In the beginning was just an article…

Here we start to recover the history of SAME SAME BUT DIFFERENT.
Wenka -our chief of development- tells us how the film idea was born:

February 2006. I read a quite impressive article in the German magazine >NEON<. It felt like a declaration of love to a moribund girl by a young guy who was about 20 years old. On the picture in that magazine the guy looks as if he had not even attained full age. With big blue eyes and a hinted smile he looks up to the observer. The woman next to him though seems to be grave like a grown-up. It’s a matter of love and responsibility.

Here you can read the article: http://www.neon.de/kat/wissen/gesundheit/hiv_aids/125222.html

Here you see a picture of Wenka:

In the office, the producer Claus asks, if I had read the article, which he found meaningful and a possible film story. I am happy that I can answer with YES and I wonder like so many times before how many people actually read NEON…
I try to find out what the whole story is about and I figure out that the guy from the article is already working on a book. This means that we have to wait and that we should remember to ask again when the time is right. It is possible that other companies scent a good story for a film too…

May 2007. Sometimes publishing companies allow interested people to already read unpublished books. After asking, you get a simple print on paper without a title page and just for internal use. If you get such an unpublished bunch of paper, you are not allowed to talk about it in public.
I am happy when the still unfinished book with the current title “Wohin du auch gehst“ arrives. Our book scout Bettina is thrilled immediately and now everybody in the company has to read the book quickly. We have first talks about the story in the development department, this is the division where a company verifies and discusses film scripts, books, articles and ideas, about their worthiness to become a film.
On one side we are enthusiastic, on the other side we analyze (like always) the problems which could appear. Problems could appear because it is a personal report of a young man with lots of reflections of his own experiences, which tragedy he describes laconically and comical at the same time.
The tone changed, because now -different to the time when the article was published- the man and the woman have a better perspective.

June 2007. I am visiting the film festival in Munich to watch all the interesting new movies. During my lunch breake Buck calls me to ask something. I tell him about the movies I’ve seen, but it seems that Buck is not interested in that. He wants to know if we have a new interesting story that he can read, cause he is looking for examination. I tell him about this book that we all read recently and about our discussions, concerning it. I realize that Buck is getting more and more attentive and that he starts to push me to send him the book. I am in Munich and there is just this stack of paper in Berlin. Buck is in Hamburg. Finally I miss the next film I wanted to see and a carrier gets the order to bring the papers from Berlin to Hamburg. I start to sense that Buck will be interested in that matter, because he will notice right away, that this is a modern love story.