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]!

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.