Ernestine Hipper had his palm read at a hippie market in Ibiza. Back then, 19 years ago, Hipper was dissatisfied with his job. And she was undecided. Should she continue to set the stage for films and travel through world history? Or would you rather open a shop and put down roots? The man who read her palm advised her to stick with film, saying, “When you’re 60, you’re going to step onto the biggest stage, win a big prize, and be known all over the world.”
Two months ago, when Hipper was 60, she received the Oscar for the production design in the anti-war film “Nothing New in the West.”
A real Oscar, the most coveted prize in the film industry.
(Photo: Catherine Hess)
Ernestine Hipper is sitting in the Literaturhaus in Munich and orders a water. “I hadn’t even thought about the prophecy anymore,” she says. A friend who was at the hippie market at the time had to remind her.
Hipper laughs and she ticks off the hippie market with it. She quickly moves from Ibiza to Hollywood. In 2020, together with Christian M. Goldbeck, she was commissioned to write “Nothing New in the West”. The production designer Goldbeck created the look and the buildings, the film set designer Ernestine Hipper filled the rooms. “I was responsible for the hardware, so to speak.” Work began in early 2021, and Hipper only had ten weeks to recreate the battlefield that was to be built near Prague as realistically as possible. “In the spring the ground would have gotten too warm, the grass and the flowers would have sprouted,” explains Hipper.
Ten weeks! Ernestine Hipper read the military post, combed through archives for images, and visited museums. It was Corona time, there was a strict lockdown in Prague. “And then Brexit!” Lots of props had to be shipped from London, but she wasn’t allowed to travel. With the help of a contact, Hipper finally managed to get a truck with props driven from London to Prague, including plastic horses on board – and special barbed wire. “5,000 meters of barbed wire,” says Hipper, “the spikes were made of rubber, and every single spike had to be glued in England.” They met the deadline and it turned out fine; good enough for an Oscar.
Felix Kammerer (right) as Paul Bäumer and Albrecht Schuch (left) as Stanislaus Katczinsky in the remake of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel “Nothing New in the West”. Ernestine Hipper designed the anti-war drama.
(Photo: Reiner Bajo/dpa)
What was the jury’s reasoning? “Christian and I designed the film in such a way that it seemed convincingly real,” says Hipper. “That you could smell and feel it as a spectator.”
Even as a child she created her own worlds
Ernestine Hipper grew up in a small village near Schrobenhausen. “I’ve always been artistic, I’ve been drawing and reading since I was a kid,” she says. She was often found in the attic of the 100-year-old schoolhouse where the family lived. Hipper has created her own world there, amid discarded but saved family items and great-grandmother’s clothes.
When she was a teenager, the family moved near Nuremberg. Hipper didn’t warm to the Franconians, longed for the south and applied to the fashion school in Munich with a drawing portfolio. “There were 100 applicants in a room and only 20 were accepted,” she says. “Then I thought: Hipper, it’s like always: you don’t have a plan B.” She didn’t need it either: she was accepted and, as she says, “at the age of 17 she was the youngest graduate who ever went to this fashion school”. It is a university of applied sciences, and Hipper also studied graphic design.
During this time she was in a relationship with a young American. Once she flew to see him in New York (she had told her parents that she was visiting an old friend in the village near Schrobenhausen). “When I saw the Big Apple back then, it was clear to me: I have to see the world, I got an insatiable desire to travel – I still have it to this day.” Hipper is no longer 17, but has been 61 for a few days, but she has remained true to herself in a few things: being an artist, being curious, being on the go.
“You can’t get ahead in film if you’re shy.”
Ernestine Hipper worked while she was at fashion school. “I tried being a waitress, but I wasn’t cheeky enough,” she says. “I was very shy at the time.” when did that go away Hipster smiles. “Later in the movies. You won’t get anywhere if you’re shy.”
Meanwhile, Hipper – dark artist horn-rimmed glasses, loose clothing – seems quite self-confident. A few days after the meeting in the Literature House, she sends an email: It would be important to her if the article mentioned that she was “film history” (sic). After all, she has been the only set designer to have worked on two works – “Nothing New in the West” and “Tár” with Cate Blanchett – which have been nominated for best film at the Baftas in England and the Oscars in the USA.
Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár in a scene in the film ‘Tár’, which co-designed Ernestine Hipper.
(Photo: dpa)
Incidentally, she slipped into the film industry through one of her part-time jobs. Hipper worked at a fair. A stylist asked her there if she would like to help out with catering at Filmhaus München, which shot commercials. She later worked there as a costume designer, and at some point the set was added, and at 25, she says, she was “the superstar in Germany” in this industry. “Every fourth advertisement was from me.” Then she lists: Mercedes, Toyota, Persil, Stuyvesant, Marlboro. And the locations: Los Angeles, New Zealand, southern France. She went to the Bahamas for Fa. You saw the whole world between 18 and 28.
“But then came the crisis of meaning,” she suddenly says after she’s finished the water and ordered a cappuccino. “I could no longer identify with the subject of advertising.” And probably not with the people who deal with it either. She speaks of a “Tarantino moment”, i.e. an inner imaginary massacre moment. She laughs and says, “I sat in a room with these agency guys and I mentally blew up the studio.” She then stopped overnight.
After reunification, Hipper went to Berlin, the film capital
From then on, Hipper made the set for television films, but was not happy with it because there was often a lack of money and thus the scope for their creativity. “I couldn’t get a wing up there,” she says. “Sometimes there wasn’t even money for flowers,” she said. Things got better when she worked as a set designer for movies, and she says her breakthrough came in 2004. She decorated the set of Helmut Dietl’s film “On Searching and Finding Love.” At that time she lived in Berlin for a few years. After reunification, the capital had become a film city.
But she returned to Munich because she loves – almost everything – here, from the mentality to the Augustinian. Ernestine Hipper has lived in Munich for more than half her life, but for the past three years she has traveled the world professionally. When she was in the country, she lived with her sister in Franconia. She is now looking for a place to stay in Munich, but as you know, that is very difficult. She can get very upset about the high rents and the parking situation in the city center; she had come to the Literaturhaus by car. Presumably she had several Tarantino moments while looking for a parking space.
An hour has passed and suddenly she pulls an object wrapped in black out of her pocket. She unwraps it, it’s the Oscar she brought for the photo. She puts it on the table. Yes, she’s proud. “In 95 years, only 18 Oscars went to Germany,” she says, “and only three of them for production design.” It is made of gilded bronze, she says, and weighs 3.4 kilos. It has a few scratches on the back because a lot of people – including those with wedding rings – have touched it. Sure, her friends, her family: they all want to hold it in their hands. “It’s surreal to own an Oscar yourself,” says Hipper; previously she had only seen Audrey Hepburn’s Oscars in a showcase.
Ernestine Hipper and Christian M. Goldbeck in March 2023 in Los Angeles at the Oscars.
(Photo: Jordan Strauss/dpa)
When her name was called at the Oscars, it was “like a thunderclap, she says. “I’ve never felt such a feeling in my life, it’s indescribable.” And then she spoke the prescribed 30 seconds to the People in the hall, which was filled with 4000 people “As I spoke, I looked Cate Blanchett and Austin Butler in the eye.”