Wurzelkinder, homemade games and screenplays

As a child I much preferred making games myself to buying ready-made ones, board games above all. I still have one of them, my own version of Monopoly. I was about eleven.

As a teenager I started programming, in Profan and Basic. My first real game was called “Mord im Dorf” (Murder in the Village), a detective game where you had to work out who did it. It fitted on a 3.5-inch floppy disk.

I don't have the disk any more, sadly, and it still annoys me today.

In my family there's a book from 1906: “Etwas von den Wurzelkindern” (Something about the Root Children), written and painted by Sibylle. She was a nun and a painter and had no children of her own. For me she's my great-great-aunt.

I was very interested in cinema even as a teenager. I made lots of short films with friends, with my own camera or a borrowed one, and joined in on pretty much everything to do with film.

Later I worked for five years in Paris, at one of the biggest companies that finance and produce feature films. I mainly looked after screenplay analysis, which means asking how strong a screenplay is and how good the package around it is. I read and assessed a great many screenplays in that time.

You learn quite precisely what a story needs to hold together. That's as true for a feature film as for a children's book, and quite a lot of it is in the stories of Sagalino.