Suddenly, the thought arises that life could always be like this: gazing at the sea with actor Hanns Zischler, eating ice cream, and discussing parallel universes. We are sitting in deck chairs at Lido di Venezia, not far from the cinema palace. No, we are hanging in it, as it is humid, and the sky weighs heavily on the rows of beach huts where Italian families spend their beach vacation. „That seagull there has probably already acted in Visconti’s films,“ says Zischler.
Zum Filmfestival von VenedigHanns Zischler arrived with the German competition entry „The Theory of Everything“. In the film by young director Timm Kröger, he plays Professor Julius Strathen, who attends a physics conference in Switzerland in the early 1960s with his doctoral student Johannes (Jan Bülow). Zischler portrays this scientist, who rejects anything new, including his student’s groundbreaking doctoral thesis, with a sly sense of humor. The thesis is about parallel universes, the possibility that variations of our universe exist simultaneously. Hanns Zischler talks about mathematician Kurt Gödel, who presented such a theory in 1949 despite resistance from established physics: „And the beauty is that cinema can easily make this scientific speculation plausible with its means.“ Zischler’s ice cream disappears from the stick so quickly that one could easily believe he ate it in a parallel time strand.