Netflix’s Sasha Buhler on supporting ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’: “It doesn’t matter what language things are in”

Edward Berger’s German-language All Quiet On The Western Front has been a phenomenon for Netflix since being launched last autumn. It ranks number four on the list of the most popular non-English language films on the platform and has been in the streamer’s own top 10 in over 91 countries including Germany, UK, US, Australia, France, Mexico, and South Korea.

Thanks to the success, Sasha Buhler, director, international original film, at Netflix. has a lot of travelling to do in the next few days. She is off to London for the Bafta Film Awards this weekend where the film has 14 nominations. In a few weeks, she will be in Los Angeles for the Oscars, where it is in the running for nine awards.

The project that first crossed her desk in late 2019 looked very different to the one up for all of those awards.

“The film was brought to me as an English language film with a South African director,” Buhler recalls, while in town for the Berlinale,

She thought the project was interesting but didn’t, at that stage, see “a compelling reason to make another World War One film.”

Flash forward three months to the pre-pandemic Berlinale of 2020 where Rocket Science was selling the film in the EFM. German producer Malte Grunert and Berger were now attached. Buhler agreed to meet them.

“Edward pitched his vision for it and I was immediately sold on it, hook line and sinker. It was something new. This book [by Erich Maria Rermarque) published 95 years ago had never been told from a German perspective,” Buhler explains.

Berger, she realised, was proposing to tell “the loser’s side” of the story and to directly confront German shame and guilt over the war – and in the German language too. “I thought that was so exciting and so important.” Buhler remembers. “We find that at Netflix it doesn’t matter what language things are in…it does matter that it is authentic

“When Edward pitched it, I was completely sold. All I wanted to do was support him in his vision of how he wanted to make it. It was fully baked in his head.

Half-German, half-American herself, the Netflix exec says she is “surprised and delighted” that audiences internationally have “accepted this German-language film, that people are willing to watch with subtitles, with dubs.”

She says German audiences have embraced the film too. “War is a difficult topic for Germans because of the shame and the guilt. They have a hard time digesting it [but] All Quiet became a must-see film.”

It is important to Buhler to champion diversity in the work she supports. She acknowledges All Quiet has few women on screen.

“[But] It’s really exciting to have women in decision-making positions at Netflix and that I could go ahead and greenlight All Quiet.”

While editing was underway on All Quiet, Buhler was busy with her next project, Faraway, “an escapist, life-affirming rom-com” which was shot on an idyllic island in Croatia.

She can’t put a number on how many German films she is backing in 2023. “We have a budget and we can make two films out of it and we can make 10 films out of it,” she says. “It depends on what we think will be impactful.”

In 2022, her other films at Netflix were Peter Thorwarth’s Blood & Gold, another war movie but in a less earnest groove than All Quiet, and Boris Kunz’s high-concept sci-fi thriller, Paradise.

All these films are “partner produced.” Buhler describes herself as “a studio exec” who works with producers. “And they produce…we fully finance all of our productions and we support the production in any way we can.”