Niklas Frank Discusses His Life And My Nazi Legacy

Read the story online here http://www.thejc.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-features/150258/we-still-live-fathers-evil-legacy

David Leon Talks About Making His Feature-Directoring Debut With 'Orthodox'

Stephen Graham as Benjamin

 As an actor, David Leon has appeared in films including Oliver Stone's Alexander and Guy Ritchie's RocknRolla. His hard-hitting new film Orthodox, starring Stephen Graham as a boxing Orthodox Jew, marks his feature-directing debut.  

Getting people to open their wallets for a first feature is never easy, says actor-turned filmmaker David Leon, whose provocative debut, Orthodox, is playing in the UK Jewish Film Festival. “You know no one is going to give you that opportunity on a silver plate. So you have to find innovative and dynamic ways of working around the system."

He started by making a short version, as “a kind of pilot”, to give potential investors an idea of what the feature-length movie would look and feel like. Also called Orthodox, it starred Stephen Graham (This is England, Broadwalk Empire) as an Orthodox Jew called Benjamin who's alienated himself from his community by becoming a boxer. The short was self-contained and existed in its own right. However, by making the material part of the longer version, Leon, who had gained experience in front of the camera in movies such as Guy Ritchie's RocknRolla and Oliver Stone's Alexander, only needed to raise funding for a 70 minute, rather than a 90 minute, feature. 

Whilst it was a clever (and ultimately successful) strategy, getting a feature off the ground was still difficult. The film's Orthodox Jewish backdrop could be regarded as somewhat niche, but Leon always saw this as a strength. 

“It was my intention that it would be niche,” he says. “I think when you make a micro-budget film like this, you have a responsibility to deal with subject matter that is niche, and probably in an unconventional way, because it is the only thing that allows your story to stand out, quite often."

 Leon was born in Newcastle Upon Tyne and is Jewish on his father's side. His religious upbringing was “moderate”, with neither parent forcing their different point of view on him. “As a consequence, it made me much more inquisitive,” he says. “And as I grew older, I became more intrigued by the conflicts that presented. And there certainly was conflict when my mother and father got together.” 

He describes himself as “half Jewish”, an identification which is “a very personal thing”, he says. He knows that to the Orthodox community he is in no senses Jewish, and this informed some of the feelings surrounding Benjamin's situation in the film. A proud and dedicated family man, he longs to be fully acccepted by his community, but the choices he has made in his life – including marrying a secular woman who converted – and his inability to meet the standards of observance demanded of him, have landed him between worlds. 

His troubles begin when he defies his father and takes up boxing, following a violent anti-Semitic attack. Leon witnessed such an assault on a Hassidic boy by “secular kids” in Stamford Hill. The fact that it happened in liberal, cosmopolitan London made it seem all the more “archaic and barbaric”, he says. 

“What was interesting was that that boy was literally wearing his beliefs on his sleeve. We all believe in various things but we don't all dress in a way that projects that for the world to see, and that's an incredibly brave thing. I wondered whether [the attack] would make him more intent on his values, or whether it could make him question them.” 

That Benjamin's father effectively cuts his son off for (reluctantly) pursuing boxing as a response to his attack, seems extreme.

Leon, though, spent 18 months in Orthodox communities in Newcastle, Gateshead, and north London doing background research for the short and feature, and says he learned that “the idea of one man inflicting pain upon another was frowned upon in the context of the Jewish faith.”

Stephen Graham (Right)

He found this fascinating. In the late 1800s/early 1900s, Jewish men used boxing as way to escape from being part of an underclass, and to assimilate and confront anti-Semitism. The sport turned them into heroes. But times change and Saul's reaction has to be seen in the wider context of the challenges now facing a community whose cultural cohesion, Leon seems to be suggesting, is under threat from modernity. 

“The intention was never to make an observation on the religion,” he explains. “It was much more about the culture. And not just about Jewish culture but about 21^st century culture and the demands that are placed on people within the Orthodox Jewish community as a consequence.”

The community is not monolithic but composed of individuals. And while they may all live under the same umbrella of shared beliefs, “some will believe in certain things more extremely than others”, says Leon. “I think what that does, in this day and age where we have access to information at the touch of a button, particularly to kids and those that have less strength of character, or those that are more inquisitive, is present a real conflict that I think the Orthodox Jewish community has never had before.” 

Benjamin represents this as a character and, in some respects, in the choice of actor playing him. Stephen Graham ties on Tefillin and wears a kippah like he's been doing it all of his life, but he's not Jewish. In fact the question of whether a Jew should play the role never came up, says Leon. 

“In many ways the character is as much secular as he is Jewish, because of the way he chooses to live his life. So there was something interesting, as a film-maker, in taking somebody who is not Jewish and introducing them to that world, because here is a man who to all intents and purposes is not living his life as a Jewish man; he is living his life as a kind of a halfway house.” 

Benjamin's predicament – inspired by someone Leon met – allows the film to reveal some of the different sides of the community, which is portrayed honestly, seemingly accurately, and without sentimentality. It offers people love and security, but can be tough on those who don't observe its practices.

“That was my experience,” says Leon. “The community can be a very safe environment and somewhere people feel very close, and there was a real sense of people looking after one another. But it's fair to say the demands placed on the individual are very restrictive and very unrelenting. And I think if you don't toe the line, you can be cast aside and ostracised.”

Many do meet the demands, of course. For Leon, as a film-maker, however, “those who fall through the cracks and fall by the wayside” are more interesting. 

That said, he stresses that he came away from the process of making Orthodox having encountered a “beautiful feeling of being willing to forgive. There is an unremitting attitude towards forgiveness, and I think that is something that the Jewish faith, particularly, upholds.”

An edited version of this story appeared in The Jewish Chronicle, November 13, 2015 

Joshua Oppenheimer on The Look of Silence

THE FOLLOW-UP to Joshua Oppenheimer’s extraordinary film The Act of Killing shows Indonesia is far from healed, he tells Stephen Applebaum

Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence returns to the slaughter of around a million supposed Communists in Indonesia in 1965, explored in his disturbing Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing. Whereas that film concentrated on the perpetrators, Oppenheimer’s focus this time is a family who lost a member in the purge, and have suffered in silence ever since.

This is the documentary he always wanted to make. However, when he first started speaking to survivors in the plantation belt outside Medan, in North Sumatra, the workers were warned off by threats from the army. Unable to co-operate themselves, they encouraged Oppenheimer to meet the killers instead.

These men lived without fear. Hailed as heroic defenders of the nation – a narrative, Oppenheimer shows in The Look of Silence, still being taught in schools – they had no shame and, in encounter after encounter, boastfully recounted their grisly atrocities to him in horrifying detail.

Out of these encounters came The Act of Killing, which helped to foster a new openness in the way the mainstream media in Indonesia talked about the events of 1965 and their legacy. The government, though, resisted until the Oscar nomination gave them no choice.

“They said, ‘Look, we understand the killings were a crime against humanity and we will deal with them in our own time,’” says Oppenheimer. “Now the government’s said it’s wrong, how long can they continue to teach history the way we see them do it in The Look of Silence?”

That history is explicitly challenged in the new film by Adi, an optometrist in his mid-forties, whose brother, Ramli, was murdered by a death squad in North Sumatra, two years before he was born.

Oppenheimer first heard about Ramli from the plantation workers. His name “was virtually synonymous with the whole massacre”, he says, because despite being badly wounded, Ramli managed to escape his captors and return to his parents’ house. Tragically, he was recaptured and left for dead in a creek, from where he was heard screaming for help. “That led passers-by to gather. Eventually the death squad came back and killed him. They left his body in the plantation. So his death had witnesses and in that sense was irrefutable.”

Adi was keenly interested in what Oppenheimer was trying to do. “Over the seven years of filming with the perpetrators, 2003-2010, he would watch as much as there was time for,” says the director. “He would visit us in our house in Medan to view rushes from The Act of Killing, and he would watch it with a mixture of devastation, curiosity, anger and distress.”

Oppenheimer always knew there was another film to be made. But also that he’d have to move fast and shoot it before The Act of Killing was released, because afterwards it would be too dangerous for him to return to Indonesia. So, after he’d finished editing The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer set about filming meetings between Adi and some of the perpetrators he’d filmed years earlier. These included Inong Sungai, one of Ramli’s killers, who talks about drinking the blood of his victims to stave off madness, and Amir Siahaan, the commander who oversaw the death squads where the murder took place.

Concerned the men might tip each other off, Oppenheimer worked quickly, filming one confrontation per day. He’d then spend the evenings between meetings with Anwar Congo, the greying killer from The Act of Killing. “I believed that if perpetrators were speaking to each other, Anwar would be told first because everybody knew he had been working with me for years. I know Anwar well enough that I would be able to tell if something was wrong, and we could stop the confrontations then and there."

He let Adi decide whether to reveal his connection to Ramli. Most important was that the perpetrators voluntarily told Adi what they’d told him in 2003/2004. “He had viewed my old footage, so he could’ve confronted them saying, ‘I saw what you said to Joshua,’ but the perpetrators would feel trapped. It was important they know that they told Adi what they did.”

Adi doesn’t want revenge but to see some sign of remorse. Instead, his dignified challenges to the official history and taboo-breaking accusations of murder are met with anger, defensiveness and threats.

In his last confrontation, with the widow of one of Ramli’s killers and her sons, Adi’s quest for some kind of closure is snuffed out as he is stonewalled by the woman’s denials about her husband’s guilt, despite Oppenheimer’s filmed proof and a book the killer wrote about his gruesome activities.

“That’s an important scene,” says Oppenheimer, “because it’s saying to viewers who want a comfortable ending, ‘No, there is a mess lurking under the surface.’ It exposes the tension and fear that cuts across Indonesian society, the abyss of an unspeakable past that divides neighbour from neighbour.”

These tensions and divisions were evident when the film opened in Indonesia. Unlike the release of The Act of Killing, which had begun with closed events, the first screenings of The Look of Silence were sponsored by government bodies (The Jakarta Arts Council and the National Human Rights Commission) and open to the public. However, as the film spread, there was a backlash from the army.

“They organised thugs to threaten to attack the screenings,” says Oppenheimer, “and then used this as an excuse to demand screenings be cancelled. Only when university students in Yogyakarta defied police orders to cancel the screenings, barricading themselves into their campus, did this intimidation end.”

He is clear about what this means: “This is evidence of the army and police’s opposition to addressing the past. This opposition is shared among all who have enriched themselves through corruption and plunder, because they fear that as the truth of their plunder is exposed, people will question the legitimacy of their spoils.”

After shooting The Look of Silence, Adi and his wife and children had to “move thousands of kilometres to protect their safety,” says Oppenheimer, showing that despite some progress in the public discourse, “little has changed”.

The Look of Silence ends messily, but it is truthful. And Oppenheimer hopes that by witnessing – or more to the point, feeling – the truth, viewers will have their eyes, hearts and minds opened further.

“I am confident any human being watching is likely to be touched by Adi and his parents’ experience of 50 years of fear and silence, and even viewers from the army, or from perpetrators’ families, will feel in their bodies how torn the social fabric is, and how urgently needed are truth, reconciliation, and some form of justice and healing.”

Article appeared in The Scotsman June 8, 2015

Related:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/tribunal-opens-hearings-into-mass-killings-in-indonesia/2015/11/10/bc865780-878f-11e5-bd91-d385b244482f_story.html

Philippe Sands Discusses His Extraordinary Fathers & Sons Documentary, My Nazi Legacy

'My quest to understand the unapologetic Nazis'

By Stephen Applebaum, November 5, 2015

Left to right: Horst von Wachter, Philippe Sands, Niklas Frank

When Philippe Sands was growing up, the Holocaust loomed silently over his world like an unwanted visitor who won't leave. “I've lived with it my whole life,” says the eminent barrister, when we meet to discuss his role in the thought-provoking new documentary, My Nazi Legacy.

“I grew up in a household in which we didn't have German things. My brother and I knew there were things that had happened, but like many families we never talked about it.”

Sands' mother was born in Vienna and survived the war as a “hidden child” in France. She claims to remember nothing before 1945. His grandfather, who was born in Lviv in western Ukraine, never spoke about the war or where he came from. Sands later discovered that he was the only survivor in a family of 80.

“So there was no talking about it, but it's there. And it's a big issue. And it informs and it affects you, and I'm sure it affected the career choices that I made.”

Last year, when filming the documentary with director David Evans, Sands found himself standing in a waterlogged field in Ukraine where the remains of most of his grandfather's family lie - among 3,500 people murdered, with a single bullet to the head, on March 25th, 1943 - to this day.

With him were Horst von Wachter and Niklas Frank, the sons of high-ranking Nazis Otto von Wachter and Hans Frank, whose implementation of the Final Solution wiped out the remaining Jewish population of Lviv and its surroundings.

The trio had already visited a former parliamentary chamber where Hans gave a speech in which he praised Otto for making many of Lviv's Jews disappear; and the imposing disused synagogue where Sands' family worshipped which the Nazis set on fire. Their next stop brought him face to face with current Ukrainian Nazi sympathisers at a chilling commemoration ceremony for the Waffen-SS Galicia Division – the first SS unit to enlist foreign fighters – created by Otto.

The men's lives converged after Sands became fascinated with Frank's father - “He was highly intelligent, highly educated; how could someone take the direction he had taken?” - while researching a book due for publication next year, East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. He wrote to Niklas after reading his acclaimed book about his father Hans, In the Shadow of the Reich, and they met in Hamburg, where they talked for hours. While Niklas bitterly distanced himself - psychologically, emotionally, morally – from Hans and his crimes, he told Sands: “You should meet my friend Horst. They're not all like me.”

Left to right: von Wachter, Sands, Frank

 

In the film, Niklas takes out a photograph of his father after he'd been hanged for mass murder at Nuremberg. (He keeps it as proof to himself that he really is dead, but also to remind Germans about what can happen when civil society breaks down.) Horst also shows Sands photographs, but the mood is different. Horst feels no anger towards his father, just love and devotion. It was the system that was wrong, he says, absolving Otto of any responsibility. Unlike Hans Frank, von Wachter was concealed with help from the Vatican, and died before he could be brought to justice. If he had gone to Nuremberg, he would have been acquitted, Horst insists. “Who would speak against him?” he asks Sands, rhetorically. “Only the Jews.”

When Sands visited Horst for the first time, the Austrian and his wife were living in three ground-floor rooms of their crumbling Gormenghast-like schloss. “It was bitterly cold, -2, -3 inside, and he's broke,” says Sands. Horst kept his father's library on the third floor, and the photograph albums he produced astonished and fascinated the lawyer. “You open them and there's Goering and Goebbels and Himmler and 'AH' [Adolf Hitler], and incredible images.”

One day, Horst took a black book down off a shelf. “It was Mein Kampf and it was inscribed by his mother - she'd bought it as an engagement present - 'For our struggle.' So he lives with it and he'll say: 'That's interesting. I didn't know that I had that.'”

Neither Horst nor Niklas hid anything from the film-makers, and even agreed to open up their dialogue to the public in a live discussion at the Purcell Room in London last year, which forms part of the documentary. “We thought there would be a huge explosion, that they wouldn't be talking to each other anymore, and that would be the end of the film,” reveals Sands.

Instead, the men respectfully held their positions without any major fireworks. And it wasn't until near the end of the debate, when Horst proudly revealed that his father is venerated in Ukraine, that the filmmakers knew where to go next. 

“After the Purcell Room, Horst said, 'Well, if we're going to go to the Ukraine, let's go on commemoration weekend and I'll introduce you to all these lovely people.'”

During the trip, Sands becomes increasingly impatient with Horst's refusal to recognise his father's guilt. In a key scene, he presents him with a document proving Otto's involvement in mass murder and is rebuffed. “His reaction, let's just say, irritates me,” says Sands, “and I lose my rag.” He admits he's “uncomfortable” with the scene. As a barrister you're “trained: don't show your emotion, stay cool, be balanced.” But, he adds, “I'm a lawyer and I'm a human being and there are points where one can no longer be excluded with the other.”

Although he never succeeded in eliciting an acknowledgement from Horst, it was important to him to keep trying because “there's a concern that in failing to acknowledge you effectively take ownership of what has happened, and that really bothered me.”

Their last destination, where newly unearthed remains of fallen Waffen SS soldiers were being buried in a ceremony attended by men in Nazi uniforms, is the most troubling. Throughout the film there is a strong sense of the past pressing against and informing the present, and nowhere was this more explicit. “My big theme in this is if you suppress stuff, it will come back,” says Sands. “It doesn't go away. It's my own family story of my grandfather and mum not wanting to talk about these things and nevertheless it comes back. And I think that you see that in the fields in Ukraine.”

The commemoration ceremony was “as shocking a day as I have ever had,” he says. Horst, on the other hand, couldn't have been happier. The inner conflict he sometimes seems to be experiencing up until that point appears too resolve itself as his belief in his father's decency is vindicated by Ukrainian military veterans and younger swastika-wearing attendees. Niklas is disgusted. He tells Sands he believes Horst is a full-blown Nazi and vows to break off contact with him.

“I'm pretty careful who I throw that label at,” says Sands, who regards both men as victims, “and I say in the film I don't think he's a Nazi . . . But he's an apologist, and that's really bad.”

Does he think, at a time when antisemitism is increasing, that the film is a warning?

“Yes, the film is an expression of my own greater consciousness of the seriousness of issues that are out there for the Jewish community but also for other communities. Xenophobia and racism are on the rise, and antisemitism is part of that.

“I think David and I felt very strongly that those scenes in the Ukraine were incredibly important. But I think the heart of it is this sense that it's showing that what happened then is very alive today. Things that are deeply buried don't disappear and we have to be constantly vigilant.”

A slightly edited version of this story appeared in The Jewish Chronicle, November 6th, 2015

Come back soon for a full transcript of my fascinating interview with Philippe Sands 

Al Pacino: Manglehorn

Screen legend Al Pacino talks Manglehorn, fatherhood, feeling young at heart and the physical realities of ageing. 

David Gordon Green, the writer-director of Manglehorn, said he wanted to make a projection of you. Is the film about you? 

“I don't think he got into my private life, if that's what you mean. I think he has his own, I won't call them issues, but he has a torn kind of relationship with his dad and his family. I guess that moves him and he wants to talk about it. That's all I can think. I don't have that.” 

You're a dad like Manglehorn. Has having kids changed you? 

“I think it's affected my desire to work. As a matter of fact, I preferred being with them for a period of time. And I still do. However, I would say that I'm drawn to the work when I feel that need.” 

Your kids live in LA, don't they? 

“Yeah and I have been there for a long time. I moved there from New York because their mother lives there, and I rent a house and see them 50% of the time. So I've been more or less a hands on dad. I'm not necessarily an advocate for that, but I see that my being there has helped.” 

Your dad moved out when you were two? 

“I never really knew my dad. I had a grandmother and grandfather and my mother, and so that gave a dynamic to the family life that I always enjoyed. I have fond memories of that. Feeling like I was a part of something. But the kids grew up in this split home, which they got used to early on.” 

You're ageing well and still really seem to be enjoying life and work. 

“I am young in spirit and having children sort of supports that because I just love it. And I knew I would. My first child was a little different because she wasn't planned. Turned out to be great, though.” 

You recently played a Jagger-like rock star in Danny Collins. Did you ever think you'd both still be grooving in your 70s? 

“I like being compared to Mick Jagger. You said the right thing! Let's have a drink afterwards.” 

Do you ever worry about ageing? 

“I try not to think about it because you're not in control of it. Things happen and best thing is to just keep going. One morning I get up and I can't move my neck. The next morning I get up and I'm just fine. It's sort of like the drinking days. So you learn to take aspirin before you go to sleep when you've had a night's drinking. I recommend it. But I don't drink any more, and haven't for decades.” 

You started to really drink when you became famous after The Godfather. Was it a new reality that you found hard adjusting to? 

“Naturally. I also think it was sort of a different world then. Almost 59 years ago, believe it or not. But the tone was different in the media, in the world, in terms of this whole idea of fame. It wasn't a part of our vocabulary as it is today. Now it's a more natural thing. It's what people aspire to.” 

But now you're an icon and can presumably do whatever you want. That must be great? 

“Well that is an extremely complicated idea when you think about it. I don't think about it much, but it's there. It's informed a lot of my life. So you get the great perks from it, but there's a dark side to it too. So you work with the balance as you go along. As somebody once said, it's a double-edged sword. And you're very grateful and you have what a lot of people want, and you also have a knowledge they don't have about it.” 

How do you adjust to everyone having preconceptions about you? 

“Hey, that's okay. Because what happens is I try to maintain an anonymity. That's one of the reasons early on why I wasn't so accessible to the press, because I always thought that knowing the character I am playing is more important to everything. To reality. To sanity. You know, I could have gone into a life of repertory somewhere, like other actors have, but I was lucky to be in these projects that took me this way. And so you say, 'The play is the thing.'” 

What has helped you keep your feet on the ground?

 “My kids. When I come home from any outing, whether it's a movie or some film festival stuff, I open the door and walk in and it's not about you any more. And there's a real relief to that. At first you're a little stunned like, 'Hey, wait a minute?!' Then you get back to reality.” 

Do you ever look back at your career, at films like The Godfather, Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, and just think, 'Wow!'? 

“Well I don't have a real memory of the 70s. But things were happening, right?” 

Clearly. 

“But no, I don't look back and I would imagine that might be a blessing. I thank God for it. But you know what I like? I like when I meet someone and they say to me, 'Gee, I met you 10 years ago,' and then go, 'You were so nice to me.' I think, 'Oh, wow!' It's like seeing a biography of yourself and you say, 'Oh, I'm not a bad guy.'” 

Manglehorn is released on DVD in the UK on November 2

Al Pacino - "Go With The Glow"

Erik Greenberg Anjou - Deli Man

http://www.thejc.com/lifestyle/food/136707/tradition-bites-back
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From The Vault: Thomas Vinterberg - The Hunt

Climate of fear: Thomas Vinterberg has returned to form, revisiting child abuse, the subject of his breakthrough film

When Thomas Vinterberg achieved instant success with Festen, at Cannes in 1998, it was both a blessing and a curse. 

Praised for its energy, stripped-down aesthetic, powerful acting, and serious, hard-hitting child abuse theme, the film was obviously the work of an exciting new talent, and everyone wanted to see what the 28-year-old Dane would do next. 

But Vinterberg, who co-founded the Dogme movement with Lars von Trier, had a problem. Everything about Dogme – the emphasis on actors, the use of hand-held cameras, the communal nature of the filmmaking – was such a reflection of him, personally and creatively, that the young director felt he’d reached the end of a road with Festen. Even as he basked in the adulation, he worried about the future.

“It was the ultimate film for me at that time and I couldn’t come further,” he recalls when we meet at the London Film Festival. “I felt like I was finished. So it brought me into a new era of my life where I had to start over, and that was very painful… I was floating. I didn’t know where to go.”

He followed Festen with It’s All About Love, a poetic sci-fi romance that turned Dogme on its head. Many critics found it puzzling and half-baked, but Vinterberg, while acknowledging some flaws, says: “For me, it’s still the most important film I did… and still something I am very proud of.”

Other movies, including an entertaining von Trier collaboration, Dear Wendy, about a young man and his love for his gun, ensued, but none escaped the shadow of his powerful breakthrough.

Artistically he was adrift. “Kubrick died around the same time I did Festen, and I saw von Trier a lot, and they were both re-inventing their form every time they made a movie. I thought I should be doing the same thing and I found out that’s not where my thing is. I’m occupied with human fragility, and for me the highest goal is to create characters that stand up. So I’m the opposite of what for some years I thought I was.”

This realisation led to his triumphant return to the Cannes competition in May this year, with The Hunt. Vinterberg’s second take on child abuse, the film is a searing reminder of why people got so excited about him in the first place.

The film’s London premiere coincided with the eruption of the Jimmy Savile scandal. It’s a weird time to be talking about a movie in which a mild-mannered kindergarten teacher, memorably played by a cast-against-type Mads Mikkelsen, in a small Danish town, finds himself at the centre of a witch hunt after his best friend’s five-year-old daughter falsely accuses him of sexual abuse.

Meanwhile, the BBC has been gnawing at its own innards, Gary Glitter, Freddie Starr and Dave Lee Travis have been arrested over allegations of sexual misconduct. And in the ensuing controversy, Lord McAlpine has been wrongly identified as a paedophile, while his accuser, Steve Messham – who was abused by someone – has been backed into making a humiliating and painful public apology.

Some in the UK might wonder whether The Hunt is the right film for now, while others will hold the opposite view. Either way, real-life events have added a queasy layer of timeliness to the viewing experience.

Vinterberg says the film has its roots in case files handed to him by a psychiatrist in the wake of Festen. “They showed me another kind of victim, which is, in a sense, children being victims of their own lies. Unfortunately, in the case of men or women being innocently accused, the child again is the most vulnerable victim, because they grow up with an illusion that something bad happened to them.

“Because of the lie, this huge theatre appears in front of them: mothers crying. Fathers going to prison. People are fighting. They’re going to the gynaecologist. They’re being interrogated. They end up believing it’s true – it’s what they call ‘added memory’ – so, of course, they have sexual problems, and, you know, they’re victimised.”

Mikkelsen’s character is also a victim, of course, and the film makes clear that a false accusation of paedophilia leaves a stain that is difficult if not impossible to erase completely. There will always be suspicion.

The fearful world of The Hunt contrasts dramatically with Vinterberg’s own upbringing in a commune in the 1970s, where, he laughs, he was “surrounded by genitals”. “I was this high,” he says, indicating groin height, “so it 
was right in front of me. In 
my garden, sometimes even in the kitchen, there would be a big bush coming by. It 
was fine, it was not problematic. And when grown-ups wanted to show love to the children, they touched them, non-sexually. It was love. But we lost all that, and there’s a reason why: we know now that a lot of children suffer from abuse… So they have reasons to be fearful. And, for me, that’s really sad.”

Apparently, Mikkelsen’s character’s experience has reminded some people of von Trier’s treatment in Cannes last year, when the arch provocateur was declared persona non grata after making some ill-advised wisecracks about being a Nazi. It was “an absurd, almost unreal situation”, Vinterberg says, but not entirely unexpected. “Lars has always been pushing boundaries, he’s always been teasing the grown-ups.” He smiles. “I think he may have come to some kind of peace, finally. Although I’m not sure he agrees.”

It is possible that with The Hunt, and the rediscovery of his filmmaking mojo, Vinterberg has slain some of his own dragons after being “humbled over the last 14 years”.

Now that people are excited again, will he seek work outside his home again? The question of where he wants to make films is on his mind daily, he says.

“Because Denmark is very small and claustrophobic and clean, somehow when I make these very small movies in a kindergarten, in bad weather, Denmark is where people pay attention to it. But I’m also being offered films from abroad. It’s work for hire, and I’m attracted to it, but at the same time I find it less important.”

Whatever he chooses to do, The Hunt should mean that at least people will be watching his next move with interest.

Originally published in The Scotsman,  25 November 2012

Nancy Spielberg: Above and Beyond

Nancy Spielberg on her documentary Above and Beyond and growing up Jewish in Arizona

E. Randol Schoenberg: Woman in Gold

Gemma Arterton Interview

Gemma Arterton plays a decapitated head in Marjane Satrapi's The Voices, due out on Friday. In 2010, I met her to discuss The Disappearance of Alice Creed. The following article was published in The Scotsman.

Published Date: 24 April 2010
 
SOME people, Gemma Arterton says, mistake her confidence for arrogance. "I'm never saying, 'I'm amazing!'" she says. "I just have strong opinions." Today, at a private members' club in London, the 24-year-old who has gone from a council estate in Gravesend to a James Bond movie and two Hollywood blockbusters, is bracingly self-assured and outspoken – but not arrogant. To me, she just seems honest.

Even so, a hint of self-congratulation would be forgivable. When we met in Cannes in 2007, Arterton was just one of several newcomers touting the first film in the re-booted St Trinian's franchise, and still at drama school. Fast forward to 2010 and she has already scored one box-office hit with Clash of the Titans since the turn of the new decade, while the soon-to-be-released Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, in which she plays Princess Tamina, is expected to be even bigger. Arterton has no plans to become Queen of the Hollywood Blockbuster, however, and in between has delivered a curveball in the shape of The Disappearance of Alice Creed.

The antithesis of a megabucks SFX juggernaut, writer/director J Blakeson's feature debut is a down-and-dirty psychological thriller, with Arterton cast as the eponymous kidnap victim, locked in a battle of wits with her captors (Eddie Marsan and Martin Compston). She spends much of the film hooded, gagged, and handcuffed to a bed, her face streaked with tears and black mascara; she is stripped naked at one point, and suffers a series of indignities. It is the kind of role that many actresses would run a mile to avoid, and even Arterton admits to being scared by Blakeson's "tight" script when she read it. Rather than putting her off, though, her fear inspired her. 

"Why do something monotonous that doesn't challenge you, unless you're just Jennifer Aniston and you don't mind that sort of lifestyle?" she says. "I couldn't do this any more if it was just about getting another paycheck. This one was scary, and I didn't know if I could achieve what was needed." Even the audition, where she realised she'd be expected to be in tears within minutes, was "petrifying". "But I did it and then I was like, 'Well, I can do it.' That's how you grow and that's how you learn. In real life there is nudity. In real life there is violence, there is sex. If we didn't have these in movies, we would just have Clash of the Titans and Prince of Persia, and there would be one type of genre only and it would be kids' movies." 

The resulting film is closer to the kind of movies she likes to watch than anything else on her CV. "I don't have anything against blockbusters, but I generally just don't go to see that sort of thing." Apparently, European extremists such as Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier – auteurs who make demands on their actors as well as their audiences – are more her taste. And the fact that they're not everyone's cup of tea just seems to add to their appeal, because "you can't live your life being the darling and pleasing everybody". 

The Disappearance of Alice Creed is in the Haneke/von Trier ballpark, and Arterton's participation in it, at a point when the 24-year-old RADA alumna is on the verge of major stardom, feels like a statement of intent: a way of defining herself as a serious, risk-taking actress, rather than just being known as the "totty", as she's often described her roles to date, in big-budget behemoths. 

"Yeah," she says, "because when I get fat and have children, and get wrinkly, I don't want to not have work because I have lost my appeal. You see it happen in Hollywood with your starlets: their momentum goes and then they're gone. I want to be in it for the rest of my life." She claims that Hollywood stardom does not interest her. "And especially now that I've had a taste of it, it's not why I got into this in the first place. I'm happy to work in Europe and make films like this and do theatre (she recently made her West End debut in The Little Dog Laughed]. I'm happy to do that now. But I think it was important for me to 'get one in'," she says, referring to Alice Creed, "and I'm so lucky that it's come out between (Clash of the Titans and Prince of Persia], because, hopefully, it will show people that I can do other things – and I'm not afraid." 

Importantly, Alice Creed was not about glamour or looking beautiful. For once, Arterton says, she didn't have to worry about her skin or her hair, or having to go to the gym – all "tiring and boring". "I let myself relax and it was all about the acting. For me, it can really be frustrating when you're just seen as the totty" – there's that word again – "and I know that I've always taken acting so seriously." Inside she feels like a character actress, but she is self-aware enough to realise that it is her choices that have "put myself in that (other] category. So I have to prove my salt. And now is the time." 

Arterton is something of a paradox. A self-described oddball, she recently played up to her sexy image by doing a photo/video shoot for GQ, but at the same time is prepared to talk about being born with a "crumpled ear" and an extra finger on each hand ("I find imperfections brilliant," she laughs). 

Her unease at being labelled a bombshell is summed up by the way she handles the red carpet. It is not Gemma we see posing at premieres, but "Gemma Arterton the Actress". "In real life I'm not actressy," she says. "I am not considered in my manner. I am not graceful. I am geeky and I joke and I am boisterous and I am silly. It's not starlet-y, and it doesn't fit into Hollywood, it really doesn't." Therefore she has learned to adopt a persona for her public appearances, she says, approaching them as another kind of acting challenge. "I have to do that, because otherwise I will fall over or say something offensive or I will be silly." 

Her unease is compounded by her distaste for what she sees as the misplaced idolisation of actresses, "when really we should idolise people because they're talented or they're intelligent, or they're doing something notable, rather than the fact that they've got a great arse or they look really good in Dolce&Gabbana. That, to me, is really boring, and is something that has been put on to me, and I really don't feel comfortable with it."

Listening to Arterton talk, it comes as no surprise to learn that she grew up surrounded by powerful female role models, or that she considers herself a feminist. Her parents divorced when she was five, and she and her younger sister, Hannah, were raised by their mother. "I really admire anyone that can do that," she says, admitting that she and her sibling could be difficult, "because we were very opinionated as well. She worked her arse off and very selflessly brought us up. My aunt as well, she's a real feminist, so I've had strong women around me all my life. Of course you then grow into one yourself." 

Her father is still a presence in her life, and has apparently always had a liberal attitude to her work. He watches everything she does, but at the time of our interview had yet to see The Disappearance of Alice Creed. Arterton suspects it won't be easy for him. "When you see your daughter getting beaten and stripped naked it's going to have an affect. But I do warn people." Will her mother see it? "I don't think she will be able to watch it. But I do think about that, sometimes, when I watch films. Like in Monster's Ball, that very explicit sex scene, I think, 'God, did Halle Berry's mum and dad watch this? What do they think?' But, you know, if we didn't do it I think films would be incomplete. It's not like every single film needs to have some sort of nudity in it. But, you know, people get naked."

Whatever anyone thinks of The Disappearance of Alice Creed, there is no denying that it is a bold move by Gemma Arterton, who next month will return to Cannes as the star of Stephen Frears' eagerly anticipated new film, Tamara Drewe. Whether there will be more blockbusters down the line remains to be seen. For now, though, her sights are set elsewhere. "I want to do things that scare me and challenge me. I want to feel I am working as an actress and not just turning up and prancing around."

Murder Most Mysterious

Atom Egoyan explores the case of the West Memphis Three in Devil's Knot

Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan didn't know what he was letting himself in for when he decided to make a dramatised account of the West Memphis Three case.

It had been explored from different angles before - most notably in a trio of acclaimed documentaries by co-directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, and another by Amy J. Berg - but Egoyan felt the story of the latter-day "Salem witch hunt" in a small, deeply religious neighbourhood known as Robin Hood Hills in West Memphis, Arkansas, following the horrific discovery of the bodies of three missing eight-year-old boys, bore retelling.

The director was, therefore, surprised when his film based on Mara Leveritt's book, Devil's Knot, and starring Colin Firth and Reese Witherspoon, was panned by North American critics after its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last September. Speaking a few weeks later at the Zurich Film Festival, he's still angry about what happened in Canada, if somewhat buoyed by the film's warmer reception in Europe.

 So what went wrong?

"There were a few critics that were prepared to engage with the film and to take it seriously, but for the most part there was this kind of dismissal because they already knew the story," he says.
"There is a kind of elitism where they don't understand that this is a very powerful story that deserves re-investigation, and that there are a lot of people who might go and see a film with Colin Firth and Reese Witherspoon who would not see a documentary. So when they say, 'Watch the documentaries', I don't think that's really responsible."

For Egoyan, the tale of the West Memphis Three isn't just another murder story, but "one of the most extraordinary pieces of mythology in contemporary American culture".
Three teenagers - Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley Jnr and Jason Baldwin - were convicted of the killings. They were released after 18 years in jail - a rare deal negotiated with the state of Arkansas set them free, though they remain convicted felons - and to this day, no one knows for sure what happened on May 5, 1993.

Egoyan's film feels haunted by the young victims - Stevie Branch, Christopher Byers and Michael Moore - whom, he agrees, have sometimes been squeezed out of the frame by the tight focus put on the plight of the supposed killers. The boys' fate, though, is the mysterious heart of the story: they went out to play in the woods together, and no one - except for their murderer(s) - saw them alive again.

"Something happened that was so unimaginable," says Egoyan. "These three boys went into this forest and the next day their naked, mutilated bodies are found, tied with their shoelaces, submerged in the water, with absolutely no evidence. No DNA. No blood. No footprints. No branches moved. It's eerie, and it is supernatural. It is the stuff of mythology. You couldn't create that."

The subsequent police investigation, arrests and trials (Misskelley was tried separately because he had confessed) took place amid a "Satanic panic", making Echols - a young Goth interested in witchcraft and heavy metal music, and, significantly, the only one of the three suspects to be sentenced to death - a particularly easy target for a police force and community desperate for answers.

"He was an outsider and didn't understand - or he wasn't coached properly - that one of his roles playing a defendant is to feel innocent," says Egoyan. "He never did. It's quite odd. He maintained his outsider role and actually seemed to revel in it."

In the film, Ron Lax (Firth), a private investigator working for the defence, and Pam Hobbs (Witherspoon), the mother of Stevie Branch, both initially believe that all of the suspects are guilty. However, their certainty becomes eroded by doubt, and they are left despairingly adrift in a sea of confusion. "The real question I wanted to deal with in this film is the notion of powerlessness," Egoyan says.

"It's a very different point of view to a documentary. A documentary is about pointing a finger and saying, 'Go after this person'. I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in this idea of bringing the viewer into a place where you want something to resolve, but it doesn't. And that is ultimately the Devil's Knot. The more you try to undo it, the tighter it gets."

Though he didn't write the screenplay, and Devil's Knot is his first feature based on a true story, it fits neatly into an oeuvre that frequently includes characters seeking the truth, or who construct false realities to cope with their lives, or are wrestling with questions of guilt and responsibility.

Asked why these themes and ideas keep recurring in his work, the filmmaker says that it comes partly from growing up as the son of Armenians, 1.5 million of whom were killed by the Ottoman government in the Armenian genocide of 1915, although Turkey still refuses to recognise the event.

"You're dealing with the fact that there's this cataclysmic historic event which you're taught is an absolute reality, but which is denied," says Egoyan, who explored the genocide and its legacy in his controversial 2002 film, Ararat. "So you're often in these bizarre conversations and that becomes a part of your formation - I mean to this day - I suppose. So there is that political aspect of it, which is just part of one's upbringing."

On a more personal level, he says he had a "strange experience" where the "young woman I was completely obsessed with, for like five years, during my teen years, was being abused by her father at the same time. I understood that there was something creepy and unusual about it, but she was in denial and, certainly at that time, no one was talking about those issues," the filmmaker says.

"So I think the combination of those two things in my life - the one which is kind of a grand, familial communal tale and this personal one - have had a very strong effect on me," he surmises.

Egoyan isn't optimistic about the real killers ever being brought to book. Pam Hobbs once suggested that Terry Hobbs, her ex-husband and Stevie's stepfather - a man with a history of violence and a strand of whose hair was found in the shoelace binding Michael Moore - might have been involved in the murders. She was on set almost every day and Egoyan says that they had what were often "odd conversations".

"The film doesn't really address this but [Terry] is still in her life. And it's the oddest relationship," the director says.

"He is a dark, malevolent man. But just because he abused his daughter, just because he had violent outbursts, just because he had this dark personality, it doesn't mean he could have done it.

"This is the thing about the crime. The more you look into it, the more impossible it is."

Originally published in The South China Morning Post, May 27, 2014