Interview: “The Book Thief”

Posted on November 15, 2013 at 8:00 am

Following an extraordinary evening presenting the film at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, with survivors in the audience, some of the people behind “The Book Thief” sat down for an interview. Director Brian Percival, who introduced the film, joined stars Sophie Nélisse, who plays Liesel, the title character, Geoffrey Rush, who plays Hans, her foster father, and the young Australian author of the book that inspired the film, Markus Zusak.

I began by asking Zusak about the book’s title. Is Liesel really a thief? “I remember reviews at some point said, ‘She hardly even steals any books!’ I added up one all of the books listed in the novel and there were about seventeen, mostly titles I made up, and I counted how many she actually stole. I decided she had stolen enough and it was a good title. It felt right. The Book Borrower? It wouldn’t work as well. It’s also different in the book when you make all those coincidences come together. But the book had a reason for the mayor’s wife to keep the window of her library open. She wanted it cold so she could go into that room to suffer and think about her son who died. In the Portuguese version, it’s called The Little Girl Who Stole the Books, and that sounds so poetic in that language.”

I asked Sophie Nélisse if it was hard to play a character who does not talk very much, especially in the beginning of the film. “My mom says that my face can say everything, so if I’m bored you can see it clearly on my forehead. I think it came naturally but it was wonderful working with Brian , who always made me feel very special. If I did a scene badly, sometimes he would go, ‘Oh, can you maybe try this? Go a bit this way?’ He would give me maybe five corrections but would always end by saying, ‘But it was great’ or ‘It was perfect.’ He wouldn’t say, ‘Do this,’ or ‘I want Liesel to be like that.’ He would let me do it my own way and then he would guide me.” She has to look much older at the end of the movie — she said that makeup emphasized her cheekbones, and Percival added that they put a ramp and had her in heels to make her taller next to the other actors. “The Alan Ladd phenomenon,” joked Rush, referring to the notoriously short actor who had to stand on a box for his kissing scenes.

Rush said that for his character, playing the accordion was like a monologue on stage. “You read a script and look at all those elements — what does this character do, what do the other characters do to him and say about him, build up a portrait of what the personality will be. It was such a vibrant and wonderful dimension of the character. If it had been a violin it would have been a completely different experience. I loved the sound of the wheezing bellows. They were like lungs. I finally learned the fingering but my tutor would always say, ‘It’s the breathing and the flow.’ That’s a great image for the internal rhythm of Hans. There were seven pieces we did. One didn’t make it into the film, but it was a great way to segue the encroaching hostilities — I was playing somewhat facetiously outside the room when the children were singing the anti-Semitic song that had been taught to them. But the moments of ‘The Blue Danube’ in the bunker. You can see he’s brought it in to protect one of the dearest things in his life and it’s his way of keeping calm, being familiar, and it’s a classic German/Austrian piece. The piece he plays later is very well known to a German audience, an old freedom song, an anti-Nazi song. You’d like to think that’s his way of rehabilitation. He will get over the shell-shock and having been injured. There will be some regrowth in the character. I could express something about the character that was completely abstract. I would not say this film had magical realism, but as in the novel there were happy accidents that made it filmic. You can’t hear music in the book.”

Percival spoke about talking to the survivors following the screening. He acknowledged the difficulty of handling such sensitive material respectfully and was encouraged by the “incredibly positive” reaction of the people who had lived through the Holocaust, and touched that they wanted to share their stories with him, stories that included some of the kindness of German citizens like that shown by Hans in the film as well as the atrocities inflicted by others. “People actually sold out their friends and their neighbors in some cases because they coveted their property. I can’t think of much lower than that. I can understand if you fear for your own life or were brainwashed into believing something wrong. But to do it for material gain — that is heartbreaking. One of the guys I spoke to had been protected by farmers who hid him for two or three years right under the nose of the Nazi occupation of France, putting their own lives in peril, taking terrible risks, a noble act.” Zusek said, as he had at the movie, it was that which inspired him to write the book, the contrast between the best and worst of human behavior that the Holocaust brought out in people.

The Book Thief

Posted on November 14, 2013 at 6:00 pm

The title character in “The Book Thief” is Liesel (Sophie Nélisse), a little girl in pre-WWII Germany. We first see her on a train with her mother and dying younger brother. The children were both going to be delivered to foster parents but Liesel and her mother stop along the way to bury her brother. As the gravedigger leans over, a book falls out of his pocket. Liesel picks it up.

Her new parents are the frosty Rosa (Emily Watson) and the gentle Hans (Geoffrey Rush). At first, Liesel is so traumatized she cannot speak. But Hans hears her softly singing Brahms’ lullabye to herself at night and coaxes her into talking to him by playing the song on his accordion. When he finds that she cannot read, he uses her book to teach her. She tells him it is hers, but “it didn’t used to be.” That was not hard to guess; it is a book about digging graves.

Liesel is befriended by a friendly classmate named Rudy (Nico Liersch), an athletic kid who wants to race like Olympic champion Jesse Owens. Around them, the rise of the Nazi party is evident in omnipresent banners and badges. A school choir sweetly sings an anti-Semitic song. Hans’ skills as a house and sign painter prove useful when someone has to remove the insults painted on his Jewish neighbor’s store. Liesel becomes a book thief again when Hitler’s birthday is celebrated with a huge book burning. It is less a theft than a rescue, the book smouldering under her coat as she hides it from Hans. The book is The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells.

The impact of the Nazi regime literally hits home when Max (Ben Schnetzer) arrives. Max’s father sacrificed himself to save Hans’ life in the first World War. It is his accordion that Hans cherishes so dearly. Hans and Rosa talk about whether they are prepared to take the risk of hiding Max, but they know they have no choice. Max becomes very ill and as Liesel helps to nurse him back to health, they become very devoted to one another. She “borrows” books (without asking) from the home of the wealthiest man in town to read to him.

The young Australian author Markus Zusak was inspired to write The Book Thief by a story he heard from his mother, who emigrated from Germany following World War II. A teenage boy in her village ran to give bread to a starving man who was being herded with other Jews by Nazis delivering them to a concentration camp. Both the man and the boy who tried to help him were whipped by the Nazis. This story of the very best and worst of humanity gave him the idea of a story set in Germany during the Holocaust.

Addressing the Holocaust through fiction is a daunting challenge and this film does not always master it. An uncertain sense of its audience makes it feel off at times, too simplistic for adults and too disturbing for young audiences. An episodic structure seems meandering and unfocused. Most problematically, the choice of Death as a narrator works better on paper than on film. But Rush’s performance and some touching moments make this what is perhaps the best we can hope for in grappling with the incomprehensible — a part of a conversation, even a conversation about what does not work, that keeps us striving to honor the memory of those who suffered and to strengthen our resolve once again to conquor the fear and ignorance that caused it.

Parents should know that this film is set during the Nazi atrocities of WWII Germany. There are many sad deaths and references to the Holocaust, racist and anti-Semitic comments, fighting, and some war-time violence.

Family discussion: Is Liesel a thief? Why did she read to Max when he was ill?

If you like this, try: the book, “The Story of Anne Frank,” and “The Devil’s Arithmetic”

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Based on a book Drama

Never Forget to Lie — Tonight on PBS

Posted on April 30, 2013 at 8:00 am

Tonight on “Frontline” is “Never Forget to Lie,” filmmaker Marian Marzynski explores, for the first time, his own wartime childhood and the experiences of other child survivors, teasing out their feelings about Poland, the Catholic Church, and the ramifications of identities forged under circumstances where survival began with the directive “never forget to lie.”

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Interview: Janet Tobias of the Holocaust Documentary “No Place on Earth”

Posted on April 7, 2013 at 3:58 pm

No Place on Earth is the extraordinary new documentary about a small group of Jews from Ukraine who hid from the Nazis in two caves for almost two years. Interviews with the survivors, narration from a book written in the 1960’s by the woman who was one of the leaders of the group, some re-enactments, and a powerful return to the caves 67 years after the end of the war. Tonight, as the annual observance of Yom Hashoah, the day of holocaust remembrance, it is especially meaningful to share this story.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n00EE5CeatA

I spoke to director Janet Tobias about making the film.

One of the people in the film says, “We were not survivors. We were fighters.” What do you think that means?

They were fighters. They stuck together. Esther Stermer was an incredible mother and grandmother, a matriarch. She didn’t do the obvious thing. She decided to do what was necessary to survive and to protect her family. It’s an incredible story of what they accomplished. The lesson I take away from it is how much we depend on each other. they were greater as a collective whole than they were individually. Many of them would not have made it on their own. We do much better when we have each other than on our own.

The families were extended families, but it was a tough world. There had to be a group of people from each family who were willing to risk their lives on a weekly basis.

Tell me about the re-enactments of some of the scenes, which you shot in Hungary.

I was blessed with an incredibly great group of Hungarian actors, from Kati Lábán, who played Esther Stermer who is a very well-known actor in Hungary to some who had never acted before. We looked for approximation of physicality but I was not going to be completely literal because it is more important to have the person who has the right understanding of the story and the spirit. We did recreations, a hybrid between documentary and drama, because on the one hand you are in the presence of the last years of people who were eyewitnesses, who can say, “That happened to me. I saw it,” which is an incredible gift in documentary. On the other hand, the Stermers were fighters, as you said. They were actors on their environment. Lots of documentaries are about people contemplating their life. But the Stermers were fighters, not contemplators. They are doers. To show the incredible thing they accomplished, what they got up and did, that needed actors. Esther Stermer had a clock in her head. She kept a cooking schedule, a cleaning schedule. They knew when they could go out without moonlight. They observed the holidays. When they were buried alive, they did not give up and say “It’s over.” They said, “We need to do the following things in construction to even have a chance of figuring this out.” They were dramatic actors in real life, so we needed to match that.

And we had to show what it was like to live in the cave. I had never been in a cave except to walk by the opening on a hike. That world is a crazy strange world, the claustrophobic spaces, the mud, the darkness. It’s really hard to imagine, so we really needed to show people the world they were living in and navigating in, the world they ultimately found safer than the outside world.

You can see how dynamic they still are when they return to the cave, 67 years later. They were so young when they were in the cave.

You do hear Esther’s words in the book she wrote in 1960. And the leadership in the cave passed to young men. It shows how incredibly brave and honorable young men can be. Esther was running things underground but the father was afraid and so the leadership in the cave was teenage boys and young men in their 20’s because they were capable of doing things that kept everyone alive.

The story of the horse is almost like a fairy tale, especially when the families, who are so hungry, decide not to eat the horse but to let him go.

Even Sol did not believe his brother would come back with a horse. For Sol, it was this miraculous thing for his brother to find a horse to help them get supplies. They felt so blessed and lucky that they did not eat the horse.

And when they returned, no one in the town even said hello to them.

After the war, fighting continued in Ukraine. Partisans were fighting the Russians. Their possessions were taken by people who did not want to give them back. There was a lot of hostility to Jews, which is why there are no Jews in that town anymore. Their dog gave them the only greeting. We really wanted their return to be meaningful for them and it was. They are very special people.

Why was it important to show the photographs of the families of the survivors at the end?

What these 38 people did, each with individual experiences, each fighting hard, from the children to the grandparents — the ripple effect is life. All the children and grandchildren and great-children who became lawyers, doctors, construction workers, physical therapists, they are all alive because these people fought. Fighting and survival and preventing genocide, that starts one person at a time. One Polish woodcutter giving information, one person saying “We’re not going to leave our cousin behind,” that has a ripple effect of life with generations who make a difference.

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Seven-DVD Set of Holocaust Movies

Posted on February 5, 2013 at 8:00 am

ALDEN FILMS is distributing a new 7-DVD special on the Holocaust that is an important resources for schools, libraries, and families. For a limited time, the set includes two extra DVDs:

WHAT FIRE CAN’T BURN, a tale of a childhood lost to Thereseinstadt

BETWEEN BERLIN AND JERUSALEM, an interpretation of present-day attitudes to Jews and Israel in post-Holocaust Germany.

AMBULANCE — the classic trigger film of the Holocaust, depicting the use of disguised ambulances as killing vans of Jewish children

CHILDREN OF THE EXODUS — the uplifting film of child survivors of the Holocaust who miraculously sailed to Israel on the actual ship Exodus

1947 EICHMANN: THE NAZI FUGITIVE — the story of the architect of the Holocaust and his eventual capture

LEGACY OF ANNE FRANK — a young girl hiding with her family wrote a diary that is still a testament to hope during the Holocaust. This film features her father, Otto Frank, and Miep Gies, who hid the Frank family.

MEMORANDUM — the survivors of Bergen Belsen concentration camp return to the scene of their torment

POLAND/KOLBUSZOWA — a look back at the world of the Shtetl, which was destroyed by the Holocaust

SIGHET, SIGHET — Elie Wiesel’s haunting return to his hometown in Hungary, where the town’s Jews were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz, never to return

For orders and previews, call 800-832-0980

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Documentary