STEPHEN DALDRY talks about directing THE READER
Stephen Daldry, director of The Reader which is currently playing in theaters and about to open nationwide in the U.S. is known for intelligent and sensitive portrayals of enigmatic characters such as Nicole Kidman's Academy Award winning performance as Virginia Woolfe in The Hours. Daldry also introduced us to Billy Elliot, the dancing boy who moves from a town of mills to the Royal Ballet School. All of Daldry's work brings a studied and complex portrait of individuals and their unstated and veiled emotional struggles.
The Reader presented these challenges and more. First, stepping into the minefield that is WWII or Holocaust related dramatizations, which have become ubiquitous, yet as often adding nothing significant to our understanding of history and sometimes damaging it. Daldry says The Reader is "not really a story about the Holocaust" as much as it's a movie about postwar Germany and "about how 2nd and possibly 3rd generation Germans come to terms with what happened in the past...how they struggle to come to terms with it."
But even with a clear vision, so many obstacles presented themselves. Bernard Schlink's novel had been published to wide acclaim in 1995 and was not handed over to Daldry until 10 years later. Kate Winslet was Schlink and Daldry's first choice to play Hanna Schmitz, the main character, but she was unavailable initially, so Daldry turned to his good friend Nicole Kidman. She became pregnant which delayed filming and it was back to Winslet, who now had to rehearse with David Kross, who plays the young Michael Berg. Later in the production, Daldry's two closest producers, Anthony Minghella and Sidney Pollack both died, causing further turmoil. Delays meant moving from acclaimed cinematographer, Roger Deakins to Chris Menges, and it even meant that some scenes, such one in the from the book where Hanna strikes Michael, were not filmed.
Yet despite all this Daldry put together an exquisite and provocative film, that is intellectually, psychologically and emotionally complex. It is a work of art that honors and extends the life and reach of Schlink's superb novel. Schlink lent authenticity to the film by taking both Daldry and screenwriter David Hare to Heidelberg and showing him the places referred to in the novel that were a part of his own life, his home, his school, his walk.
But probably the central struggle in the making of the film had to do with the portrayal of Hanna Schmitz. "She's an ambiguous figure, how much she understands or has remorse was a big discussion between myself David Hare and Bernard Schlink." Daldry states that they wanted to "calibrate" their empathy or lack thereof towards the character. In the book everything is told from a first person point of view, that person being the adult Michael Berg. Filmically that could not be done without a ponderous voice-over, so there had to be points at which the audience walked in Hanna's shoes, as it were. Then, of course, she must be humanized, not all bad, perhaps even recognizable as someone we might have known if we had lived during that time, in that place. At the same time, there is no great recognition or apology, Daldry fearing, rightly, that it would be facile and inacurrate. As we know from Eichmann's testimony recorded and interpreted by Hannah Arendt, evil is banal as when functionaries are merely following orders, doing what they were told. It all adds up to a chilling, discomfiting and dramatically compelling portrait.
As for the motif of reading and "the glories of Western literature", Daldry isn't saying whether it brings Hanna to consciousness or not. He likes "the idea that people have their own way of coming at it." But given what she does throughout, how she uses books including her denouement, there isn't much romantic or hopeful about it.
The Reader is in limited release and opens nationwide in January.
