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Ulli Lommel (born 21 December 1944) is a German actor and director, noted for his many collaborations with Rainer Werner Fassbinder and his association with the New German Cinema movement. Lommel is also well known for the time which he spent at The Factory and as a creative associate of Andy Warhol, with whom he made several films and works of art. Since 1977 he has lived and worked in the USA, where he has written, directed and starred in over 50 movies.
Born in Zielenzig in 1944, a few weeks before the arrival of the Red Army, Lommel's family fled the city, wrapping the infant Ulli in a roll of carpet. His father, Ludwig Manfred Lommel, was a popular radio personality. His mother was the actress Karla van Cleef.
Lommel started his cinematic career as an actor in the early 1960s. One of his first film roles was in Russ Meyer's Fanny Hill, in which he starred alongside Italian actress Letícia Román. This began a long series of roles in which Lommel would play a romantic, or gentlemanly lead.
In 1969, he appeared in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's directorial debut Love Is Colder Than Death. The movie, an existentialist, film noir, received a shocked and confused response at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1969, but the cast as an ensemble would go on to win an award at the German Film Awards in 1970.
Fassbinder and Lommel worked together more than 20 times over the course of a decade after they first began their creative partnership, with several of their collaborations becoming multi-award winning movies.
In 1971, Fassbinder's surrealist westernWhity, which Lommel produced and starred in the leading role, won several German Film Awards (the German Oscars). Shot in Almeria, Spain, in the summer of 1970, the shoot was so tumultuous and grueling that it became the source of inspiration for the subsequent Fassbinder film, Beware of a Holy Whore. Beware of a Holy Whore was a postmodern analysis of Fassbinder's career. in which he used fourth wall methods to poke fun at the trials and tribulations of filmmaking.
Lommel's second film as directorThe Tenderness of Wolves, which was produced by Fassbinder, was a drama about the murders of Fritz Haarmann. Haarmann was also the inspiration behind Fritz Lang's M. This was the feature which brought him to the attention of Andy Warhol, after the film was screened at a Chicago Film Festival. A very enthusiastic review was written by the renowned critic Vincent Canby in the New York Times which stated: "It is beautifully and enthusiastically performed and it doesn't contain a single superfluous or redundant camera movement. Like Mr. Fassbinder's own early films, "Tenderness of the Wolves" is cryptic, tough-talking and swaggering in the manner of someone who means to shock his elders. Like the early Warhol work, "Tenderness of the Wolves" seems to be sending up everyone and everything, but, unlike the Warhol movies, it takes filmmaking—the possibilities of the discipline—with complete seriousness."
Lommel moved to the United States in 1977 and started working with Andy Warhol. He became fascinated with Warhol's artistic style. Lommel owns an array of Warhol's polaroid photographs and pop art pieces. Their friendship led to Warhol becoming involved with several of Lommel's films. He produced Cocaine Cowboys, a rock and roll western which starred Jack Palance. Warhol appeared in Lommel's Blank Generation (1980), a film which focused on the punk rock scene in New York City. It starred the punk icon Richard Hell and his band Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Several scenes were filmed in CBGB and offer an insight into the frenetic madness of the scene at the time.
Since the mid-1980s, he has directed almost 30 films, from drama to action and horror to science fiction.
For a period of four years, Lommel made a series of direct-to-video movies based on the lives of serial killers, most of which were released through Lionsgate.
In 2002 Ulli Lommel participated in the documentary Fassbinder in Hollywood, which is available as part of the Arrow Films and Video Fassbinder Collection (Vol 2). The documentary contains an interview with Wim Wenders.
In the summer of 2013 Lommel went for nine months to Brazil to work on several projects. He completed his bio-epic documentary Mondo Americana and wrote a book. Ulli Lommel: CAMPO BAHIA and also made a film about Campo Bahia, the official camp for the German National Soccer Team in Brazil.
In 2016 Hollywood Action House began developing "Boogeyman Chronicles", a series of eight 45-min. episodes. The first episode is currently in post-production and the series will start airing on Halloween 2018 world-wide. It is inspired by Ulli Lommel's 1980 cult hit "The Boogeyman". The new story line was developed after test audiences in the U.S. and Europe saw various cuts of a series of plot-possibilities and characters entitled "Boogeyman Reincarnation". The writing team headed by Colin McCracken is currently working on episodes 2 - 8 with the plan to create a total of up to 64 episodes. Lommel has indicated that, even though he directed episode 1, most of the remaining episodes will be directed by a series of young directors from the U.S, Europe and Asia. Starring in episode 1 are Skylar Radzion, Laurence R. Harvey, Andreea Boyer and Tristan Risk. It was produced by Frank Dragun, Ulli Lommel and David Bond. It is set to develop the story of his famous cult-hit The Boogeyman (1980).
Lommel was celebrated as part of the Yes! Yes! Yes! Warholmania event at the 2015 Munich Film Festival. Several screenings of his works with Warhol took place alongside a series of special interviews.
Lommel is a founding member of the international Charity My Good Garden, as well as being on the board of My Good Planet, a global positive news network.
