The Reader, Stephen Daldry’s film about collective German guilt, is to
premiere in Germany at the Berlin Film Festival in February. Is he worried
about the response? “I am.” Why? “Because I am English.” Because it’s their
story? “Correct - who am I to do this? All I can offer is a T-shirt saying
1966 . . .” I look blank.
“World Cup final. . . I’m joking.” But for the fact that his jeans and jacket
are plainly expensive and that he is 47, Daldry is like a bright young
history teacher, all groovy haircut, bounce, chuckles and a slightly
challenging manner. Maybe the history teacher wouldn’t smoke quite so many
Marlboro Lights - 30 a day - but he would certainly do the raised eyebrows
and significant pauses, suggesting both a touch of paranoia and a mild
desire to intimidate.
In fairness, Daldry has a lot to be nervous about. The Reader is not exactly
Billy Elliot, the family feelgood story he filmed in 2000 and has been
nursing as a big stage musical ever since, most recently on Broadway, where
it is more than likely to win awards. The Reader, though, is a story about
the effect of the murder of 6m Jews on the German national psyche. Such a
film, with British stars (Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes), a British director
and a British screenwriter (David Hare), based on a novel now taught in
German schools, is all too likely to raise the question: who does he think
he is?
As we spoke, the film, recently released in America in time for awards season,
was getting conflicting signals. There was a savage review in The New York
Times - “this fatuous film” - but there were also its four Golden Globe
nominations - for Winslet, Daldry and Hare, as well as one for best film. It
could go either way, but, for the moment, here he is, fabulously charming
and easily likeable, smoking in a rather bleak suite in the Soho Hotel in
London.
Bernhard Schlink, the novel’s author, sold the film rights of The Reader to
the late Anthony Minghella. But Minghella could not seem to get round to
filming it. “I badgered him to let me have a go. Eventually, he felt a sense
of obligation to Schlink to get the movie made, and he allowed me and David
Hare to do it. It’s a fantastic fable, and I thought Schlink navigated his
way through the material brilliantly.”
The book, first published in 1995, sprang out of its purely German context and
into the ranks of world bestsellers when the mighty Oprah Winfrey endorsed
it on her TV show. It is mysteriously described everywhere as
“semi-autobiographical”, but Schlink will not say how “semi” it is. It
starts in Heidelberg (transposed to somewhere called Neustadt - new town -
in the film), where 15-year-old Michael Berg falls ill on his way home from
school and is rescued by a woman in her thirties, Hanna Schmitz, with whom
he then has a passionate affair. Their foreplay, required by Hanna, involves
Michael reading her vast quantities of great literature. Some years later,
he is a law student sitting in on the trials of former SS guards. Hanna
turns out to be one of the defendants. Worse, she seems incapable of
understanding or acknowledging the enormity of what she has done.
“The question I leave open is the degree of consciousness she achieves. To be
frank, David Hare and I were always quite clear that we did not want the
character to gain moral consciousness, to gain redemption.”
Nevertheless, because of Berg’s continued involvement with Hanna, the film
does raise awkward questions about how far we are meant to sympathise with a
woman implicated in the murder of 300 people by letting them burn to death
in a church and in the dispatch of countless others to the gas chambers. It
is an awkwardness Daldry regards as the heart of the matter.
“I was interested in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial in 1963, the first trial of
Germans by Germans. What was reported in the German press at the time was
that the people on trial were obviously monsters, sadists, mad people,
criminally insane. They must be because only the criminally insane could
have been involved in this. There was a real ghoulish interest in making
these people criminal, bordering on insanity.
“But not everybody was a monster. They were your mother, your father, the
baker, the priest or the teacher. It’s a debatable issue, but it seems to me
that if you portray the people as not human beings, then you are letting the
country off the hook. It’s a little bit like the use of torture within
American jails in Iraq. If you just think it’s perpetrated by bad apples,
then you lose the idea of systemic failure, the culture of dehumanisation.”
But there’s a further trap here. In the best scene of the film, the
middle-aged Berg - played by Fiennes - visits a Holocaust survivor in New
York and lays all his anguish before her. She, played with icy grandeur by
Lena Olin, will have none of it. Seek your therapy in art and literature,
she says, not in the camps; nothing comes out of the camps.
“We always knew that scene would be the last pivotal scene of the movie. We
wanted absolute moral clarity from her, and I was particularly interested in
trying to depict a survivor who had survived, who had flourished and not
remained in victimhood. And there’s that German sitting on the sofa in a
quagmire of his own moral compromises. I think it’s a fantastic scene, I
think it’s some of David’s best writing.” But - too late, after we have
parted - I realise it is a scene that questions the legitimacy of the entire
movie. Out of the camps comes nothing, silence.
I ask him if Schlink, one of the very few Germans to have actually seen it,
liked the film. There’s a long pause.
“I’ve only had very general conversation since he saw the movie. He’s been
incredibly sweet and very supportive, and he was very happy that we hadn’t
sentimentalised the situation or the characters. That was his biggest fear.”
And why, I ask, do all the characters speak English with a faint German
accent. He looks, for a moment, hunted.
“What would you prefer? . . . The honest answer is, I cast David Kross [young
Berg], who didn’t have great English, and he spoke with an accent. So
everybody had to match David. It was easier for the English actors to match
him, because the Germans had all learnt English in different ways.”
Daldry, through his work at the Royal Court, the National and the Gate
theatres, and through films such as Billy Elliot and The Hours, is an
institution, a grandee. But he’s a grandee with a divided personality. He
is, famously, both gay and married with children, and he is, equally
famously, an internationally lauded director of both film and theatre.
Currently, presumably because he has just finished a film, he seems to be
pining for the theatre. “The advantage of the theatre is that it’s more
collegiate. The people you start the process with are the people you finish
it with. In film, the people you start with aren’t the people you finish
with.”
He talks at length and with some anguish of the alienated and lonely but
inevitable movie process of getting some minor but important detail right -
young Berg picking up a pen, a woman rolling her eyes - while 300 people on
the set have no idea what you’re doing, Kate Winslet is waiting and
everybody is growing impatient. “In the theatre everybody is aware of the
importance of these things, and the great thing about the theatre is it
doesn’t matter, you have always got tomorrow night. In film, you get just
one chance.”
He also suffers from the common agony of film directors, of being unable to
watch his own work. “By chance I caught about four seconds - well, maybe
four minutes - of Billy Elliot the movie on television in America, and I
thought, this is a ridiculous film. What are they doing? Why are they taking
so long?”
He watched Howard Hawks and Ingmar Bergman movies while making The Reader. But
for light entertainment he has a fondness for end-of-the-world movies -
Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow. So does he like the idea of having
$300m or so to blow on a blockbuster?
“I wonder what it would be like . . . But, anyway, it’s ridiculous, I’d never
do it.” I suggest he might do an end-of-the-world film about the
crisis/recession. He likes the idea, but sees it as a play. “A really good
David Hare play, a boardroom play about those banks and how they cope with
this awareness of their own greed and complicity. It feels interesting. I
haven’t asked him yet. Maybe I will do tonight.”
In fact, Hare spent his time while in Berlin writing his next play - called
Berlin - which he will read, directed by Daldry, at the National in
February. Otherwise, he says, for the first time in his life, Daldry has
nothing to do. It’s deliberate.
“It’s a conscious choice. The musical [Billy Elliot] was a lot of work. I’ve
had four years of continuous work, and I do think a rest would be useful. I
don’t know what I’ll do. I’ve never been unemployed. I do need to spend more
time with the kids, and I do need to give up smoking, I’ve smoked since I
was 15.”
He has two children - one biological and one the child “of a friend”. The
older, biological one is five and thinks everybody has the same job as her
daddy: making up stories. He reads her The Miraculous Journey of Edward
Tulane by Kate DiCamillo and seems to be vaguely considering the possibility
of filming it.
“It’s about a porcelain bunny, which, I imagine, would make it unfilmable.
It’s about what happens to this toy on a journey through the American
Depression, which is interesting. Everybody invests their hopes and dreams
in this f***ing bunny.”
Hmmm, bunnies. Time to bring him back to the February reception of The Reader
in Germany. “I’ve entered the festival thinking I’ll throw the dice and see
what happens. I might be thrown out of town.”
What does he think they would object to? “The changes I made to the book, I
think they might object to . . . Well, I don’t know, I honestly don’t know.
It will be .. . for me, it will be the most interesting part of the journey.”
That’s the crunch, as far as he’s concerned? “Yeah.” Long pause. “That’s the
crunch.”
The Reader is released on January 2 www.bryanappleyard.com
