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Under discussion:

The Hours  (2002)

David Hare has been writing for the theater since the 1970s, has served as Royal Dramatist to the Royal Court Theater in London, has been the Associate Director for the UK’s National Theater, is an accomplished director of both theater and film, and was knighted in 1998. That’s a pretty impressive resume on its own, but in the past few years he’s also become known for writing successful adaptations of novels.

In the past few years he’s adapted Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections for film, and his latest is Bernard Schlink’s The Reader, which pairs him again with director Stephen Daldry. I spoke with Hare in Los Angeles, just after he’d (thankfully) recovered from losing his voice.

Were you aware of the book before you became involved with writing the screenplay?

Yes.  I read the book when it first came out.  I rang up Anthony Minghella when I discovered he had the rights.  He wouldn’t give them to me.  I said I wanted to write it.  He said, “No, no.  I am going to write it.” I said, “But why don’t you produce it and I will write it?  That way you will get all the glory and I will do all the work.”  He said, “No, no.  I am really going to do it.”  I said, “I bet you don’t do it because you do big movies and I like doing little movies.”

He said, “No, no.  I am going to do it.”  After eight years he rang Stephen Daldry and me and said, “David is right.  I am never going to do it.  So you go ahead and do it, but you have to do it within a year because I have promised Bernhard Schlink that the film will get made.”

So we were in a lovely situation, which was we were green lit before a word was written, which was hugely attractive to me, because I hate wasting time writing movies that never get made. So it was bliss, this one, from the beginning that we knew it would get made.

Do you read German or did you read the translated version?

I read the translation.

This is unique.  It doesn’t happen often that it is translated from another language to English then to the film.  Was Bernhard happy with it?

Well, Bernhard said that the translation is very, very good and he was very, very happy with it.  The rights to the translation were bought as well as the rights to the book, because effectively I was working from a translation, though occasionally I would check with Bernard. I would say to Bernard, “In English, the line is such and such.  Is that exactly what it is in the book?” He’s always reply yes, or tell me it was extremely close.

What was the biggest challenge you faced when you wrote the screenplay?

Well, there are a whole number.  The chief is why the book exists at all.  In other words, the book exists because a man who has kept a secret for 50 years decided to reveal it.  He reveals it.  How does he reveal it?  By writing a book. Now there is no film equivalent for that.  So obviously the first thing I had to do was create that framework, which is he tells his daughter.  It is the same, but it is different.

In other words, I then had to imply that what his whole modern life was and the way he treats women, obviously, his failure to have relationships with women, or rather the nature of those relationships that he has with women. Once I got past that, which was contentious –– in other words, not everybody on the movie believed in the structure I came up with, so that was a fight — the much bigger thing was, “How do you keep the two stories…?”

It seems terribly simple, but like all fables, it is actually fantastically complicated.  But how do you keep the basic thing, which is the intimate story.  The romance is a parallel for the infatuation of Germany with Nazism. The price of the romance, the price Germany paid for its romance with the Third Reich and the price Michael paid for his romance with Hannah.  So keeping those two things aligned throughout the movie so that it is working both as a love story and metaphorically, that was very difficult.

Where there elements you had to lose from the novel just for time?

Yeah, just for time.  It is a slim little book, yet somehow, once we wrote a version which contained every scene in the novel, we had a film that was running at four and a half hours.  It was enormous!  So it has been a question of paring it down, quite surprisingly.

Did they shoot some of the subplots that got cut during editing?

Yes.

It will be interesting to see if they include any of that later.

I think that Stephen is doing a whacking job on the DVD, because he did so much research.  It is not so much the lost scenes as the fact that he felt this incredible duty to Germany. In other words, we were English speaking film makers coming in and making a film about a culture that knew much more about the situation than we did.  So Stephen did a fascinating amount of research.

He often was spilling over with research, that I couldn’t incorporate it into the film.  A lot of it had to do with, “Why was there this 15 year hiatus between 1946, the Nuremburg Trials, and the beginning of the Auschwitz Trial in 1953?”  There was this huge period in which nobody was being brought to justice.  How did that come about?  Why was there this hiatus?

A lot of stuff about post war Germany.  And given the book is so hugely popular in schools…It is taught in every school in Germany.  I think we are very concerned to put together a school pack, if you like, that will be a means by which younger Germans, younger Europeans, and Americans who are interested can learn about their history.

This movie comes at a strange time because we have “Valkyrie” coming out soon, this big, giant production which ran into problems when they filmed in Germany because people were complaining about seeing the Nazi flags. Then we have this film, which is so inherently about that post-war era.  But I think that the only images you even see are the stamps in Michael’s book.

Yes, that is right.

Which was great because it is more about the character.

It is interesting, because one of the things that people who read the script said was, “Yeah, this first part.  Wasn’t everybody sort of in the 1950s talking about what had happened in the 1940s?” You had to explain, “No.  They went into this period of silence and denial about what had happened, because as Schlink said, “If they said anything, they lied.”  He said, your parents lied to you.  Your teachers lied to you.

It is paralleled in a very interesting way. In Israel it was exactly the same. In other words, the survivors did not speak about it.  There is a connection with Primo Levi and his book, If This Is a Man, It was published, I think, in 1948. Most of the copies were left unsold.  It was barely bought at all.  It is only in the 1960s that Levi’s work suddenly becomes known, when survivors ceased to be shamed.  Shame on both sides is a powerful thing.

The survivors felt shamed because they had survived and their friends, and families, and colleagues had died, and they had survivor shame.  Similarly, on the other side, there was the shame of having committed this huge ethnic crime which nobody really wanted to talk about for a long time.

I was talking with Karina at Spout about this.  We had both seen it and I said, “Wow.  This movie really makes reading kind of erotic.”  She was like, “Well, I think what really made the movie erotic was all the wall to wall sex.” And she’s right, there was so much sex in the first part of the film.

Did you feel that?  I didn’t…

We saw it a bit differently. I found the reading erotic, but I see her point. What I wondered is, when you were writing this, was this more of Stephen’s choice to feature this much sexuality?

No.  I think on the contrary.  I say the script was much more… I think the script was originally much more explicit.  But having said that, we were very keen to make it clear that we make no connection between sexuality and the Nazis.

In other words, that genre of film, which has tried to do what one might call Third Reich porn, this absolutely doesn’t go near.  I think one of the things that Stephen has done brilliantly is to say that the erotic stuff is about a romance between an underage kid and a woman who is plainly, at one level, exploiting him and able to use him in a way which I hope is quite disturbing, which is erotic.

That has absolutely nothing to do with the Third Reich, because nothing dismays me more than those movies that try to suggest that the Nazis are in some way sexy.  I don’t think that the Nazis are sexy at all. I think it is fair to say that we have a slightly different criterion in mind, don’t we? In Europe than in America.  I think that in Europe this would not be seen as a particularly erotic or boldly erotic film, nor indeed would it in America in the ‘70s.  If you look at American films in the ‘70s, a film like Carnal Knowledge is far bolder than The Reader erotically.

But it is in recent American cinema that a veil has been drawn over these things, for reasons I don’t understand, because I don’t live here.

I don’t think we do either.  When the book was published there was some controversy from some Jewish groups saying it was oversimplifying the Jewish problem.

In what way?  Tell me.

They were saying that Schlink had simplified the means by which the way the guards chose people and the way the sent them to their death.

I really don’t think that is true.  I wait to be corrected about that.  But obviously one of the things we have done is show the film to a lot of people who either were survivors or were experts.

The film has been absolutely, exhaustively researched, and shown to a lot of people who know a lot about the subject, and to experts in the subject.  I think on the contrary.  I think that at the Auschwitz Trials in 1963, the question was not whether you worked in Auschwitz, but whether you could be proved to be implicated in the process of selecting the particular people who went to the chambers.

If you merely ushered people to the chambers…In other words, if you were somebody who was like traffic police for the chambers, you were not actually in the same state as the people who had said, “You, you, and you.”

Which is why, “You, you, and you” in the film, to me, is such a crucial moment.  That moment at which people are singled out and chosen.  The people who do the singling out and choosing are guilty of a criminal offense, which other people who work at Auschwitz are not.

You have to remember, 8,000 people worked at Auschwitz.  I think 17 only were found guilty of murder. That is partly because of the lack of evidence.  That is partly because many of the witnesses died and were not alive to tell the tale.  But it is also because to prove murder, you have to prove intent, and you have to prove that you weren’t just, as it were, part of the machine that murdered, but you were the people that chose the victims.

So I am open to reading anything that says it is wrong, but our understanding of it was corroborated by a lot of people who knew everything about it.

What are you working on now?

I have an hour-long monologue I’ve been working on that I would perform in the theater. And you can say this if it will get me a job.  I would love to write a thriller.  I think that first of those Bourne films was just heaven.  I am very jealous that I never get offered those.

Well, maybe someone will read this and that will all change.

If you haven’t already heard the news, I’ll sum it up for you: Ridley Scott is directing a feature film version of Monopoly. It’s probably the single strangest thing I’ve ever heard in the film business. I’m not sure if Scott himself seems to know what this movie will be about, because he keeps waffling on the subject: one moment he says it’ll be a broad family comedy, and the next minute it’s going to be dark like Blade Runner. He seems to have only been wooed by the fact that it’s one of the best-selling board games in the world.

This doesn’t mean that making a movie out of a board game is a bad idea, necessarily. It worked for Clue, after all. But unless Scott’s movie features Rich Uncle Pennybags jumping around with his monocle screwed firmly in place, I’m going to have to call shenanigans on it. Check out our list below of the 10 Board Games We’d Like To See As Movies, complete with fantasy casting.

Power Grid

In Rio Grande’s Power Grid, you’re in charge of a power station. You not only have to provide power to several cities, but you also have to manage and maintain the materials necessary to create that power. To use an old school Nintendo slogan, you’re literally playing with power.

The pitch: Electrical magnate Klaus Schmidt (John Malkovich) has slowly been buying up land in Eastern Europe, quietly acquiring small power stations along the way. Before long, he has a near-monopoly across most of Europe, controlling the massive network of power lines that feed various countries. He still needs one pivotal station to complete his grid, but the owner of that station (Ian Holm) chooses to stand up in the face of electrical tyranny and fight back.

Rail Baron

In Rail Baron, you strive to create a network of connected cities and gain access to routes that will give you the largest railroad on the board. At the same time, you have to try and keep your opponents from doing the same thing. It’s based on the historical rail lines that ran across the United State, and was originally called Boxcars. Long before Railroad Tycoon came out, you had to get your steam-powered for from Rail Baron in 1977.

The pitch: Two brothers (Mark Ruffalo and Kyle Chandler) take over their father’s fledgling railroad after he dies. However, one alcohol-fueled argument soon spirals out of control, and each brother takes half of the company and begins building in different directions. Over the years, both brothers meet with success and failure, but when a government contract brings them together decades later, they bury their bad feeling for each other as they pound the final stake uniting their two lines into the ground.

Arkham Horror

In Fantasy Flight’s Arkham Horror, you’re an investigator who has to try to keep one of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulu baddies from breaking into our world in the 1920s. Along the way you’ll fight other monsters, upgrade your character, get new spells and weapons. and team up with other players.

The pitch: A team of mismatched adventurers (Megan Fox, Malcolm McDowell, Robert Pattinson, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Jay Baruchel) have all been mysteriously summoned to Arkham Asylum, long since abandoned and start investigating sets of clues they find. However, one of them accidentally activates a set of runes and they all find themselves transported back to 1926 in bustling London, right outside the gates of the Asylum. They have to talk to several inmates, pieces together the clues they’d found, and find out why one of the Ancient Ones is intent on using this location to cross over into our world.

Risk

Risk is generally accepted as the first mainstream war game. You could argue that Chess and Checkers are like war, as you battle an opponent to capture pieces, but those games were abstract, and Risk is definitely literally about global conquest. March your armies across the world map, destroy your enemies, collect cards and win the game. If you play with the wooden cube version, the roman numeral version, or the little plastic armies version, it’s still satisfying to lay down some smack.

The pitch: It’s 1922, and World War I never happened. However, the leaders of the world’s nations have grown uneasy. Trust is a rare commodity, and everything seems to point to one sign: war. As each nation begins to close their borders and ramp up war production, the world is thrown into complete upheaval. Battles begin to break between countries, and before long there’s a complete world war. After some of the smoke begins to clear, the North American leader (Clint Eastwood) faces a hard decision. Does he ally himself with France (Liam Neeson) and Asia (Ken Watanabe)? Or does he annihilate them both in an effort to have a sole, united world? Choices are tough when war comes knocking.

The Plot to Assassinate Hitler

The often-delayed Tom Cruise / Bryan Singer film Valkyrie opens at the end of the year, and it’s about the real-life effort to assassinate Hitler during World War II. The only problem is, you know what the outcome is: they didn’t succeed. Now you can actually turn the tables and make it work, and long before the end of the war. Not only that, but you get to take control of the government was well as a consolation prize.

The pitch: June, 1940. Germany has invaded Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, and The Netherlands. The Allies have decided that in order to stop the Axis threat, they have to take Hitler (Jon Voight) out of the picture. A plot involving high-level Nazi cabinet members and a lot of subterfuge and secret messages begins to unravel, with sure exposure being risked at every turn. Will they succeed, or will they fail, allowing Hitler to run rampant across Europe, Asia, and Africa? One man (Billy Campbell, yes, let’s bring him back), deep in Hitler’s cabinet, has the best chance of making this plan succeed, and the most to lose if it fails: his wife (James King) and children are embedded deep in the Reich.

Settlers of Catan

This German board game has won umpteen Game of the Year prizes, and continues to sell well and impress. I just bought a huge framed board that’s just an accessory for this game. That’s how addictive it is. The game consists of several players running tiny factions on a small island. As you develop your small village, you have to simultaneously trade with, and try to stop your opponents. You won’t be able to win without their help, and they can’t advance without yours. You just have to decide when to play nice, and when to steal their assets.

The pitch: It’s 2151, and the Earth is dying. A group of scientists who have been working on an escape rocket find out that a riot is about to break out that will destroy the vehicle, so the four of them (Gwyneth Paltrow, William Petersen, Meryl Streep, and Josh Duhamel) launch themselves into space, leaving the world behind. After decades in hypersleep, the computer lands them on a planet that they dub Catan, and they try to figure out how to repopulate their species. Slowly (but not Kubrick 2001 slowly) they begin to turn on each other, alternately helping and hindering as they break off into factions. Who will dominate the planet? Will they flourish or fail?

Cranium

Cranium came along and meshed Pictionary, Charades, Trivial Pursuit, and the creative ability to mold clay all into one game. People would either groan or cheer when it was pulled out at parties, and you really couldn’t be shy while playing this game. Chances are you’d have to imitate Marilyn Monroe or try to sculpt the Leaning Tower of Pisa by the end of the game.

The pitch: Genetics are the building blocks of life, and in an effort to increase total brain power, a deranged scientist (Christopher Walken) decides to combine the best of everything into one brain. He takes some of Albert Einstein’s DNA, combines it with DNA from Aretha Franklin, Michaelangelo, Richard Burton, and creates a Frankenstein-like monster (Justin Long) who can out-act, out-sing, out-sculpt, and out-think just about everyone on the planet. But where’s his place in life? He struggles to find acceptance when just the mere sight of him intimidates everyone. Will he find love, or will he have to return to his creator and live alone?

Scrabble

To paraphrase Tommy Boy, If you guys have never played Scrabble, just ring your call button and Tommy will come back there and hit you on the head with a tack hammer. Basically, it’s a game where you get wooden tiles and attempt to spell words out on a board. Simple enough, yet it’s one of those games you don’t want to play with a brainiac or someone who just bought a Word Power calendar.

The pitch: For years, secret organizations have been meeting across the globe, deciding the fate of the world in clandestine meetings in the hidden rooms of chapels, underneath cities in vast catacombs, and behind false chambers in the Pyramids. They meet for one reason: to decide which one of them will rule the world. However, they don’t do this through feats of strength, or through a show of force. No, they decide things with small, wooden tiles emblazoned with letters on one side. Leaving the outcome of the world to the fates has worked so far, but a lone dissenter with a voice of reason (Sean Connery) threatens their very existence. Through a series of codes and clues, a woman (Audrey Tatou) from the outside must connect with one within, and find out how to save the world.

Fireball Island

Milton Bradley’s Fireball Island was a game that game out in 1986, and didn’t stay too long on the store shelves. Now, it’s considered a rare gaming gem. If you spot this thing at a thrift store or garage sale, grab it and run home immediately. In this game you play one of four explorers trying to wind your way up to Vul-Kar, the Tiki God, in order to steal his prized jewel and make it safely back to the boat. The only problem is that Vul-Kar spits huge red fireball marbles at you to try and stop you.

The pitch: The is shamelessly blatant, but it makes perfect sense: The Goonies II: Fireball Island. 23 year after the strange events involving a pirate ship and treasure in Astoria, the Goonies decide to have a reunion. They all (Jonathan Ke Quan, Corey Feldman, Sean Astin, Kerri Green, Martha Plimpton, Jeff Cohen, and Josh Brolin) fly to Hawaii, where Mikey lives, for a mini-vacation and to catch up. Data now works as a computer programmer, Mouth is a radio DJ in California, Chunk works as a trainer for a pro football team, Stef works in a research lab, Brand and Andy are married with a couple of kids. Mikey runs a failing tour guide operation in Hawaii, and the group have decided to book a tour as a surprise to try and boost his business. On the tour, they come across mysterious clues that Mikey thinks they’ve planted to try and make him feel better about his business. But when they find the mysterious Fireball Island, they all have to band together to survive the wrath of Vul-Kar after they steal one of his jewels to try and save Mikey’s business.

Dark Tower

Like Fireball Island before it, Dark Tower was another amazing game from Milton Bradley that was truly geektastic and not appreciated enough when it came out. It had a fairly large playfield and a wicked cool electronic tower that controlled the game in the center. Copies of these now sell for $300 and up on eBay, and you can even play an electronic version of it online here. You play as one of four different kingdoms, trying to collect the three keys that you need in order to lay siege to the scourge of the land: The Dark Tower.

The pitch: Four different kingdoms, each ruled by a different king (Sean Bean, Nathan Fillion, Brendan Fraser, and Orlando Bloom), have come under the control of the ominous Dark Tower that sits in the middle of the borders. Ruled by a dark presence (a CGI Orson Welles), the four kings must don their armor and arm themselves in order to explore the dark wilderness that has sprang up in each of their kingdoms. Fighting brigands, doing battle with dragons, staving off the plague and collecting treasures brings them them ever closer to the Dark Tower, and to certain doom. Will all of them survive to take down evil? Or will they be taken from the land forever by the Dark Tower?

Special thanks to all my friends at BoardGameGeek.com for helping with this. I recently attended their Board Game Geek Con 2008 in Texas, and I’ve never met so many game enthusiasts in one place before. There were a million games I’ve never heard of, and everyone was eager to show you how to play.

Top Monopoly image is courtesy Flickr user d0bb0.

Under discussion:

The Great Muppet Caper  (1981)

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington  (1939)

Newsies  (1992)

Patton  (1970)

National Lampoon's Animal House  (1978)

Braveheart  (1995)

Swingers  (1996)

Independence Day  (1996)

Galaxy Quest  (2009)

Milk  (2008)

Thanks to Barack Obama, you’ve possibly had enough inspirational speeches for one year. But if not, go see Milk, and also watch this video, which splices together bits from 40 films including obvious choices like Independence Day, Patton, Braveheart, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Animal House, as well as surprise additions like Newsies, Swingers and Galaxy Quest. The montage had me at the 7 second mark due to an appearance from Fozzie and friends (from The Great Muppet Caper), but it goes on longer than 2 minutes.

This is not just some compilation of cinema’s greatest inspirational speeches, though; it’s a well-edited stitching of words that come together as one long speech, the most perfect inspirational speech ever. Even Obama could learn a thing from this video from YouTube genius Matthew Belinkie (he also gave us “The Dark Bailout”), especially if the president-elect finds himself at the center of an alien invasion, a war with England or in a roomful of Muppets at the Happiness Hotel.

Check out “40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 Minutes” after the jump.

[via Cinematical]