Berlin Hidden Gem How to Be Normal’: Outcast, Ed Sheeran, Spaghetti

Take a social outcast protagonist, surround her with an ensemble cast, add in an Ed Sheeran lookalike and unusual camera and edit work, throw it all into a genre blender, and top it off with a homage to the tradition of spaghetti in film. Those are just some of the ingredients Austrian writer-director Florian Pochlatko used, garnished with a healthy dose of other offbeat vibes, to cook up How to Be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World (Wie man normal ist und die Merkwürdigkeiten der anderen Welt). His feature directorial debut, world premiering in the Perspectives program of the 75th Berlin International Film Festival, serves up a mix of existential strangeness and such themes as mental health, identity, and disorientation in the digital age.

Leading a “normal” life isn’t exactly a piece of cake! In fact, life is a real bitch! And so are people. That much seems clear to a young woman named Pia, portrayed by Luisa-Céline Gaffron (And Tomorrow the Entire World), who feels alienated and misunderstood by most people, including her ex Joni (played by Felix Pöchhacker) and her parents (Elke Winkens and Cornelius Obonya), after her release from a psychiatric hospital. Struggling to reintegrate after her release from a psychiatric hospital, she must not only juggle a new job at her father’s company, other societal expectations, and heartbreak. And then there are such issues as social stigma, self-doubt, and, oh yes, her meds. Pia really only connects with 12-year-old neighbor Lenni (Lion Thomas Tatzber). And then she meets Ned who looks very much like Ed Sheeran (Wesley Joseph Byrne).

“I am always very interested in mavericks,” which have also featured in his shorter films, Pochlatko tells THR. “I’m very much drawn to these people.”

He feels the same about mavericks off-screen. To do the eccentric Pia and her take on the world visual and auditory justice, he worked on the cinematic aesthetics with fellow narrative feature debutants Adrian Bidron, who handled the cinematography, and Rosa Anschütz, who is responsible for the score. (Bidron has developed a reputation in Austria for his work in photography, commercials, and music videos, including for Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst.) “I wanted to take as many brilliant people as possible on the path who maybe wouldn’t normally get this chance,” Pochlatko says. “We closely collaborated on finding the visuals and the feeling for this film.”

The result is a decidedly stylized rendering of a world teetering on the edge of chaos. “I really wanted to go for a very artificial world because that correlates very much with the feeling people have of the world today,” the filmmaker explains. “People are talking about how we live in a simulation,” Pochlatko explains. “This has very much to do with internet culture and with late-stage capitalism. On the internet, you are confronted with different perspectives on reality. So I wanted to make a film that really feels like a made (or manufactured or fabricated) film where it doesn’t even matter if this is a dream world or the real world, where the real world feels as fake and made-up as dreams.”

Pochlatko highlights in this context how The Matrix has found renewed interest in the digital age with its question of how real reality is. And he’s not afraid to tackle the post-factual era. “Donald Trump very much understood that it’s not important if it’s real what you’re saying. The truth is not relevant anymore. It’s the emotions that are relevant.”

Speaking of what is real: Pia meets a man named Ned who looks very much like Ed Sheeran. “Wes, the guy who plays him, is a street cleaner in Greater Manchester,” Pochlatko tells THR, leading this writer to momentarily wonder if he has ended up inside the Matrix now. “I found him because I saw internet articles about mass panics at (soccer) stadiums in England because all these people thought that Ed Sheeran was there. And it was this guy. And I thought this just fits this world in the film that is slightly off.”

Ned fits into the psychology of Pia whose ex-boyfriend is also a musician. “I wanted her to meet somebody who is an even greater musician, actually one of the best musicians in the world, so she can show off to her boyfriend,” Pochlatko emphasizes and surprises with a Ghostbusters comparison. “There is the famous scene where they are all not allowed to think of something bad or it will appear. And then one of them thinks of the Marshmallow Man but in this case, it’s a giant Marshmallow Man. So I thought of the most harmless character I could think of. I thought, okay, it has to be Ed Sheeran because he’s cute and even if you don’t like his music, you have to acknowledge that he’s a really brilliant musician.” And no spoilers but Ned at one point turns into “this Matrix Morpheus version” of How to Be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World, he adds.

Another element of this slightly skewed world is … pasta. Pochlatko is clearly a film lover. But he actually calls himself a film nerd when asked about a memorable scene in which Pia eats spaghetti (as you can see in the main image of this article). What’s up with that? “There’s a path of spaghetti in film,” especially from directors he likes, he shares. One of his heroes is German filmmaker Maren Ade whose Toni Erdmann includes a scene in which the protagonist (played by Peter Simonischek) has the nickname “Spaghetti” for his daughter (Sandra Hüller). That was likely influenced by the famous spaghetti meal scene in John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence. “These are also my heroes, so I wanted to go on with the tradition of spaghetti,” Pochlatko highlights. “And of course, there’s also this very famous scene in Harmony Korine’s Gummo where the child is eating spaghetti in the bathtub. So I thought, if I ever make a film, there has to be spaghetti involved.”

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Gaffron’s take on the food scene in How to Be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World was “pretty intense,” adding to the standout feel of the scene, the filmmaker recalls. Another spaghetti tribute that he filmed, a scene in which Pia’s mother uses the nickname Spaghetti for her, didn’t end up in the final version.

Pochlatko has more ideas that he hopes to bring to the screen in the future. “I’m working on a very arthouse-influenced film at the moment that is taking place very close to the place where I grew up,” the Austrian auteur tells THR. “It’s about religion, in a way. And I hope to get funding for my next feature film. It’s called Cover Song: Tales From the Land Before Our Time and is about three generations of a family in the diaspora. It’s set in Austria and somewhere else. It’s about a family father who disappeared 10 years ago and started a new life in the Caribbean where he’s struggling with his old problems again.”

His Berlinale movie raises many questions. But viewers may be curious how the title How to Be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World came about for the film, whose cast also includes such Austrian favorites as Harald Krassnitzer, Oliver Rosskopf, and David Scheid. Pochlatko credits the COVID pandemic, Hollywood tentpoles, and the late U.S. cult musician Daniel Johnston as inspirations. When he first started to work on a script in 2020, “it felt very natural to call it How to Be Normal,” Pochlatko recalls. I was very unsure of this title. And then (Molly Manning Walker’s) How to Have Sex came out and had great success.”

Given his desire to make the film feel like a real quest movie, he also looked to such titles as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for inspiration. “But ‘the other world’ is something that comes from Daniel Johnston,” Pochlatko shares. “In many interviews, he was talking about him against Satan, him against the other world. And this ‘other world’ is very inspiring for me. So, one of the first points of the film was to make something that was Daniel Johnson-influenced film.”