All Quiet On The Western Front Star Felix Kammerer Plotted His Performance On An Excel Spreadsheet

Edward Berger's Academy Award-winning film "All Quiet on the Western Front," based on the celebrated novel by Erich Maria Remarque, is as dour, bleak, and emotionally devastating as its source material. Following a young man named Paul Bäumer into the trenches of WWI, "All Quiet" is a litany of desperation, death, mud, and horror, meant to show the true Hellish nature of war. The young Paul is battered into the ground on day one, and rarely manages to stagger to his feet again. He is hungry, filthy, and constantly exposed to violence. Nothing is real but pain now.

As Paul, actor Felix Kammerer made his feature film debut. Prior to "All Quiet," the Austrian actor attended the performing arts-centered Ernst Busch Academy in Berlin, and would go on to be a repertory player at the celebrated Burgtheater in his native Vienna. It was here that Sabrina Zwacht saw Kammerer perform for the first time. Zwacht was married to the "All Quiet" producer Malte Grunert, and she brought Kammerer to her husband's attention. Grunert brought the actor to director Berger, and they all agreed that he was to be their Paul. Berger is quoted as having said that "Felix has a wonderful face, really open, very old-fashioned. [...] I also wanted someone who you hadn't ever seen before."

This story can be found in a recent article in Empire, which also laid out Kammerer's acting process for film. It seems that Kammerer, while an experienced stage performer, wasn't quite prepared for the way cinema is made. Indeed, cinematic chronology threw Kammerer's theatrical process for a loop, requiring him to need an actual Excel spreadsheet.

It's going to be rare indeed that feature films shoot their scenes in chronological order, often shooting every scene they may need on a single set — no matter when it happens in the story — before moving to the next one. This requires film actors to be nimble, jumping forward in the story's timeline by the dictates of the shooting schedule. Live theater, by it very nature, must be performed chronologically every time, and actors have the leeway to grow and modulate their performance as it is presented in real time.

The character of Paul spends the movie falling deeper and deeper into despair, and his level of emotional intensity is going to be dictated by where he is in his journey. To remind him of where Paul needed to be on any given day of shooting, Felix Kammerer laid out what his emotional level needed to be on paper. Edward Berger recalled seeing the "emotional beat sheet" and being amused by its formality. Knowing it was what Kammerer required, however, Berger worked with it, becoming something like an auditor for his lead actor. Berger said that it "looked like a tax refund sheet. [...] I pretty much became an accountant for the character."

It seems Berger was a game and helpful director. Kammerer, meanwhile, was devoted enough to his role to create a spreadsheet, but had a great deal of physical struggle besides.

The Empire article also pointed out the parallel between Felix Kammerer and his character. Shooting "All Quiet on the Western Front" took 52 days, a long process that Kammerer had to dive into without any cinematic acting experience. And, just as Paul falls into a lengthy Hell of wartime violence, so too did Kammerer fall into a grueling shoot. There was real mud, and the weather was actually cold. In many ways, the physical struggle wasn't even acting. Kammerer recalled the difficult shoot, saying:

"I think it was after the first week, we weighed the costumes, and they weighed about 90 lbs. [...] You realize you're running around for 16 hours a day, with 90 lbs. of costume on your shoulders, knee-deep in the mud. And then you're trying to act."

As of this writing, the 27-year-old actor hasn't booked any additional films. It seems he is still performing at the Bergtheater, and will be appearing in a stage adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's novel "The Distant Land," as well as an adaptation of Thomas Mann's novel "The Magic Mountain." For anyone keen on observing the talents of a rising film star, who also happen to be in Vienna, this will be a golden opportunity.