So you’ve started this U.S. press tour immediately after doing the same in Europe, all within just a few months of actually finishing the movie. Are you tired of talking about Perfume yet?

No, on the contrary. It’s different talking about it in America, actually; there’s a much more… open-minded feel about it here. Whereas in Europe, it’s like we’re talking about The Lord of the Rings or something. It’s just such an important and beloved novel in Europe. Here, it’s known, but there’s not quite the same mystique. Before it opened in Europe, things were kind of tense, and the expectations were so unbelievable. But then it turned out to be great, because the film’s doing amazingly good business. People who love the book have told me that they feel it’s a very faithful film, which makes me feel good because I know that, in many small, page-by-page ways, it’s really not. [Laughs.] But I hope that the overall spirit of the original remains intact.

I wanted to ask about that mystique of the novel. You’ve got a reclusive author who had long resisted any attempts by producers to buy the rights, even to the point of writing a screenplay [1997’s Rossini] about the ridiculousness of the process…

Have you seen the movie? No? It’s a really good film. It’s not only fun because of its regards to the whole backstory behind Perfume, but also just on its own merits. It’s great. I hope that this movie Perfume makes more people aware of it.

A lot of the things I’ve read about the development of Perfume have mentioned that some major-league directors had been interested in the past, only to call it unfilmable.

I think that a lot of that unfilmable thing is a myth, really. Just a few weeks ago, actually, I met with a producer of Stanley Kubrick, who said that Kubrick never called it unfilmable, but just decided that it wasn’t his cup of tea. I really wonder why any filmmaker would say that it was unfilmable, because it’s such a brilliant, cinematic concept. It’s a movie in more or less every aspect. It screams at you to become a film when you read it. There are certainly challenges that present themselves in the translation, but I think that makes it more attractive as a director. I mean, it’s got an amazing story, an incredible resolution, a fantastic premise, a very peculiar, yet involving protagonist, and this whole mysterious world of smells that has never really been investigated in films. Another thing that I like very much about it is that it is set in the 18th century, but isn’t a typical stiff costume drama, one of those aristocratic, production designer show-off things. [Laughs.] You know, you build these big sets and have them on screen for longer than needed just because you’re proud of them. That’s absolutely not what I wanted to do because the novel doesn’t really care much about the upper class; it’s mostly about the street life and the dirt and the filth and the reality. When I read the book, I felt that it’s really unlike anything—an absolute one of a kind. That’s exactly the kind of movie I wanted to make.

How difficult was it to translate that uniqueness into a screenplay?

It took about three years, all together, of trying to find the right way into the novel. Of course, this is mostly because the hero is so difficult. It took ages to figure out how to take this strange creature and make the audience stick with him and live the movie through his perspective, which is basically his nose.

Right. How do you write a script featuring a mostly non-verbal main character? Werner Herzog did it with The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, but I can’t think of many other successful examples.

Well, our character is a bit of a Kaspar Hauser figure in a way, it’s true. It’s one of the few references that we actually worked with. As difficult as it was to write him, at times, I think that the way that he isn’t much of a language guy is great. It means that the character has to really connect with the camera, and we have to find new ways to establish his relationship with the lens. It also invites the movie to be more subjective, and from his point of view, than it would if we had to listen to him. It gave me the chance to make what feels, in a lot of ways, like a silent movie. A very modern silent movie. The other real challenge, I guess, was to balance the innocence and darkness of the character. One of the things I realized during the making was that literature and movies have different rules. Literature has much more experience with dark characters and dark stories and being very gritty and disturbing and all that stuff. In films, I think that’s less accepted, by both audiences and filmmakers. One of the things that I loved about the structure of Perfume is that you feel connected with this guy until the bitter end. Even though he does things that you totally disagree with, you somehow understand what’s driving him. What makes it a meaningful movie, hopefully, is that you can understand his desires.

You’ve added a motivation for his actions that didn’t exist in the book, where his crimes seemed much more random. Here, I found, his having an ultimate goal makes him more of a sympathetic character, even though he does horrible things. You almost want him to get away with it.

That’s my favorite thing to hear. If anyone watching the movie feels that way, then I’m completely proud. That’s the tension that I love to create for an audience, where you’re sort of torn apart between not wanting these innocent beings to die, and being so curious about his voyage that you’re willing to let this moral aspect go. Temporarily.