A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID HARE on THE READER
Sir David Hare, screenwriter of the superb adaptation of Bernard Schlink's novel THE READER recently discussed the challenges of bringing the film to screen. Hare had just gotten in from London, by way of New York where he has recently directed The Year of Magical Thinking, the stage adaptation of Joan Didion's memoir.
Sir David has been writing and producing plays since the 1970s and has been director of the National Theatre in England where his current play, Gesthemane, about politics and the media is causing quite a bit of controversy. His films have included Plenty (adapted from his own play) with Meryl Streep, Louis Malles' Damage, and The Secret Rapture. He has written and directed Wetherby, Paris by Night and Strapless.
THE READER is his second collaboration with director Stephen Daldry, with whom he teamed for his Academy Award nominated screenplay adaptation of The Hours. He was also nominated for a BAFTA, a Golden Globe and won the Writer's Guild of America award.
So how did you get involved in the project?
I read the book when it first came out in 1997 or 1998 and the minute I read it I wanted to do it, and that it's very rare. I rang Anthony MInghella because I discovered he had the rights and he said no,no I'm going to do it. I said why don't you let me write it and you can produce it or direct it if you want to. "But I really want to write it," he said, "no I'm going to write it."
Every time I saw him in the following decade, I'd say to him, "Are you going to give me the reader?" and he'd say no. And then finally, 2 years ago, he rang and said I feel very bad that I never made THE READER because I promised Bernand Schlink I would. So he said you can do it on these conditions: that you have the money, it's greenlit before you write a word, and you have to make it in 1 calendar year because we owe it to Schlink to get it made. Daldry and myself dropped everything to do it.
In fact we didn't make it in a calendar year because so many things happened that went wrong not least of which was Anthony and Sydney (Pollack). But it was essentially Anthony and I have to say he was incredibly generous, really, letting me write something that he really wanted to do.
What was it about the story that attracted you?
It's a very powerful fable. What's so great about the book is that it seems to be incredibly simple yet the more you examine it, the more complicated it becomes. And I love those kind of movies that seem, on the surface, to be very simple but actually the more you look into them, the more complex they are. Most of all the subject of literacy and literature and what the reading is about, what he's doing when he reads to her and what she does or doesn't learn from literature, all of that is completely fascinating to me.
As a writer, myself, I found that part to be, well, devasting.
Because ultimately, what Schlink is saying is that it's not the same to be literate and to be morally literate. In other words, by becoming literate, by actually learning to read and write she does not learn to understand what she did or indeed to repent, she dies in the Christian sense "unshriven", without ever having come to terms with what she did. Schlink's way of putting it is that you can be literate but a moral idiot.
The challenge for the writer is obvious because you are not following a conventional arc, which is expected nowadays, and which seems incredibly boring. Second, you're not writing a conventional love story because you could say the lovers far from getting close together are getting farther apart.
Do you see it as a love story?
Yes.
But it's rather complicated, on some level a form of child abuse in the way that the sexual relationships between adults and teenagers usually are, long term effects of which are not good.
I'm mystified by criticism that says it's a film about pedophilia because if you do see it that way, as somebody who is exploited by an older woman, than the book clearly tells you what price you have to pay. If anything it's moralistic. It's about a man who can never get over a predatory relationship. Ann Roth, the costume designer, said something which really helped me throughout the writing of the screenplay which was this it was a terrible story because it's about someone for whom the most important thing in their life happens when they're 15. Then there is the metaphor or parallel of Germany's romance with Nazism as the most important thing in the lives of that generation from which they never escape.
The complexity of the story was welcome.
That's the thing that I had to do that was really hard. To keep it simple, to keep the action narrative incredibly simple but then to make its make its suggestiveness very very complicated.
How do you communicate the thoughts of the first person narrator without voiceover?
That's why they come to me. The films that I get asked to do rarely involve Jason Bourne leaping over the rooftops, sadly I'd be very happy to write Jason Bourne leaping over the rooftops. They always come to me with unfilmable books, that's my category. I did DAMAGE which was an interior monologue. I did THE HOURS which was an interior monologue. Now, first person narrative, interior dialogue so obviously what I'm required to do is to invent situations. I invent scenes, which dramatize things which novelists are able to just tell you and what they're thinking.
Thats the fun of it. Thats actually the part that's satisfying about it and very rightly and very shrewdly you say I don't resort to voiceover and I don't resort to voiceover because I think it's a cheat, except maybe in SUNSET BOULEVARD...except the narrator's telling you something thats extra to what is being shown then it maybe legitimate...but if you can show it why wouldn't you not.
You know that noise that an art house film makes which is a slightly lame, self-pitying noise, that comes from voice over. I also think it's just lazy because it's usually because the screenwriter hasn't bothered to find ways of showing what is being felt.
You're also dependent on actors in this kind of film.
That's why Ralph is always the first person to play these parts because he's so brilliant at giving you access to what he's thinking and feeling whereas in a way Kate's performance is based on the opposite of finally not giving you access to what she's thinking and feeling in other words there's something in Hanna which is like a rock inside her which she will not yield and she never finally yields to anybody and in a way you know the two things are opposite studies. One is opening himself to you, the other is closing herself off to you.
Opening himself in a way, but with Ralph we see that he's built a wall but he's showing us what's behind it.
But that's what he's brilliant at. I mean the minute we wrote the screenplay there wasn't any question that Ralph, because that's what he's brilliant at showing you what he's thinking and feeling without saying it.
Kate is fearless.
I think with that film LITTLE CHILDREN, that's where I saw that this woman really will do anything, I mean emotionally. I just thought that she was finding a freedom that was like proper big movie actor freedom. I think she's incredible.
What about the moral ambiguity?
Ambiguity is very much what the film is about in other words you know then the principle of the film from Stephen and my points of view was that we wouldn't tell the audience what to think and feel. The question of how you live in the shadow of a great crime whicthe previous generation committed a crime and you have to live with. There is no answer to that question, but that you have to find your way in the world and in some way come to terms with it.
One of those things we were determined to do was not to package the subject in any way but to leave it in it's complexity so the audience decides for themselves what to think.
So you had to make some choice about to leave in and what to take out and I noticed there's that point where she hits him with the belt.
No we didn't decide to take it out we just never got round to shoot it. We ran out of money. I would love to have it. It drove me nuts that we simply, we had a lot of production problems, as you know, casting, our producers deaths. But I regret it's not in the movie, it should be in the movie.
But of course it balances the film, in terms of, how much is foretold, how much is hinted at, how much do you understand, when do you understand, so that if you don't know the story.
Leaving that out makes her less obviously a villain.
That's what I mean about not oversimplifying. What Stephen has always said it's not trying to justify, it's not trying to forgive, it's not trying to say that these things weren't terrible. On the other hand, the monstrous things were not done by people who were all monsters. But there is in Holocaust fiction, but not in serious Holocaust writing because in all the serious Holocaust writing you see something much more profound but in Holocaust fiction there is easy assumption that the whole thing happened because of a lot of sneering people had a sadistic problem. Not so, a lot of ordinary people got caught up in something which, of course, they should have resisted but which they failed to resist. And if people feel so confident that never in that situation would they do what those people did, well they live in a more morally hygenic climate than I do.
We sort of live in a culture that leans toward simplistic melodrama, the Manichean dynamic of "good and evil".
It's a culture of pretending your innocent of all the feelings and all the deficiencies that all human beings have within them and pretending that does not help you to understand anything. And the book is very clear about trying to understand, not to escape blame not to excuse, not to forgive but to achieve that impossible balance between understanding, what happened is to be condemned, it also has to be understood. There's a wonderful bit in the book which I haven't got in the film which is where Michael Berg says everytime I felt I was understanding it I was failing to condemn it and everytime I was condemning it I was failing to understand it. That paradox is the paradox the film is facing.
So what are you working on now? I understand you have play that's a sort of political commentary?
It's Gestheme. I'm trying to talk about this dance of death which is happening in Britain now whereby politicians feel trapped and unable to express themselves and caught in a tiny box because everything they say or do is scrutinized. As soon as they say anything that is slightly different from what they've said before they're accused of inconsistency and it's a sort of blood sport in Britain at the moment to bring down politicians, to raise them up and then chop them down. And it's about the cycle in which politicians feel more and more trapped and do less and less and the press is more and more vindictive. That's very a simple gloss, it's much more complicated than that, and it's caused a great brouhaha.
Do you seem something similar with politics and the media in the U.S. similar?
I don't know enough to say. At the moment the media is in a new love affair, a honeymoon, but we all know what's going to happen. D-I-V-O-R-C-E in 5 years, and that cycle is incredibly depressing. It's depressing for both the politicians and the media because both sides feel that neither one can escape that cycle and I'm really writing about that cycle.
Thank you.
Thank you.
The Reader is currently in limited release, expanded on December 25, and then opening nationwide in the U.S. on January 9. 2009
