You used to be a projectionist yourself and have effectively swapped sides: from projecting to producing images. I'm interested in why you're so fascinated by the old-fashioned technical side of screening films.
For me it was always magical to sit behind my little hole in the wall and to lock people up in the auditorium with no daylight, just the dancing of my projection beam. I had a tiny bit of power over them - after the projector was switched on, I was able to create extremes of emotion in them, through light and shadow and celluloid. I could make them laugh or cry and that's precisely what I found so fascinating about the cinema.

What unites all the episodes in the film?
The unifying element is definitely a passion for the cinema and a faith in the power of on-screen stories. My cinema-makers are all missionaries, spreading a global idea. They are dealing in dreams and see themselves very firmly as part of a machine that creates illusions: they sacrifice their private lives simply to make their audiences happy for a couple of hours. Films which tour the planet - like TITANIC - frequently glide through their fingers. There are on-screen stories which are understood all over the world, behind every muckheap. This makes it fascinating to go more deeply into this unifying element, these dreams. And I needed the right central figures in order to do this. These are the people who are literally opening up the spaces where dreams come to life, the cinemas. I have travelled across the world with them, a world located somewhere between screen dreams and everyday life.

The film takes place moves almost exclusively in the private sphere of the protagonists. Is that broad enough to deal with such a globally-encompassing theme?
As far as I'm concerned, the discussions taking place about globalisation and culture clashes lack concrete examples. I miss the stories of the people involved, those behind the scenes, as it were. The concern of the film is to shatter these over-simplified concepts of the enemy. In the western hemisphere we live in a media dominated world, one in which highly complex political and social connections are reduced to headlines and 1:30 scale. Whoever makes most noise is the one who is heard. What is lost in all of this is the emotional entry point to foreign ways of life. Only when you have this, can you get rid of the pervading sense of uncertainty that watching the news tends to give you these days. One is only afraid of what one cannot understand. This emotional understanding is one that can only be created by cinema - this is where we see TV's limitations. The film does not aim to answer any of the "big" questions of our time. I only hope that it encourages people to open themselves up to other worlds, by entertaining them. Conversely, I am convinced that the political dimension of the film is to be found in the private world of the protagonists. I would really like to highlight some kind of perspective whereby it is really possible to discover similarities, purely at a private level.

The culmination of all this is in the contrast between America and North Korea.
The meeting of North Korea and America is a very interesting element within my film. I wanted to contrast two figures whose lives actually resemble one another's - in their passions and in their loneliness, for example. If we were to sit these two women down at the same table, then they would be able to talk fantastically well to one another. They are very similar, inasmuch as they both believe in something. I myself believe that ideologies are pretty much interchangeable but human passions are not. It was a tremendous challenge to contrast two such extremes and yet be able to find similarities. Whenever I was shooting something with the "contrast", I was also thinking about the other woman. I had the opportunity to bring them together to the "table" for the first time. I was generally delighted to be able to unite four cultures within a single film. The episodes complement one another, giving me the chance to describe a variety of facets and similar themes.

Let's stay with North Korea for a moment. I had never experienced this insider's view of the country before. As a viewer, one immediately wonders what has been manipulated. What are you really able to show, how freely can one move at all in such a country?
I knew the second that I set foot in this country that I would be able to do very little to stop things being staged. And so my only secret weapon remained my wonderful main character HANG JONG SIL. I'm always very optimistic that when I work with people in front of the camera something deeply personal and therefore intense will arise out of this. And Mrs Han had something very approachable about her, so much was immediately clear to me. There are a set of human emotions about which one can talk, that are independent of any political system. These include loneliness, sadness, joy, love, fear of death ; very ordinary feelings which motivate people across the world to get out of their beds every morning.
These are questions that I have been asking myself my whole life long and this makes it easier to talk about them with my main characters. In this way, we quickly learn to trust and like one another. I don't deal explicitly with the big issues; I prefer to approach them through people and that also means I have the chance to break through something like the situation in North Korea. We never knew, for example, on any of the days we were shooting there, whether or not the house where we were really belonged to our main character or not. We carried on worrying about this for about three days afterwards and then we simply resigned ourselves to how things were. We just said, we'll take this woman, the film projectionist and we'll work with her, chuck everything else to one side that could bother us while we are dong this. And that was probably the breakthrough too.

Was there always someone standing next to you, watching things day after day?
We couldn't prevent this. The only thing we could stop was them influencing my main character too much. That meant battling hard to have her left in something approaching peace and to try to ensure that we spent more time with her than they did. I noticed that she liked us and trusted us, at least a little. As I started to discuss simple things with her I noticed that her fear receded somewhat.
And the more she grew to trust us of course, the more nervous her opposite number became. So it was always a kind of game. A game whose rules I know very well, thanks perhaps to my own East Bloc origins. I tried too to put myself in the shoes of our ³opponents² - who continued to let us shoot, incidentally. I played for time, always trying to thwart them a little, staying cool and trying to find some peace, those were my coping strategies. It's only by persevering that things finally open up to you.

There were several beautiful moments when she really allows us to look inside her soul. Isn't that rather an unusual thing for an Asian, an Asian woman, to allow - especially coming from where she does?
For me, it was all about trying to get to the bottom of this deadlocked image of North Korea. And this was only ever going to be possible via a fascinating and multi-faceted main character. When we manage to show a little bit of what goes on inside her, then we hope that the audience becomes curious and are therefore prepared to invest in her. North Korea really is something else, it is an unbelievable place, one that we can really hardly imagine. But those who live there are also of course just people like you and me and they must have emotions; they're not made of concrete. Mrs Han is in her mid fifties and has experienced a lot, has raised children, she has a husband whom she once fell in love with. These are all things about which one can speak relatively easily, without too much intrusion from what is occurring "outside".

How did you get on with the languages used in the film? Do you speak all the languages which appear in it?
Language is something that I choose to leave to others! I work with translators but only listen to brief translations of the scenes after they've been shot. I have a certain setting and that runs first. And I can hear the voices, that I can only interpret from the facial expressions, the gestures, the movements that accompany them. That is very cinematic, in fact. Cinema started this way: no one could understand anything, as there was no sound. So cinema originally communicated to audiences solely through gestures. I have come back to that idea repeatedly over the course of the last three years. I shot in four countries in which I did not have even a rudimentary understanding of the language used there. Over this long period of time when we were shooting, I did however manage to get by when anything came up which was related to the cinema, again thanks mainly to people's gestures and body language. When anything major happened to the protagonists - for example in Africa during the tree scene, we all sensed that something was being "unburdened" there and as we shot the scene we all knew too that audiences would be able to pick up on this. These are moments where I can be 100% certain about things. If something happens to the protagonist and something in turn happens to me, then I know that later something else will happen on screen.

Perhaps you could say a brief word about the principles which informed the editing process. The film is not constructed in a linear way but rather intertwined. And perhaps a word too about the images - a film about cinema should itself be a worthy piece of cinema.
Let's start with the images. After doing the initial research for this film, I sat down with my cameraman Axel Schneppat - who also shot "Havanna mi amor" and "Marry Me"- and we put our heads together to think about how we could best create a monument to cinema and celluloid. And we decided to make things a little "bigger" than a documentary film. We took a crane with us. We shot much less footage than we did previously when we shot on video.
Our editor was Andrew Bird who has also worked with Fatih Akin. I very consciously wanted to work with an editor who had experience with feature films. We knew that we wanted to jump back and forward between countries which meant trying to capture the essence of a place with an image. From its light, colours, and how a particular place felt and how the people who lived there moved.

And because we were shooting on film, we were left with a manageable amount of footage. I captured at least two really good moments per country from which we then started to further construct the film. Then the figures that we were following also began to develop. And we edited things in such a way that we "declined" certain features through every country, aspects related to the central theme of the film. In addition, I allow myself to be guided by music very often and that can help to keep the beat, as it were, to retain the general mood of isolated scenes. We often create scenes which run out by themselves, just like in a feature film. And we tinker around with them until the essence is right, as we did, for instance with the scene which takes place under the tree or the one with Anup on the roof of his brother's house. Generally, it is my aim to make the audience highly emotional, to make them grasp for their own individual memories, dreams or feelings. And when it's possible for them to identify aspects of their own experience with those of the main characters , to walk a little way in their shoes, then we've scored something of a victory. If he or she leaves the cinema with a tear in their eye, then I'm happy - just as I would be if they did so after COMRADES IN DREAMS.

A rather more personal question to finish: You spent a lot of time with your protagonists, a large chunk of your life. How do you feel when you look back at that time?
I got to know the designs for life of people - from a 25 year-old Indian to a nearly 60 year-old American - which were vital, life-affirming and inspiring. I came home and said: I have a family, I have a son, I ask myself similar questions in my life. I enjoy being able to think myself into other people's life stories, partly because that leads me in turn to question things in my own life. I have learned a lot of tolerance towards other cultures and other lifestyles from this shoot and for that I am very grateful. It was a very intense time and yet a strangely short one too.

Edited from an interview with Knut Elstermann, Berlin, 20.9.2006