Oliver Hirschbiegel Biography (2)

Oliver Hirschbiegel was born in 1957 in Hamburg. His early life was shaped in a private school which had strong anti-authoritarian principles. He took these principles so seriously that he ending up leaving the school early to become a cook at sea. Following that adventure, he began studying painting and graphics at the Hamburg Art Academy where, under the direction of Sigmar Polke, he turned his attention to photography, video and film. A series of installations and performance art pieces led him to an interest in directing, and with video and filmmaker Gabor Body, he developed the video magazine Infermental.

In 1986, he sold his first screenplay Das Go! Projekt (The Go! Project) under the condition that ZDF, the German television network, would allow him to direct it as well. "Suddenly, I was a film director! My heroes were directors like Hitchcock, Huston and Hawks. I actually sketched out North by Northwest from the first camera set-up to the last; it was basically a storyboard for the entire film. I was trying to figure out how to tell a story with images. How do you have someone come in through a door? How do you shoot an airplane attacking a man? How do you shoot a car ride -- where do you cut and what do you cut to? That was a good exercise, and it worked! I did the same thing with sequences from Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously, Sidney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor, John Schlesinger's Marathon Man, and everything by Ridley Scott, particularly Alien and Blade Runner."

Das Go! Projekt got good reviews and Hirschbiegel began to receive more offers. In the following years, he directed a wide range of award winning thrillers and crime stories for television, as well as 14 episodes of the television series Kommisar Rex and two stories for the series Tatort (Scene of the Crime). DAS EXPERIMENT is his debut as a feature film director.

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