But somebody might be in the carriage with you, dressed as one of your peers.” And then they go, “OK, we want to see your ticket.” I think that is a very, very German thing to do. Remember, you also had this in the GDR, where people were snitching on each other, and were giving away information about their best friends or even family.

And, of course, it’s about race. If you have been raised in Germany as a Turkish person, like me, you’ll understand. My family isn’t really Muslim, but, of course, people assume we’re all Muslims, and then we get racially profiled for no freaking reason. You enter the US and you’re put in a room with a lot of other people who look alike, and you think, “What the f*ck is going on? Why am I being singled out? Is it because my name is Ali? Because of my brown hair?” That’s the reason why the first kid who gets singled out is Turkish.

There’s a bunch of things that, identity-wise, have made their way into this film. Stuff that I’ve been dealing with in German society, and stuff with that my co-writer Johannes had to deal with, because he grew up in Turkey as a German boy. We both have this slight feeling of alienation as well as a will to show everyone else that we are one of them. I remember using sophisticated language in my youth, just to show everyone that I was one of them. I was saying, “Look, I might look different, but I’m actually German.” A lot of that kind of stuff is in the film.

DEADLINE:Going back to the kids, how did you find them? They’re all extraordinary. Was it a long process?

ÇATAK: Thank you. Well, yeah. First, I had these general castings where I saw, like, 150 kids, and I improvised with them. I saw real quick which kids I could work with, which kids were bright, and which were playful. And then I gathered those kids, put them in the classroom, in the presence of cameras, and shot even more tests. While I was shooting these tests, I was talking to them, telling them what we were doing and asking them about their lives. Then I’d go to a screening room to look at those tests and see the chemistry.

For the next step I’d have personal interviews with them, telling them, basically, “I’m not your boss, we’re colleagues, and I expect some sort of work ethic.” I told them I expected them to know their lines, that we’re a family, that we take care of each other and there are no extras, there are no VIPs here. We’re an entity. And that was the way I prepared them.

When we got to set, as I said to you before, it was like a good cop-bad cop situation with Leonie. I would start the day with a conversation, and really just tell them about myself, show them my vulnerabilities, ask them about theirs. And at some point—and I think it was a key moment in this whole process—I said to them, “We’re all going to die. That’s the truth. But this film will be around, and your kids and grandkids will see it, so you better make sure we get this right.” [Laughs.] I think they got the idea…

DEADLINE: Obviously, I haven’t been to school for a very, very long time, and something that really interested me about the film is the way it shows how the power has shifted in schools. The parents now have a louder voice, and so do the children. Is that at all reflective of your time at school, or was that something new that you had to research?

ÇATAK: Yeah, the climate of teaching has changed a lot. I think the profession has had some sort of erosion over the years. I remember my parents saying, “If your teacher says so, then it must be right. You’re not going to challenge your teacher.” And now it’s quite the opposite. Now it’s more like, “Why is my kid getting a bad grade? Isn’t that your responsibility?” And of course, in this whole era of WhatsApp groups and emails, any little incident becomes a sh*tstorm. Teachers have to be much, much more precise about what they say and how they say it. And there’s this whole notion of ‘safe spaces’ for students: they can go ahead and accuse a teacher of a tiny little thing and it immediately becomes a big, big sh*tstorm.

This is the reason why many teachers that we talked to said that they sometimes really can’t take this job anymore. They have to be so careful. Every word you say is a potential threat to your own safe space. They create safe spaces for students, but there’s no safe space for teachers. The other day I was just reading about four teachers who committed suicide in South Korea because they couldn’t take the pressure anymore. And the richer the parents are, the worse it gets. At least that’s what teachers said to us. With wealth comes confidence, and with confidence comes the ability to criticize much more bluntly.

DEADLINE:The film premiered at the Berlinale last year, and it’s been shortlisted for the Oscars. Why do you think it’s lasted this long? And why has America embraced it?

ÇATAK: It is hard to say. I mean, I think the issues that are being tackled in this film are also issues affecting US society: the way debate culture has shifted, the way alternative facts have been introduced, the way the search for truth has become an issue, and truth itself has become something elusive. It all resonates with the US, maybe even stronger than it does with Europe. Especially given the fact that they have a gun-violence issue over in the States, which is why audiences are much more vocal when they watch the film. In fact, I usually ask, in those Q&As after screenings, how many people were expecting some sort of gun violence. Sadly, a lot of them raise their arms.

There’s also something very universal about a story about a teacher who’s trying to do good. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say. And this is something that I think each and every one of us has experienced in their life, at some point.

DEADLINE:Where were you when you found out you’d been nominated?

ÇATAK: I was in Paris. I was doing a press tour, and I was in the offices of our French distributor. At first, I was thinking I should just turn off the phone and then turn it back on a couple of hours later to see if we got nominated or not. But then my producer asked us all, the whole team, to join in on a Zoom and to go through it together. I said, “OK, I can’t leave my team alone.” [Laughs] And then this crazy Oscar nomination happened. It was overwhelming.

I felt sick the day after, and I think that had to do with the fact that so much tension had built up in my body. I’ve been touring with this film ever since Telluride in the U.S. last September, and it’s been very exhausting. I’ve been doing really even the tiniest festivals — as they say in the U.S., kissing the babies. And once we got it, the whole work of the last weeks and months, it all paid off. But I also realized in that moment that — oh, man — it stressed me out, and if we hadn’t been nominated, all that work will have just been gone.

DEADLINE:You must be asked this a lot. If I watched it again, two or three more times, would I find out who actually stole the money?

ÇATAK: Well, you would find out how we, as societies, treat each other. It’s not about who did it, really. It’s not about that. That’s a bit of a — how do you say? — MacGuffin. I wanted to make a film about how we deal with each other, how truth has become something very elusive.