In an interview with GQ, Christoph Waltz talks about his life in the Corona crisis, the new James Bond film, music, waiting, whining celebrities who aren’t in need, “Querdenker” in Germany who are just plain dorky, and humility.
Christoph Waltz currently lives far from his home in Los Angeles, between Vienna and Berlin, waiting for the right time to return to California. As a meeting place for the GQ interview suggested Walz who loves music, the Berlin Philharmonic.
His ability to wait patiently would have to do with his experiences as an actor: “Waiting is the main occupation in my industry. When I’m shooting, I wait about six hours out of every 10 I work.” Christoph Walz would have no problem with that; it’s part of his job. “From zero to a hundred, from a standing start, that’s what I do for a living.” That is his job and to be able to “manipulate himself up and down,” Waltz told GQ.
Still, far be it from him to whine. “I have certain inhibitions about talking about the fact that I have time to reflect, time to read, time to sort. That I haven’t been productive, or very little. I always say I’ve made good progress – with my stagnation. It all left me personally not exclusively frustration and negative, the past year. But, and I’m aware of this, I’m in such a privileged situation that I can’t talk about my supposed deprivations,” Christoph Waltz said in the interview with GQ.
He doesn’t have a guilty conscience but takes his own principle to heart, “Don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you,” and when it comes to putting himself in the shoes of someone else “who has lost his job and doesn’t know where to get it, who doesn’t know if he’ll even work again because the company he works for may soon no longer exist at all,” that person should then hear him say that he has time to reflect? No, then he would rather say nothing at all.
He wouldn’t mind stepping down for a few months. “For me, it wasn’t bad to do nothing. Why wasn’t it bad? Because I could afford it. So you don’t need to be a Marxist to realize how much the economic circumstances interfere with the most private, even the most intimate areas,” says Christoph Waltz.
He can no longer see or hear the sensitivities that celebrities talk about, how bad the crisis is for them. They could no longer go to a restaurant or meet with friends. “Yes, then just don’t meet,” Christoph Waltz said. He would rather think about the people who live in 50 square meters in threes and lose their jobs. For him, he said, it’s not existential as long as he’s healthy. “For many, though, it’s existential despite being healthy.”
The end of the pandemic will drag on for a year or two, he said, “and a lot of the real damage won’t be seen until then. It won’t: Spring is here, we’re vaccinated, hooray, we’re starting again. It’s going to get a lot tougher. And the wave of bankruptcies, that’s just coming. It’s really going to be a disaster. You don’t need to be a Marxist to see that,” says Christoph Waltz.
Christoph Waltz has hope and would like to see “that we don’t return to the status quo, but that we make a development. He would imagine “that possibly the idea will prevail that the individual can’t do anything for himself and that the flourishing of the situation depends on all of us.”
We would teach our children what we had already heard from parents: “Don’t do unto others what you wouldn’t have them do unto you.” That idea would have totally dissipated, even though it wasn’t hard to grasp at all. “When I look at the lemmings, how they all run toward the cliff and think it’s a heroic act, well, I hope they see the light someday.”
“These people who call themselves “Querdenker” think along the “plank” they have in front of their heads,” Christoph Waltz said. They would believe they have an advantage of their own “if they dismantle the obvious.”
After all, he said, one had seen in the example of Donald Trump “this insane president in the United States” how easy it is to destroy something “and how incredibly difficult it is to build something up.”
Those who perceive the wearing of a mask because of a sniffle four as a restriction of their fundamental rights have a problem in the thought process, he said. “He’s not transverse, he’s just dorky.” Such people probably believed they could gain a personal advantage from dismantling the obvious.
We would not be in the post-war period where there was nothing left and everything had to be rebuilt. We would be living in a time where we had everything we needed at our disposal and because of a destructive minority, what was keeping things going would suddenly be questioned.
“Put on the stupid mask and stay two meters away from me. No one will take away your rights with that. Nobody. So, the institutions are all there and work in principle, but are cornered by a group of antisocial morons,” says Christoph Waltz.
Christoph Waltz has a certain hope “that this unbelievable presumption of believing that nothing can happen to us will turn into insight. Perhaps we will become more sociable … a little more modest.
The whole interview with Christoph Waltz at GQ
Also in german: Christoph Waltz über “Querdenker”, jammernde Prominente und Bescheidenheit
Vienna or Los Angeles, jogging or meditating, theater or film: What does GQ cover star #ChristophWaltz choose when given the choice?
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