He graduated in political science at the Sorbonne, while at the same time studying film at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques, where he was friends with Bertrand Tavernier and met Louis Malle.

Malle gave him his first job as his assistant director on Zazie in the Metro (1960), which continued with the films A Very Private Affair (1962), The Fire Within (1963), and Viva Maria!

Taking place at a semi-military Austrian boarding school, Törless witnesses the bullying of a fellow student but does nothing to prevent it despite his superior and mature intellect.

The film stars Jones's then girlfriend Anita Pallenberg as a young waitress who accidentally kills her boyfriend and hides the body with the help of two male friends.

[3] He then made another film that spoke to the counter-culture generation, Man on Horseback (Michael Kohlhaas – Der Rebell, 1969), set in medieval Germany.

The film depicts seven peasants in 19th-century Germany who rob the local tax collection cart but are so conditioned by their poverty that they cannot handle their newfound wealth.

Von Trotta plays Elizabeth Junker, a recently divorced woman who must struggle to live her life independently as her husband has everything come easily to him, including the villa and son they shared together as a married couple.

The film stars Angela Winkler as Blum, who after falling in love and spending the night with a young army deserter becomes the victim of a corrupt police investigation and predatory tabloid newspaper, which cast her as both a terrorist and a prostitute.

The newspaper is based upon the real right-wing German tabloid Bild-Zeitung, whose publisher Axel Springer was the inspiration for the character Werner Tötges.

In Schlöndorff's view, West Germany had fallen into political hysteria over the activities of a terrorist group, the Red Army Faction.

[3] After directing his second opera, We Come to the River, in 1976, Schlöndorff followed The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum with the equally political Coup de Grâce (1976).

He hurls himself down a flight of stairs so as to give the adults around him a rational explanation for his handicap, and later discovers that he has the ability to tactically shatter glass with the power of his high-pitched scream, which he produces whenever anyone attempts to take his tin drum away from him.

The film co-stars Angela Winkler as Oscar's mother, and Mario Adorf and Daniel Olbrychski as the German and Kashubian (Pole) who may both be his biological fathers.

The film was shot in France and financed by Gaumont, and stars Jeremy Irons, Ornella Muti, Alain Delon and Fanny Ardant.

Schlöndorff then went to the United States to make a TV adaptation of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, starring Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman and John Malkovich as Biff.

Handmaids are fertile women who are enslaved by the state and put in the households of wealthy men – who have "ceremonial" sex with them in the hope of conceiving a child.

To save herself from execution, Kate – renamed "Offred", since she now is attached to Fred's household – allows the Commander's driver (Aidan Quinn) to impregnate her and falls in love with him.

[4] During that time, he helped Jiang Wen finish editing his film In the Heat of the Sun (1994) in Germany, with the studio's full financial support.

Based on a novel by Michel Tournier and starring John Malkovich as the titular Abel Tiffauges, the film revisited many of the themes and time period of The Tin Drum.

In a noir plot, the film stars Woody Harrelson as a falsely accused journalist who was sent to jail after uncovering corruption in the local government.

After getting out of jail and unable to find work, he encounters Rhea Malroux (Elisabeth Shue), a femme fatale who propositions him to help her extort money from her millionaire husband.

Rita abandons the revolution and lives in East Germany under protection of the secret service, but after German reunification she faces the risk of discovery and consequences for her past crimes.

Ulrich Matthes plays Father Henri Kremer, a Catholic priest who is interned at Dachau concentration camp during the Second World War.

There he meets a young SS soldier who informs him that his mission there is to convince the local bishop to cooperate with the Nazi Party, in which case he will not be sent back to Dachau.