David Hare Deigns To Discuss THE READER With Mr. Beaks!

David Hare was a mere thirty years old when he put the theater world on notice with PLENTY, a lacerating drama in which a heroine of the Second World War takes out her frustrations on the New Europe by tearing down the Foreign Service career of her generally decent husband. So it is perhaps fitting that, thirty years later, Hare has turned his harshly unsentimental mind to the plight of another complicated woman whose deep discontent with her war record results in the harming of an innocent. This time out, the mental tumult is easier to understand. The wantonly destructive central figure in THE READER, Hare's adaptation of Bernhard Schilnk's bestselling novel, is Hanna Schmitz, a middle-aged streetcar ticket taker whose profound unhappiness over what she did during World War II has thrust her into a reckless affair with a fifteen-year-old boy. Normally, the mental anguish that would compel someone to commit such a distasteful act would be difficult to pinpoint; however, when one takes into account that Hanna not only served on the German side of the critical conflict of the twentieth century, but also "followed orders" at Auschwitz, her capacity for wrongdoing sort of flies off the charts. Whereas Hare acutely understood the dissatisfaction of postwar England, he had to knock himself out of his comfort zone to consider what will hopefully remain unthinkable for the rest of human history. He also had to contend with a character whose distress goes largely unarticulated. Unlike PLENTY's Susan Traherne, Hanna isn't one to speak her mind. To do so would be to confess, and what she has done is, in human terms, patently unforgivable. Yet it's forgiveness that's sought by her former paramour/victim, Michael - and it's the degree to which that forgiveness can reasonably be granted that imbues THE READER with such unexpected power. To completely write this film off as prestige bait is a mistake; a sober-minded, evenhanded pondering of the banality of evil is not the kind of thing that sweeps the Oscars. Though the incorrigible theater geek in me wanted to pester Hare about the cinematic prospects of SKYLIGHT or RACING DEMON (and whether he's worried that his recent work, like STUFF HAPPENS and THE VERTICAL HOUR, might not date all that well), I mostly stuck to THE READER. Mostly. Actually, if I've any regrets, it's that I didn't discuss the state of THE CORRECTIONS (which Hare adapted several years ago for his friend and frequent collaborator, Stephen Daldry). Fifteen minute interviews are brutal like that. Interestingly/awesomely, my recording of the interview begins with Hare rumbling "Burl Ives."

Mr. Beaks: In the press notes, you say you've an aversion to "those dreary old voiceovers" when adapting a novel. You need to find a way to get rid of a lot of exposition without resorting to something so artless. It seems like non-linear storytelling is a good way to avoid this.

David Hare: This is pretty linear. I do flashback, it's true. I do whilst in the context of the moment. You know, the book exists as an interior monologue. In the book, a man has held a secret for the whole of his life. And how does he finally reveal the secret? By writing the book. So the first problem I was faced with is that there is no film equivalent for that. You don't believe that Michael Berg made a film in order to tell the secret of his life. That doesn't make sense. So there was the whole question of why does the book exist at all. It's clear why the book exists: it's for him to finally reveal his secret. So that's why I had to create the framework for the film, where he's going to tell his daughter and she's going to be the first person he tells. And so from that flowed the whole way of telling the story. The story is pretty linear by contemporary standards. It's pretty classical.

Beaks: Well, by MEMENTO standards.

Hare: Or by the standards of THE HOURS. And having done THE HOURS, I basically didn't want once again to throw bits of mosaic up in the air. I felt we'd done that.

Beaks: But choosing where to enter the story, if you're not going to proceed in strict chronological order, aren't there still pitfalls and cliches to avoid with that type of structure?

Hare: What you're trying to do is control knowledge. In other words, you're trying to control at what point the audience learns she's a war criminal, and at what point are they going to understand she's illiterate. So what you're really doing is all the time trying to leak out information in a way which hints at more profound things going on, but which doesn't tell you. The same is true of foretelling her suicide. You want these events-- they're what Stephen and I call "badoing moments", right? "Badoing moments" are like that moment in JAWS when the camera countertracks, and Roy Scheider's sitting there on the beach and he's like, "Oh, my god!" Badoing! Now the problem with THE READER is it's full of "Badoing" moments. "Oh, my god, she's a war criminal!" "Oh, my god, she's illiterate!" And I think it's how we prepare for those moments, and how you know it's coming, and how you don't make those moments seem melodramatic. Because they're not melodramatic in the book. They're completely structured into the book. So it was structuring knowledge into the movie and foretelling things without making them too obvious.

Beaks: You know, one of fascinting things about this film is that the first third is so erotically charged. The nature of that relationship is troubling just in terms of the years separating them. That's a really difficult dynamic, because the heat adds so much to the film, and yet there's a crime being casually committed there.

Hare: Which crime?

Beaks: The crime of a thirty-six-year-old woman have sex with a fifteen-year-old.

Hare: Yeah.

Beaks: And it is, in a perverse way, a lesser crime than those committed by Hanna at Auschwitz.

Hare: That's right. And that's why that line comes up in the last scene with Lena [Olin]. "Did she ever admit what she did to you?" And he says, "She did much worse to other people."

Beaks: But when I wrote about the film last week, I got feedback from readers who argued that if the film had been about an older man having sex with a teenage girl, It would've been somehow more objectionable.

Hare: More objectionable! Are they saying that approvingly or disapprovingly?

Beaks: Disapprovingly.

Hare: But I don't understand what the problem is. If you do take it... and we can discuss whether in my view one has any choice about how love appears and in what form it appears. That's another question. But even if you did say the film was about an older woman taking advantage of a younger man - which to a degree it is - then the film is very moralistic about saying that the damage she does to him lives for the rest of his life. So I don't understand how anyone can take objection to the film on that grounds; it's almost exemplary in saying, "Look, just because a woman takes advantage of a young man at that stage, he suffers damage from which he can't escape for the rest of his life." So I don't understand what the objection is.

Beaks: I tend to agree with you, but it is something that's come up that should probably be addressed.

Hare: I've heard that thing about people saying, "Oh, well, it's about the exploitation of a young man." Yes, he gets in deep with her in a way that is deeper than he expects. And she turns out not to be what he thinks she is. And, yes, she's exploiting him because he's young. Yes, she does him horrible damage. So I don't see that there's any possible objection. What are we saying? That we mustn't portray that? If you get into a situation in which you say bad things in life cannot be portrayed, then the performance of the play MACBETH becomes impossible because it's about regicide, and regicide is a bad thing. And the James Bond films, where people are killed indiscriminately, there are far more morally objectionable things in those films than in THE READER. Because you are really saying that: that only exemplary human behavior can be shown in movies. Well, we're virtually to Disney in the 1940s, aren't we?

Beaks: You could argue that those are objectionable, too.

Hare: Yes! Even DUMBO! To show kids a movie in which an elephant loses its mother at the age of five? That is exploiting children in the most horrendous way, by that argument. I'm always shocked when I watch DUMBO. I always do go, "My god, isn't this too powerful to show to children?" Showing a film about an older elephant dying, it's a big risk!

Beaks: BAMBI has scarred more children than any film ever made.

Hare: BAMBI! Reducing art to sociology, which is really what that line of argument is doing, is not very intelligent, is it?

Beaks: It's just looking for things to get offended about.

Hare: But the eroticism... you know, we were very, very keen not to suggest that the eroticism had anything to do with the Nazism. I think the film is absolutely brilliant in the way it avoids that suggestion. Because there has been a ghastly genre of movie called "Nazi erotica" - as if there's something sexy about Nazis! Now that's something Stephen and I both find profoundly offensive. And I think Stephen's walked a brilliant line in avoiding any mixup in the movie - because it doesn't exist in the book. As if sexuality and Nazism are somehow interlinked. They're not at all, nor are they in the movie.

Beaks: The way the character of Hanna is dealing with the weight of her actions in World War II, it struck me that she might be something of a counterpoint to the character of Susan in PLENTY. (Hare laughs) And maybe I'm struggling to find parallels here. But was that ever something that ever occurred to you?

Hare: No, what occurred to me was that I was born in 1947, and the most significant event of my life, The Second World War, happened before I was born. So the reason I was drawn to the book was that: it exactly paralleled my own experience. Michael Berg has to deal with the great German crime, which happened before he was born. But that generation produced the Baader Meinhof gang, it produced all the turbulence in Germany in the 1960s, it produced Fassbinder, it produced Wim Wenders... it produced a deeply disturbed generation of people who were basically brought up on a diet of lies. It's like Bernhard Schlink says: "I began to understand that everything I was being told by my teachers and my parents was a lie. And I wanted to come to terms with what they had done before I was born." So, yeah, there's a parallel in the sense that I have written a lot about the impact of the Second World War on people's lives. But never from the German point of view.

Beaks: Is that more challenging then?

Hare: Very much. Most of all, you feel a responsibility to get it right. Stephen had spent some time as a young man in Germany; he spent time on Air Force bases in Germany when he was young because of his family. I visited Germany, but we went to immense lengths which would not insult the experience of people who knew more about this than we did. For instance, the reconstructions of the trials - if you care about these things - are in a documentary way completely faultless. There were people in the room when we were filming who had been at the original trials, and who were authenticating absolutely everything in those trials. We did feel a responsibility because Schlink wanted the film to be made in English, not German. He wanted English-speaking filmmakers to make the film. So we did feel a great obligation to get it right.

Beaks: You mention a "diet of lies". That's something Americans were being fed for the last eight years. And the parallels get a little troubling when you think that no one was standing up to say this was wrong--

Hare: Well, a few people stood up and said, "This is wrong!" But those of us who did stand up were extremely unpopular. Retrospectively, those of us who protested the war at the time had all sorts of rubbish thrown at us. However, unlike Germans or Jews before the Second World War, we did not in any way endanger ourselves by doing so. We did so with perfect freedom. That's the difference. Whereas in the 1930s, you're talking about a situation which is like what you have today in Zimbabwe. In Zimbabwe today, you cannot say there is a cholera outbreak. If you say there's a cholera outbreak, the government will come beat you up. And, yet, there is a cholera outbreak. That's a level of lying way beyond anything we've endured about Iraq.

Beaks: Have you thought about writing a play about that? Your plays of late have been dealing directly with the political discourse.

Hare: I think that the reason I wanted to do this film, and the reason Schlink wanted it done in English, was that he wanted it to apply to all situations in which there's been a great ethnic crime, and in which what we now call "truth in reconciliation" is known. He didn't want it to be specific to Germany in the Second World War. He both wanted to introduce to people in cultures who may not know much about European twentieth-century history. That's why I put in those contextualizing scenes where Bruno Ganz explains mid-twentieth century German history. Whereas people in Germany who read [THE READER] knew it inside and out. But Schlink says it's really about truth in reconciliation. In Rwanda now, people are being made, whose families were killed by one tribe, to sit down with their own killers and begin the process of coming to terms with those killers. It's unbelievable what's going on in Rwanda in terms of trying to bring about truth in reconciliation. This film is both about truth in reconciliation, and about the limits of what's possible through truth in reconciliation.

Beaks: I spoke with Stephen Daldry last week, and he said that you were working up another one man show, and that this one would be about the war.

Hare: On "the wall".Beaks: (Still not hearing the "l") On "the war". The war in Iraq, I guess.

Hare: No, it's not true. What I'm doing is a little reading which he's going to direct. It's about the city of Berlin.

Beaks: Oh, it's about the wall!

Hare: Exactly.(Laughs) It's an English mispronunciation. I apologize. But it's about the fact that Berlin has been a part of my life for thirty years. It's a city I've been to a lot. I went there a lot when it was divided, and I'm now going in the days when it's open. It is, I hope, an amusing monologue about Berlin.

Beaks: Well, that eliminates my next question about how this is so different from VIA DOLOROSA.

Hare: Yes, this is like that. This is very like that. It's just... VIA DOLOROSA was meant to go on for six performances in the Theater Upstairs, instead of which I ended up doing it for years all over the world. With this, we're trying to do the same thing, but we're going to start off quietly. I'm going to read it. I'm not even going to learn it. Maybe because I'm too lazy. And Stephen, having done THE READER and the [stage production of] BILLY ELLIOT has, I think, had enough of public exposure. (Laughs) He wants to go do something quietly.

The interview ended here. As I ventured home, hundreds of follow-up questions materialized. Hopefully, there will be another time. THE READER is currently out in limited release. It will expand on December 26th. Faithfully submitted, Mr. Beaks