Director continues to draw connections in 'Heaven'

"The idea was to show that they're all the same," Fatih Akin says of his film's characters. (Strand Releasing)

After a lengthy post-Fassbinder hiatus, German cinema made a resounding return to American screens with Turkish-German director Fatih Akin's remarkable "Head-On" in 2005. As "Head-On" made clear, Akin is not just a German filmmaker; he is a poet of Turks in Germany, Germans in Turkey, and other forms of cross-cultural collision. The movie was an electric tale of doomed love.

Akin's new film, "The Edge of Heaven," opening Friday, has similar preoccupations while being a markedly different work of art. Measured where "Head-On" was hurried, elegiac where its predecessor was raw, "Heaven" is a "Babel"-esque patchwork of fractured chronology and displaced characters. A Turkish-German professor of Goethe, a Turkish political activist, her German girlfriend, and her girlfriend's mother (played by Fassbinder muse Hanna Schygulla) shuttle between Germany and Turkey, and past and present, exploring the bonds formed by love, friendship, and death. The Globe spoke with Akin by phone from his home in Berlin.

Q. Did you start with one particular character, or did you begin with the idea of interlocking relationships?

A. I think it all started with the idea of the character that was played by Hanna Schygulla. She was the first character, and then other characters followed. It was like a puzzle - it was step by step.

Q. The film has parents and children, Turks and Germans, men and women, dancing around each other, drawing close, and pulling apart, each coming to an accommodation with the world. What unites the film's characters, and what divides them?

A. In the very end, the only thing which really divides them is they carry a different passport. They carry either a German passport or a Turkish passport. Hanna Schygulla's character and the teacher, Nejat, when they look out the window at the very end of the film, and they see all those people who go to the mosque, and she's asking, "Why [do] these people go to pray?" Suddenly, Schygulla realizes we have the same stories about sacrifice, so you know this is a story of the sacrifice of Abraham which is equal in the Jewish religion, in the Christian religion, and in the Muslim religion. The idea was to show that they're all the same. We are all human. We have our diseases, we all die, we all [are] born one day.

Q. The echoes and repetitions in the film - like the images of two coffins being loaded onto planes - are haunting, and add to the feeling of interconnection. Is your work influenced by filmmakers who have embraced a similar narrative style, like ["Boogie Nights" director] Paul Thomas Anderson or ["Babel" director] Alejandro González Iñárritu?

A. Guillermo Arriaga [who wrote Iñárritu's films "21 Grams" and "Babel"], he influenced me a lot. I think [Iñárritu] is a fabulous director, but the style we shot "The Edge of Heaven" is much different than the fast style of "Babel" or "21 Grams." But I like the narratives, especially "21 Grams." You don't get everything served, but you have to think about what you see. The audience is really involved in what you see. I tried that out with "The Edge of Heaven." This is not very new, the narrative style. This goes back to Tarantino, and Tarantino got it from Kurosawa, and Kurosawa got it from the '20s. My interest is not to invent the cinema - I like the tools of the cinema how they are - but to try to bring them into my world, and to see if I can work with them or not.

Q. Your films always have a remarkable ear for music, from Wendy Rene in "Head-On" to the Turkish music in "Edge of Heaven." Do certain songs suggest themes for your movies, or do your preoccupations guide you to certain songs?

A. Sometimes, I don't know how the emotional level of a film should be. Then I'm listening to a track, and the track fits, and I think that this could be the right emotion for the film. When I was writing the scene in "Head-On" when Cahit [Birol Ünel] kills the guy with the ashtray, I was listening to the Wendy Rene song. I was listening to that track, and it fit somehow. Scorsese is great with that - using music as a key for the audience.

Q. You've emerged around the same time as some other German filmmakers who have made an international splash, like Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck [director of "The Lives of Others"] and Oliver Hirschbiegel [director of "Downfall"]. Do you feel a particular affinity with their work? Is there a new German filmmaking?

A. We cannot call ourselves a Brat Pack of filmmakers, who really have a dialogue, and who share ideas - we don't do that. But Germany has changed in the last 10 years, in the last 20 years. I was born in '73 in Germany, and at that time Germany was an occupied country. It was occupied until I was 16. And then in '89 or '90, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and after the falling of the wall, East and West Germany became one country, and suddenly it was not an occupied country anymore. It took the filmmakers seven or eight years to realize that Germany had become another country, another identity. I'm part of that.