Other People’s Money plays in the Panorama section at the Berlin Film Festival. The series premiere will be a full circle moment for Jan Schomburg – his first film, Above Us Only Sky, played in the same Berlinale sidebar in 2011.
The German writer and director is speaking to Deadline from his Berlin Film Festival base. The warehouse-like space will serve as the venue for the after party following the premiere of the series that he wrote, and upon which he was showrunner.
Other People’s Money takes in a tax fraud that centered on so-called cum-ex trades, and the work of those seeking to expose the wrongdoing. The shorthand explanation often used for those not familiar with the complex financial machinations is it’s “a bit like parents claiming a child benefit for two children when there is only one child in the family.”
The series was inspired by the CumEx files, the investigation by a host of European journalists and news outlets into the tax double dealing, as well as the Oliver Schröm book ‘Die Akte Scholz’ and research by Christian Salewski.
Schomburg says he did not pay close attention when news of the multi-billion Euro scandal first broke – “I thought, oh, it’s just some stupid shit where some rich people stole some money from us,” he says – but Michael Polle, who produces Other People’s Money with Ole Søndberg, urged him to look closer.
“I started to do some research and I found the characters involved in the real case really interesting. I had the feeling it was as if Shakespeare and [German-American director] Lubitsch had teamed up in a writers’ room and created these characters.”
Part of the story revolves around an older tax lawyer, Bernd (Justus von Dohnányi) and his younger counterpart, Sven (Nils Strunk). The duo team up to illegally work the angles on the tax rules. Schomburg’s take was to give their relationship a rom-com spin.
“If you if you look at the structure of the storytelling closely, it is built up a little bit like a romantic comedy,” he says. “They team up together, and this whole process of them forming a company together is a little bit like a marriage and I really wrote that part like a love scene. [Bernd] says: ‘You know, I thought about something, maybe we could form a company together. You don’t have to say yes, immediately. You can think about it.’ [Sven] says: ‘I don’t have to think about it, yes, I do.’”
Tom Tykwer’s X Filme produces with True Content Entertainment and, fittingly for a drama that spans Europe, a host of broadcasters from across the continent. These broadcasters will air the show in their respective countries: ZDF (Germany), DR (Denmark), NRK Norway), SVT (Sweden), RUV (Iceland), YLE (Finland), NPO (Netherlands), VRT (Belgium). Beta Film is distributing and the series is a highlight of its London TV Screenings lineup.
Christine Fenzl
Other People’s Money opens with a man walking into a garage full of expensive cars and lying naked, face down, on the bonnet of one of the luxury automobiles. But that is not a sign of what follows. As the drama unfolds, Schomburg says he set himself a guideline: “I don’t want to show the villains in a sexy way.”
He speaks of a “weird philosophical emptiness” at the heart of the perpetrators of the fraud. “I always asked myself, why are they doing it? They already have a lot of money. Then they get more and then they don’t do anything with it. They just pay it into some bank accounts.”
Making a TV series was the hardest work Schomburg has ever done, he says. “It’s like, okay, episode six is finished, but in one week it’s the deadline for episode seven. It’s crazy industrial work and it’s also nice somehow. You don’t think: ‘Do I feel like writing?’ You get into this industrial process. You just have to do it.”
The story that inspired Other People’s Money is public record. For Schomburg, a tale of greed and disregard for the wider population is actually inspiring given the actions of the people who came together to expose the fraud.
“It’s possible to think that the financial markets are not just there for themselves or for some rich people, they are there to serve us,” he explains. “I also tried to convey this idea that now is the time to think in a collective kind of way. There are some very inspiring people who show us that we can fight and we can win.”
