By Ali Moosavi.
We were working on small details like what it means to be lost for so long over the course of the movie; Matthias just stares and looks a lot throughout the film. We were working on small nuances….”
Austrian Bernhard Wenger‘s debut film Peacock has been selected for his country’s official submission for the 2026 International Film Oscar. The film, based on a real organization in Japan which provides people for clients to acts as their friend, son, whatever person they have in mind, bears some resemblance in its central idea to Yorgos Lanthimos’s Alps (2011) but the two directors treatment of this idea is very different, Lanthimos’s being more somber and serious while Wenger’s is laced with humor. Peacock focuses on Mathias (Albrecht Schuch), an employee of one of these rent-a-friend agencies. He has morphed into so many characters for various clients that he has lost his self-identity, and even his wife is not sure to whom she is married anymore. I talked to Wenger about his film.
This is your feature debut film yes and already it has won awards from festivals including Venice and been selected as Austria’s entry for the Oscars, have you come down to earth yet?!
It’s still all very overwhelming and exciting of course. It’s been such a wild ride with this film, it’s so beautiful of course and I’m very happy about all of that.
How was the progression from making short film to a feature film and what were the major difficulties that you faced?
I was lucky enough that after I made Excuse Me, I’m looking for the Ping-Pong Room and My Girlfriend (2018), production companies were interested in a feature film script and I had read about these rent-a-friend agencies in an article many years before. So I immediately knew that this will be the topic for the project; but the difficulties were of course, as always, financing and it was a very ambitious project for my first feature film with 30 locations and around 90 speaking roles. That naturally proved very difficult throughout the process of preparation and pre-production. But in reality, if I was to say what is different from shooting a short film to a feature film, I can only say that the feature is bigger in scope and takes longer.
Did you visit or get in touch with any of these rent-a-friend agencies for your research?
Yes, I went to Japan to do research in 2018 before I started writing the script. I knew that these agencies existed in Japan back then for more than a decade and I knew that they were founded because of the big isolation and loneliness in Japanese society. People who don’t have anybody in their lives can rent someone to talk to or have a coffee with or to go for a walk together. But very quickly these agencies started to be used for different purposes such as self-presentation, hiding lies, manipulation, showing off power and these are the reasons why they would work in our western world as well. When I was in Japan, I talked to employees from these agencies and of course their stories and to hear how these agencies function and what kind of clients they have was priceless. I was also interested to find out what kind of people are their employees. I met a man working at such an agency who told me that because of his odd job, being someone else every day, he doesn’t know how to be himself anymore. That’s what I took for Mathias and built this satirical story around.
How was your process of writing the screenplay?
I wrote the first draft without thinking about the dramaturgy and I don’t know if I would do it again like this because as it was the first time that I wrote a feature film. I did not have that much knowledge of something like that before. But many of the scenes from the first draft stayed in the film nearly just as they were. I just shifted a lot of scenes around and of course with every draft the script got more precise. So, I think it was a process of development and some scenes needed to change their place in the script. For example, the first scene of the film with the burning golf cart was once in a later place in the film but when later the sequence was cut out of the film, I thought it would still be an interesting start of the film where you get a sense of the world that Mathias is working in.
You have moments of high drama and tragedy and then moments of humor and comedy and the two have blended very well.
I’m just always interested in tragic comedies and satire. The humor I’m interested in comes from tragedy. I’m not interested in classic mainstream humor that comes through dialogue, huge exaggeration or slapstick. I’m interested in humor that is inspired by everyday life observances, also visual humor that’s created through camera, set design, costumes, editing and it’s a situational humor. On the set I direct the film as a drama, but the humor comes from the oddness and the surroundings and not by actors and actresses trying to be funny.
For the Mathias role, you needed an actor who is able to play different characters but also to make them believable for the audience and Albrecht Schuch does both brilliantly. How did the casting go?
It was a very classical casting. He read the script; we met in Vienna to talk about it and the next day we did the audition and Albrecht was great. Then we tried to develop this character together. The reason why I wanted to cast him in the first place was because I knew that he is a very versatile actor whom I have always really admired in every role he played. Whichever character he played in his previous projects, I was always so close to them and wanted to follow their every step and that’s of course something you do need for a passive main character. So, this quality was something we were especially looking for and throughout the process of preparation we had so many conversations about this odd character, trying to figure him out together. We were working on small details like what it means to be lost for so long over the course of the movie; Matthias just stares and looks a lot throughout the film. We were working on small nuances like is he being lost in the moment because he doesn’t know what’s going on or because he already thinks about how to get out of all of that.
I think that the toughest character that Albrecht Schuch plays is himself because actors are used to finding the characteristics of the people they’re portraying but Mathias, though he’s played so many characters, doesn’t have any distinct characteristics himself.
Interestingly the Mathias character is based on the man whom I met in Japan. He told me that he started to emotionally close down before his assignments. Whenever he plays a father, a son, a partner, he tries not to really get attached to them and by realizing that it’s not that Matthias hasn’t got any emotions but it’s just that they’re hidden a few layers below. This helped us a lot to define Matthias as a character. Like I said, we were working on these small nuances and Albrecht told me that whenever he played Mathias he felt a bit like a robot who always functions for everybody but has no character of his own. As Matthias always wants to please everybody and to be perfect in society, he has lost touch with his emotions and this man in Japan he told me that whenever he comes home from an assignment, he would want to open up again but it is not possible because it would take time and on the next day he’s already playing another role, so he’s kind of lost in this limbo.
The scenes with last character that he plays, the son, must have been the toughest to film.
Albrecht was very happy to finally play breakout for Mathias. So I think for him it was not the toughest thing to act because he finally could do something that felt very natural to himself. But to shoot, of course it was a very difficult scene. We had many extras, many shots, many characters in that scene. We shot it over two days and when Matthias is covered in mud it was not easy to find a mud that stays moist, so Albrecht had to stay in a cool room while we were not shooting during the breaks.
Some of the key crew on this film like your cinematographer and editor, you have worked with them before and that must have helped.
Absolutely, first it’s absolutely really beautiful to work with friends and secondly of course when you know each other that well from previous projects, communication is much easier. You know how other people work and you can create better results because you do not need to get to know this other person you’re working with. The fact that we went to film school together and did the short films together, helped us to find our own way of telling a story. The cinematography and editing it is something we created together as a team, as filmmaking is always something you do as a team.
What has all the awards and recognition done for your career? Are you getting offers to make more feature films? What are the plans for release of Peacock?
Thankfully our world sales did a wonderful job selling the film and it has been sold to 40 territories. It has started in theatres in many countries, but it will still start in some countries in mid-2026. Of course, this beautiful journey of the film is a help for the next project. Not just because I learnt a lot, but I also could also define my handwriting with the film and could show people that I can make films with so many characters and locations. Now I’m just really excited to finally be able to write again. I have been working on Peacock for seven years, so I’m craving to finally jump onto the next project. Thankfully I do have one idea for a TV series and two ideas for feature films, so there are hopefully plenty of things coming up.
Ali Moosavi has worked in documentary television and has written for Film Magazine (Iran), Cine-Eye (London), and Film International (Sweden).
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