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.

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.