To trick people with April Fool’s jokes, or more precisely with invented or fake, spectacular or fantastic stories or actions, is not least to interrupt everyday life and create magical moments. The movie “The Prank” shows the potential that cinema offers for this. A conversation with director Benjamin Heisenberg.
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Magdalena Taube/Krystian Woznicki: Your film “The Prank” (2025) seems to us like a declaration of love to cinema. We are thinking of the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, of formative experiences such as being confined to one’s own four walls (if one enjoys this privilege) and being close to one’s family during the lockdown. During this phase, not only social relations, but also cinema – the public, collective viewing of films, but also the production for this context – went into a deep crisis. What (direct or indirect) role did the experience of the pandemic play in the development of “The Prank”?
Benjamin Heisenberg: That’s interesting, because the idea for the movie actually came up during the lockdown in Zoom conversations between my co-writer Peer Klehmet and me. This desire to make a movie with a big movement through a city, showing two kids who somehow escape their everyday life and their normal ‘fetters’ and go on adventures, was a core idea and certainly also has to do with this confinement during the pandemic. And of course, pranks and tricks are always little revolutions that humorously question what is considered to be without alternative, and there was a lot of that during the pandemic.
MT/KW: The development of “The Prank” was funded as part of the ‘Special Children’s Film’ program, which is primarily aimed at developing original material for this genre as a counterbalance to the practice of filming existing children’s literature. What makes the film a special children’s film in our eyes is the fact that it works across generations because of its overall quality – script, direction, cinematography, acting, etc. – but also because of the way it deals with its subject matter. There aren’t too many parallels in film history, but perhaps it can be compared to films by Hayao Miyazaki such as “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988) and other films by Miyazaki’s production company Ghibli such as “Whisper of the Heart” (1995) by Yoshifumi Kondō.
BH: “My Neighbor Totoro” was a particularly formative and, in the best sense of the word, fantastic movie for me and my family, and of course I really absorbed the other Miyazaki films. For “The Prank,” however, the U.S. films of the 1980s that my peers and I grew up with were more of a reference point, and some of them are deliberately quoted. First and foremost John Hughes’ “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (1986), but also “Back to the Future” (1985), Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America” (1984) and, of course, “Fahrenheit 451” (1966), François Truffaut’s adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel, not to mention the great short film “Surprise” (1995) by Veit Helmer, in which a woman is surprised by her husband with a chain-reaction prank. “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” was especially important to us because it has such a nice blend of freedom and positive anarchy, and it turns life upside down in a beautiful way.
Magic in the everyday
MT/KW: As in “The Prank,” the setting in which Miyazaki explores the role of magic in everyday life is always an ordinary (if imperfect) family situation. “The Prank” emphasizes the role of magic in everyday life right from the title. Your movie is about an April Fool’s joke that interrupts the course of everyday life and unsettles the familiar world to some extent. How do everyday life and magic relate to you as a director?
BH: For me, there is always something magical about communicating with an audience through a movie, because I am formulating a sentence, a tableau, a choreography in gestures, images and sounds, which, of course, are read differently by each person, but which also create a collective experience in front of the screen, which is always a happy experience for me. But by magic you also mean an inexplicable, enchanting, spiritual moment – and I have experienced that in everyday life, too. Although I come from a very scientific family, I have repeatedly experienced telepathic encounters and dreamlike certainties that I could not explain rationally. This had a strong influence on me, as you can read in my novel “Lukusch” (2022). In “The Prank,” I feel this quality especially in the overlapping of reality and fiction, when life seems to be a strangely unfolding chain reaction, or when a computer game and the frenzy of the Schaaf character suddenly merge with the car. Of course, the self-driving car in “Beta Drive Unit 451” also has an inexplicably autonomous life-that’s part of the magic, too.
MT/KW: One could also think of the films of Jacques Tati, which of course also potentially work across generations, and in which, for example in “Jour de fête” (1949) or “Playtime” (1967), magic is created in everyday life at the interface of the functioning or non-functioning of the modern world.
BH: Absolutely. Tati is always a bright star in my comedy sky, and with Lucas and Xi Zhou and their friend Charly, the main characters in “The Prank,” children look at a world that sometimes seems very absurd to them, and that connects them very much to Monsieur Hulot in Tati’s films, who always wanders through the modern world in a very devoted and loving, but often confused and almost always out of place way. This is not the only reason why the machines and constructions in “The Prank” are always a bit dysfunctional, imperfect, and the movie never seems to want to end until the end credits roll, because this cosmos, so to speak, keeps on rattling happily on ad infinitum.
MT/KW: In “The Prank,” the dialectical tension between functioning and non-functioning in the modern world is programmatically presented right at the beginning, so to speak, on the basis of an April Fool’s joke. The father of the family, played by Mehdi Nebbou, who also played an important role in your film “Sleeper” (2005), has built a highly complex apparatus that transforms half the house into the setting for a prank – and whose final performance goes more badly than well. The mother of the house, present as a test subject/spectator, comments laconically: “But you’ll clean that up later.” The big story, about the world of money built by capitalist patriarchy, is anticipated here on a small scale. At the center of it all is a delivery of protection money in a pizza box – an April Fool’s joke that is only revealed to be a hoax by another April Fool’s joke. An April Fool’s joke within an April Fool’s joke that turns the world upside down and reveals at least the criminal side of the world of money, while also reflecting on the role of public fame. It’s a pretty complex construct when you think about it, but it doesn’t feel that way when you look at it.
BH: Exciting! Yes, you can read it that way, and we thought a lot about the mother’s sentence: “But you’ll clean that up later.” On the one hand, we didn’t want to force her into the role of an overwhelmed, humorless mother, but on the other hand, given the chaos of her tender, chaotic husband, it was a very understandable reaction. I was also thinking of the bachelor machines from art history, which also deal with communication between men and women, or rather a gender relationship that always oscillates between seduction, swinging together, merging, overwhelming, power struggle and suppression. This is how you can see this machine and the relationship between the parents.
The nested April Fool’s jokes were, of course, the core of the entire film construction for Peer and me, but they also offered the wonderful possibility that all the terrible, disturbing statements and events of that day could simply be a joke. A lie in a positive sense. “Come down from your [April Fool’s] trip,” as Lucas and Xi Zhou argue, because at some point they both want to know when and where the joke ends and reality begins, which has consequences. Incidentally, it’s hard to come up with such a thought when you see Donald Trump juggling tariffs, hunger relief, layoffs, etc. today.
Cinema as a prank
MT/KW: The world of money is reflected through the lens of gangster rap. The circulation of counterfeit banknotes, already reflected in Robert Bresson’s “L’Argent” (1983) as a descriptive level for the functioning or non-functioning of the modern world, seems to be what “The Prank” wants to place on a level with contemporary youth culture.
BH: Money, which is also the subject of the rap song “Moneyrain,” written especially for “The Prank,” plays an ambivalent role in the film – as a trigger for great enthusiasm and great stress, and of course in the form of wealth as a state of longing. For me, the whole world of finance and consumption has a very realistic place in this film, just as it plays a gigantic role in our lives today, because our societies are so commercialized. At the same time, it is the relationships between people in the movie that touch us, that stay with us emotionally, that entertain us, that move us, that inspire us. It would be nice, however, if film could succeed in reorienting these values, so to speak, and put people back at the center of attention, making an appeal for real, interpersonal, haptic, blood-filled life.
MT/KW: Gangster rap is a prism that allows the film to play with all kinds of racist clichés and to deconstruct them successfully, as was confirmed to us in discussions with young people who had seen the film. The pizza gangsters who are not really gangsters, the Chinese boy who is introduced as a one-dimensional exotic (‘only speaks Chinese’) and turns out to be one of the most idiosyncratic and multifaceted characters, etc. It is also worth recalling Mehdi Nebbou’s role in your film “Sleeper” (2005), in which you play with projections of the other as an object of fear. So “The Prank” offers not only a contemporary, ‘diverse’ cast – including the black rapper Die P – but also a reflection on the ‘multiracial’ composition of magic in everyday life that the film seeks to unfold.
BH: We thought about this a lot and incorporated certain phrases and reflections on racial or gender bias very early on in the writing process. I was often bothered by the fact that in the film and television industry there is often a kind of preemptive obedience when it comes to ethnic and gender images, so as not to appear discriminatory. This was also more or less demanded by the funding agencies and editorial offices. Peer and I, as well as the casting agents Jaqueline Rietz (children) and Ulrike Müller (adults), also wanted to show a diverse world as we experience it in our everyday lives, but at the same time the viewers should meet their own, more or less modern role models and have fun being surprised.
Unfortunately, we are currently experiencing a backlash in terms of racism and modern gender roles. That’s why I think it’s even more important to tell stories that overcome prejudices and simply celebrate equality, diversity and tolerance as something normal and natural that is part of our culture.
MT/KW: During the Q&A session after the screening at the premiere of “The Prank” in Berlin, there were some interesting comments from children. One of them referred to the sequence in the self-driving car where the two protagonists are in a state of limbo between freedom and helplessness. The child who referred to this asked how it was possible to shoot this sequence when self-driving cars or autonomous driving are banned in Germany. This question, in which knowing and not knowing meet in a wonderful way, points to an impossibility that the film makes possible, and thus to the magical core of “The Prank” or the prank of “The Prank.” In this sequence, in which the two protagonists also experience some very sensual, contemplative moments, the film comes to itself to a certain extent, and the declaration of love to cinema that “The Prank” makes reaches a crystallization point – and thus ties in with many contributions to film history, from Max Ophüls to Kathryn Bigelow, in which sequences in vehicles such as trains, buses and cars reflect and celebrate the medium of seeing itself. Ultimately, it is your film itself that represents the magical interruption of everyday life, offering the opportunity to experience the functioning or non-functioning of the modern world as a sensual, magical adventure.
BH: That’s a great observation, and I fully agree with it. When we shoot in the studios in front of large LED walls onto which reality is superimposed, it’s also a simulator for the actors, which inspires the gaming experience, as it does for the audience later on. So the magic begins with the production. Cars are also interesting places because, even more than houses in film, they live from the relationship between inside and outside, because they move through the landscape and their occupants themselves become spectators, or are observed from the outside and identified with their cars. This means that when we look into a car from the front (as in “Der Prank”) and see two or more people sitting in it, looking ahead, then the viewers in the cinema encounter the viewers in the film and reflect on themselves or their asserted reality and distribution of roles. The moment of loss of control, which of course also refers to the situation of the viewers in the cinema and which occurs when Xi Zhou lets go of the steering wheel, I recently saw very nicely in Maren Ade’s “The Forest for the Trees” (2003), when Eva Löbau, in the leading role as the driver of the car, simply sits down in the back seat during the journey and the film abruptly finds an open ending.
We always had a lot of fun shooting these scenes in the car, but also in the massage parlor, when the guys get out of the chaos and the hustle and bustle and, like us viewers, devote themselves entirely to pleasure. In a time when we are constantly expected to comment on, maximize and react to a flood of information and demands, the poet Robert Lax’s saying often comes to mind: “Opportunity knocks – sit still, it will go away”.