‘Oktoberfest: Beer and Blood’ isn't a limited series says director, confirms Season 2 is in works
‘Oktoberfest: Beer and Blood’, the six-part German miniseries about the famous beer festival at the turn of the twentieth century, had a global Netflix release in several languages. Fans of the show can rejoice, for it may have a second season, with the makers already chalking out plotlines, even if it's not been greenlit yet.
The show, loosely based loosely on the life of Georg Lang, tells the story of the struggle for power between beer dynasties. It examines the idea of modernity versus traditions, it sees the hungry growth of capitalism, and it doesn’t work too hard to create an aura of darkness.
Director Hannu Salonen and cinematographer Felix Cramer employed the use of dark tones and shadows along with lush shots to emphasize how in the modern well-to-do Munich of 1900, evil and deceit lurked on every corner. Both Salonen and Cramer spoke to MEA WorldWide (MEAWW) about the show. Answering the most important question for fans -- whether the show was going to get a second season -- Salonen said, “I know that in publications here and there you read that it's like a limited series, but it was not the idea. It was left open. But of course, Ronny Schalk (the co-creator) and I, and everyone was planning that this has to go on because there were plenty of intriguing stuff to be told.”
He added, “I started in January with Ronnie… I mean, you know, developing the second season as I want, but it hasn't been greenlit. More or less, the producers, the writers, and I are kind of like thinking it might go on. And we’re having some fun imagining a second season. But we don't know.”
Asked if he had any plans for what direction the show would take in a second season, Salonen said, “I think we will dig deeper into the characters. There might be some new players coming in -- mighty players. Obviously, that changes certain things, but we have a lot of stuff that we can go back onto here. Basically, just the conflicts that we created in the first season. Of course, we have to continue with them because I think the audience is also feeling with those characters a bit. So, some of these going to happen that I can promise.”
Talking about the show’s aesthetics, especially with its comparisons to ‘Peaky Blinders’ or ‘Boardwalk Empire’, Cramer said, “We watched [Peaky Blinders] of course, and also others series. So, of course, when you, when you start to do a series like that, you want to get inspiration from other series that play or are settled at the same time. But we very soon realized that we couldn't use them as guidelines. So we came up with the idea -- more to look into the arts at that time. So like the late romantic painters. Also the music of the time.”
He explained further, “When you see a similarity to ‘Peaky Blinders’, I think it's more because we use a lot of fog and of course the locations, the production design, and also the costumes. They are really very accurate. And that was very important for us.” He also emphasized that while the British series had a kind of desaturated sepia tone, ‘Oktoberfest: Beer and Blood’ had a more saturated tone.
Salonen added in this regard, “The deeper we dug into this whole thing, the less I watched anything. Because this was really important too, to have our own language. And as I stepped in like two-and-a-half years ago into the whole thing -- this was in the stage of the outlines -- and I had a feeling that the whole thing needed something else than being just a documentary or a historical period piece because that didn't really interest me.”
Talking about the show addressing an era that prominently does not feature in American pop culture about Germany, Cramer said, “I think it's very, very good that we now can show other periods as well because of course there are two things that people worldwide know about Germany. The one part is this dark period -- the Second World War. And the other is Oktoberfest. And I was really amazed that this was one of the first serious features dealing with the festival. So for us, it's really great that the biggest folk festival here now has a series about it, and that is not showing all of us the same period [World War II] of Germany.”
‘Oktoberfest: Beer & Blood’ is now available on Netflix for viewing.