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White Ribbon

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : An undercurrent of malice runs through a German village as a series of misfortunes plagues its citizens in the year prior to the outbreak of World War I.

Opened December 30, 2009

Runtime:2 hr. 24 min.

Interview with director Michael Haneke

 

The White Ribbon

(Q): The viewer of “The White Ribbon” is asked to be an active participant in the film; kind of a part of the community. We’re asked to draw our own conclusions and grapple with the lose ends and this gives the audience kind of a dangerous power. What did you hope that the role of the spectator would be?

(Michael Haneke): The viewer should think about what he or she has seen.

(Q): When you were developing the script, at what point did you decide that you wanted World War I to be the elephant in the room just sitting at the back? And why World War I? Was it ever a larger part of the script that you wanted to incorporate into this village and have it interact with the war itself?

(Michael Haneke): 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.

(Q): One of the things we were talking about after we saw the film was whether there was a connection between all the crimes, or was it intended that you didn’t necessarily want us to know that there was a connection? 

(Michael Haneke): Maybe.

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

(Michael Haneke): Yeah.

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

(Michael Haneke): 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): Can you talk a bit about the ways in which you like to use the genre conventions of a thriller to advance your point? It seems like with this film and with “Caché” especially, you’re clearly not a genre filmmaker, but it’s interesting the way in which you use those to advance your own ends. Could you talk about the way in which you conceptualize that?

(Michael Haneke): 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): So you’d say 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?

(Michael Haneke): 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.

(Q): Do you find that under the certain influence of the Fascism plays in the school system or ritual punishment in the household?

(Michael Haneke): 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.

(Q): I don’t know if you had intended to answer the other part of my question but the other gentleman jumped in. The second part was, did you get people giving you 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?

(Michael Haneke): 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): Did you know who committed each of the crimes?

(Michael Haneke): 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): Structurally the film sort of reminds me of a novel – there are many different characters, many different stories – were you inspired by any particular authors like Dostoevsky? 

(Michael Haneke): 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): In all your films you work with actors and you put them through a lot, but in this one you especially have to work with children in very very difficult situations. Can you talk about your process for preparing small children who can’t even comprehend the themes of philosophical ideas of your films for these difficult scenes?

(Michael Haneke): 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, they were too young even to read the script, so with them of course you don’t expect them to understand the whole film but 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 in the movie turn out to be quite evil and terrorizing. Are you in any way worried about the present generation of European children?

(Michael Haneke): Why should I be worried?

(Q): Any children. Children.

(Michael Haneke): 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): 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.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.

(Michael Haneke): 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): Some of the visual approach are kind of reminds me of Ingmar Bergman. Were you conscious of that?

(Michael Haneke): I’ve heard that before, I’ve also heard comparisons to Andrei Tarkovsky, and Michael mentioned previously that because of that he went back after finishing the film and looked at "Offret"(In English Title, "The Sacrifice").
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. Andrei 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 Andrei.

(Q): It feels like 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?

(Michael Haneke): 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.

(Q): Can you talk about the challenges for you in depicting scenes that feature extreme physical violence?

(Michael Haneke): 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): Can you talk about returning 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.”

(Michael Haneke): 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. And also, 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?

(Michael Haneke): 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.

(Q): And regarding the period German, was there something special about the fact that they spoke, and they spoke a particular dialect I think in that area, right?

(Michael Haneke): 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): I heard that you at one point tried to cast the guy from "The Lives of Others," Ulrich M?he and because of his death you couldn’t cast him. What was the role you were thinking of using him in?

(Michael Haneke): The Pastor.

(Q): Why did you want to cast him as that?

(Michael Haneke): He’s simply my favorite actor; he was the lead actor in so many of my films.

(Q): The film feels like it probably was originally much longer. Can we maybe expect a three hour cut of the film or deleted scenes at some point?

(Michael Haneke): 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, how did you plan it in terms of knowing how far, how long, and how you shortened it? Can you talk about how it was organized? Did you storyboard it?

(Michael Haneke): 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 scene in particular that was very difficult to shoot even though you had storyboarded it?

(Michael Haneke): 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): I understand that you studied philosophy at university, and I was wondering what role philosophical concepts play for you in the creation of your films. Perhaps when you begin working on a new project you start from a philosophical concept that you’d like to communicate?

(Michael Haneke): 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 said previously that the role of spectator is to think and reflect after the movie. What kind of audience were you targeting with this movie, if any?

(Michael Haneke): As broad an audience as possible.

(Q): Do you believe an audience, in order for the movie to have the correct effect, has to have a certain level of maturity or an age or anything?

(Michael Haneke): 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?

(Michael Haneke): There are many actors I’d like to use again, and many I’ve used in numerous films. My next project with have Isabelle [who] 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. 

End.