Nils Bühler Filmmaker

A friend once said to me: “People go to the theater to forget.” I guess this friend had a lot to forget because he went to the theater almost every day. Just like me.

 

The light goes out, the cell phones get dark, the theater becomes silent. It’s almost magical. The heart begins to beat faster, and we don’t really know what is about to happen. But we know without any doubt that something is about to happen. We are about to hear a story. We love stories. They are all over the place–from the advertisements at the station to the bookstore to the Christmas dinner with the grandparents. We love them. I love them. But why? Someone said in The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs (Coens) “People connect the stories to themselves.” We become a part of the story. We are Jack and Rose, we are Vincent and Jules, we are Fanny and Alexander, and we love to see ourselves. When the Titanic hits the iceberg we come to realize: we too are on that ship, and we too have to get out of there. That’s what movies can do. They can give life. As soon as the lights go out it doesn’t matter anymore how we came here or what’s happening later. The only thing that matters is now. I think that’s what my friend meant by forgetting. We can transfer the emotions projected on the silver screen to ourselves and empathize. That way they become our emotions. Our own life. Our own movie.

 

I have beem shooting movies since I saw Winnetou. Every day I reenacted the scenes with my brothers in the backyard. Every time I died. I even wanted to train myself to become left-handed because Pierre Brice (the actor who played Winnetou) was left-handed. I loved the movies. I remember the day as if were was yesterday when I first held a camera in my hands. I didn’t know that this day was about to change my life forever. I shot a movie with my grandparents. An agent had to stab the villain with a sword to keep a virus from deleting all the computers in the city. We crafted a slate and shot the epic fight: a seven-year-old boy battling against his seventy-year old grandfather (while my grandmother held the camera). There was never a time in my life when I knew more clearly how my life was supposed to go. I was going to make movies.

 

Now I’m twenty years old and still I am like a seven-year-old boy behind the camera, longing to tell you the stories that make you feel alive.