It's a fact of life for actors that being on film sets requires a degree of hanging around, but for Angus McGruther the German horror movie Bela Kiss: Prologue literally turned that expectation upside down. As one of five criminals whose hideout in a remote hotel is stalked by an otherworldly killer, the Sydney-based actor found himself dangling from a basement ceiling via chains as captured prey to be cruelly toyed with.
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Forget ego: the only thing going to McGruther's head was blood. The stuntman supervising the shot insisted that the actor could only spend 90 seconds upside down at a time. So the director of the bloody tale, Lucien Forstner, did six separate takes.
"You can feel the blood rushing to your head and you do panic. Your body is literally trying to get out of that position and there's no way you can," says the 28-year-old McGruther. "But at the same time it was fun because I had all the elements there to work with. It wasn't hard to play scared."
Bela Kiss: Prologue is one of several dozen features screening as part of the Audi Festival of German Films, an annual survey of the northern European nation's varied cinematic output. With a program that includes psychological thrillers (A Pact), a coming-of-age drama (Broken Glass Park) and a period western (Gold), German cinema appears to have a healthy outlook, intent on telling stories that reflect a country that has never been easily categorised.
"It's a very old industry and it's so tied up in the history of the country as well," McGruther says. "They're proud of their incredible history in the cinema, which has been a huge influence in Hollywood. It would be nice to see more of that in Australia, with people embracing Australian cinema more. Sometimes people here see Australian cinema as automatically being very niche."
McGruther is speaking from experience. Raised in Sydney's eastern suburbs, he attended a Catholic school for boys that focused on German as a second language. McGruther studied it throughout high school – and attended early iterations of the German Film Festival, where he was taken with films such as Wolfgang Becker's Good Bye, Lenin! – and when he subsequently found acting work hard to gain in his home town after graduating from the University of Wollongong's drama program, he decided to put his fluency in German to the test.
"I'd heard a lot of great things about the creative industries in Berlin. So I decided to go there and make it my base while I backpacked around Europe and I ended up meeting a group of expat performers associated with the theatre, and then I got an agent whose clients were all foreign actors," he says. "After 12 months I was able to get work and I ended up staying for four years."
One of the trends the actor has noted in German cinema is that alongside German productions are an increasing number of co-productions, such as Stephen Daldry's The Reader and Cate Shortland's Lore, and a desire to take German stories to an international audience. Bela Kiss: Prologue is a case in point: it was written in German and translated into English, and performed by a bilingual cast so it could be distributed internationally.
McGruther, who has now worked in film, theatre and television in Germany (but will be trying his hand in Los Angeles later this year), can see a difference between how the arts are valued as an integral part of society in Germany and back here.
"Germans feel very strongly about their culture and the way they're funded by governments. Every state in Germany, for example, has its own state theatre funded by the state government, where local actors are employed on a full-time contract," he says. "It's ingrained in their society that the arts need to be supported; they know that they need the cinema to provide an ongoing reflection of their own storytelling.
"In Australia it's not seen as being universal, so we need more stories to be told and more filmmakers to be encouraged," McGruther says.
"Hopefully there's a German filmmaker who wants to come here and make an Australian story."
The Audi Festival of German Films runs from March 27 to April 11 in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane. Angus McGruther appears at Q&A sessions at screenings of Bela Kiss: Prologue in Sydney and Melbourne. Details: goethe.de/ozfilmfest
