In the next part of this wide-ranging discussion, Johannes discusses his new film Solvent and how it was made. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, there are some major spoilers regarding its ending.

B&S About Movies: What I’ve enjoyed about your films is their density. They create their own universes and logic. Throughout the three films, you’ve ramped up the intensity by the time Solvent arrives.

Johannes Grenzfurthner: Yes, by the end of Solvent, it really becomes something else—even compared to the craziness and bizarreness of the previous two films. Solvent ultimately creates its own messed-up reality. A critic friend of mine had an interesting reaction: he could only watch the first half-hour in one sitting because some unforeseen work came up. He told me later he almost felt disappointed by how “normal” the beginning seemed. It feels like a very classic found footage film at first, with the helmet camera and the search for stuff. I told him, “Come on, watch the rest of it!” When he finally did, he said, “It totally lived up to what I was hoping for by the end. I can never look at my penis the same way!”

B&S: What was it like to watch with Jon Gries on Solvent? He’s not a big star to the rest of the world, but to me he is.

Johannes: Jon Gries is such a veteran—he’s been acting for 50 years and has been in everything! When we started casting, it was fun because we only needed someone for one day of voice recording for the main character. Since the talent wouldn’t have to come to Austria for weeks, we could afford a more prominent name. We reached out to a lot of actors—it could have been someone else in the end. But thanks to Tom Gorai and Tim League, we connected with Jon Gries.

When we started working with him, I was so glad it worked out the way it did. Looking back, I can’t imagine anyone else in that role. Jon was perfect—his voice, the brittleness in how he talks, everything about it felt right. Watching the film now, hearing his voice, it’s like the perfect storm. Funny enough, I didn’t even realize at first that Jon was Uncle Rico! (laughs)

The crazy part is that Jon was in Thailand when we recorded. I was sitting in my little office in Vienna, directing him remotely while he was in a sound booth in Thailand. Because of the time difference, I got up at 2 a.m. to work with him. It was incredibly hot in the sound booth, and Jon was sweating so much. Because we recorded chronologically, you can hear him getting more and more exhausted as the film progresses.

It ended up being perfect, though. He had to repeat lines, focus, and deal with the heat, and by the end, he was sweating like a pig. Jon even joked that it was almost like method acting—melting away just like the character. We both laughed because, in the end, it felt so right for the role. (laughs)

B&S: I love the end of it! I love how it looks!

Johannes: Thanks! But some guy in a review didn’t. Honestly, I was a little offended by that. He said the melting at the end looked “so CGI.” And I was like, what the fuck? It’s not CGI! We worked for three days in a studio to make that effect. It’s actual wax—our special effects guy created a wax puppet, like in Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark.

We melted it with industrial-strength hair dryers, filmed it, and sped it up. It’s such a hands-on, old-school effect. There was so much melted wax on the ground by the end that it almost caught fire! The industrial dryer made it incredibly hot, and there was liquid wax everywhere. At one point, we thought we might burn down the poor special effects guy’s studio. (laughs)

B&S: That’s why I like practical effects; at one point, this effect existed.

Johannes: Exactly. And then, after the shot, you look around the room, and it’s filled with debris. You’ve created something, but now you have to clean it up. You have to deal with it. After you’ve nailed the perfect shot, your next thought is, “What now?” Oh no. (laughs)

Nobody gets into filmmaking to stand around in a green room with dots on your face. Nobody wants that, honestly. But from a production standpoint, I get it. I mean, Marvel couldn’t pump out their movies so quickly if they didn’t rely on CGI and post-production. It makes everything cheaper because it’s more feasible than doing it all practically.

We’ll see where AI takes us in the coming years, but there’s something special about being on set, knowing this is the one moment in time where we can do this. It’s like I’m channeling my inner Whitney Houston. If we mess up the take, that’s it. I love that. There’s something tremendously energizing about a whole team of people focused on that moment in time.

There’s an entire crew—special effects, camera, lighting, everyone—all focused on making those 20 seconds, that one minute, perfect. That’s why I’ll never give up on making films in the real world, in reality. It’s just the best.

B&S: Where did Solvent come from?

Johannes: The idea for Solvent came from this moment when I stepped into my grandfather’s old farmhouse after not having been there for ten years. There had been a rift in our family—my mother and her sister didn’t speak for a decade, partly due to inheritance disputes and family drama. When my aunt passed away, her daughter came back to Austria for the first time in twenty years, and we went to see what she inherited. It felt a lot like the story of Solvent.

When I stepped into that house, I could feel the mold attacking my lungs—it was horrendous. The smell was unbearable, and everything was decaying. But I spent some of my best childhood days there, so walking into that house again, seeing what my aunt had or hadn’t done with it, hit me hard. I saw it through this nostalgic lens—how it used to look in my childhood, compared to how it was now, in ruins. Something in my brain shifted, and I thought, I need to do something with this. It felt like the perfect setting for a horror story.

I’ve always been fascinated by Austrian history, and the movie was born out of a need to confront Austria’s historical baggage—not in a traditional or sanitized way. The farmhouse, tied to my family’s history, became a metaphor for exploring guilt, complicity, and how the past still seeps into the present. Austria has this unique way of dealing with its Nazi past. When I was in school in the 1980s, we didn’t learn a lot about the Nazi era. The German school curriculum, by contrast, was much more proactive about it. But in Austria, it was as if the country didn’t exist between 1938 and 1945. Austrians were very eager to forget, despite the fact that most of the concentration camps were run by Austrians.

Austria was never good at confronting the past, and I saw this gap in my conversations with friends, their parents, and grandparents. It was as if Austria had this hole in its soul, this thing that no one wanted to talk about. The more time passes, the more people forget. And that’s the core of the film—there’s something in the ground in Austria that never goes away, something that still affects us. It doesn’t matter if you talk about it or not—it will catch up with you. It’s very Freudian, embedded into everything, this festering wound that never heals.

In the final part of this interview, we’ll get into the concepts of Solvent, inspirations and Johannes’ favorite films.