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.

Kate Winslet Copes With Making the Reader, The Nazi era and Oscar Buzz

Feature Interview by Brad Balfour

With both Revolutionary Road and The Reader coming into theaters around the world, this has been quite a creative year for 33-year-old British actress Kate Winslet. There's Oscar®-talk for each film, with Winslet in line for best actress, best supporting actress or both. And ironically, these two films complement each other in that they're both partially set during the same period--the post-World War Two-era of the mid-1950s.

Winslet already has five Oscar nominations to her credit, two of which made her the youngest actress ever to be nominated twice. She's also regarded as a champion of showing women's bodies as they naturally are and has always refused to conform to anyone else's template for female nudity.

As a novel by Bernhard Schlink, The Reader offered a forceful look at the seductive effect of the Third Reich as it gained power and the effect it had on the first post-war generation. Once World War II was over, the generation that followed had to reconcile how their parents, uncles and aunts had allowed Hitler and the original Nazis to gain power and draw the nation into its insidious system. As this country begins to cope with this post-Bush era, a slew of Nazi-related films like The Reader (Valkyrie, Good and The Boy In The Striped Pajamas) are examining the slippery slope that led to total compliance with a Fascist dictatorship.

Virginal 15-year-old Michael Berg (played by German actor David Kross; the older version is played by Ralph Fiennes) is similarly seduced by Hanna Schmitz (Winslet) and then the relationship is discarded. As he grapples with its effect on him, he also grapples with building a life afterwards--a life that includes becoming a lawyer and dealing with an untested legal system established in the wake of the Nazi regime. As part of his legal studies, Berg witnesses the trial of four female work camp guards who sent countless people to their deaths. When he recognizes one as his former lover, the ever deepening gyre of emotions and ideas spins.

During screenings, this film has produced polarizing responses. When the opportunity arose to speak with Winslet in a near-exclusive interview setting, it produced equally strong emotional reactions on both sides of the table.

Q: I saw both Revolutionary Road and The Reader on the same day; you played two very different people. Was it a different process for each film to adapt or adopt these people?

KW: it's an extremely different process with any character; every character is different. I would hate to use the old regurgitated emotions of another character and layer them into a new character with a different wig on, or a different costume and a different accent.

These two projects were wildly different in terms of how I had to approach them. But both were unbelievably complicated, the most challenging experiences of my working life. I find myself saying again and again: the fact that I got to play both of these characters in my lifetime, let alone in the space of a year--it doesn't even add up; that doesn't happen to people.

To say that creatively it's been the most rewarding two years of my life would be a massive understatement. I've learned so much about myself as an actress. I've just honestly learned so much.

Approaching someone like Hanna Schmitz is so different from somebody like April Wheeler [of Revolutionary Road]. The one thing that they both do have in common is that they're based on novels, and the source material is so rich in each case that they really became my bible in both instances, which doesn't happen all the time.

My copy of The Reader is on my shelf right next to Revolutionary Road and they both don't really resemble books anymore; they both [look], sort of, like a dog has had a go at them. They're practically falling apart.

[With] Hannah I was very much playing a character, and I remember staring down the barrel of the gun and thinking, "Shit. I really have nothing I can relate to here. There's nothing of my own experience I can put into this character, at all. So let's just start right there and hope for the goddamn best."

It's such a terrifying position to be in, especially when it's such an extraordinary book; the material's so rich. It's a much loved piece of German literature, and so important to Germans and I wanted to get it right. I was the person asked to play Hanna Schmitz.

It was an enormous pressure [on me]. "Jesus Christ! Don't fuck it up, girl." The thing about playing Hannah that quite honestly was the hardest--aside from all the obvious things: the dialect and so on, and the aging, and the illiteracy and the moral illiteracy--the hardest thing was to hold on to my instincts as to who you are.

With something like this--a very, very intricate and difficult love film that is set up against a Holocaust backdrop (though I don't feel it's a Holocaust movie at all)--[is that] everyone had an opinion about Hanna Schmitz. She meant something different for everybody. People were alarmingly vocal about that, and everyone would assume you shared the same opinion, "Well obviously she was a Nazi; obviously, she was in control of her action; well, obviously--" and the list goes on.

I would sometimes think, "Oh my god, that's not what I thought. Oh shit. Am I wrong? Hang on. No, wait a second. I might not be wrong. I actually might be right, maybe they're wrong. Does it matter who's right or wrong?"

All that mattered at the end of the day was that I made her my own and hung on to that and played the honesty and the truthfulness of that, the vulnerability of her and that I understood her. That's the most important job, I think. I'm really learning more about this, actually. All the time is that as an actor it's really so key that you get inside the character and you understand them--the good bits and the bad bits.

You don't have to forgive it; you don't have to sympathize with it. You just have to just have to understand why those things [happen] to that person and why they behave the way that they do. That's what I was able to do, somehow, with April and with Hannah. And that's why I'm absolutely not good right now, because of having gone through these two extraordinary experiences. It's literally blown my mind.

Q: Why do you think Hanna had an affair with this high school boy and why did she keep calling him "kid?"

KW: You'd have to ask Bernhard Schlink why she called him "kid," quite honestly. You really would. That's what she calls him the book and I don't know why that was. That was a little nickname, an affectionate term she had for him. I don't think she was calling him "kid" and really meaning a child, or baby, or anything like that. Also, Hannah thought he was 17; he's a 15-year-old boy, but he let her believe he was 17 years old. I just don't think she really thought about the age.

She's a woman who--because of her illiteracy--has probably never had a close, intimate relationship of this nature. She's never been able to let anyone in for fear of being found out, and being exposed, and the shame of that she carried in her day-to-day life. Her illiteracy informed everything about her existence.

For her, to feel these things, be touched in that way, be overwhelmed at how much she ended up, ultimately, [made her] emotionally need this boy. I would actually say that in many ways I feel, she ended up emotionally needing him almost more than he needed her. You don't expect that to happen.

I think she genuinely loved this boy, this young man. And that's how it always felt to me: he was a young man. It didn't feel inappropriate even--it didn't feel salacious, or uncomfortable, or wrong. It somehow always seemed so real, and so pure, and so tender. That's what it was for me.

That's why I think it didn't feel uncomfortable or unnatural to do those love scenes with David [Kross], because I always understood them--we both did as characters. And it doesn't matter how nervous you get before shooting scenes like that. At the end of the day as long as you believe in the reason that they're there and present in the story, then you can embrace it, and really play those moments out and fill them with as much honesty as possible.

Q: What was that process for you--to get into her mind, you had to do a lot of research since you don't have much of a frame of reference for her to begin with?

KW: It was really hard. It was incredibly helpful, and so interesting. But it was a long process, and I felt like I had to cram quite a lot in. I really only had about two months, and there was a lot to do--with the dialect and the general preparation of Hannah: who she was, her back story, where she came from. I came at it and thought, where do I begin? Okay, I thought, I could do this thing, I could do this thing, or I could do all of these things. Okay, let's start with that. I'll just do all of these things and I'm just going to see which one helps me the most. And ultimately everything I did was beneficial.

I had to educate myself a little more about the Holocaust; and I had to educate myself a lot about the role of an SS guard, about which I actually knew very little. And I'm not embarrassed to say that, because I think that's the case for many people of my generation.

Once you see documentary footage of the camp, you read anything on the Holocaust, you can never un-see those things, you can never un-hear, un-read them. I'm still absolutely haunted and traumatized by so much of what I saw during the preparation process. At a certain point I just had to stop, because I thought, "I have what I need now; I get it. I really get it."

Then what became most beneficial to me was the book. I practically memorized it.

Understanding the mind of an illiterate person--that was crucial to me. Have I said this already in this interview or am I having déjà vu? Have I talked about the literacy part in it yet? So I spent a lot of time with a group in New York City, the Literacy Partners, and they teach men and women to read and write, and that was really the most helpful stuff I could possibly have done because I had to understand the level of shame. I had to understand how you live with that lie, how it affects every single area of your life.

I literally sat in on classes with people that were learning how to spell cat, bat, sat and mat. And some of the younger people in that group were 22, 23, and some of the older people were 72 and 73 years-old. And they had spent a life being so ashamed that they can't turn around to anybody and say, can you help me?

There was one woman in particular who spent a lot of time with me--she's in her early 60s and she had learned to read and write two years ago; she's just so proud of herself, I can't tell you. And she was happy to talk about it, happy to talk about how she survived.

So I would say to her, "Hold on a second. How did you get jobs? What kinds of jobs did you do?"

"Well Sugar, let me tell you. I was a telephone operator and when you can't read or write...I have the gift of the gab--you become a good talker. You talk with people a lot. You try to escape from it."

But I would say, "Yes. But how did you get the job in the first place? How did you fill in forms?"

"Oh honey, did you ever hear of Ace bandage?"

"Yeah"

"Well, I would go to the store and I would buy myself an Ace bandage and I would go to my girlfriend and say, 'Oh my hand; I can't hold a pen. Could you fill in that form for me?' And I would tell her what to put, 'Yeah, you put that.' That is what I did, for years and years of my life."

"But how many jobs are we talking about?"

"We're talking a lot of jobs and a lot of Ace bandages," is what she said. She had a son, so I would say, "How would you help him with his homework?"

[She said,] "No. I did not help him with his homework. I employed somebody to do that, because his life and his education was so important to me, but I knew I couldn't do it. I couldn't let him know that I couldn't read and write."

I said, "What about bedtime stories?"

"No ma'am. I would sing to him made-up songs that I would make up."

I was blown away. And then, [I asked,] "Okay, restaurants; what would you do in a restaurant?"

"I would sit with my menu and my beautiful suit that I had made for myself, which I had perfectly pressed that day myself, and I would look at that menu and say, 'I'll take the chicken.'"

And I would say, "How did you know they had chicken." "Oh honey, everybody has chicken." But I would say, okay, "Salads, whatever...?"

"I would say to the gentleman, 'What vegetables come with that today? Oh, that sounds good. Let me take some of those."

So my understanding of how good you get at hiding that, the lies that you live through, and the level of control you have to exert on your day-to-day life just to simply understand what happens next is a level of protection. That was the most valuable, eye-opening stuff.

You cannot imagine how fascinating that whole process was for me. It literally blew my mind. Walking down the street, I just think, pretend that you can't read that sign. Could you imagine that, all of those things?
Also being told that illiterate people can count, so that when we were putting the process together of how Hannah was actually able to teach herself to read and write, we realized the counting element was quite important. The-lady-with-the-little-dog--one-two-three-four [syncopated]. You see her doing it on her fingers. It helped a lot with how [director] Stephen [Daldry] put this together.

Q: Even when you're doing these interviews, you seem to be learning something about yourself; about what you did to get there. It sounds like this was a pivotal experience for you.

KW: It was huge. I full-on broke down and thought, "I'm going to have to leave the room." Don't get me started on the trial. I am still coming to terms with the whole experience of having played Hanna, I really genuinely am.

We wrapped on July 12th, and I sort of walked away like some car crash victim who somehow hadn't been hurt on the outside, but I felt like I couldn't speak [about it]. It was truly overwhelming. I really went somewhere. I was in some kind of a trance. And I'm still coming to terms with all of it. I'm so blown away by the movie.

There are moments in the film when I actually make a noise. The moment when he goes to the camp, and the camera's on the inside of that barn, and I go [makes guttural sound]. I just can't watch--and we're not seeing any bloodshed. It's just the emptiness and the power of the imagery and the memory and the fact that that was a real camp.

Q: Is Hanna naïve when she's telling the truth, telling it the way it is? When the Judge and prosecutor ask her questions, she's the only one saying, "What did you expect me to do? This was my job." Does Hannah realize she's taking the brunt of it while the other three female concentration camp guards are lying through their teeth?

KW: No, no... It's both. She's naïve; she's vulnerable; she doesn't have the intellectual capacity to articulate what's happened. She doesn't know about lying on that level. Someone's asking the question--she's giving them the answer. So when she says to [the judge], "Well, what would you have done?" she really wants to know.

She just thought she was doing her job. In those moments she sitting there, she's realizing, for the first time, "Oh, so I had a choice then? Ok, so doing my job meant I was committing a crime, is that what it is?" She didn't know. That is because she was illiterate.

And when those other women realized very quickly that they can pin this thing on her, you just feel her spiraling out of control. Because all she can do is speak faster, say what she said already and say more of it, again and again. You just see her losing control in this catastrophic way. Of course [there's] that moment when, "I need to see a sample of your handwriting," she will take that life sentence [rather than] admit she's illiterate. God, it's devastating.

Q: Everything is left up to the audience; no judgment is made in this film. It asks more questions than it even tries to answer. How important is that in the telling of the story to you?

KW: I think it's crucial. I think it's absolutely crucial. We didn't want to give answers. We wanted to ask questions and have an audience walk away questioning everything, and possibly questioning their own morals if at any second they felt sympathy for Hanna Schmitz.

I knew it wasn't my job to make an audience sympathize with her, humanize her or warm her up. I had to make her a person; I had to make her real; and I had to be 100% committed to conveying the honesty of every single emotion in order to give the audience the opportunity to understand her if they wanted to, feel any level of sympathy if they wanted to.

And the most exciting thing for me, personally, is if the audience feels morally impure, if they feel any degree of sympathy towards her, that's what is interesting. That means that it is getting some kind of new perspective; it is raising questions for people. I think your observation is absolutely right, and it's absolutely what we hoped people would feel about the film.

OSCAR WATCH: Director Stefan Ruzowitzky and Actor Karl Markovics Make "The Counterfeiters" an Authentic Holocaust Film

Feature Interview by Brad Balfour

Just when you think everything that happened during the Holocaust has been chronicled, a new film appears based on a true story that offers another look at that horrible experience in a fresh way. So it's no wonder this Austrian film, "The Counterfeiters," got nominated for the Foriegn Language Oscar.

Based on the published memoir of Adolf Burger, it details the experience of Salomon “Sally” Sorowitsch, a masterful member of Berlin's criminal underground. Upon being sent to a German concentration camp, Sorowitsch agrees to help the Nazis in their organized counterfeit operation—“Operation Bernhard”—set up to finance the war effort against the Allies. Through a brilliant performance by veteran actor Karl Markovics, Sally obliquely reflects the prime conflict for the Jews during the Holocaust—resist and die or survival at all costs.

Burger, one of Sorowitsch’s fellow detainees (played in the film by August Diehl) captures many of the traumatic decisions these prisoners grappled with; help the Nazis and live or sabotage their efforts and be executed. In this cinematic telling of this gripping drama, director Stefan Ruzowitzky (“The Inheritors”) documents the inner war within the counterfeit workshop against the backdrop of the Reich’s final months while wrestling with complicated issues of morality and survival.

Though both Ruzowitzky and Markovics aren't Jewish, they offered particular insights into the emotional and psychological depravity wrought by the Holocaust. A favorite to win the Academy Award, it's no wonder the film was a hit at the Berlin, Telluride and Toronto International Film Festivals last year.

Q: You both made this film from the perspective of someone who isn't Jewish... of not being someone who has the same imposing sense of that experience and that definitely lent the film a different perspective.

SR: The thing that struck me, was that these [prisoners] are actually Germans. I tried to stay away from every cliché, [even] positive clichés, that all Jews are intellectuals and cultivated and wise people because this is something I learned from Alfred Burger’s book as well, that the people he’d been together with, they were Jewish blue-collar workers, Jewish Prussian bankers and for me that was rather an interesting thing.

So here’s a group of Germans and just because they have Jewish ancestors they’re put in a camp and the Nazis want to kill them; that’s that insane concept I’ve been thinking about a lot, and that struck me in a way.

It’s also when Adolph Burger is asked whether he still hates the Germans or whether he has problems with the Germans, he always says no because he’d been in the camps together with so many Germans, German Jews [yes]—these were people from Hamburg and Munich, whatever—but they were Germans as well, so for him it wasn’t Germans on one side in the uniforms and Jews on the other. There were Germans on both sides.

Q: And Karl, what about from your point of view?

KM: For me it was much easier, because playing a Jew never mattered to me because this character doesn’t care about his Jewishness at all. So it was much more [about] the point of why human beings treat other human beings like that, and under what conditions.

This was the most interesting point for me and I hope that we will one day come to the point that it doesn’t matter at all anymore. At that time, [when] the story [takes place], it mattered too much, today it still matters very much in Austria and Germany, but there are not so many Jews left.

On the other hand there weren’t so many at that time as well. This when I first heard about I really thought I can’t believe this, that only 0.8% of the German population in 1933 were Jews. This small amount of population should be responsible for all the evil happening to the German race? This number drove me crazier than other facts of this part of our history.

Q: How do you explain that it happened to so many people, yet their role in society was so blown out of proportion.

KM: It’s only possible because of several centuries of an ongoing tradition of having a minority within the [majority] population to blame for anything you want. It’s kind of a fashion, sometimes, to protect them and sometimes, the governors, the kings, the dukes and so on would persecute them for any reason.

Of course, [these reasons include everything from] Christian ideas of they killed Jesus to the fact that they often were really well skilled and well educated. The thing was that they often had a lot of money because they were forced to only do jobs as bankers and the economy stuff and then the people blamed them for that.

So it’s really weird, but it seems to be human [is]to look for a minority you can blame for everything. There was one famous line in one of my favorite American novelist’s books, Annie Proulx. In “Accordion Crimes” she writes that even if there hadn’t have been the African-American population in the States there would have been an ongoing civil war between the Polish, Germans, Scandinavian immigrants, but they all had the Blacks to look down on and to kick and to feel better and this we did to our Jews.

Q: It's an interesting permutation that your character is a criminal. His alliance is less with the Jewish community and more with the criminal underground. You successfully showed another side to this when these different classes of people together were thrown together. That gave you an opportunity to play the role with a unique outlook, and, for you, to direct him with a unique point of view.

SR: From the very beginning [that’s] what intrigued me the most, the pitch of having a counterfeiter in a concentration camp, which is just a great pitch, a counterfeiter who’s somebody who’s betraying somebody, who’s manipulating reality and without knowing the details I thought right away, well that’s interesting. Will he be able to manipulate reality in the camps? Will he be able to betray himself and things like that?

On top of that I felt it was very interesting, or it would be a completely new perspective because all the autobiographies that we know [about the camps] by Bruno Bettelheim, Primo Levy, all these were written by people with an intellectual, bourgeoisie background, an academic background, and here we have somebody who’s sort of trained to survive and survive well within a prison.

Of course a concentration camp isn’t a normal prison but still he would know how to get along within the hierarchy of the inmates and all these things. Doing research on the concentration camps I did find out, [that] there were many criminals in the camps and they usually got along much better and survived better because they were better at organizing themselves for food and good jobs and all these things with a mix of betraying, stealing, and just performing their skills. So I felt, well, that’s an interesting new perspective that I haven’t heard about that interests me.

Q: To play a criminal who wasn’t just an obvious hero was an extra wrinkle for you...

KM: Yes, definitely. That was the point for me, because he’s sort of a lonesome wolf. He thinks of himself as a lone wolf and that he doesn’t belong to all the others, all the rest of the world outside. [He thinks] “I need them, I use them, but I stay on my own” and suddenly at once in the concentration camp he’s forced to belong to others because he’s a Jew.

He’s suddenly forced to be responsible for others, too, if he wants to or not because his skills decide whether they will live for a certain time, at least, or if they will be killed at once if he doesn’t manage to make the pounds and the dollars. So, he is forced to start socializing for the first time in his life.

Q: He’s challenged with a moral dilemma that he wouldn’t ordinarily be challenged by.

KM: Right.

Q: The film is morally complex. On the one hand you have a character that advocates the idea of not helping the Nazi war effort but at the same time there's the logic of wanting to stay alive and doing what you can to do to survive; what were the challenges in presenting that point of view?

SR: The idea was to balance all that as well as possible in terms of not saying there is a right way and there is a wrong way. The idea was that you would watch Sally and say, “yeah, probably, I would have done the same thing” and then you’d hear Burger talking about principles and that the Nazis wouldn’t have a chance if people would stick a little bit more to the principles and you say, “yes I agree completely,” but you also understand the guy who said “I almost died a dozen times. I just want to go on living.”

I just wanted to show that everybody’s right in a way and everybody’s causing some special problems with their approach. Initially I thought that audiences would fall much more for Burger because he’s sort of the typical hero with his ideals, so we have some scenes which show his dark side as well, but then pretty early on I found out that the opposite was the case.

People love Sally because they can identify with him, because that’s what we all are doing, just sort of trying to get along somehow and it’s not always 100% correct. But we try to be good people which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. Whereas people like Burger, the movie character not the real person, we admire them to a certain extent because they’re radical and idealistic, but at the same time they’re boring and we all know that they don’t succeed with their big ideals and that often leads to even bigger catastrophes.

Q: Moral ambiguity is always more interesting than dogmatism.

SR: Yes and the interesting thing is I had one screening in New York for the National Board of Review and there was a couple of Cuban immigrants there. They said that when they saw him in the first scene, recognized him right away because he was just the typical Communist, saying "I have my ideals and I’m ready to die for my ideals and I’m also ready for other people to die for my ideals." That’s enough of a dark side for Burger, so we didn’t use these scenes I was referring to because I felt he’s negative enough in the eyes of many people.

Q: Did you do certain things to create this character without being too obvious and was the moral ambiguity a challenge for you?

KM: It’s hard [to say] because I don’t really know how to explain the process of acting, because I don’t know myself. It happens. It sounds stupid, but it is a little bit like that. One always tries to find the symbols or analogies to explain something. So I could talk on for half an hour, but wouldn’t really say anything clever or smart. I don’t know. It was a challenge... a challenge for me in itself, to do this.

The biggest challenge was could I be able to put away my personal feelings, my feeling of "am I allowed to play a Jew as a non-Jew?... To put away my historical knowledge about this time, all the things we heard at school or I read in books, because the guy I play doesn’t give a shit about all this, he has no political sense and is not aware of his Jewishness; he is what he is, I am what I am and that was the biggest challenge... To be sure when we started shooting, not to care about all this, just make it happen.

Q: You bookended the film with an opening scene with a woman and the last scene with a woman. What did you have in mind and was that for you to give you him someone different to play against?

SR: From the very first idea and treatment I had this frame and there were some clever people who said you shouldn’t do that, you’re taking away a lot of suspense by showing that he stays alive. This could be a big suspense thing and actually it was much later, actually some interviews helped me to find out that what’s happening here is the movie actually starts with the ultimate happy ending: there’s a guy after six years in concentration camps, he’s sitting on the beach of the Cote D’Azur with a beautiful woman and a suitcase full of money and then he asks himself, “why me? Did I come to close to evil? Did I compromise too much?”

This is actually what the movie is about and it’s not that sort of cheap thrill of "he’s a Jew in the camp, is he going to survive or not?" but it’s rather about the how [of his survival] and I think that’s far more elegant than it would have been without the frame.

Q: Is that why you decided to film this as more of an adventure story, almost like a film noir?

SR: I wanted to make an accessible movie, a movie for people of my generation who are not [feeling] guilty because we have been born years after the war and I wanted to invite them to be interested in that period of time because it’s worthwhile to think about it.

So I tried to make an accessible movie which is emotional and suspenseful but not with the kind of suspense of "are they going to descend into the gas chambers or not;" that kind of cliffhanger would be disgusting. It’s about other things, [and that's] where the suspense lies.

Q: Was it a pleasure to work with those two actresses?

KM: It was a pleasure definitely, in different ways. Of course it was a pleasure because it was a pleasure, but also [there was] the opportunity that I really felt this clash of dimensions personally—we were shooting all these [glamorous] scenes before we went onto the concentration camp scenes.

So we had been in Monte Carlo and it’s at the Mediterranean sea [we're there] with this beautiful suit and dresses in the casino; and we did all this and then there was a short weekend and then [there we were] on Babelsberg Studios lot with the prefabricated barracks and we started in the [concentration] camp.

It was sort of, you know, there is a cut in your life and you can’t imagine [it being] deeper. I felt a little bit like this working the first morning before we started shooting with all my memories of the Mediterranean and Dolores Chaplin and Marie Bäumer, the only two girls in this movie, [fresh in my mind]. It was such a short time and then [we started] going on to the real story.

Q: Then there is the "real" unreality of this whole Oscar nomination thing.

KM: Yes absolutely. It seems fake as well. You can’t believe there’s really an Oscar. I’m sure it’s chocolate [inaudible].

Q: Did it catch you by surprise?

SR: Not really, because of the short list. You know you have this short list with nine movies [on it from which they pick the Oscar nominees for the international award].

KM: I didn’t know. You did? I was surprised.

SR: So you’re kind of prepared, and I think you know if you’re among these last nine and then you don’t make it among these last five, that’s really frustrating. Now of course I want to win but okay, if you don’t win you can’t help it you know, but being among the last nine but not among the last five must be really shitty.

Q: Is there anyone you want to talk with or something special you want to do at the Oscars?

SR: It’s funny... It’s similar to when a movie is premiering and you have this red carpet situation. When you’re there on the red carpet in that situation they make you feel like you’re the most important person in the world and then one minute later you meet the same journalists in the bathroom and nobody gives a shit about you.

It’s like a play and you have your role, which is smiling on the red carpet as they shout “Stefan, Stefan look here” and you look there and it works only in that very moment and not later on and it’s fun.

KM: I want to meet Governor Schwarzenegger, my former fellow Austrian citizen.