What will you be doing when you are 95 years of age? It is unlikely that you will be diving in the waters of the Indian Ocean, filming the creatures which populate its depths. But that is what Leni Riefenstahl, just past her 95th birthday, is doing. The magazine section of the stately Hamburg journal Die Zeit carries a photograph of her, slim, smiling, in a light beach and swim outfit, her hair understandably grey, but abundant.
She is known, perhaps above all, as the producer of a hugely praised (in Germany) film of the National Socialist Party Day in Nuremberg in 1934 - Triumph of the Will. And then in 1936 her film of the Berlin Olympics. Indeed, outside Germany, among people who were against the whole Hitler philosophy, the dramatic choreographing, if that's the word, of this vast human mass could not fail to impress.
She says that while she always admired Hitler's ability to abolish unemployment, she was not a joiner. She was offered the top position in German films, but always wanted to be her own boss. Tough, and yet motivated according to her interviewer Jorn Rohwer, by a love of nature, of all living things. When she was young she loved butterflies, caterpillars, meadows and woods. In early life she was a dancer, but suffered an injury which put her out of that as a career. So she became a filmmaker.
Today as she looks at life, she says that of all religions the Buddhist is nearest to her thinking - because it loves all creatures. The interviewer asks: How do you experience religion? Her answer: through the miracle of life and nature. So she looks at television, for example, only in the light of trees, insects or the world under the sea . . . I am a piece of nature; I see myself in a lizard, a fly, in every animal under the sky. And in everything I see God.
A romantic, you might say. She spent three years in prison after the war and accusations were made against her for having taken gypsies out of concentration camps for filming, and later knowing them to have been killed. On the contrary, she says, they survived and thanked her. She was asked about Marlene Dietrich. Yes, she knew her, but she, Marlene, was so jealous that she threatened to commit suicide when Josef Sternberg, the great filmmaker, asked Leni to be his partner at the Press Ball.
And now? If she survives a coming operation, she will make a film which will have the same expertise as Triumph of the Will and others - but will be about the life of the underwater world.