Director Michael Haneke Draps The White Ribbon

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Thursday, 14 January 2010 16:22

Written by Super User

In his elegant and obtuse way, Austrian director Michael Haneke expresses a dark and mysterious vision in deploying his odd period film, The White Ribbon. The White Ribbon won the Palme d'Or for best film at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.

Michael Haneke, June 21, 2007

March 23, 1942 (age 67) in Munich, Germany
Years active    1974 -

Michael Haneke (born March 23, 1942) is an Austrian filmmaker and writer best known for his bleak and disturbing style. His films often document problems and failures in modern society. Haneke has worked in television‚ theatre and cinema. He is also known for raising social issues in his work.

He was raised in the city of Wiener Neustadt, Austria and later studied psychology, philosophy and theatrical sciences at the University of Vienna, Austria.

He started as a playwright for the Südwestfunk (ARD) in 1967 and started working as a freelance director for TV and theater in 1970.

Besides being a filmmaker, Haneke also teaches directing at the Vienna Film Academy.

Q: You like to use the genre conventions of a thriller to advance your point with this film and “Caché” as well. Though you’re clearly not a genre filmmaker, it’s interesting how you use those xxxxx to advance your ends. How do you conceptualize that?

MH: The genre conventions are the glue I use to keep the audience in their seats. Suspense is a dramatic process that I use for that end.

Q: It’s almost like a Trojan horse that you use in order to keep the audience in rapture so that you can then advance your more philosophical, denser points?

MH: The highest rule in both cinema and on stage is not to bore your audience, and suspense is of course the best means of achieving that.

BB: Do people giving you their conclusions or solutions to who was committing the crime that surprised you or that you didn’t expect to hear that gave you answers to who committed them that were different than what you thought?

MH: Nothing surprises me. The explanations and how interesting they are depends on the person who’s offering them. Some of the interpretations are silly but others I find very interesting. However, I don’t want to give the appearance of approving them because that puts the stamp of approval on them and forces other people to see the film the same way.

Q: Do you know who committed each of the crimes [laughs]?

MH: I think so. As I said before, for every act, every crime that’s committed in the films, there is in fact a rational explanation but it’s up to the viewer to see them. In the same way, the explanation can’t be that simple as to be obvious, it has to be something hidden.

For dramatic reasons, to create this tension I try for each of the crimes to provide several different possible explanations. If the explanation is too unrealistic then it’s simply silly, counterproductive. Nothing in the film suggested all the crimes were necessarily committed by the same person.

Q: The film is structurally like a novel –- with its different characters, many different stories – were you inspired by any authors like Dostoevsky?

MH: That’s a very complimentary comparison. You’re absolutely right that I did choose a novelistic form; the explanation is that most of us know this period through novels that we’ve read about the time so it made it easier to identify with the story. That also lay behind the choice of using black and white, because we know this period from numerous black and white photographs that we’ve seen. That’s also behind the choice of using the narrator to present the film at the very beginning.

As you remember, the film starts with him saying, “I’m not sure how accurate the depiction of what I’m going to tell you is.” On all my films, I try to fuel the mistrust that the audience has for what I’m depicting; I never pretend that what I’m showing is an exact depiction of what actually took place. That’s the problem with historical films; they claim to, or seem to be pretending to depict things exactly as they were.

Q: You put your actors through a lot in your films, but in this one you had to work with children in very difficult situations. What was your process of preparing small children who can’t comprehend your themes or philosophical ideas of your films for these scenes?

MH: Of course a child doesn’t have to understand the entire film to shoot a scene. All this requires, especially with the youngest ones, is that you explain what the scene is about and that’s something they can identify with.

The youngest kids were too young to understand the story, too young even to read the script, so of course with them you don’t expect them to understand the whole film. Rather you only explain what each situation is about, and the scene itself was something that they could understand.

I’m not sure even when I’m working with adult actors if they all understand. In fact, it’s important not to give them too much information because then, if they do know too much, then what they deliver isn’t acting in the situation but they’re providing rather a meta-commentary on the situation itself. So you give them as little information as possible so they’re only confronting the questions that are raised in the scene.

Q: The children turn out to be quite evil and terrifying. Are you worried about the present generation of European children?

MH: Why should I be worried?  I think that every human being is capable of the worst; you just have to observe children who are playing in a sandbox to see that there’s really not much left of this idea of the innocent child.

Q: One of the things about a lot of your films is the use of landscape, the sense of place. If you think of this one. In The Time of the Wolf if you have us moving along the landscape, it becomes a character.

MH: In this film that’s certainly the case, and also in The Time of the Wolf. The landscape’s important because the film was shot, in a large extent, in exteriors. But the vast majority of my films are shot in interiors. Even in this film, if you were to put together the time of how much the scenes take place outside then you’d find that there are far more scenes that are shot in interiors. However, it’s true that in this case the landscape’s so beautiful that you notice it more.

BB: I was also meaning the sense of place, even in Funny Games plays a role. You locating it somewhere adds to that quality or the foreboding or the issues that are at hand.

MH: Everything has to contribute to the whole, whether it’s the costumes or the sound design, all of them are careful to be as specific as possible and as precise as possible. In this case it’s because so much of the film takes place outdoors, but I far prefer to work in studio because it’s far more comfortable.

Q: Your visuals recall Ingmar Bergman. Were you conscious of that?

MH: I’ve heard that before, I’ve also heard comparisons to Carl Theodor Dreyer, Jr., and Michael [his film?] mentioned previously that because of that he went back after finishing the film and looked at [what? 20:36]. He finds that the film is actually very different; the earlier films are much more theatrical in terms of lighting because of the technical means that were available at the time.

[That film 20:49] is extremely theatrical, both in terms of lighting and also in the way the actors are staged. Now, with current technical advances, it’s possible to use black and white in a realistic manner that’s so different from the works of both Bergman and Drier.

Q: Was there any conscious Bresson influence? I understand that Diary of a Country Priest was at the top of your [BFI?] poll in 2002. With the pastoral setting and the religions themes, was there any conscious Bresson influence in the film?

MH: There are many directors that I admire and it’s well known that Bresson’s a huge influence on me. However, it’s not so much that when I’m dealing with a specific film that I try and imagine how other people would do it, rather, I’m trying to discover my own approach to what this story requires. If you want me to mention a visual reference we used for this film I would cite the photographs of August Sanders, who was the German photographer of the period and who’s work influenced us in creating a look for the film.

The extreme sharpness of the images that you see on the screen was impossible to create up until a few years ago with the advent of digital post-production. Even though the film’s in black and white we had to shoot the film on color film because black and white isn’t sensitive enough to light to be able to use natural lighting and the candlelight and gas lamps that we use.

The problem there, however, is when you’re shooting with color film and with candlelight then it gives a pinkish shimmer to the faces, and when you filter out pink then you’re left with faces that are a little bit fuzzy, a little bit blurry, so we had to sharpen each face individually to get that very sharp outline and that was a huge amount of work.

Q: With this film your career as come full circle. You went from Austria to France to America and then to Germany. Where do you think this film represents as a point in your career?

MH: I never think about such questions, in fact the fact that I have shot the film now is merely a coincidence. I wrote the script 10 years ago and I wanted to make it even earlier than that; I wasn’t able to because I couldn’t get the financing. The success of Caché allowed me to put the budget together to make this film.

Guy: What were the challenges in depicting scenes that feature extreme violence?

MH: In fact there’s almost never any violence in my films that are depicted on screen. If you were to collate all the violence in all my films and put them end to end, you’d find that there’s far less violence that’s depicted than in the most banal tv thriller being broadcast.

The only reason that violence appears so powerful is because it’s not shown, because it’s not visible. I call on the spectator’s imagination to imagine what I’m alluding to, and the spectator’s imagination is far more powerful than any images you can provide them.

I remember reading a very amusing review of Benny’s Video that described exactly how Benny killed the girl in the film and went into great detail as to exactly what was done. It’s all the more striking because that murder doesn’t take place on screen, but that critic responded as if he’d seen it.

Q: You've returned to your natural language of German and if you feel there’s anything in terms of the language subtleties that you feel might be lost in translation that you may have not had a chance to do in something like “Caché” or “The Piano Teacher.”

MH: It’s true that you’re much more comfortable working in your mother tongue but not because your means of expression are limited. When you’re talking with actors, for example, they’re forced to listen to you and forced to listen while you’re explaining what you want. The problem is rather that it’s harder for you to follow what’s going on around you, and that’s a problem especially when you’re a control freak like I am, you just can’t follow conversations as easily.

You can think of the example that if you’re sitting in a restaurant and people are talking at the table next to you in your mother tongue that it’s easier for you to follow their conversation, but if you’re travelling in another country and people are talking, even if you speak that language, it’s impossible for you to understand. So it’s very unsettling for all this commotion to be happening around you and not to know exactly what’s going on.

Q: This German is a particular German though. You’re dealing with some particularities about religion, the fact that it’s set in this Protestant area and there was the issue between Protestantism and Catholicism in Germany. Can you talk a little bit about having those extra textures? The specific German language and the specific issues of religion and how they affected your thinking about the film?

MH: The Protestantism is present in the film because Germany is in the vast majority composed of Protestants, and also because the rigor, the severity, of the Protestant religion was better suited to the story that I was trying to tell.

BB: Regarding the period German, was there something special about the fact that they spoke this particular dialect from that area?

MH: We chose to shoot the film as little as possible in dialect for the simple reason that if we’d wanted to use the original dialect then we would have been limited to using actors who came from that region. So the film itself was shot pretty much in standard German, what’s called High German.

There’s one exception of that and that’s the foreign administrator; he speaks with a very strong Bavarian accent but in the film, and it’s explained, the midwife refers to him as the “Bavarian pig head.” He’s an actor I like very much and admire and I wanted to work with him, so I allowed myself to give that little bit of explanation to justify his presence in the film. The farmer himself though, in the film, whose wife dies, he’s actually an Austrian actor, and because his accent wasn’t right we looped him for the final mix.

Q: At one point didn't you try to cast Ulrich Mühe who was in Funny Games, Der Schloss and The Lives of Others but couldn’t use him because of his death. What character were thinking of casting him as?

MH: The Pastor.

Nobu: Why did you want to cast him as that?

MH: He’s simply my favorite actor; he was the lead actor in so many of my films.

Q: The film feels like it was originally much longer. Can we expect a three-hour cut or deleted scenes at some point?

MH: The original script would have been three and a half hours long. The film itself, everything you see, everything that I wrote, everything that was in the script, you now see on screen; there wasn’t anything that I wrote and did not shoot. That’s why it was impossible for me to finance the film for so long, because of it being a three and a half hour film, but finally I accepted reality and shortened it by an hour and that made it possible. Two and a half hours in the limit, in terms of length, that a film can be so the theater owners don’t have to reduce the number of screenings they have per day.

Q: When you organized the film, how did you map it out, and plan it in terms of knowing how far, or how long, or how you shortened it? How was it organized? Did you storyboard it?

MH: I always write all my films and prepare them as precisely as possible. Michael says he takes as long to storyboard as he does to shoot. In this case he storyboarded for about three months and then shot for the same amount of time.

Q: Was there any particular scene that was difficult to shoot even though you had storyboarded it?

MH: Yes, the first scene of the film, the opening scene where you see the midwife going to pick up her son from school, I originally intended to shoot that in a single take, a planned sequence. We were about to shoot in one day but because we were working with a child with Down Syndrome, he was difficult to direct and we couldn’t get that shot, so we broke it up into three different shots.

Q: You studied philosophy at university, so what role do philosophical concepts play in the creation of your films. When you begin working on a new project do you start from a philosophical concept that you’d like to communicate?

MH: It has nothing to do with the films that I make. I went into philosophy believing that the studies would provide me with the answers to the questions I was looking for. It was an important process but the end result was that I found out that I’ll never have answers to those questions. So the studies do not have a direct influence on my work.

Q: You previously said that the role of spectator is to think and reflect after the movie. What kind of audience are you targeting with this movie, if any?

MH: As broad an audience as possible.

Q: Do you think an audience has to have a certain level of maturity or age in order appreciate this movie?

MH: Obviously this is a story that isn’t suited for very young children, but other than that it’s not very hard to follow so I hope that the film will reach as broad an audience as possible, as many people will want to see it and that they will understand it. Every director, regardless of the kind of film that they make, hopes for the largest possible audience. Whether a film finds its audience or not depends to a large extent on marketing.

Q: Do you want to revisit some of the actors that you’ve worked with before?

MH: There are many actors I’d like to use again, and many I’ve used in numerous films. My next project will have Isabelle [Huppert] again in a leading role. As a director I’m the faithful sort, not only in terms of actors but also in terms of my crew; if you’re working with the same people over again then it gives you an advantage because they know what you want and you don’t have to start over from scratch.

Q: Was there connection between all the crimes, or did you intended that you didn’t necessarily want us to know that there was a connection?

MH: Maybe.

Q: Did you want us to act as our own detectives to see if there were clues?

MH: Yeah.

BB: Did you have clear conclusions or have you heard some really interesting ones that you never thought of?

MH: I think there’s a rational explanation for every act that takes place in the film but it’s certainly not up to me to point those out.

Q: A viewer of The White Ribbon is asked to be participate in the film asked to draw its own conclusion and grapple with the loose ends; this gives the audience kind of a dangerous power. What did you hope that the role of the spectator would be?

MH: The viewer should think about what he or she has seen.




Q: When you were developing the script, when did you decide you wanted it to be set at the advent of World War I -- why World War I? Was it a larger part of the script that you wanted to incorporate into this village and have it interact with the war itself?

MH: It was clear from the beginning to take this moment because 1914 was the break of the whole feudal traditions. So it was clear that it would be this time.



Nobu: 05:33 Do you find that  the influence of the Fascists is raising [something something]? And also [something] punishment.

MH: The film shows how people can be prepared to follow an ideology, and for that reason I used the best known example of an ideology, which is German Fascism. But I don’t think that the film is so much about German Fascism, rather it uses that social and historical context to explore the broader question of how people can be manipulated in such a way to follow an ideology and to want to grasp an ideology to save themselves.

The press kit that you received, Michael wants to point out that he never got a chance to edit the interview so he’d prefer…
Don’t use it.