The film about the Stasi spying on East German lovers was seen as too dark, with one funder even wanting it remade as a comedy. But it went on to win an Oscar

In winter 1997, during my first year at film school in Munich, I was lying on the floor listening to music. I started thinking about how Lenin once told his best friend that he couldn’t listen to his favourite piano sonata as often as he would like, because it made him soft, and might stop him from wanting to hurt the people he needed to hurt. Suddenly, an image came to my mind: a man with headphones, in a bleak and depressing attic, secretly listening to his enemies, but thereby involuntarily hearing the kind of music he has been avoiding his entire life. I opened my laptop, started typing and within about an hour had written the outline of the movie.