The director of The Reader, Stephen Daldry, talks to HELEN BARLOW about being the man behind Nicole Kidman and Kate Winslet's Oscar wins
British director Stephen Daldry has the golden touch. Yet when the accomplished theatre director came to make his first movie, Billy Elliott, he never dreamed how successful it would be, let alone the phenomenon it would become as a musical.
"Billy still takes up a lot of my time because
there are complicated elements, mainly to do with the kids," Daldry admits of the stage show. "It's a once in a lifetime thing. The show goes to San Francisco at the end of the year, then we go into the foreign language versions in South Korea and Germany. Can you believe it?"
The Reader, of course, is Daldry's latest phenomenon. Based on a novel by German author Bernhard Schlink, the film figured heavily in the Oscars, with Daldry receiving his third best director nomination - after The Hours and Billy Elliott - and where his actress, Kate Winslet stole the limelight with her Best actress win, as Kidman had done with The Hours.
Interestingly with The Reader Kidman had come in as a replacement when Winslet's commitment to her husband Sam Mendes' film, Revolutionary Road, had forced her to pull out. When Kidman became pregnant, Daldry managed to lure a willing Winslet back to play the role that she was so keen to make her own.
Winslet is Hanna Schmitz, an uneducated German woman who comes to trial for her deeds as an SS guard in the Nazi concentration camps. The story is told through the eyes of her former teenage lover (German actor David Kross), who unwittingly attends her trial. As an older man, played by Ralph Fiennes, he remains scarred by her desertion during the height of their passion and is obsessed by her memory.
Winslet not only had to create an emotional life for Hanna, she had to perform extensively in the nude, and then in aged make-up, while all the time perfecting a German accent. She deserved her Oscar glory, and it's difficult to imagine Kidman in the part.
"I think Nicole would have been ..." Daldry trails off, hesitantly, and fails to finish the sentence. "But Kate was our first choice," he adds, referring to himself and Schlink. "I can't answer that question now, I can't imagine anyone else. Kate has an astonishing emotional range; she's fiercely intelligent and a fantastic collaborator.
"It was a mountain for her to climb; obviously she's not close to the character in any way. Hanna is full of ambiguity and moral complexity so Kate had to find a coherence to the character because she is not fully explained to us.
"We did an enormous amount of research, and based our trial on the 1963 Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt."
Ultimately what makes Winslet's performance so riveting is that we come to like Hanna, against our better judgment.
"I knew it would be wrong to expect audiences to sympathise with her," says Winslet, "but if they do and feel morally challenged as a result, that's going to be interesting to me. All we did was try to tell the truth."
The truth in terms of the film comes from Schlink's own experiences of growing up in post-war Germany. Certainly the German people are now more openly dealing with their past, so that The Baader-Meinhof Complex, about the terrorists who drew on German fears of another Hitler coming along, was Oscar-nominated this year too.
"Bernhard Schlink was brought up in a veil of silence, not understanding what his parents or teachers or religious figures had been involved in during the war," explains Daldry. "When he came of age he also came to understand the involvement of everybody to different degrees. In his novel he puts it in the specific story of a love affair, the complications and shame of that love and the responsibilities you have as you grow older. He's talking about coming
to terms with what the people you love were involved in, and asking how you deal with that love."
Such a provocative story was always going to engender debate and Daldry was ready for it. In fact he has been fascinated by people's reactions.
"The vast majority of films made about the Holocaust have been filmed, quite rightly, from the point of view of the victim. This is not a film about the Holocaust, but certainly it's dealing with a perpetrator and the consequences for succeeding generations. Inevitably you're looking at a woman who is a war criminal as a human being. Some people think it's inappropriate to tell a story about one of the perpetrators and I think that's a fine point of view."
Then there's the under-age sex. Winslet explains Hanna was not aware that her young lover was 15; he told her he was 17. "Who knows how she would have reacted, if she had known," she wonders. "I was actually in a relationship with someone who was 13 years older than me from the age of 15 till 20, and it will remain one of the greatest relationships ever in my life," she notes, referring to actor Stephen Tredre, who died of cancer in 1997.
"I was naturally nervous to tell my parents, but my mum said, 'I don't know what the big deal is; there were 19 years between your grandparents'."
She says the nude scenes were not a worry. "When I was younger I thought I was being brave, but now it's about honouring the story." The biggest challenge was the aging. "I was fascinated because I'd never worked with prosthetics in that way and I had the luxury to see her all the way through. It took seven hours every morning for hair and makeup, so that meant I was up at 3.30 for a 10.30 start, we'd shoot for 13 hours then we'd go home and have three
hour's sleep, then go back and do the same thing again. It was seven days straight for the prison scenes and 16 days overall."
"You'd be surprised how many high-profile actresses were prepared to do that," admits Daldry of looking old and craggy on screen. "Certainly Kate was brave and that was never an issue. We did lots of testing regarding how her body and particularly how her face would age and evolve over the course of the story. Kate studied relatives and referred to her grandparents' looks. It was stressful for her and incredibly hard work."
Few would disagree that Winslet deserved her Oscar. "All I can honestly say is I'm a 33 year-old actress who is realising some of her dreams," she says. "I know how lucky I am and it's an incredible position to be in."
LOWDOWN
Who: Stephen Daldry, director of The Reader
Credits: The Hours (2002), Billy Elliot (2000) Eight (1998)
When: The Reader opens at cinemas on April 9