David Thewlis (The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas) Interview
In UK cinemas now, The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas is a fictional story told through the eves of an eight year old boy largely shielded from the reality of World War II. David Thewlis plays The Father.
What do you look for in a script?
What I have learned to look for over the years now is a good story. That’s what brought me to this one [The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas] because it was the best script that I had read for some time. It was like reading a good novel; I kept turning the pages, encouraged by what I had read. Obviously I also look for a character that is going to be a challenge to me. I try not to do things that I have done before, or do something that will be too easy or that I can already see the way that I will do it and I’m bored before I begin the film. So I like to scare myself a bit and think …well, I’m not sure that I can do this, or that I am the right person to do it, or if by casting me they are making a good decision. So I usually look for things that I think will challenge me.
How do you become involved in the filming of The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas?
There is no real story…I got sent the script, via my agent. She read t and really recommended it to me. She said you should read this one quickly, it’s very, very good and there is a lot of interest in you and Mark Herman (director) wants you to do it. I read it, it was a no-brainer – I said yes, and absolutely I’d like to do it. I was in Los Angeles at the time and the same day I rang back and said that if they were interested in me I would certainly do it. Then when I heard about the rest of the cast…Vera Farmiga, Rupert Friend and David Hayman. I knew David Hayman (Pavel) since I was at drama college. Her is an admirable guy, a great guy in many, many ways.
Had you been aware of the book?
I was unaware of the book, I’m afraid. I had never heard of it. I had been working out of England for a long time – In Eastern Europe and Spain and Portugal and the USA. I am such a big reader that I am sure that I would have known about it if I had been in the country. So my first experience was the script, which is rather unusual because I was not sent it in hard copy, I was sent it in a PDF file, so I actually read it on a computer because I did not have a printer with me where I was. So when I got to the end, I kept pressing the key because I thought that you couldn’t just finish there. It is even more brutal on the written page than it is on the screen. So it ended on the computer and then…and roll credits! I thought, what does it mean…roll credits…you can’t just end the film like that. But of course you can end the film like that and it is one of its great, great strengths. It is very hard to talk about this film without discussing the ending because the ending is what everyone talks about and the many people who have bought the book will know the ending. Even though it is slightly different in the book, but not very much different from the film.
So once you knew that you were going to do this film, did you go and get a copy of John Boyne’s book?
Yes, I did. As I remember I think that I was able to get hold of it in the States. So I read it straight away. There is a difference between the book and the film. Firstly [in the book] the parents are not as prominent and from the beginning I think that the father comes over as being a little bit more intimidating. But there was something in the film script that suggested that he could be played gentler at the very beginning. That was not to fool the audience in any way, but just to have a gentle progression into the madness. One of the great themes of the film is the relationship between father and son. Not just Bruno and my character but Lieutenant Kotler and his father and Shmuel and his father and my character and his father. So it is exploring that on many levels. So I thought it was more interesting to show my character as a loving father – as indeed such people no doubt were. No matter what they were, I am sure that even Goebbels loved his children, even though he poisoned his own children at the end of the war. I have no doubt that he experienced love and affection for them. You could say I suppose that he killed them out of love for his children…either because he did not want them to exist in a Germany without National Socialism or that he didn’t want them to face the recriminations of being the children of Goebbels. The point is that Nazis loved their children; we can’t say that they didn’t.
Did you have any reservations about playing this character in The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas?
Not at all, no. I thought it was very challenging to get into the mindset of such a person. There have been such great, wonderful actors who have played Hitler. I was in fact approached myself years ago to play Hitler. I would not shrink from that because as an actor it is fascinating to try and find the man behind the monster. You can’t just put on a funny moustache and learn all the gestures and say that’s Hitler. You have to think about what they were thinking about and be quite brave with yourself and contemplate the darkness within them and look at the darkness within you. Some people have mentioned the British accents that are used by the cast…but what if it were set in Britain? There were Fascists here. So it is not impossible that it could happen here. It is not exclusively a German thing. It could happen anywhere in the world, with the right sequence of circumstances. I just immersed myself in the period. At the time I knew everything about that period of history. It was not something that I had read a great deal about before. Obviously we are all aware of it, but I read every book and watched every documentary. I did not read anything else at the time. I did not read anything that was contemporary or look at any newspapers or indeed watch any television. I just basically had a Nazi education. After a while that kind of gets to you.
How were you with your nearest and dearest during that period?
Most of the time that I was doing that I was in Budapest and I wasn’t with the family. I had started researching it when I was at home with the family… starting to read things and understand it…so I was with Anna and the family there. But when I went to Budapest that was when I started thinking about it a lot…to the point of going to the gym every day, to feel like a soldier, to feel strong and to have like a military regime. Even if we had a 5 am call, I would be in the gym at 4 am. And I was eating in a very disciplined manner, I was not drinking, I was trying to live a very strict like. Spartan. Which was good and worked and when I had reading time I was reading all this material. Having said all that, making the film was not a grim time because it so happened that it involved a rather nice bunch of people. There was just a nice chemistry…the children who play Bruno and Shmuel were wonderful. Asa Butterfield [Bruno] and Amber Beattie who plays Gretel were hysterical when they were together, they cracked me up and Vera [Farmiga] is a big laugher and Rupert is the same. So we did not have a grim time making this film, indeed sometimes we had a very nice time and I do not feel guilty about that, it is, after all, a film.
Did you also want to do a film like The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas because you are now a parent?
I think that I still would have done the film if I had not been a parent, but it did bring it home to me, especially in those final scenes. Really I suppose then you tap into the thought of what if something happened to your own child. When I was doing all this research I was having a lot of bad dreams – I had dreams about my daughter being taken away from me. That happened several times, until I stopped it all. I stopped all the research after a while. I decided that I knew how to play the character and the research was not too healthy for my head. No-one should be watching [documentaries of the Nazis] all the time…night after night. I had watched some footage that is not really shown on TV any more because it is too horrific. I thought it was getting a bit perverse to keep watching, even though I was trying to de-sensitise myself. This man used to go and watch experiments to watch how the prisoners died – looking through the peep-hole – and then have lunch with his family. He would kiss his children and then throw children into the gas chamber. It is hard to imagine that. So I suppose I was trying to de-sensitise myself and think about how this was possible and it was because it happened to an enormous amount of people.
