Superstar Tom Cruise Stars in Valkyrie, And Considers That Slide Down the Slippery Slope to Fascism

Feature Story by Brad Balfour
[Photos by Loud & Clear]

Though he totally missed the Oscar loop, you have to give some credit to media magnet Tom Cruise for releasing his World War II drama, Valkyrie at the end of 2008 despite the surge of Nazi-inspired holiday fare. Anytime a star of his stature dons a Nazi uniform and parades around Berlin in jackboots while enjoying facetime with a cinematic Adolf Hitler, it invites ridicule. Yet by playing the stone-faced Colonel Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg--who made the final coup attempt against The Fuhrer--Cruise provided audiences with a bete noir to his Jerry Maguire-esque stereotype.

Certainly this wasn't a follow-up to his comedic cameo in Tropic Thunder where he does an astounding parody of the ultimate Hollywood exec--the kind that Cruise, as an executive among the team running United Artists, clearly knows intimately.

For a long time, the 46 year-old actor had been Mr. Moneybags, the most bankable star who could sell a movie even if it had a thin premise. But as he has gotten older, and taken on the responsibilities of a producer, maintaining that star power and financial dominance isn't as much of a challenge to him or that easy anymore.

So in light of seeing the media character, or even parody that Cruise has become, he turned to making Valkyrie, a film that's not a standard heroic starrer. Cruise turns to this devastating period and to a character who ambiguously seems valiant in his goals and means, except that he was an arch-conservative whose goals sometimes intersected with Hitler's. Maybe in regaling us with the lavish, subtle eroticism of boots and black leather, Cruise does his Nazi with a cinematic flair, but the complex implications of this character and era require serious contemplation not just flair--something Cruise and director Bryan Singer addressed in this interview drawn from a recent press conference.

Q: Valkyrie has come out at a time when other Nazi-era films have been released -- but this film has a different angle from the others and it's an important too to educate the public about the Germany of that time.

TC: It's something that Bryan and I have spoken about -- that it's important to know that not everybody felt that way and fell into the Nazi ideology. To me, that was surprising. To take this story -- and it's such a massive, comprehensive story; we could've made this a five hour, 10 hour, miniseries -- it could've been very different kind of movie. [But] Bryan was always specific: this is a suspense thriller about killing Hitler. It's not a bio-pic. That [the story is true] was a bonus, really, for the film.

BS: It's not a "Holocaust" movie. There are movies that happen to take place [about] this subject matter that are coming out around this time, but it's a coincidence. This is far from a Holocaust movie. It's a conspiracy thriller about assassinating Hitler. As Tom was just saying, the bonus is that it happens to be true, it happens to be gripping. And even things that you might think are film conventions -- some of the twists and turns -- actually really did happen.

TC: We spent eight months working [together], and Bryan spent more time before that. Bryan wanted me to come on board, and I started working with him, writers Chris [McQuarrie] and Nathan [Alexander]. Every time we started talking about the Holocaust and the different characters, and trying to put as much into that story as possible, Bryan always went back to, "This is a piece of entertainment. This is a suspense thriller about killing Hitler."

The more you know about the history of it, [you find] there are so many moments we were able to put in there. Von Stauffenberg despised the Nazis, [yet] as a parent [he had to] look at his daughter saluting him. On that day, July 20th, 1944, his son was indoctrinated into the Hitler Youth. These are the moments Bryan wanted to seed in there, but [he] never var[ied] from the picture that he wanted to make. We wanted to [make] this movie [accessible] to a broader audience.

Q: What was it about Claus von Stauffenberg that made this role so irresistible to you?

TC: When I first read the script, I thought how incredibly suspenseful it was. Right from the beginning, I thought it was a great story, this is a suspense thriller. I went, "Whoa. It's cool."

Stauffenberg went to Hitler the day after D-Day; you find out it really happened. It is definitely an important story. I'd never heard [of] it before. I grew up playing with the neighborhood kids in the yard, wanting to kill Nazis, wanting to kill Hitler. As a child, I [wondered], "Why didn't someone just shoot him?"

And, [after] sitting down with Bryan and finding out it was a true story, and I wanted to work with him, off we went. Bryan is someone I've always wanted to work with. [I was first introduced to Bryan] when I saw his film The Usual Suspects but we actually met at the premiere of the first Mission Impossible. And I said, "Man, I want to work with you."

He was totally accurate to the behavior and what was happening during that time period. I really respect Bryan's staging, his composition, and his storytelling. When I look at his movies, it's very cinematic, classic storytelling. So you don't see the hand necessarily until you see that it's missing. They build to that so you see it in the bed.

I've always felt that you want to get it right. And within the limited amount of time, and economics, you want to do the best that you can for the audience, for the subject matter, whatever it is. The most important thing is the film, because I want to entertain an audience, and when I'm making a film, that's so important.

Q: You two seem to have a partnership as much as an actor-director relationship. What's the difference in working together as producers and then working together as an actor and director?

TC: I have great respect for him as a filmmaker, as a storyteller. Out of a scale of one to 10, I think this film is a 20. It was a challenge to make.

BS: We spent a lot of time, we had Tom's interest in the project as well as position at the studios. We has the freedom to spend a lot of time working together, working with Chris and Nathan, and talking about the project.

We have a lot of fun talking. We had meetings at Tom's house 12 hours long. We camped out in the desert when we were shooting the desert sequence, and everyone's families were there. When we moved to Germany, we learned more information. We had some good experiences.

And then once we get on the set, he becomes an actor. And I become a director and for my experience, there was never any difference. I knew that no matter how many takes I asked him to do, it would never be as many as Stanley Kubrick did [laughs]. And we tried, we experimented, and it was phenomenal, because anything you'd [saying to Cruise] ask -- anything, you'd be like, "Let's do it." There was never a lack of wanting to try and never a lack of trust.

And then afterwards, [there was] the full support of an actor -- it's a rare opportunity with Tom. As a director, you always feel like nobody cares about the movie as much as you do. What you probably see here is a relationship with someone who cares about this movie as much as I do.

TC: I want to be directed. I enjoy that. I do like to be directed. I don't stand outside myself and direct myself. And I have a lot of fun doing it.

BS: He doesn't come to the monitor and look at it and say, "Oh, there's none of that," which some actors do.

TC: As an actor, getting direction from Bryan, he gave great notes on behavior and we were just tracking. I like that in a movie where as an actor I'm tracking with the director.

BS: It's been a really great journey, but one that comes from caring about the project.

TC: There's certain things that Bryan knew from a story sense how you want to build to those moments, because there [are] little pieces that build to a moment. There are moments where there's tension, you've got to take the audience along and build that tension. Every scene has to move the story along, but every scene you're revealing more about the characters. There [are] rhythms and structure to a movie that I love as an audience.

When I read a script, when I'm seeing a movie, I see it like an audience and not necessarily as a filmmaker, particularly when I get caught up in the picture.

Q: Does Tom Cruise, the actor, compete with Tom Cruise, the businessman?

TC: I've produced a lot of films. Mission Impossible was the first film that I produced and then I produced all the Mission films, and The Last Samurai. So there's always the balance of art and commerce, and the challenges of that.

And it's not just having talent in making a film, it's also important to know to surround yourself with great people. I've got very good people that I work with. I've always tried to surround myself with people that I respect, that I enjoy working with, and that's what we have. I'm very happy to have these guys on board with MGM. At the studio it's actually a very exciting time, with Mary Parent, who's come on at MGM.

But I am an actor first and foremost. That is my love.

Q: You both have had so much control over the project. Why wasn't it just put into a December release originally; at one time it was scheduled for October and then, February 2009?

BS: Originally, the schedule of completion had to do with that. It was going to come out a lot earlier, but then the Tunisia sequence took time. I ended up scouting Jordan for a location, and then Spain, but those two locations didn't work out, both aesthetically and economically.

We figured we would just see what movie we had when we got home. [We'd] cut it all together, and then go back and go to California where the location we found looks far more like Tunisia. Cougar Buttes, that's where we shot. We would have the equipment and resources, and we would sort of drop and pick up.

And then that moved our release day. It was a crowded Christmas, but we didn't know where we were at finishing the movie. Is that pretty much as you remember it?

TC: You know, we were making a film not for a release date, to be honest with you.

BS: Yeah, exactly. Thank you.

TC: February was never a firm date. We also never wanted to say, "Hey, we want to put it in awards season." That's not even why we moved to Christmas. Christmas is a great time for audiences. It's the biggest time of the year for people to go [to movies]. You want to put your film where it can [be] available to as broad an audience as possible.

Q: So what were the challenges and rewards playing this character?

TC: The rewards are that I thought it was a very exciting film. It's a story I'd never heard of before. And I wanted to work with Bryan Singer [as I said]. I loved Chris's script [and] to be able to work with these actors. That's the reward every day, going in and having that challenge... and, as I said, to entertain an audience. I thought it'd be a very compelling story and a fascinating film. That's what I like. That's what I'm looking for in a film.

When I'm making movies, it's about "us," it's not about "me." It's about the journey that we all take together. We got to shoot in locations where these people [lived and where] they died, which was very powerful to be there and to see that world.

I grew up wanting to travel the world and I wanted an adventurous life. Sometimes [there was] a little more adventure than I had ever bargained for [laughter]. But this was something I didn't want to pass on.

BS: Chris and I used to make war films in my backyard.

TC: And I saw the World of War. The way that this film was directed, [it's] not like anything that I've seen -- these films that I greatly admire: Schindler's List and Paths of Glory. But this is very different.

Q: From the military formations to the assassinations,the [orchestration] was pretty amazing and quite ominous. What was it like for you, Bryan, in the directing and you, Tom, in performing this... that it was so precise?

BS: Well, [we] stud[ied] a lot of war photography. There was a huge amount. Hitler filmed everything, so we had the benefit of a lot of both color and black & white motion picture film of that era. Also, we were in Germany so we shot with Arriflex cameras and the Zeiss lenses. And also, with color, I wanted to give a sense of vibrance so it would look like it did to people who lived back then, as opposed to trying to approximate black & white or muddy the film or desaturate it.

The pageantry and the military aspects of it we have, thanks to all that recorded film material. And then we worked with the military advisors who knew the history, and who could help us with the movements and the salutes. So we could have authenticity regarding the difference between the way a colonel would salute a major, or a field marshal, or the Fuhrer.

TC: And specifically at that time period. There is actual dialogue in the film that I discovered were from letters [and] journals that Chris and Nathan had studied.

BS: Yeah, which changed after the assassination attempt. Certain things were more mandatory. And that's what made the scene where he throws up his hand. If you were missing your hand, you wouldn't put it up and give the Heil Hitler salute. And that's why it's interesting that he does. He shows his stump.

TC: This is a film that, right in the beginning, needed that kind of dynamic orchestration, and you had to be very specific in editing these pieces together. That was all very thought out. From top to bottom of the production, we really had a lot of help and support from the Germans -- their production, the stuff that they gave us. When you talk about colors, the reds, the whole point is to try to give that audience that visceral feeling of being on the edge of their seat, even down to the wardrobe.

[In] wardrobe with Joanna Johnston, a lot of time and attention went into this -- the kind of fabrics, and also studying the fact that certain people would make their own uniforms.

And so [too] with Tom Sigel [cinematographer]: the kind of film that he used, the lighting that he used. The level of detail in the film -- even down to Hitler's signature, [which] was, to the best of our knowledge, exactly the signature that he signed at that time period. Same with Stauffenberg. This is the kind of stuff that we film geeked and history geeked out on.

BS: People were taken blindfolded to the homes of people who collected Hitler's furniture so we could see it and know the furniture at the Berghof, his summer house. There are people who collect this stuff secretly in Germany.

Q: Are they neo-Nazis?

BS: I don't know, they just like the furniture; [they're collectors].

TC: There's certain things you go, "Look, I don't care. I don't wanna know. [laughs]." But we're very happy to have the desk in his office...

BS: I had lunch with Hitler's bodyguard, [Cruise] wouldn't go.

TC: It was good for the director to have it. He needed that. I didn't need it. I'll read about it.

Q: I understand the eye patch initially gave you unexpected balance problems.

TC: Yeah, it did. I was surprised -- for a few hours and a few days, when we started working on it, especially when it was dark, I lost depth perception and balance.

From visual storytelling, I think it was a challenge for Bryan. He also understood it's a different story depending on where that camera is on my face -- different profiles, shooting with the patch and the hand. It was a challenge always going into a room, or which angle we shot.

Q: What about the creative decision of not going with German accents for everyone, but letting the actors speaking their own natural way?

BS: Well, we didn't want that to be what the movie was about. It should be exciting and the audience should be taken on a ride through the film. The actors speak wonderfully the way they do in their current dialects.

We have an international cast: American, Dutch, German, British actors. To have everyone try and approximate German accents, when in reality they're supposed to be speaking German -- which, I promise you, after the first 20 minutes, you'd be sick of it -- would ultimately sound silly. And it would distract from the drive of the plot. Though they can do it -- that's Tom speaking German at the beginning of the movie. But it would ultimately be not as fun for the audience.

Q: Did your research find anything new about Hitler and his followers?

BS: That meeting between Von Stauffenberg and Hitler actually took place -- it was his first time meeting Hitler and the Big Six. It was the day after D-Day, and the thing that Stauffenberg noticed, and went home and told his wife -- it's not in the film, but we keyed off this testimony -- is that Göring had on makeup. There was distrust [among] them, clearly the Allies were at their door, and Hitler was detached from what was going on. The only one that seemed to have a clue was [Albert] Speer, but he was just the architect along for the ride.

TC: The scene where Stauffenberg goes to Hitler after Berghof, it's challenging. I've grown up with the footage of Hitler at the rallies. I was interested in the focus on Hitler, and to see him particularly during that time period where he wasn't [yet] so obviously, utterly insane.

That sequence has this eerie, terrifying feeling -- all of the detail where Goebbels is looking at Göring, all these little looks.

BS: Hitler walked over and held Stauffenberg's hand, and acknowledged his injuries and his heroism as a way of mocking his own people. He would do that. He was always playing one against the other. It was how Hitler rose in politics-through flattery, promises, and backstabbing. He did it with Stalin and he did it with the German people, and eventually that's how the war ended.

So it was nice to put hints of that kind of detached, laconic Hitler in the Berghof scene that the people didn't get to see, in a scene that genuinely happened, and all the specifics of that leading up to [it].

The reason that we have such detail in the third act of the film is because the Gestapo did a very stunning investigation into this assassination attempt, and trials were held and filmed.

So we have the benefit of all of those facts and information to inform our story, as well as the research we've done, and actually talking to a lot of people who were with Hitler.

TC: I was surprised [at] Stauffenberg upbraiding the General [in the desert]. He did that. He had those conversations with generals exactly in that way.

Q: Which is why he ended up in Africa?

TC: Which is why he ended up in Africa. He had actually court-martialed friends of his for war crimes. His uncle was concerned for him, arranged for him to go to Africa. And he was that outspoken with generals. He was a supply officer [at the rear]. He was saying, "What's happening? How can this happen? Why is this happening? This guy's a liar. This is not the country that we want, that I've wanted."

The amount of desperation and pain for him -- because he loved his country, [because] he wanted a moral country, but one that participated in the world, not annihilating [it], not [creating] the Holocaust, not [committed to] world domination. He was a man that was able to really think for himself within all of that propaganda, and recognized very early on that insanity.

At first he's thinking, "Well, someone's got to stop him. Let's overthrow him." "Someone's got to shoot that bastard," is a quote of his. And it's ironic that those injuries actually put him in the position of high command where he got on the inside, and realized that the only way to stop this is from the inside.

And really recognizing that it wasn't just enough to kill Hitler. You had to have something that's going to put people in a position where they're going to follow you, because you have that oath. That oath is so creepy, to get people to not be able to think for themselves. As an American, to open the film [with it], that struck me.

BS: Because the army was compelled to give an oath. An army of 10 million people in Germany was compelled to give an oath to Hitler himself, personally.

Q: Did you think of Fred Zinneman's film,The Day of the Jackal, in the sense that people knew going in what the end would be?

BS: Not so much; I hadn't seen it in awhile. But movies like that were discussed.

TC: Yeah, definitely. You look at Apollo 13, Titanic -- any film that's made out of a book [where] people know how it's going to end. I had an idea when I read -- of course I heard of the briefcase under the table. When I read it, it was so surprising to me, the story, the details. And I was surprised in reading it that I was that caught up and I was whipping through the pages.

BS: You might [know] if you know history. But I don't think audiences know the full degree of how this particular story ends, and that's an important thing.

Viggo Mortensen and Jason Isaacs Address Good and Wax Philosophical about the Nazis

Feature Interview By Brad Balfour

During a snappy roundtable with a few journalists, actors Viggo Mortensen and Jason Isaacs double-teamed to express their thoughts about their disturbing new film, Good, based on the acclaimed British play by CP Taylor. Set during the Nazi era—like several other movies this season—this feature describes a relatively banal man's acceptance into pre-war Nazi society of the 1930s. As he rises in status, we see how the seductive power of fascism can compromise someone slowly until they are in so deep it's too late to repudiate it.

German literature professor John Halder has written a novel advocating compassionate euthanasia. When the book is unexpectedly read by Hitler and his key advisers, Halder is enlisted to make an argument for managed euthanasia which is ultimately used as a rationale for the Final Solution. The meek professor suddenly has a new career as an honorary S.S. officer.

With Halder’s change in fortune, his seemingly inconsequential life is imbued with an allure and power he hadn't experienced before, leading him to leave his wife for a beautiful, status-hungry grad student (Jodie Whittaker) and ultimately betray his Jewish friend, the charismatic Jewish psychiatrist Maurice (Jason Isaacs), who ends up in a concentration camp.

There's no better actor than Mortensen to express this transformation from an apolitical professor living within his world of words, to someone who enjoys the prestige and power of the Nazis initially, only to be appalled at the consequences of his tacit support of their methods. Ever since he made his mark with A Walk On The Moon, Mortensen has wrestled with some complicated characters in two David Cronenberg films (A History of Violence and Eastern Promises), and Appaloosa, and played the heroic and enduring Aragorn in the The Lord of The Rings trilogy.

As a foil to Mortensen's character, Veteran British actor Isaacs (he's in the Harry Potter series) provided his character Maurice with the trajectory of a man once on top of his world declining precipitously as he is destroyed by the pernicious system around him. And both bonded through Vicente Amorim's sympathetic direction (who popped in at the end of the interview and is pictured here with Viggo and Jason).

Q: This movie has two distinct character arcs that intersect. The challenge, to get those things in sync—as if they're happening simultaneously—is tough; can you explain the dynamic of getting those rhythms right?

VM: It's true. We do cross and take on different roles as Halder builds up this new persona for himself. He was always the one who was like “Let's go have a beer,” then all of a sudden the roles change. They don't exactly swap, but they're different.

JI: The power dynamic shifts enormously. For me that was one of the great and interesting things about this story—that it wasn't about governments or armies or Nazi generals. It was about two ordinary guys who are best friends, and a friendship that I recognize: someone who's much larger than life, someone with a great big hunger—a womanizer, a drinker, just kind of an eater of life—who has this friend with a rather dull marriage who basks in his shadow.

Then these outside circumstances so change their lives that in many ways the power dynamic is reversed. Playing Maurice as he gradually deflates was, I thought, very interesting and a very human journey, to see someone stripped of all their dignity like that.

Q: Conversely, Viggo, you play this character whose ego is built up, and then given responsibilities that he doesn't want to shoulder as a result. But then you do shoulder them and you feel regret. There's this back-and-forth process that you have to get right.

VM: Well, some people have said to me, "This is a very passive role compared to others you've played recently." My answer is: it's active in a different way. He's passive to a point, but then he starts building up this persona and buying into it. He's in a lot of denial. Then he's actively accepting and even pursuing this new new sexual life, being part of some sort of subsection of the elite of the country he lives, and he's liking a lot of it.

Whether he's being completely honest with himself a lot of the time or not, he's accepting it and saying, "Yes, I like it, I’m doing it. And in fact, I think I won't go see Maurice tonight for a beer because I don't want to deal with him looking at me and having to think about it."

JI: You think he believes that argument that you made to me, that if more good decent people like us joined the [Nazi] party we can dissolve the lunatic fringe?

VM: I think he's told himself that. He believes it, but he's forcing himself to believe that. If we were to stop and think everything we're doing wrong, then these personalities we construct—and we all do it to varying degrees—are dependent on who we meet, what the circumstances are, and what the climate is. We present ourselves in slightly different ways [according to the circumstances].

My character has really gone to great lengths to create this [persona] who no longer stutters, who looks people in the eye, who is a person of importance now. He knows he doesn't belong there, what the fuck is he doing there? Excuse my language...

He knows if he were to go and have a drink with Maurice now—like the scene when they sit on the bench and are talking—it [would be] difficult.

JI: It's like when I was saw Bono and [Bob] Geldof talking about working with [George] Bush in Africa. They said, “You know, he is in power and he does have the money and I can make him do good.”

VM: I can see the argument. I think that's the strength of the movie. You can look at this person and see he's intelligent and thoughtful. When [the Nazi professor says to Halder] "We don't teach Proust," he’s sarcastic about it.

For the record, [my character is] saying "I don't like it." But he goes along with it. He wants to keep his job, so he goes along with it: "Yeah, fine." I think people identify and understand the idea of if you're in the system, you can make changes to it. But if you're out of it, it's easy to sit on the sidelines.

Each person knows themselves. How far have I gone? Have I arrived at the point where I know I'm really doing the wrong thing? You really know that yourself, if you force yourself or are forced to examine it. To some degree, that's what this story is about.

JI: For me, it wasn't about whether he was doing the wrong thing. It was, “How would you do the right thing?” In the last eight years, we've been saying we don't agree with torture. But have we done anything about it? Are you ultimately powerless, [so] you get on with your life and the people who love you, and your work? I personally found it very hard to point the finger [at anyone in this movie].

VM: The fact that there are no easy answers doesn't mean you don't do something, even if it's going to fail.

JI: That's the message you get at the end of the story. There was a line: it's the easiest thing to do, to say there is no line. You're powerless and there's nothing you can do, other than vote once every four years. But there must be some action you can take, no matter how hard and complicated it is to find.

Q: We know from the outside the real apocalyptic legacy of the Nazis, but they're on the inside, so they don't know it.

VM: Well, that's the strength of this movie. It doesn't work from hindsight, like almost all movies on the subject, good and bad, and books about the period. There's this scene when the character Anne says [the swastika] makes people happy, so it can't be bad.

You see these kids running along with swastikas made out of flowers. In fact, there was this kid during the break on the first day of shooting, this little Hungarian kid about five years old, playing with the little swastika flag. [He was] sticking it in the sand castle, really having fun with it. There's a still they took of that; it's really quite disturbing, but he's having a fun time. What people forget is that in the 1930s that was simply the flag of Germany. It didn't have all these Holocaust connections [it has today].

When the Olympic [athletes] competed in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, they competed under that flag. It was simply the flag of the party, and the swastika was a symbol that had come from other places – India, the Navajo. It was a universal symbol meaning different things in different places. If you raise your hand in a certain way in Austria, you'll go to jail, but that's now. This movie [tells it] as if you're there.

JI: I didn't think it was about the apocalyptic circumstances that came about. In 1933 this was an amazing country. [It was] coming into full bloom, kids had clubs to go to. But a small part of the community were having their civil rights eroded, but not in such a way that it took away from all the other wonderful things going on—unless you were Jewish. In which case, it wasn't so great. But you weren't hard up [initially]. The Jews were benefiting from many other things happening magnificently in the country [at the time]. Because I've done interviews where I've been asked, “Is the message of the film that, if we don't watch out, all this could happen again?”

It’s not about where we got to in 1943. 1933 was bad enough if you were Maurice. 1937 wasn't such a great year for him. Frankly there are people around the planet today who, as a consequence of me buying these clothes made in China, don't have a very good day at work. There are homeless people I've stepped over to get into the hotel today. It’s about this ethical minefield we experience every day. It's not about whether it would or wouldn't come to a genocidal apocalypse again. It's about how do you live your life in the very challenging times.

Q: It's easy enough to condemn the distant past. But the Iraq war movies have all been box office failures because that's what is all around you. It's a different thing.

JI: I think when Arthur Miller wanted to talk about McCarthyism—this cancer that was eating American society—he wrote a play about the Salem witch trials called The Crucible. I think, in these very challenging and terrifying times we live in, which are full of fear and rationalization, there are a million decisions that I make every day that I'm not sure about. I have small children. I have no idea how they will or won't judge me for the things I do.

VM: Sometimes, a good way that I looked at this story metaphorically, was the notion that when you have a pot of water, if it's boiling water and you throw a frog in, it will jump out. But if you bring it up slowly, the frog will just get warmer and warmer [until it's too late] and then he cooks.

JI: Wow, that's really cruel, have you done that?

VM: No. But that's a metaphor for the German people. Why didn't they do something? Why didn't you leave if you were Jewish? They didn't realize what was going on, how warm it was getting. It wasn't boiling at once, it took a while.

Q: Did you know each other before shooting?

VM: No. I knew Jason's work, and I flew out to Providence where Jason was filming [Brotherhood] to meet him, as I knew we wouldn't have time before filming started.

JI: It was a generous gesture of Viggo to do that. I don't want to get too soppy, but it made me feel incredibly warm towards him. When I arrived in Hungary, having had to shed a character on the plane, Viggo had already been around Europe on his own research trip and gathered some artifacts he thought might be useful for the character of Maurice.

Viggo made it very, very easy for me to like him. He made it very easy to be his friend on screen and off screen. We have a relationship and these things count. You're relaxed in each other's company; you tell each other when you're being an idiot. That usually takes months and months on a film set, and we had about 20 minutes [to do so].

VM: Also, there's a simple idea of, “Do you like to rehearse and talk about stuff?” Of course, we both do [so that was] great.

Q: This film seems to welcome a degree of improvisation.

JI: We improvised a bit. You look someone in the eye and try and figure out how a human would behave in 1935.

Q: Did you need to do research, and what kind did you do? Obviously you've read these books, but were there films you watched as well, like the Nazi propaganda films that Goebbels commissioned?

VM: This is different in that it doesn't have a big moment at the end. You're not let off the hook as an audience, with a catharsis. You can't say, “Oh, what a horrible villainous person who deserved to die,” or “How great, he went down in a hail of bullets but he did save four-and-a-half people. This film is different. It's not over when it's over, which is the mark of a good story. [In István Szabó's film] Mephisto, which was also shot in Budapest, is a character who bears some resemblance, but he's ambitious from the get-go and he's monstrous.

The thing about Halder is that he's quite normal. The strength of the film is this normalcy. It's quite mundane—even in the camp—it's just another day in the camp. The sun happens to be shining; there's a couple of dead guys, there's a guy who looks like he's going to die pretty soon, and there's someone's going to get some crappy soup; some are lined up and are going to get gassed. It sounds terrible, but it's actually just another day.

One of the things I did, apart from going to Germany and listening to music and all that, was that I drove around in Poland where camps had been. Some places were hard to find. It was a hot day, I was by myself. I finally sat down, and I’m thinking about all these sign posts I've seen. I gradually realized I am here and the sun is shining and the birds are singing and it was a beautiful spring day—and you know they saw those days, too. Whether they were dying or ill, or guards, or maintenance men cleaning the officer’s porch, or preparing the soup, there were nice days.

There weren't always what we see in these movies—grim, black and white, dramatic events every second. You walk down the camp and it's disturbingly quiet and normal. It's become acceptable. For the Jews in the camp, yesterday, today, tomorrow, this is what I'm dealing with now—it's not dramatic in a sense. And that's what's disturbing.

Even when we were shooting that scene at the end, the strangest thing was the quiet. We hear this music playing as I approach with the camera following me, and it [gets] louder and louder, but there wasn't much else. So people say, “It doesn't seem like concentration camp.” No, it doesn't seem like a concentration camp in movies. But it’s a place, and there are people there, and it's just another day. Unfortunately.

I’m not saying I wasn't disturbed by it. It was even more disturbing. I brought things and covered them in dirt and placed them around... But it was more disturbing than fires and rain and screaming.

JI: The first day I had off, I went to the Museum of Terror, which was a state police museum. In the very first room there was a panel that deal with the fact that half a million Jews were killed in the first month there. I did an open-top bus tour, and the guide was saying that 90% of the population are Catholic and about 2% other, mainly Jewish. I asked, what was that percentage before the war? And she said, “I don't know, I think maybe the same.” Everywhere I went, I wondered who lived there. I wondered who was dragged out screaming.

Q: Viggo, your next film is based on Cormac McCarthy's The Road and it deals with some equally difficult situations in the near future.

VM: And there's lots of great Germans in it! It's no surprise that that book is [McCarthy's] best-selling book, because it’s very direct, and very universal. Everybody is the child of someone. Many people have children, everybody has some idea of the parent-child relationship. Any parent who's halfway interested in their child has that concern: “Well, if I'm not here for a week, or a day, or forever, will my kid be all right? Who's going to watch, who's going to feed them?" Children will also worry. That's taken to an extreme… Any parent's worry is taken to an extreme—like, if I'm gone, this kid has nothing and probably will be killed and eaten [laughs]!

The Strange Case of Claus Von Stauffenberg and Valkyrie

Review by Brad Balfour

VALKYRIE
starring Tom Cruise, Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp, Tom Wilkinson, Jamie Parker, and Eddie Izzard, Thomas Kretschmann, Carice van Houten, Christian Berkel   
directed by Bryan Singer, co-written by Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander 

Both director Bryan Singer and star Tom Cruise have described "Valkyrie" as an adventure thriller. So that's what they had in mind—which is understandable since Cruise has established himself as an actor who can drive such films—but they should have pushed the notion aside. Maybe Singer can't help but make a film full of elaborately uniformed heroes and villains; after all he effectively launched the X-Men franchise and re-imagined Superman (albeit in the none-too-successful "Superman Returns").

With reasonable diligence and relative accuracy, "Valkyrie" tells the complex story of Colonel Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, who attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler and, with his band of co-conspirators, take over the crumbling Third Reich before the Allies force an unconditional surrender on his homeland. Stauffenberg was an aristocrat, an active soldier, and an unrepentant nationalist who believed in the greater glory of the German people.  

A devout Catholic, he was appalled by the Nazis' brutality and lack of honor. With other aristocrats and conservative Catholics (played by Branagh, Nighy, Stamp, Parker, and Izzard, among others), he joined a resistance movement that plotted to kill Hitler and remove the fanatic Nazis from power while still believing in a German "victory." By July 20, 1944, the day of this final attempt against Hitler, a surrender to the Allies was still possible that would have allowed Teutonic dignity to remain intact.

As the film unfolds, the conspirators become increasingly desperate, since earlier attempts to kill Hitler failed and the war has taken a decidedly dismal turn. Stauffenberg, who had been terribly wounded by an Allied attack in North Africa (he lost an eye, a hand and most of the fingers on his other hand), is sent to a Munich hospital to recover. The resistance engages Stauffenberg to join them, and he goes from discouraged conspirator (he has little faith in the civilian plotters) to key organizer who must both kill Hitler and initiate the coup that gets the regular Army to suppress the Nazi cadres of the SS and Gestapo ("Operation Valkyrie"). Fortunately, he has risen in rank to Colonel, has been transferred to Berlin and becomes part of the general staff that gives him access to Hitler.

This tale becomes richly compelling as the audience gets to know who the players are. As we learn about the various plotters' motives, we see the attempt unfold and ultimately fail. Though Singer accelerates its thriller pace, "Valkyrie" reveals a lot about the striations and counterforces in German society that led to the Nazis' takeover and their iron-fisted control of the country. As the historical facts of the July 20th coup emerge, we see the complex dynamics behind the scenes which suggest that the German Third Reich was far from a coherent juggernaut, but a careening mess of madness and compliance. Unfortunately "Valkyrie" breezes along without enough moments of digression to illuminate the various factions involved and the failures of character that caused this plot to fail.

Though an excellent crew of international actors—such as Brits Nighy, Wilkinson, Euro-actors Kretschmann, and van Houten—round out the cast, they play their parts in disconcerting English accents. Nonetheless, the supporting characters provide a rich foundation to nurture Cruise's Stauffenberg as de-facto coup leader. 

Even though Cruise dominates throughout, Singer assembles the film from a kaleidoscopic bunch of set pieces that speed up into the failed coup and the conspirators' executions. While the diminutive Cruise gives Stauffenberg a large presence, he performs the character with greater restraint and poise than he has shown in the past. Though his very Americanness sometimes gets hard to overlook, Cruise manages a fine performance.

Having recently viewed a much younger Cruise in "Jerry Maguire" one could see the making of the superstar. With an abundant energy and passion, Cruise imprinted on his character both an edge and vulnerability, like a loving kid with attention-deficit disorder. But the Cruise of "Valkyrie" is all about control, and though his mania seethes underneath the surface, he effectively manages it as Stauffenberg makes his bid to determine Germany's destiny. 

The script tries to seed the film with the rich historical, cultural, and political realities of the time among a field of ever-intensifying action. But while Singer nearly overwhelms with the powerful imagery of Nazi culture—the elaborate military uniforms, endless Swaistka-laden flags and banners or imposing architecture—he sacrifices background for the drama, occasionally diminishing the importance of the story.

One can only begin to appreciate "Valkyrie" by getting past preconceptions of Tom Cruise in an eyepatch and Nazi regalia or the baggage of his "Oprah" appearances. And if you can get past the polyglot of accented English or the scuttlebutt about the film finding an appropriate release date, then "Valkyrie" is both suspenseful and enlightening. It goes far beyond the cliche that pits "heroic/good Nazis" against the "bad" fanatics who supported Hitler, but rather reveals the intricate and daunting dynamics the led to the rise and fall of the Third Reich.