If you haven’t seen Michael Haneke’s latest film The White Ribbon, then this is a timely reminder to do so – check out our glowing review.
The Austrian filmmaker returned to to Germany, his place of birth, for the Palme d’Or-winning masterpiece, and set himself a new task – the period piece. Content with destroying modern middle-class society with disturbing revelations from people on the outskirts (the self-mutilating titular Piano Teacher, the bored teenagers who terrorise a family in Funny Games, and the guilt-laden husband in Hidden), Haneke this time takes it back to the root of evil – the vulnerable child.
Set in a German village in 1913 and 1914, The White Ribbon is a snapshot of a turbulent time for both its children and adults, as a series of unpleasant events create a pervasive feeling of unsettlement and resentment. We attended the intimate press conference with Haneke at this year’s BFI London Film Festival, where he started to speak about the challenges his meticulously-designed film set him, including recreating the period: “The first thing I had to do of course is to read a lot. First about education from the middle ages to the 20th century, and secondly country life in the 19th century, which I don’t know much about, because we don’t know much about. Secondly, collecting images. We used an enormous amount of images, from the photographer August Sander – they were important to the costumes, and crucially for the sets. We had to be precise about that.”
Why were the years 1913 and 1914 used for the film? Was it because it was the last stage in European history you could still observe a feudal system? “Yes, and because of the children, because of how old they are going to be at the rise of fascism. In that period 80% of people at least were living in villages, so it was easy to get a cross section of society in a single village. You get a microcosm of a central macrocosm.”
The narrator in The White Ribbon asks us to think ahead, by the fact that he is looking back, by saying by retelling these events we can understand the events of the future. How was the balance of making it a German story as well as pointing to the future events achieved? “The film does try to use German fascism as an example of how people are indoctrinated into an ideology. People who are already in a state of repression who have been humiliated by society and who clasp at a straw that’s offered to them. It doesn’t have to be facist, it can be religious or political. It’s always the same model in these circumstances. It’s that which is the actuality of this film. Therefore, it’s not specifically an explanation of German fascism because that would be an impossible thing to do in any case.”
Compère Dave Calhoun then opened the questions to the floor, with Haneke being asked if there was anything in present society he was trying to draw upon: “You can decide that for yourself! Now if I were to make a film in an Arab country, that would be about Islamism, then that would be something entirely different, but the psychological model would be the same.”
We were blown away by the performances of the children in the film, so asked what was being looked for: “It was very complicated. Not only did they need to be talented, but they needed to have the faces we recognised from the photos from that period, and my biggest worry was that we wouldn’t find them. So we started casting six months before we made the film, and we tried 7000 children in order to find the right ones.” Haneke then went on to talk about how he got round the difficulties of directing young children: “It’s difficult, because you can’t generalise about these things. In essence you deal with children the same way you do with actors – you have to show respect and lovingly protect them. If you protect them enough they are open to what you want to do with them. With children more so than actors, if you ask them to play a lion, they ARE the lion. So a gifted child is something very special. On the other hand, if a child has no gifts in that way it’s absolutely hopeless and there’s nothing you can do.”
When asked why he felt the need to have a narrator, the director responded: “It wasn’t specifically because it was a historical film, it’s because it’s to achieve an estrangement, as per in the beginning of the film – ‘I don’t know if all the details are correct, and some things I only heard secondhand’. I do hate it because historical films always have a false sense of naturalism, as if that’s what really happened. A film is not a reconstruction of reality.”
At two and a half hours, the film is a gloriously detailed study of a society at breaking point, but Haneke admits he had to get Jean-Claude Carrière to help him edit the screenplay: “The original script was three and a half hours long, and of course the producers said we couldn’t sell that. So we decided to cut one hour from it, and I could only cut twenty minutes, that’s all I could do. So we asked Jean-Claude Carrière to come along and help with the cutting. We spent two afternoons together, and we managed to cut an hour from it. It was painful, but Jean-Claude’s suggestions were so convincing that I was happy to follow them. The stories were more complex, they were broader. Smaller figures did fall by the wayside, but it was more to do with the details. They had to be cut.”
Was it a conscious decision for him to go back to Germany? “Not really, because the script went back ten years, but the only reason I couldn’t do it was because of the money. It had more to do with chance and coincidence!” Haneke’s last film was his own US remake of Funny Games in 2005, and he revealed it was a bit of a struggle: “My English is pretty bad, so it was uncomfortable in America. I fared better in France, but I’m more relaxed in my own language. Not because I couldn’t explain things to the actors, because it’s their job to understand, but because I wanted to be able to control things. That’s very difficult to do if you don’t have complete understanding of a language. It makes you uncertain, it makes you nervous.”
How does that affect actors on the set? Are they free to communicate changes? “Improvisation you can do in the theatre – not in the cinema. I have a storyboard to dictate what happens. If an actor comes up with something better and talks about it I would certainly take it on, but with a film with a particular aesthetic must always be prepared in advance. There’s the idea that people like [John] Cassevettes did their films with improvisation, but that’s not true – he rehearsed for months in advance. Any successful film has to be prepared.”
Finally, Haneke revealed what’s next, and it looks like the 67-year-old shows no sign of mellowing: “My next film is going to be about the humiliation of the human body in old age. It’s going to star Isabelle Hupert as the daughter, and I’m due to shoot it next summer, but I need to write it, and I haven’t got the time at the moment. And in 2013 I’m going to direct Così fan tutte.”
Becky Reed
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