The Lives Of Others, a film about the East German Stasi, won film-maker Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck an Oscar. Steve Pratt speaks to him about his inspiration.

The film won him an Oscar and five-star reviews about which most film-makers can only dream, but the director of The Lives Of Others confesses to being disappointed.

Writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck says this with a slightly embarrassed laugh as he knows he should be grateful for all the awards and praise.

Winning the best foreign language film Oscar, three European film awards and seven German Lolas isn't enough. "I dream of something I call in my own heart the democratic movie, one that would really be able to reach everybody," he says.

"I found with this film, it's more educated people that go to see it, which I find a little disappointing."

In the US, The Lives Of Others is second only to submarine drama Das Boot in the list of top German-language movies. Yet he longs for his feature debut to be seen by as many people as possible and, as we've already talked about the great film-maker David Lean, he uses one of his films as an example.

"With Doctor Zhivago, he managed to capture more people there and not stoop to anyone's level. He was being completely truthful to himself and how he wanted to tell the story, but somehow it didn't come across as that intellectual," he says.

Born in Cologne 34 years ago, von Donnersmarck grew up in New York, Berlin, Frankfurt and Brussels. He did Russian Studies in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) and studied political science, philosophy and economics at Oxford University.

After studying direction with Richard Attenborough on his film Love And War, he joined the directing class at the Academy of Film and Television in Munich.

The briefcase he's carrying, arriving for the interview, reinforces the impression of a university lecturer and indeed The Lives Of Others addresses important issues in the guise of a political thriller. Set in 1984 Berlin, it looks at life under the Communist regime in East Berlin where the Stasi state security services run things with Big Brother-like efficiency, using surveillance as suppression. The story focuses on an officer who begins to have doubts about his work while spying on a playwright and his girlfriend.

Von Donnersmarck's dedication to researching his subject, followed by filming on real locations where possible, meant that The Lives Of Others took five years to bring to the screen.

"I thought I'd be able to do it faster, but if I'd really looked at the biographies of film-makers I admire, I would have probably seen it would take that long. It took Stanley Kubrick that long for every single film that he made.

"I could knock off one-and-a-half years if I didn't write the script myself, but I see myself as a writer as much as a director. I can't say how often on the set, when there was all this pressure, I thought 'I'm glad I wrote this' or I'd be asking myself 'Who am I to tell all these people what to do?'.

"Sometimes I couldn't even justify what I wanted - it was just it didn't feel right for me, let's do it this way. That's not a very pleasant situation to be in, but if you feel this has come out of your own soul as the writer, you can trust that you don't have to rationalise things. You can just do them and they're going to be right."

It could've been so different after one of his short films won a prize that included the chance to do a project for Universal Studios in Hollywood. "They sent me over to the home entertainment department, which is a euphemism for direct-to-video. I was shown the slate of projects in development, which were things like Beethoven the St Bernard dog part six, or Tremors the rocket worm. Things like that.

"I thought maybe I'd rather do a German film. So I went back and thought to myself 'what's the furthest away I can think of' and The Lives Of Others was that idea."

The film may sound dry and intellectual but grips from start to finish, causing more than one critic to say that the picture couldn't be bettered. Von Donnersmarck, crusading to reach a mass audience, says: "I'd say to people, forget all the historical background and talk of Beethoven, Brecht and Lenin. What it's about really is how it feels when someone wants you to believe something you don't want to believe, how it feels when someone doesn't respect your privacy. You'll recognise situations in this film.

"Every child who's been to school knows what it's like to be subjected to that authority, almost to the absolute power of people of often limited intelligence. Their private world is not respected, they're treated as part of a group. Those things will seem familiar to people."

His own experiences of growing up in a divided Germany, with family on both sides of Checkpoint Charlie, are reflected in his screenplay through glimpses of the atmosphere in those days

"Seeing adults in fear, that was a pretty exhilerating thing, and something any child will remember," he says.

"If you've seen your parents, who spend most of their time and energy making you think they're in control of everything, and their relatives are afraid, then children will feel that immediately. That's probably my most significant personal memory."

* The Lives Of Others (15) shows at York City Screen from Friday and Newcastle Tyneside Cinema at Old Town Hall, Gateshead, from April 27.