RIP Simone Bär

 

The German Film Academy mourns the loss of casting director Simone Bär

 

Deutsche Filmakademie

1/18/2023

 

The casting of a film resembles a family constellation and Simone Bär was the congenial performer. The 57-year-old casting director Simone Bär died on 16 January 2023 in Berlin.

In her long, diverse casting biography, she has connected many actors and directors and thus very often given us the realization that the perfect casting of a film can change everything. Simone Bär has elevated casting to art, impenetrable for most, shaped by her unique feeling and curiosity about people, about life. She was one of the best judges of human nature in this profession, always looking for a new face, a new inspiration, always ready to throw everything overboard for the perfect group, for the perfect leading role.

So we will soon feel the tension between Bachmann and Frisch in "Ingeborg Bachmann – Reise in die Wüste" by Margarethe von Trotta. Experience whether "All Quiet on the Western Front" by Edward Berger with a stunning, completely new ensemble or "Tár" by Todd Field at the Academy Awards, where the new film by Christian Petzold's "Red Sky" takes us or how "Sisi and I" by Frauke Finsterwalder catches us.

Simone Bär cast "Babylon Berlin" for Tom Tykwer, Henk Handloegten and Achim von Borries, worked repeatedly with Christian Petzold, Matti Geschonneck, Florian Gallenberger, Robert Thalheim and Baran bo Odar and with Sherry Hormann for "Nur eine Frau".

In addition, she was an expert in major international arthouse cinema in collaborations with Stephen Daldry ("The Reader"), Quentin Tarantino ("Inglourious Basterds"), Steven Spielberg ("War Horse"), Jonathan Glazer ("The Zone of Interest"), François Ozon ("Frantz"), Martin Zandvliet ("Land of Mine") and Wes Anderson ("The Grand Budapest Hotel").

At the same time, she accompanied young filmmakers such as Ilker Çatak, Barbara Ott and Philip Koch on their first films with great enthusiasm, incorruptibly interested in the book and the collaboration with the artists.

Above all, the long-term nature of the cooperation, recurring and characterized by absolute trust, was significant. When asked what casting was for her, she replied: "Credibility, that it is coherent, ... for me the characters are tangible, that I am kidnapped, ... They enchant me. You can't generalize, you cast a comedy differently than a drama, but the actors have to convey the script as well as possible."

And she searched for these actors and found them congenial again and again, to find the finest nuances in the cast of the Netflix series "Dark" – to find in dialect adaptations of the older and younger players of a role – was a pleasure for her. Nina Hoss, Sandra Hüller, Paula Beer, Vicky Krieps, Peter Kurth, Christoph Waltz and many, many more have grown with the joint works.

Simone Bär has achieved world fame in her profession due to her precise eye and her high level of competence. She has cast films that have been awarded the most important prizes for their knowledge and feelings, including multiple Oscar winners and nominees, winners of the Golden Globe, the German Film Award, the European Film Award and Grimme winners.

Simone Bär has also been honored several times for this outstanding work, she is the winner of the German Casting Award and multiple winner of the German Acting Award in the field of casting. She has received numerous honours from her colleagues, such as the Angela Award at the Kilkenny Film Festival.

She was a Grimme Prize winner, a member of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as well as the German and European Film Academies.

Simone Bär will remain close to all of us, in the encounters we remember, in the films she worked on. No one will be like them.

BAR, Simone

Born: 1965, Konig’s Wusterhausen, Brandenburg, Germany

Died: 1/16/2023, Berlin, Berlin, Germany

 

Simone Bär’s westerns – script director:

Tom Sawyer - 2011

The Adventures of Huck Finn - 1972