Mr. Beaks Leafs Through THE READER With Stephen Daldry!

Stephen Daldry was already one of the theater world's most acclaimed directors when he made his feature filmmaking debut with BILLY ELLIOT. And while success in one medium is no guarantee of a career in the other, Daldry's deft handling of the working-class-boy-does-the-ballet drama - which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Director - guaranteed that he wouldn't go scurrying back to the boards beaten and bowed. Two years later, Daldry returned with THE HOURS, a critically acclaimed, heavily nominated adaptation of Michael Cunningham's bestselling MRS. DALLOWAY triptych. Though best remembered for deglamorizing Nicole Kidman to Oscar-winning effect, THE HOURS was most noteworthy (for theater aficionados at least) as Daldry's first cinematic collaboration with playwright David Hare, with whom he'd perpetrated the brilliant one man show, VIA DOLOROSA, three years earlier. Though Daldry has flirted with other projects from other screenwriters since then (primarily THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY by Michael Chabon), it's nice to see him circling back to Hare for THE READER, an unsentimental take on Bernhard Schlink's semi-autobiographical novel about one man's lifelong struggle with the banality of evil. As with THE HOURS, it is a film of narrative precision and emotionally acute performances: Hare has subtly restructured Schlink's story to obviate the need for voiceover (or other artless means of conveying exposition), while Kate Winslet has daringly humanized a creature who, for reasons that are never entirely clear, did her part to further the crime of the twentieth century. It is also, for a time, a strangely erotic picture - which is immensely troubling when said eroticism derives from a sexual relationship between a thirty-six-year-old woman and a fifteen-year-old boy. Given the many reports of behind-the-scenes turmoil (in short: producer Harvey Weinstein wanted the film released for 2008 awards consideration, while Winslet and producer Scott Rudin preferred a 2009 release), it's amazing that Daldry was able to emerge from the editing room with a thoughtful, finely wrought film. Undoubtedly, this is his finest work to date. Whereas THE HOURS bloodied your nose with blunt metaphor, THE READER resists easy interpretation; it's up to the viewer to pass judgment on Winslet's Hanna. But even if one chooses to hate her, there must be an understanding; the Holocaust may have been the creation of monsters, but it was enacted (and abetted) by an unquestioning citizenry. Though the achievement of THE READER is not easily explicated in a fifteen minutes, I think Daldry gets at some interesting issues in the below interview. I've also included the exchange regarding KAVALIER AND CLAY, which I excerpted earlier as its own item.

Mr. Beaks: It seems like you had a quick turnaround on this film. You wrapped this summer, correct?

Stephen Daldry: Yes.

Beaks: So you obviously had a tight editing period. Was this always meant to be a December release?

Daldry: Well, we started shooting last December, and we had a number of hiatuses. And the advantages of a hiatus is that you get to know the material very well. So, yes, we finished shooting this summer, but we already had the film in a certain shape before we had to do our last section of shooting. We were worried about bringing the film out too early - it was actually to be released a month prior to this - but we came to an arrangement whereby we got more resources and another month. So, in the end, it all turned out fine.

Beaks: When you're working a story that jumps around in time, it would seem that editing would be the most important part of the process.

Daldry: The advantage I had was David Hare, the screenwriter. I have a close relationship with him, and you tend to know where the weight of the film is going to be in each section and how it's going to jump around prior to shooting - let alone having time during the shooting to reanalyze and recalibrate that. So, in that sense, we were quite secure in the source material. Obviously, the editing is always going to be a complex rewriting process, but that's why David Hare is always involved.

Beaks: Because you two have that shorthand?

Daldry: Exactly.

Beaks: He's an amazing writer. When did you first start working with him? I know your professional relationship at least stretches back to VIA DOLOROSA.

Daldry: Back to my Royal Court days, actually. I've known David an awfully long time, and we're very close friends. We worked on STUFF HAPPENS together as well. I don't know what to say other than it's a very close collaboration.

Beaks: This material presents you with a tricky tonal balancing act. The first act is very erotically charged, but then you very gradually move into tragedy. How did you go about managing those tones?

Daldry: [Bernhard] Schlink gives you a very strong narrative drive. So trusting Mr. Schlink in terms of the narrative drive, we were set out to trust where he had placed certain twists and turns of that story. The hardest element to handle, I suppose, in terms of tonal shift - because we always knew there were three very different acts to the story; the love affair, the trial and the later life of Michael Berg - was the emotional tone. How much empathy, or no empathy, were you going to have for Hanna? How much were we going to invest in her? How much did we need to flip to her point of view, where did we need to flip to her point of view, and why? Because the book, of course, is just from Michael's perspective. But one of the great things in the book is that [Hanna] is ambiguous. And we were very keen to maintain that if we possibly could, so the character wasn't wrapped up in a way that allowed a very simple reaction. I think there should be a very complex, very ambiguous and very contradictory response to that character.

Beaks: Dramatizing the banality of evil... that's a concept that's hard enough for people to accept. How do you dramatize something that's so internalized for the character of Hanna.

Daldry: One of the great problems of postwar Germany was coming to terms with the idea that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were not necessarily monsters, were not necessarily bad apples, and were not necessarily "a few individuals". It was millions and millions of Germans who were involved at different levels and to different degrees. This story is the one woman's story, but there will be millions of other stories that led people to, if you like, the crisis of the twentieth century. The fault-line of the twentieth century. I think for Hanna, a whole series of peculiar and particular, but also small choices led her to find herself working at Auschwitz. And I think Mr. Schlink always wanted to find a - for want of a better way of describing it - moral illiteracy to the character which expressed his own feelings about that generation. I think for Mr. Schlink, the subject of the book is not really the Holocaust, but how his generation, the second generation, came to terms with what had happened. But more importantly, the people that they loved who were involved in what happened. So how do you deal with your lover? Or your parents and teachers? Your pastors? People who were either involved or let it happen or let the perpetrators thrive afterwards in their midst. And how do you live with that? Of course, German nearly tore itself apart in 1968, the generation after Mr. Schlink really fighting to establish a different sort of a country. For that generation of Germans, it's been a constant battle of how to come to terms with it.

Beaks: That's where the casting of Kate Winslet is so integral. She's projects the inner turmoil of this... unimaginable guilt so effortlessly. How do you draw that out? Do you have to draw that out?

Daldry: As an actress, you get someone who is a fantastic collaborator with great emotional intelligence. When you're dealing with a subject that is potentially quite controversial, you have to be very clear with what you're presenting and why you're presenting it at a particular moment. Kate was fantastic on that journey. But, obviously, not just as an amazing, transformative actress, but as a human being allowing herself to play a character, and allowing her, Hanna, to be a human being and not a monster - even though she did monstrous things.

Beaks: The perspective of the film does shift around a bit. How did you manage that without getting the focus too far off of Michael?

Daldry: (Pause) Um... we just did it. (Laughs) You know, the story could've been subtitled "Born Guilty". I think as a young man, a young adolescent learning to love for the first time and not having any understanding of what his country had been through, and then the clash of the country understanding what the country had been through and understanding his love affair... that takes him the rest of his life. We were always going to be jumping through different times in his life, and I suppose that's one of the reasons we didn't want to tell it linearly. Start off with Michael battling with what to do now, and the decision to tell his daughter or not. And wanting to find an equivalence to Mr. Schlink having to write the book, so the book is an act of confession - which is also a release and a level of understanding about what he went through. We didn't want to have a writer start tapping away at a typewriter, but... the act of telling. And knowing the act of telling was essential part of the process for the reconciliation - which was terribly important for him. Also, when you keep meeting the young lad when he's sixteen or nineteen or twenty at law school, you keep understanding that there is an older self that is still coming to terms with the reckoning of what the past was for him.

Beaks: Did you shoot the film so that these pieces could move around?

Daldry: No, we always knew where we were going. But that's the advantage of having David Hare. And that's what we did on THE HOURS. We tend to have a decent map before we go into it.

Beaks: I wanted to briefly touch on one project that's been of great interest to our readers: THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & KLAY. You were attached to direct a few years ago.

Stephen Daldry: Indeed.

Beaks: It was one of those films that seemed to constantly be in development. Then, all of a sudden, it was on the brink of production. And then... nothing. Michael Chabon has said the stall-out was a result of studio politics. What do you think? Is it something you could see yourself directing at some point?

Daldry: Oh, absolutely. It would be great. I sincerely hope Paramount picks it up at some point.

Beaks: So you're still technically "attached"?

Daldry: I think that's up to them, but as far as I'm concerned, I am.

Beaks: Structurally, that's another story [like THE READER] that poses challenges in terms of do you tell it linearly or non-linearly.

Daldry: Also, how much you use the comic books and how much you don't. How much is animated? Do you use animation? How do you use animation in comic books? What's the difference between the two? That was one of our big discussions. I spent a lot of time with different animators exploring ways to animate comic books.

Beaks: Well, it could be that the book is finally ready to be filmed. We're finally getting to the first major deconstructive work with WATCHMEN. Perhaps KAVALIER & KLAY has benefitted from the delay. Now the comic book film is further along, and people are more familiar with the history of the medium and its conventions.

Daldry: Maybe you're right. It's a good time to remind people who wrote them and who created them and why they were created. And how central they were to a generation of immigrants coming to the United States from Europe and what the superhero was originally speaking to and speaking about.

Beaks: Do you see yourself doing some theater anytime soon?

Daldry: I hope so! I always love doing theater. I've always been a theater director primarily. It's what I've been doing all my life. It feels like my natural territory.

Beaks: Do you think your creative relationship with David Hare will continue past THE READER?

Daldry: Absolutely. It's always great working with David.

Beaks: Are there certain themes you two are jointly interested in, or is he just the kind of writer who can handle anything?

Daldry: There are a few other writers that are similar to this that I work with, but it would be irresponsible for me not to work with David on anything he wanted to do.

Beaks: Or Caryl Churchill?

Daldry: Yes, she's the other one. You agree to do those shows sight unseen.

THE READER opens in limited release on December 10th. It will expand on December 26th. Faithfully submitted, Mr. Beaks