HeyUGuys were recently lucky enough to speak with Dieter Laser who stars as the disturbing Dr. Heiter in Tom Six’s The Human Centipede.

Dieter Laser is an experienced actor on both stage and screen and he shared with us his reasons for choosing the role, his inspirations and much more. In a conversation we had whilst I wasn’t recording Dieter also told me a story of  hitch hiking in the Netherlands as a teenager where he was refused service because he was German and also how he was involved in protesting in the late sixties. These feelings of guilt and also anger about Germany’s past were clearly an important influence in his performance, something that Dieter also speaks at length about in the following interview.

HeyUGuys

What was your initial reaction when you heard the idea?

Dieter Laser

When I heard the idea I didn’t really realise it because Tom told me so precisely his vision and what he wanted to do with Dr. Heiter that I didn’t catch in the first moment what it really would mean. I was just fascinated by Tom and Ilona (the producer). I was so fascinated by his obsession, his dedication, the precise vision he had and he conveyed it so picturesque to me that I saw the whole film. He is really a man who is able to not only be a talker, he is a doer. I saw he was able to turn his vision into real stuff. When I came home from that first talk I was so fascinated I said, you are dedicated, you are obsessed, you know what you want to do, we have to do that. For about one hour on a Sunday morning at the Hilton in Berlin, he described Dr. Heiter and after that one hour Ilona said okay lets have a deal and it took about three minutes and we had a deal. I went home and said to my wife, deal! Nice movie, leading part, great Sunday!

Later I thought, mmm.. my first horror film, what would the German intellectuals and critics say to that. Then I thought lets wait and see what the script tells. Well, the script came and I read it and the first time I thought, a little bit embarrassing maybe. Then I thought if I would have had an offer from an independent film company which said: we have a nice script, Silence of the Lambs, without any names like Jodie Foster, I would have read that and I would have got the same ideas. Eating of the brains of other people, shall I do that, what would the critics say? What would my fans say and so on and so forth. So I said, stop it! I’ll do it, this guy is great, you can always smell if a director is good for you, do it!

Then I started to prepare, then I discovered in the script that there are several layers, just one first surface of pure entertainment or horror flick then underneath I slowly discovered in a way the Kafka idea, the way The Fly adapted. This is even more original because that goes farther than Kafka did to come to this idea of The Fly. With all this stuff of mutating human beings into animals or something like that and then I thought about Siamese twins and suddenly I saw that one of the deeper layers had the Mengele stuff involved and I thought that’s great. Me, as the first generation after World War 2 with a father generation of mass murderers, that’s wonderful because for most of my generation the guilt feeling lasts, like the bible says, until the fourth generation. And now we are in the fourth generation with that guilt and now I thought we can do jokes about these imbecile, idiots and mass murderers.

HeyUGuys

So, you saw it as a way of confronting these issues?

Dieter Laser

Yeah, to get rid of some anger from my childhood when I always thought we, our people, are criminals, mass murderers, the whole people over decades have been totally crazy and sick. So I started to have big fun developing the character and to say that there’s a wonderful possibility for parody like, cartoonish in a way, sketch of a psyche, a Nazi psyche, of Nazi ideology and the way of regarding groups of people like insects, like centipedes. Having a first try with dogs, going further on with three human beings, later on maybe more, in the end to have a real centipede you need to have 25 people.

Step by step, look for the economics, the starving third world. It’s even economically very reasonable to do that. Because you are God and other human beings are shit you can do everything with it but you always have to keep in mind, they are rats, they are insects, they are bugs so you can do everything you want because you can do it because you are skilled and you are an artist. So that’s a very good metaphor for the Nazi psyche, because they told and were told; every morning shaving they said, these insects, I have to clean up my people, they are bugs, they are vermin. For the body of the people, the whole whole country is infected with these insects and I have to clean it up. So they didn’t think, what bad guys we are, what murderers we are, wading through blood. No, they thought what I’ll do for my country is incredible. I’m a hero.

HeyUGuys

So you saw the Dr. Heiter character as a deluded God figure then?

Dieter Laser

Yes, in his mind, yes. These totally crazy thoughts of the Nazis. Totally imbecillic stuff. So it started to be great fun and the joy to work on that part increased tremendously when we started to work because the chemistry between Tom, the director of photography Goof de Koning and Ilona, the producer and me, we were so tight and so familiar and the chemistry was wonderful. We didn’t have to talk a lot. It smoothly worked because we all had the same ideas and the same taste, and how to do things. It was a wonderful time.

HeyUGuys

So on set there was actually a fun atmosphere?

Dieter Laser

Let’s say it was very serious fun, so just to make normal jokes it is distracting but to laugh a little bit idiotically when you have a very complicated shot with a very complicated choreography and you do it with one clap everything is crazy and you say, yeah we rock!

HeyUGuys

What was the dynamic like between you and the three people (who make up The Human centipede)?

Dieter Laser

Based on that basic plan of how to portray Dr. Heiter, I kept away from them. During the whole shoot, very scarcely did we exchage private talk.

HeyUGuys

Was that your choice?

Dieter Laser

It was my choice from the beginning. That’s the great thing about Ilona. Ilona understood immediately. I said I want to be picked up from the hotel in the morning with a separate car, I want to come to the set alone. I have to have as far away as possible, a single wardrobe and I have to have have my lunch brought up into the wardrobe. I don’t want to talk to people, I don’t want to see people, I just will be called, go downstairs from my wardrobe and shoot so that I’m always on my track. So I got up at 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning, did 1 to 2 hours jogging to have a good mood, have enough oxygen for my little brain. Then I was picked up, without saying anything and driven to the set, where I went to the wardrobe where they did my make-up. Then I just waited, staring to the ground, waiting for the call and I went down and we did it. That paid off, the girls and the Japanese guy, very disciplined and dedicated actors, were a little bit afraid. Even privately I didn’t talk to them, I always looked very serious because anyway during work I look like I’m angry because I’m concentrated. Like a boxer with that tunnel view. They excepted that, admired it even and when we had our mid-shoot feast they said, it’s an honour to shoot with you and when we finished we had a celebration. Since then we like each other very much but that helped a lot. Them and me.

HeyUGuys

So was that focus and intensity quite hard and was it something you brought from your theatre background?

Dieter Laser

Yeah, I started at 18 years old in the theatres and with my dumb, young brain I regarded film as no art. 16 years I just did theatre, because we have a big theatre tradition in Germany, they are fixed companies all over the country and you can have contracts for 5 years. So I worked 16 years in the theatre and up to the most acclaimed theatres in the seventies. At 34 I left the theatre, I broke up contract. I said, I’m fed up, it’s too comfortable, too secure. An artist has to be freelance, he has to be uncertain. More risks, and to be free to choose what I wanted to play and slowly, slowly the dumbness of my youth was gone and I thought cinema is a great thing, maybe I can start there as well.

HeyUGuys

Were there any films in particular that convinced you?

Dieter Laser

Marathon Man for example, or Point Blank with Lee Marvin. Films like that.

HeyUGuys

So, do you like method actors as well?

Dieter Laser

Yeah, I started to admire and what’s very strange, I didn’t know what this method acting was, but I discovered slowly and when I slowly learnt what it is I slowly discovered that just by gut feelings I had on the stage, in the theatre, I had done a lot of work in that direction. For example, when I was 2o years old I played a leading part in Sacco and Vanzetti and in the break of the play I went into the shower and took a very, very hot shower. Putting on my costume again and going on to stage and the opening after the break was the trial. I was sitting there in my suit and sweating like hell. All these little things I developed for myself.

HeyUGuys

What are you looking forward to in the future?

Dieter Laser

I recently finished Twelfth Night, I will have some guest appearances with that in Switzerland and Luxenbourg. And I will direct and act in Switzerland for a festival a Samuel Beckett play called A Piece of Monologue. I will do that with four wonderful musicians. That’s my next thing but I decided to go on, preferably with Tom, in the horror realm because I think after you have reached some age you have two choices. Either you are giving your grandchild a chocolate bar or you have a gun in your hand, killing people. And I decided a gun is more fun.

HeyUGuys

You like playing a villain then?

Dieter Laser

Yeah, right. I love it!

The Human Centipede is currently playing in UK cinemas.