Premiere of "The Perfect Vacation": "One is glad that one does not have to experience what we experience on the screen"

If you travel to this island with the aim of having real fun, then you are also ready to go for more. So, to get drunk on the Mediterranean breeze, the drinks, the mountains in the background, the party at the hotel pool. A certain lack of inhibition is indispensable for this, and this feeling of letting go should also be generated on Monday evening at the premiere of "The Perfect Vacation": Malle in Mathäser. There is no real sun, but there is a red carpet and loud people, who apparently are so important that they have to be bathed in spotlights. First, Ilse Aigner (CSU), president of the Bavarian State Parliament, gets caught in the net of the TV teams and is allowed to express herself: "I think Florian David Fitz is great, I am happiest about him tonight." The vacation heroes from the new film by director and screenwriter Bora Dagtekin are already in animation mode, warmly chatting after the long interview day. After Dagtekin's comedy "The Perfect Secret," which attracted more than five million moviegoers in 2019, the follow-up film is supposed to achieve another audience wonder – and at the same time account for the significantly higher production costs. But what do the vacation heroes themselves say about this film, which is about the resilience of friendships and the explosiveness of feelings when human weaknesses and character flaws are exposed mercilessly? Frederick Lau does not need to be poked; the man is his own devil, as excited as in the film where he lets no slip-ups and no foolishness. What is his biggest weakness on set, asks a reporter? "Sleeping," claims the Berlin actor with a mischievous grin. "I can always sleep, even on set." Elyas M'Barek, his buddy in the film and in real life, stands two meters away and has a formula ready for the whole film: "You are glad that you don't have to experience what we experience on screen." The great fun was not always the filming in the winter in Mallorca with nighttime temperatures of up to five degrees, reports Wotan Wilke Möhring. But just as he starts describing the big shivers at the hotel pool, Frederick Lau jumps into the picture: "Stop whining, Wotan!" M'Barek plays one of these striving, not quite young men who want to be loved by everyone, in his case especially by his ever-suspicious wife Carlotta. Karoline Herfurth shows her full skill in this role as an envious drama queen who is constantly checking her husband's phone – that's how it should happen sometimes. Herfurth can look wonderfully amused to pitying when a TV reporter puts the microphone under her nose in a strange Ballermann costume. "What are you doing here?" asks Herfurth mercilessly. When all the guests and actors finally sit in the large Mathäser hall, Oliver Berben, head of Constantin, comes on stage. Berben often gets excited when it comes to his own productions, but with Dagtekin, the successful director in the service of Constantin ("Fack ju Göhte" 1-3, "The Perfect Secret", "Chantal in Wonderland"), he adds another layer. "Bora poured his soul out for this film," says Berben and tells the story of how he flew to Venice with the director and producer Lena Schömann to convince the Italian rights holder of the original "The Perfect Secret" to agree to shoot a German sequel. For a long time the Italians had categorically refused, but Bora's energetic pitch was apparently convincing, after an hour the Munich had the license in their hands. "Despite wild storms," Oliver Berben adds, "we drove in the same direction with this film," which is also a reference to the fact that the perfectionist Dagtekin rewrote his own script "a thousand times." "Tonight I surrender to you," says Berben. The premiere audience then, measured by the laughter, is clearly enjoying this fast-paced comedy. Yes, this director loves his characters, whom he knows how to put in the best light as if they were a circus director, even when they drift completely off course. And that's why the audience loves him back. Bora Dagtekin, who always seems a bit lost on stage, is celebrated that evening. And somehow you have the feeling: this story is not quite over yet.