A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID HARE
Dianne Brooks
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
Amer-ica
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 An-
thony 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 incredi-
bly 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 ef-fects 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
some-
thing 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 ac-
tion 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 inte-rior
monologue. Now, first person narrative, interior dialogue so obviously what
I'm re-
quired to do is to invent situations. I invent scenes, which dramatize things
which novel-
ists 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
tell-ing 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
perform-ance
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 whic-
the previous generation committed a crime and you have to live with. There is
no an-
swer 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
no-ticed
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 produc-
tion 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
ter-rible. 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
Holo-
caust 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
under-standing,
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
po-litical
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
any-thing
that is slightly different from what they've said before they're accused of
inconsis-tency
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
vin-dictive.
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
honey-
moon, but we all know what's going to happen. D-I-V-O-R-C-E in 5 years, and
that cy-
cle is incredibly depressing. It's depressing for both the politicians and the
media be-
cause 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
open-ing
nationwide in the U.S. on January 9. 2009
© Writemovies 2008