‘Explanations are limitations, and every limitation is an indirect lie.’
Translated by Deborah Holmes
The Austrian-born writer-director Michael Haneke worked in German television for almost two decades before moving onto the European art-house stage to direct The Seventh Continent (Der Siebente Kontinent) (1989). He has received acclaim and consternation in equal measures from critics with intelligent but sometimes demanding films like Funny Games (1997) and The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste) (2001), starring Isabelle Huppert. Code Unknown (Code Inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages) (2000), starring Juliette Binoche, was his first to be shot in French. Haneke divides his time between Vienna and Paris.
Synopsis
Paris, the present. Anne, an actress, meets Jean, the younger brother of her war-photographer boyfriend Georges. Jean has run away from his father’s farm and asks her for the new entry code to her apartment; he discards a crumpled paper bag into the lap of Maria, an illegal immigrant who is begging on the street. Amadou, a teacher of deaf children, demands that Jean apologize to her. In the ensuing scuffle, policemen arrest Maria and Amadou. Maria is deported. Amadou’s father leaves for Africa, Georges returns from the war, Maria makes ends meet in Romania, Anne stars in a thriller and Jean returns home to his father.
* * *
KEVIN CONROY SCOTT: Michael, as far as I can see, you’ve been a poet, a pianist, an aspiring novelist, a TV development executive, a literary critic, a theatre director …
MICHAEL HANEKE: I deny it all … [laughs]
You were born into an artistic family – your mother was an actor and your father was a theatre director. Was creativity something that was encouraged in your household?
Well, I didn’t grow up with my parents. I grew up with my aunt, my mother’s sister, on a farm about fifty kilometres south of Vienna. Of course, I was influenced by what my parents did, particularly in my adolescence, but I wasn’t in a milieu of artists, surrounded by them on a day-to-day basis. I would go with my grandmother to go see my mother on stage, though.
And at a certain point you became interested in writing plays?
Like every teenager, I started writing poems and short stories. When I was fourteen I wanted to become a priest, when I was fifteen I wanted to become an actor, and when I was seventeen I snuck off to do the auditions for drama school. They didn’t take me, thank god. Then I was forced to study philosophy, and I started writing literary reviews.
You are also a trained pianist?
Yes, I wanted to be a pianist as well. My stepfather was a composer and a conductor, and he gave me the advice at the right time not to pursue it, because he thought I wasn’t talented enough. So many film directors you read interviews with, their dream job at one point is either being a conductor or a composer.
Robert Bresson once said, ‘Anyone who is interested in making films should study music first.’ Do you agree with that?
Everything Bresson says is a very good tip …
Since you’ve studied composing music and have also studied writing screenplays, I was wondering if you could see a correlation between the two?
The structure of feature films, at the very least, has a lot to do with musical structure. It can’t do you any harm if you have an idea of how to compose music. If you are writing a novel, you can start off and not know what the end is going to be. But whether you start off composing a piece or writing a script, you have to know exactly what your material is going to be, and how it ends before you start working on it. It’s the same as music; you have to have your material organized before you actually begin to develop it. If you’re writing a fugue like Bach, you need a fixed theme before you start developing it, otherwise you’ll be lost.
By your late teens what kind of films were you watching and what kind of literature were you interested in?
I always read things that were too difficult for my age. Thomas Mann once said, ‘You should always read things that are above your level so you are learning the whole time.’ That’s what I was always trying to do. At the age of twelve or thirteen I was reading Chinese philosophers I didn’t understand, but I still learned from it. Film was difficult, because I wasn’t living in the capital at the time and there was no television, so what I was able to see was really a matter of chance. When I moved to Vienna to start studying it was completely different – then I started organizing my day around which films were playing where, seeing about two or three films a day, which is why my degree course wasn’t very successful. [laughs] In fact, it’s funny you mention Bresson because he had a seminal influence on me and I actually wrote an essay on him while I was at university.
My very first memory of the cinema is going to see Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet with my grandmother when I was five or six. My grandmother had to take me out after the first five minutes, because it started with the castle and the waves and I was terrified, screaming, and everyone complained about me.
A couple of years later, after the war, when a lot of Austrian children were being sent abroad to escape the country’s poverty, I went to Denmark for three months to live with foster parents, to be fattened up. I didn’t enjoy it, I was very unhappy because it was my first time away from home. To try and cheer me up, they took me to the cinema. I can distinctly remember this long auditorium where they were showing a nature film set in Africa with rhinos and long shots through the savannah. When the curtains fell at the end of the film and they opened the doors at the back of the cinema, it was still raining outside and it was still Copenhagen. I was deeply traumatized by the idea that I had been in Africa but here I was still in Denmark and it was still raining outside. It would be quite different for other people who grew up with television, because you never have that moment of realization that the pictures and reality are two different things. It’s like those interesting experiments carried out with ‘primitive peoples’ – as they are sometimes called – where cinema screens are put up and short scenes of dialogue shown where you just get a close-up of two people talking and they will run away screaming in terror. When they have calmed down and you ask them what they were screaming about they say, ‘They were severed heads. There were no bodies to them so they must have been spirits talking to each other!’ We fill in the gaps and they just see what they see: two severed heads, talking to each other.
At the University of Vienna you studied philosophy and psychology. When did becoming a filmmaker become a tangible aspiration for you?
It had nothing to do with my degree course. While I was at university the idea of making films was great, but I didn’t think it was very realistic. I was writing quite a lot back then, and my short stories were being well received by people ‘in the know’, so I thought that was a more realistic thing to do. By the time I graduated I got a chance to do work experience with the ARD, Germany’s public broadcasting company, who were taking people on three-month work placements straight out of university. That coincided with this particular channel looking for a ‘drama director’ – the guy who was there at the time was just about to retire. They had been looking for someone for quite a while to fill his position, but they hadn’t taken any of the previous people on work placements from university. By chance I turned up at the right time and they took me. So at a young age I was working in television.
You mentioned writing short stories. What kind of stories were you writing?
Once I started working in television, I stopped writing short stories and was writing drama scripts. But before that? I’d say my short stories were heavily influenced by D. H. Lawrence. That was all there was to them, [laughs]
So what were your responsibilities as a ‘drama director’ for television?
Every day I had a large pile of scripts on my desk that were sent in by other people so I had to read through them and review them. That’s the best way to learn, to read an awful lot of bad scripts. Not that there’s a recipe: you can’t automatically read a bad one and then write a good one yourself. In this case, they weren’t that bad that you could call them rubbish, they were things that could have worked. It was my job to play around with them and see what could be changed so that they would work. So you would have to look at the mechanics of the thing and have to decide how to put it right. Reading through other people’s scripts was the first two years. Later on I was working with professional writers to produce stuff ourselves.
The whole department had been created to make socially critical television drama. It doesn’t really exist any more. But we would take specific themes, like, ‘If you come from the working class, you don’t get a good education and you stay underprivileged. What happens? How do you deal with that?’ It was the golden age of German television, the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies.
I also read that you were a film critic as well at this point in your career.
Actually, it was mostly literary reviews I was doing, reading new books that were coming out for the newspapers. And when I was still studying in Vienna they had a radio station that dramatized the ‘great novels of world literature’ over the course of ten weeks, so I worked on that to earn some extra pocket money.
And then you were also a theatre director at some point here. How did that happen?
The ARD is based in Baden-Baden and there was a small theatre there where my girlfriend at the time was working as an actress. She wasn’t very happy with the way the theatre was being run and the way that her director worked. I told her to show me what they were doing, and then I would try and make it better. In the end, she realized that some of the things I said actually helped, and the theatre caught on to this. I helped out directing three productions and the actors were pleased to get the extra input. The first play I directed was Marguerite Duras’s Whole Days in the Trees and I had just been working on it for television – we had this massively expensive set. So that’s how I got them to let me direct it at the theatre. I told them that if they let me, I would bring the set with me to the theatre. I then did another couple of plays at the theatre and went back to the television people and said, ‘It’s working well at the theatre. Let me do a little something that will air at midnight on the terrestrial channel.’
You once said of film critics that you could approximate from their reviews whether or not they were raised before the advent of television. How so?
It hangs together with what I said earlier about people who have grown up around television since they were babies; they have a completely different experience. They see it as reality. They have a completely different method of accessing it. People who grew up before television are a lot more aware of the possible dangers of taking it as reality. But critics who didn’t are a lot more susceptible to manipulation; they are so used to it that they are actually in favour of being manipulated.
Do you think that this current generation has lost the ability to have a better awareness? That there is no option but to lose it because we have been brought up in the world of media?
Yes, I think so. We live in a world that’s been made completely unreal, yet we think it is reality. The pictures of the war in Iraq are a good example. We all know intellectually that the pictures have been manipulated and what we are seeing is not reality. It is dead knowledge, because we are not able to feel the same shock of experience that I had as a little boy in Copenhagen watching the African animals, then realizing I wasn’t in Africa. The shock is not there. It’s the difference between ‘knowing’ something and actually experiencing or feeling something.
That’s interesting because it is the core behind what you do and what your films are about – questioning reality. When did you become fascinated with this?
I started to explore it in television. But it was the thing that always concerned me most. For me, the first film that had this built-in shock experience was Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones. There’s a point when Tom Jones is being chased and he suddenly stops and looks into the camera and says something like, ‘I hope he’s not going to catch me!’ He breaks the illusion of fiction. It was a real shock for me as a spectator in the film, to realize that you can actually do that, and make people realize they can be manipulated rather than having them, when they buy their ticket at the box office, agree to accept the illusion and not question it.
You worked from 1973 to 1989 in television. In 1989 you made your first feature. What are some of the major differences between writing for television and writing a feature film?
When I first started writing for television I had written a script and handed it in to the German Film Foundation, who agreed to give me 300,000 marks. But that wasn’t enough to make the film and therefore the money expired and the script got put in a drawer somewhere. Then there were ten years where I did a lot of work for television and theatre. The television work was commissioned, so it was a case of writing to order and getting paid for it. I was so busy with that that I was not prepared to think more about writing another script to make a feature film.
The turning point was when I started making films for Austrian television and they were very successful at a time in Austria when there weren’t a lot of people making films of any kind. The people in Austria said, ‘Well, why don’t you make a feature film?’ At the same time I was working with people from the ARD in Bremen in northern Germany, and they were saying, ‘Why don’t you write a television film for us?’ So with that encouragement I took a story I read in Stern magazine of grim events that happened ten years before and wrote what became my first feature, The Seventh Continent. I was going to give it to the people in Bremen, but they said they didn’t want to do it because people would not want to see it. I told them that, since they didn’t want to make it into a television film, I would make it into a feature film in Austria.
There are two reasons why I went into making feature films. The first was that television was already developing the way it’s gone today, not as interested in social criticism. After The Seventh Continent I carried on making television films but they were only literary adaptations because that was the only ghetto left in television to do critical stuff. The second reason was that I hadn’t wanted to make a film beforehand. Before I wrote The Seventh Continent I never found a personal approach that was different from what everyone else was doing and that treated cinema as an art form rather than just a film that anyone else could have made. Then I found something that was mine and mine alone, not just in the content but also in the form. I had found a different way.
The article in Stern was about this family who commits suicide but before they commit suicide they destroy everything they own. The journalist’s way of writing about these things is to look for explanations; they didn’t have enough money, it wasn’t a happy marriage and all the rest of it. In finding explanations for everything and making it rational, they take away the horror and the shock of the act. That’s what I wanted to get across. Television and genre films tend to explain everything and make it nice and neat and have the reasons, so you can go and watch it and then come out again and not be touched by it at all while thinking that the world is all OK. But the world is not all OK. Cinema is an art form and therefore cannot make us think that the world is OK.
This seems to be getting back to the question of reality. It’s like you’re trying to get your audience to look at cinema as if they were watching a film and looking at the world for the first time, to see it as it is and just look at it.
It would be good if I could manage this, to get people to feel as if they are seeing a film for the first time. The problem is, of course, if you want to tell the story without explaining it then you have to somehow work out a way to tell the story that doesn’t have built-in explanations. I wrote The Seventh Continent on a Greek island, somewhere I often go when I am writing my films. I tried desperately to get it to work by showing the actual event of the suicides and then have flashbacks, but I realized I couldn’t do that, because as soon as I have a flashback, it automatically works like a commentary, an explanation. It turns into journalism all over again. This is how I came to the method of chronicle, which is like taking Day One in the life of the family and then showing Day Two where not much happens. There may be some small indications of what is to come in Day Three when they commit suicide. So you have a chronological structure: one day in one year, the next year and then the next year. This way you can put the horror back into the story even though television doesn’t want it any more …
For almost all of the screenwriters I have talked to for this book, explanations are a very big part of their writing.
It’s the American way of thinking. That’s because it’s a way of reassuring people. If cinema wants to earn money then reassuring people and entertaining them is the way to do it.
Can you take me through the process of how you write an original screenplay? Do you outline, go through research, do numerous drafts …?
It’s different for every film, but if I’m starting from zero and it’s completely new then I usually start with an idea or something interesting that occurs to me. Then I carry that around with me but it doesn’t actually come to anything, because everyone has an idea for a film but one is not enough, so I wait until I have another idea that fits with the original idea. Then I collect other things that might fit and make notes and it starts to come together. When you have a few ideas that fit together, you put your feelers out and become obsessive about collecting material for your film. At some point I reach the stage where I feel I have enough material but up until then I’m constantly collecting notes.
The script that I had written that I was offered money for in Baden-Baden but I didn’t take was actually Funny Games. But it was Funny Games without the self-reflexive bits, so it wasn’t a film about a film about violence. It was just the plotline, and I wasn’t interested in it because there are millions of films with similar plots. It was only fifteen years later when I had the idea to make it a film about a film about violence.
Once I get to the point where I have enough material I use the classic method of systematically writing every single idea down on a separate note card, putting them up on a board and playing around with them.
How do you start bringing characters and plot into it?
You can’t separate the characters and the plot, they more or less happen at the same time. I already have a fairly good idea of who the main characters are going to be once I put the ideas on to the cards. I also write biographies of the characters, sometimes but not always. There are times when I don’t want to define certain characters closely because I want them to remain a mystery to me as well as to the audience.
The main job is finding the construction of the piece. The writing is actually fun. The really hard work is putting these cards together. Once I have finished all the cards on the board I put them into tables on the computer. It doesn’t have to be finished to the absolute last detail or last scene, but the points where it branches and the points where it joins have to be decided and established. When I start writing I already know the number of scenes that the film will need. Sometimes I change these things while I’m writing, but that doesn’t happen very often.
I am very systematic about the way I write. When I have a deadline or I set myself a deadline for a film, I know how long I have to write and I know how many pages I have to write. I’ll divide them up and say, ‘Right, every day I have to write so many pages.’ And I will write that number of pages, however long it takes. The difficult thing is getting started, no matter what day it is … Of course I tidy my desk and do all those things to procrastinate. Everything I enjoy doing, like drinking, listening to music, I can do none of that while I’m writing.
The idea or the inspiration doesn’t come when I’m writing. It generally comes at night when I am lying in bed trying to fall asleep. I have a dictaphone by my bed and in the last couple of weeks as I get closer to the writing process I find myself waking up in the middle of the night, dictating until my wife tells me to shut up.
How do you handle feelings of self-doubt, those moments when you are halfway through your mapped out story and it just doesn’t feel right?
When the script is finished, you just hope no one else can see all the mistakes in it – there are always things you could have done better. Self-doubt is part of the profession. There are some bits that write themselves and it all seems to be going really well. There are other bits that are like getting blood out of a stone and you are fighting for every word because there are so many different ways of saying something and you can go through thousands of variants before you find what you are looking for. On the other hand, when it’s writing itself and going really well, that isn’t necessarily a guarantee of quality. Those are the bits you might read after and say, ‘That’s not so good.’
Have you ever directed someone else’s screenplay?
The first two television films I did were other people’s scripts. I also twice worked with co-authors on television projects, but they got completely frustrated with me because I’m not a very good collaborator. All the feature films are by me and just by me, apart from The Piano Teacher which is based on a novel but is still adapted by me.
As a writer-director could you ever direct a screenplay that wasn’t written by you?
Never say never. I spent fifteen years in the theatre directing other people’s stuff so it’s not impossible. However, I have to say it doesn’t interest me much. To make a quality film, you have to be sure that the content and form are really identical; it’s virtually impossible to do that with someone else’s ideas when you use the kind of film language I do. It’s so specific and pointed and has so much to do with my intellectual background, I really have to write the stories for it myself. There is one person I’d be really interested in working with, Michel Houellebecq, the novelist and author of Platform. The things he writes are very close to my writing. But for the moment, only him. [laughs]
You’ve worked a lot in theatre and also done some acting yourself. Has that experience informed your writing at all?
Of course. Both as a director and a writer you must have a pretty good idea of acting to know what is a good role and what is a bad role, and how you can give the actor a chance to show themselves. It’s like composers and opera singers, if you don’t have an idea of how to sing then you can’t write music for the singer.
Moving on to Code Unknown … when I arrived in Paris this week I was talking to my translator and we were discussing the different meanings of what an ‘unknown code’ might be. We parted ways and I went to a friend’s flat, it was my first time staying with someone in Paris. I got to her place after getting lost due to my poor understanding of French and I went to the door only to realize that there was a code box there. I couldn’t buzz up to her flat like you can in New York or London. I went around to a phone box, rang her, and discovered that no one was home. So I was alone, on the street with my luggage. Then I said to myself, ‘I think I understand what Code Unknown is about now.’
Did you ever have a similar experience to mine?
It was a fundamental experience for me in Paris, arriving from Vienna to find that if you don’t have the code you can’t get into the foyer to buzz up to the flat. It wasn’t the first idea for the film, but it did give me the title.
Would it be fair to say that Code Unknown originated in your interest in immigrant culture in France and the problems with communication barriers that exist there?
My inner motivation was that for years I wanted to do a film about immigration in Austria because I think it is one of the themes of this century. People from poor countries will want to come and share our riches, and we won’t be able to get away with not dealing with them. Then Juliette Binoche rang me and suggested that we make a film together; that was the external motivation. I started thinking about France, which I didn’t know very well at the time. Then I came to Paris and researched for three months. Multicultural society already exists in Paris and London – it doesn’t yet in Vienna.
The film features French and Romanian languages but not German. I know you speak French but still, how did you handle writing in a tongue not your own?
I wrote it all in German and had it translated; my French isn’t good enough to do any different. I have a translator I always work with for my French films. But we go through the translation, sentence by sentence, because I have enough French to understand whether it is something I want or not. I just wouldn’t know how to say it from scratch.
The plot of Code Unknown might be called disjointed, focusing on several unrelated people and random acts of violence. Why not use more of a traditional method such as interlinking stories as seen in films like Magnolia or Short Cuts instead of using your Brechtian device of black spaces to separate the scenes?
It’s not the first film I’ve done like this. I did it on The Seventh Continent and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance; they’re also done with the same structure. The point is that we don’t perceive the world as a whole, we have separate impressions and we only put them together in our heads. Every scene, every take is one impression, they don’t correspond, we create the correspondences. Although I find films like Magnolia and Short Cuts very elegant and very well done, they use aesthetic means to present an illusion of totality that does not exist; in reality our impressions are isolated. I present the fragments as they are which is why you see that black between the scenes. The only part of Code Unknown that is not broken by that black is the sequence where we show the film being filmed. That scene was supposed to be a hint to the viewer to help them understand, but in that scene you still fall for it. It’s because there is a trap in every scene; the viewer gets caught up in the aesthetic. That’s why the filmmakers can do what they want with the viewer.
Many of the scenes in the film are similar; you start off and you don’t know where you are, like when Juliette Binoche is auditioning into the camera. You don’t actually know if she’s locked in the room with the gas on or not. You don’t know where you are or what’s happening; it’s a way of showing the audience that we shouldn’t be so quick to trust our perception of reality.
What is interesting about the structure of Code Unknown is how we come back to where we started by seeing the code box outside Juliette Binoche’s flat. This is the only moment where you use music to score the film, by using the drums as played by the deaf children.
I thought a long time about whether I should have the music in there or not. It doesn’t necessarily fit in with the rest of the film’s strategy but I liked the ambivalence of the music. On the one hand it can sound quite threatening, serving as a marker for the fear that Westerners have about people coming into their country. On the other hand it also has positive energy, a sort of ‘We are coming, we are on our way.’ It was this ambivalence that made me decide to go with it, although it’s against the strategy of not overlapping one scene to the next. I hope it is permissible. [laughs] It is something I do often in The Piano Teacher, where I let music drift in from one scene to the next.
I thought it worked perfectly. For me it served as a hopeful metaphor about the possibility of communicating.
Because it is the deaf mutes who are making the music.
Given that you use the music to create an effect and take a little bit away from the reality by having overlapping sounds, it seems like it’s a moment where you are torn between wanting to transport the viewer in the way that art does and at the same time trying to get them to doubt their impressions. Were those two aims at odds for you?
I was torn in two directions and it was a question of, ‘Do I give up this effect on a matter of principle or do I close my eyes to my principles and keep the effect?’ Besides, the rules are there to be broken. [laughs]
You said you wrote Juliette Binoche’s role to be that of an actress in Code Unknown because that is the only part she can play. Obviously, this is not due to her limitations as an actress.
The problem is what do I do with Juliette Binoche in a film that is trying to be realistic? It’s more realistic to have her playing an actress in the film than it would be to have her playing a servant girl, even though she doesn’t play a successful actress. Also, it was a way to kill two birds with one stone because once you have that, you can show the breaks in reality by having her at work in the cinema and theatre. You can have the film within the film, which is the most interesting formal feature of filmmaking as far as I’m concerned. What do you do with a star like Binoche when it is not a genre film? She is in my next film as well, but just as an ordinary woman, because it’s a thriller.
What was the most difficult part of writing Code Unknown?
One of the most difficult things was with the girl at the beginning of the film – the deaf girl who’s showing an emotion that her classmates are unsuccessfully trying to guess – trying to explain to her what she had to act out, while leaving it open to different interpretations.
Did you actually give her one emotion to work with?
Yes, I did but I am not going to tell you what it is. [laughs]
Some American critics found Code Unknown to be hard to follow because the scenario is not constructed in a traditional cause and effect style. Do you ever worry about alienating an audience because you don’t give them easy signposts to follow?
No. It would be stupid to worry about it, especially in retrospect. My films are written for a very particular audience as compared with mass cinema. If you were writing a poem you are going to have a more limited audience than for a popular novel or whatever. You have to live with that. If you want to explore your ideas as precisely and in as much detail as possible, you have to decide: do I want to do that, or do I want to be successful?
You have said that the reason you don’t give concrete explanations for your characters’ behaviour is because, ‘Every kind of explanation is just something that is there to make you feel better’ Are you saying that explanations are lies?
It’s not so much that explanations are lies in that you are willingly giving false information. An explanation gives the impression of explaining the world in toto. If it was possible to explain the world then it would probably look very different and we would look very different. Explanations are limitations, and every limitation is an indirect lie. They give the impression that in 90 minutes or in 200 pages of a book you can explain everything. Modern literature would never dare to claim that it explained the world, whereas genre cinema does just that but with the participation of the audience. They know they are paying for an illusion, but it still reassures them; not only is the illusion intentional, but the audience consents.
The notion of not explaining holds true for Code Unknown. I am thinking of Maria when she is deported from Paris. She lives in a communicative, loving family in Romania. Then she goes back to Paris but we don’t know why she doesn’t stay. If an artist has an obligation to seek reality doesn’t he also have an obligation to pursue emotional truth?
I think it’s very clear from the beginning why she has to go back. Ninety per cent of Romanians who work abroad are doing it so they can build a house at home. That’s why you see all the empty shells of houses that they drive by. I think her emotional conflict is also expressed very clearly when she’s walking down her road in Romania and is picked up by a friend of the family in his truck. They both lie to each other about how they are earning a living abroad. So now, at home, they are living a lie. The truth is that once they’re abroad they live on the streets.
Anne is given a note through the door about the girl who screams upstairs from time to time. Anne initially thinks it is from her elderly neighbour, but she denies that it is from her. The next we see of this is the funeral of the girl and a very long tracking shot of Anne and her elderly neighbour walking away from the burial, not saying a word to each other. That little scenario is enough to make a whole film of. Did you ever worry that you were trying to do too much with all of these stories?
No, otherwise I wouldn’t have done it. Thematically I think it all becomes clear, so it isn’t too much. I think all of my films are about guilt and responsibility. The scene where they walk away from the burial is paradigmatic; each is isolated with her feeling of guilt, because they didn’t take any action to save the girl. Perhaps they wouldn’t have been able to do anything, but that is another matter. Things happen to us every day where we perhaps could have done something but mostly don’t even realize that we could. I want to remind the viewers of their own sins of omission. That’s the point of the stories. In the opening scene, the young black guy wants Jean to apologize to Maria, and it is actually his fault that she is deported back to Romania. He didn’t mean to harm her at all but because of his trying to help, she is deported.
And the road to hell is paved with good intentions …
[laughs] Which doesn’t mean that you should repress your good intentions! People who talk to me about this scene often ask what the point of it is, whether I’m actually trying to say that we shouldn’t help each other. I say no, I’m trying to show how complex life is. That’s the drama of human existence.
There are many different characters from many different cultures in the film and I thought that their experiences, which range from war photographer to taxi cab driver to immigrant beggar, were convincingly drawn. Can you tell me something about the research you did for each role?
In contrast to my other films practically nothing in Code Unknown was invented, at least as far as the themes of being an immigrant or foreigner are concerned. I just threw together stories of people I met. I put them together of course, but very little is made up. It’s either things I saw, or things people told me. I met Romanian families and African families, the stories are real. For example, in the African family, the two women who quarrel all the time are both wives of the taxi cab driver.
That sums up your story-telling style for me, this man having two wives and you not pointing it out explicitly for the audience.
Yes, how the relationships work in these families is all real stuff that I went out there and discovered. Also, the war photographs in the film are taken by a friend of mine who is a war photographer. The story of George and Anne is actually based on a documentary that was going to be made in collaboration with Libération on the difficulties of being a war photographer. One of the people who was going to be profiled had written about his problems with his family. The documentary didn’t get made so the material got passed on to me with the hope that I could do something with it.
How do you work on dialogue? Do you incorporate an actor’s comments in rehearsals?
Once I get around to directing the script I want everything that is in the script to be realized on the screen, which applies to dialogue as well. Even when there are things that the production team says are too expensive I say, ‘I am just the director, I am here to make sure that the writer Haneke’s work appears on screen as he wanted it to be. I can’t have my writer frustrated.’ [laughs] Obviously, if I notice there are any things that the actors are having trouble getting out, then I will simplify it or modify it.
I was wondering if you could take me through how you approached writing the long opening scene that was shot in one take. I was thinking of how you went about establishing character, tone …
The main thing is introducing the characters and the relationships between them. You find out that Anne is an actress, that the boy is her boyfriend’s brother. What I really wanted to do was to get the characters together at the beginning of the film rather than at the end of the film, which is more the convention. It’s difficult to find something at the beginning which you can then repeat at the end which doesn’t look unlikely. The difficult thing is to combine the aesthetic side and the plot side so that you have something that unites all the characters but is also realistic. Obviously you have the earthquake in Short Cuts and the television and the song in Magnolia that bring everyone together. And the raining frogs too! [laughs] There are very few possibilities in Short Cuts to get all the characters doing the same thing. You have them being sprayed with insecticide at the beginning, and the earthquake at the end, but in between it is very difficult to get everyone together.
How do you feel about expositional dialogue? It’s necessary to set up your characters but it often feels dead on the screen.
Yes, it just depends on the set-up of the scene. I have no recipe for it. I say to my students that when you are playing billiards you don’t hit the ball straight on, you often try to bank it off a cushion.
The main problem in shooting this scene was that I had dialogue that needed careful timing, but since I had one take in one tracking shot it was difficult to get the written dialogue realized on screen with the right pauses in between. So we had to do things like plan when a certain pedestrian was going to walk past and mark a turning point in the dialogue. As a result, there are no passers-by who aren’t passing by for a specific reason. [laughs] So we ended up doing this long take thirty-eight times … the problem with such a long scene, of course, is that someone always forgets something or something goes wrong and even if it is three seconds before the scene ends you have to do the whole scene again.
In the original script the idea was that Jean would pass by a shop where there are lots of televisions running, where you see all the different pictures. The problem with that is that if you stop to look in a window, you have to pull back with the camera to see all the pictures he’s looking at. Then we wouldn’t have been able to catch him throwing his trash into the beggar’s lap with any degree of accuracy. That’s why he walked into the passageway, so he could walk by her and drop the trash in her lap instead of throwing it.
And what about when Juliette Binoche’s character is shooting her film? We have already seen this scene before when she is auditioning in front of the camera. We see it again, through the lens of being an audience. Isn’t this redundant?
It’s a step back because you know you are watching the making of the film. During the filming of this scene the actual camera that films this scene is hidden in the woodwork of the flat she is viewing with the estate agent. There is a transition that you barely notice where you go from watching the film being made with the crew in the shot to actually being in the film. Then we come back to ‘reality’ when she looks directly into the camera, then we know we are not in a film any more.
Was this scenario a playful swipe at the French idea of a thriller? The film within Code Unknown is about an estate agent who kills his clients, called The Collector.
The whole plot of this film is told during the course of Code Unknown, so I was just trying to just show the self-reflection that is possible.
So your next film, the thriller starring Juliette Binoche, will it be called The Collector?
No, no … [laughs] ‘Thriller’ is a bit of an exaggerated way to describe it. It uses the tools to tell another story of guilt and personal responsibility in a child who does something when he is young that is not particularly bad. But it has bad consequences.
Paris, France
Wes Anderson
‘Dear Max, I am writing to tell you that I have learned that Miss Cross is secretly having an affair with Mr Blume.’ Max (Jason Schwartzman) slips away after stinging Mr Blume in his hotel room.