| The Boy in the Striped Pajamas |
When his father (David Thewlis) gets a promotion, little Bruno
(Asa Butterfield) and his family have to move to a new home by an
odd farm, one where the workers wear their pajamas during the
day. It's when he sneaks off to explore the farm that Bruno meets
and befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), a boy about his own age who
isn't allowed outside the fence, for reasons neither of them
quite understand.
While several films (Life is Beautiful, Jakob the Liar) have
shown Holocaust stories that involve young children, The Boy in
the Striped Pajamas is unique in that it's done almost entirely
from Bruno's innocent, sheltered point of view.
The atrocities all lurk off camera, more visible to us because we
know what's really going on. Bruno's default position, however,
is that his father is a wonderful man who does good things, and
the film never deviates from that view, or the assumptions it
guides the little boy to make. Even when Shmuel is beaten by his
father's assistant, the scary Lt. Kotler (Rupert Friend), Bruno
still believes the adults in his world must be acting on a higher
wisdom.
Some of the best horror involves a child, and some of the best
drama happens when someone doesn't realize a terrible mistake
they're making. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas uses both of these
elements in a powerful story about childhood innocence and adult
monsters.
(Asa Butterfield) and his family have to move to a new home by an
odd farm, one where the workers wear their pajamas during the
day. It's when he sneaks off to explore the farm that Bruno meets
and befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), a boy about his own age who
isn't allowed outside the fence, for reasons neither of them
quite understand.
While several films (Life is Beautiful, Jakob the Liar) have
shown Holocaust stories that involve young children, The Boy in
the Striped Pajamas is unique in that it's done almost entirely
from Bruno's innocent, sheltered point of view.
The atrocities all lurk off camera, more visible to us because we
know what's really going on. Bruno's default position, however,
is that his father is a wonderful man who does good things, and
the film never deviates from that view, or the assumptions it
guides the little boy to make. Even when Shmuel is beaten by his
father's assistant, the scary Lt. Kotler (Rupert Friend), Bruno
still believes the adults in his world must be acting on a higher
wisdom.
Some of the best horror involves a child, and some of the best
drama happens when someone doesn't realize a terrible mistake
they're making. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas uses both of these
elements in a powerful story about childhood innocence and adult
monsters.
Potter film alum David Thewlis (Prof. Remus Lupin) stars in a new
movie adaptation of the novel, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, by
John Boyne. The following is a review of the film and an
interview with the writer/director, Mark Herman, excerpted from
Creative Screenwriting Magazine.
movie adaptation of the novel, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, by
John Boyne. The following is a review of the film and an
interview with the writer/director, Mark Herman, excerpted from
Creative Screenwriting Magazine.
| The Review |
| The Interview |
Writer-director Mark Herman (Hope Springs) was hungry for a new
idea when his agent passed him a pre-publication copy of The Boy
in the Striped Pajamas, a young-adult novel written by one of the
years writing and directing a romantic comedy, Herman wanted his
next project to have some dramatic weight to it. "So when this
arrived," he explains, "I just thought, 'This is the one.' It
blew me away."
Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is a 1930s German schoolboy who's proud
to learn that his military-officer father (David Thewlis) has
received a very important promotion, but not as happy to learn it
means moving away to a new home outside the city. Much to the
young boy's surprise, his family's new home is near a farm that
his father is in charge of, one protected by high fences where
the workers wear their black-and-white striped Pajamas all the
time. Despite many warnings from his mother (Vera Farmiga), Bruno
eventually wanders out to see the farm and meets Shmuel (Jack
Scanlon), a Jewish boy his own age who isn't quite sure why he's
inside the barrier. As the summer rolls on, Bruno brings balls,
checkerboards, and sandwiches out to the fence to share with his
new friend, a friend everyone tells him he should hate.
On the film's press day, Herman took a break between roundtable
interviews and photo sessions to sit down with CS Weekly to talk
about adaptations, trying to be lighthearted with a Holocaust
film, and tripping up his audiences.
Considering how it came to you, did John Boyne work with you at
all on this?
This is the fourth adaptation I've done. On all the previous
three, I've hardly ever met the original author or playwright.
But just for this one...I did a film called Brassed Off, which
was then transferred from film onto the stage, so I knew how it
felt to hand over your baby to someone you don't know [chuckles].
I bought the film rights to Striped Pajamas myself, because I
wanted to be my own boss for a few months and simply be on my
own. I was buying my own freedom. John had sold the rights to me
personally, and contractually that's normally goodbye. But in
this case I was very keen to have his approval and support
throughout. I'd send him every draft just to get his notes. There
were many discussions. Like I say, it wasn't contractual, just a
desire on my part to have his approval. That carried on through
the filmmaking process. We invited him to set, and to have an
author still aboard a film doing publicity, that's quite a rarity.
How faithful an adaptation is this?
Well, one of the most rewarding things is everybody says it's
very, very faithful, but in fact, when you analyze it, it's very
different. I mean, John thinks it's incredibly faithful. I think
that's because it's faithful in spirit. There are a lot of very
good scenes that I've cut out that were in the book, they worked
very well in the book, but they just wouldn't work on screen. I
suppose a major part of the screenwriter's job is to know what
not to write.
Do you think of yourself as a director who writes his own
material or as a writer who gets to direct?
[laughs] It's hard to answer this question because I've never
known anything different. I often find it very useful, and I
think actors find it useful, that the writer's there on set. One
of the fears I have of directing somebody else's writing is that
I don't fully understand a certain aspect of it. At least when
it's your own writing, you know absolutely everything about it.
Sometimes you've invented these characters. I think the actors
find that useful, that they can not only talk to the director,
but they're actually talking to the person who wrote it.
Is the process of writing different for you when you adapt, as
opposed to creating from scratch?
It is a different process with a book. The first thing I did on
this was simply to lift all the dialogue onto the computer and
then realize immediately that 80% of the book is the two kids at
the fence. This won't work, because people are going to be
irritated by the kids if they're on screen that long. So you hone
it down and that creates a space for something else, which is the
development of the family life. At least you have a first step
that isn't your own; it's simply words on screen from the book.
Then you hack away at that and swap it around. One of the first
changes I made was to make it chronological, because the book
goes back and forth with flashbacks.
With an original I spend so long plotting. If I use Brassed Off
as an example, I spent a long time plotting it but then from
writing page one of the screenplay it was probably just two days.
It just whistled off. As long as you've got the whole plot in
your head.
Would you ever write something for someone else to direct?
I might. I would actually write in a very, very different way.
There have been projects where I've written the same draft
number, but in two different ways, an A and a B. One to get a
certain cast aboard and another one to get the studio interested.
It's the same version of the script, just doctored towards
different things.
Striped Pajamas is told almost entirely from Bruno's perspective,
so a huge amount of it depends on the audience's understanding.
Were there a lot of challenges writing a screenplay with so much
subtlety to it?
Well, you're walking a very dangerous line, especially with this
subject matter. Even down to long discussions with the designer
of the film. You've got the fence and the camp in the distance.
Things like that, it's dangerous, because people might say, "That
doesn't look like a concentration camp," and you don't want to
upset anyone through not being authentic or realistic. But the
trouble is, we're having to tell a story where the child thinks
this is a farm, so it's got to look like a farm, through the eyes
of a child. I suppose, like most good horror movies, the monster
is hidden until the last few minutes. That's when it's revealed
in all its gory horror.
Now, this is a fictional story that's grounded in reality -- did
you do a lot of research for this past what was in the book?
Yeah, when I was writing the screenplay I did a lot of research.
I mean, most research these days is on the internet. You get into
some pretty dark places. You find yourself on a website you
really shouldn't be on, you shouldn't be at. Then you click a
link and then you're at one you really shouldn't be at. I think
what was scariest is there are a lot of these sites that are
present-day movements, which is scarier than anything.
Also, at 50-whatever-I-am, you think you know about the
Holocaust. But you know so little. To find out more and more
about what happened, instances that happened at the time, is
actually pretty disturbing. I think we'd all been to those dark
places. Me as a screenwriter, the actors, the designer, the
costumer. We'd all done our own research and been to some of
these horrible places, so by the time we started shooting the
film, we were very keen to put all that behind us and have a good
time making the film. It sounds ridiculous to have a laugh making
a Holocaust film, but it was very important with the kids there
that we didn't all walk around being suicidal.
That's an interesting point. Because it's Bruno's view, a lot of
the Nazis are seen in a very humanized light, especially Father.
Was this a hard selling point?
Well, it's not a sympathetic light. I'm not sure humanizing is
the right word. I suppose I was keen to avoid cliché Nazis. One
of the terrifying things about that time was they were human
beings who had families and kids and loved their families and
kids. In the film he can play chess with his son one night and
the next day go out and kill several hundred people. Again,
through the research, looking at Rudolph Hoess' family life.
There's a picture of his garden swings, and just beyond it is
Auschwitz. The closest you get to cliché is Rupert Friend's
character, Lieutenant Kotler. But then there are moments, like at
the dinner party, when he starts talking about his father. Again,
it's a family thing and they are human beings. One of the reasons
we shot it with a straight English accent is that it opens out.
It's not just about Nazis and Germans, it's about human beings.
Not that you need to have an English accent to be a human being.
[laughs]
In the book the camp actually is Auschwitz, isn't it?
Yeah. It's such a sensitive subject. Again, it works in the book
because you can imagine certain things, but on screen if you're
saying this is Auschwitz, people say, "That house wasn't there,"
and "Which commandant is David Thewlis playing?" That muddles it
all up. It's not very good for the movie, really. My favorite
scene in the book was a scene when Hitler comes to dinner to give
him the job in the first place. Fantastic scene. I started to
write it in the first draft and then just thought, "I can't get
away with that." You can't put a real person in this fictional
story. That's very dangerous. It could almost be comedic. So I
took that out. I thought to be non-specific would be better.
The propaganda film that father makes was your addition, yes?
Yeah. One of the things that worried me -- again, works very well
in the book, but on the screen -- the naiveté of Bruno. I worried
that on screen it might look like stupidity rather than naiveté,
because he's on screen so long. To combat that, I felt he needed
to ask more questions, which he does in the film. Also, just to
underline at that time the German people were being fed that kind
of propaganda. But it serves a dual purpose in the screenplay.
It's at a time when he's most doubting his father. He catches a
glimpse of this propaganda, falls for it, and it confirms his
trust in his father, ironically.
Bruno's family seems to represent all the different faces Germans
could wear during the war. His father's a devout Nazi officer.
His mother's horrified at what's going on but makes no attempt to
stop it. His sister (Amber Beattie) doesn't know what's going on
but embraces the ideology. How much of this was deliberate
construction?
And the grandfather, who is, I think, the worst character in the
lot of them, David Thewlis's father. Yes, that is design. Again,
not really in the book, because the book is so entirely about
Bruno and inside Bruno's head. There are no scenes that he
doesn't see or hear. That's one of the things I put in the
screenplay, was more to do with the family life. Certainly,
Mother's thread is born out of the screenplay. I felt you needed
a character that was a mild conscience in a way, somebody who
knew it was a camp but didn't know the extent of it until she has
an awful discovery. What isn't symbolized, I think, is that
portion of the population that knew the extent of it but didn't
want to know, or pretended they didn't.
Very early on, once the tone is set, it's apparent there's only a
few ways this story can end -- none of them good. It has sort of
an awful finality to it. Is it hard to write a film that has such
a sense of impending, predetermined doom?
I think people know it's not going to be a happy ending, but I
don't think they know the extent of the unhappiness. What was the
best part of the screenwriting process was to maintain a sense of
dread throughout. There's a sense of dread, you think it's not
going to turn out great. Without giving away the ending, it is
really the final minute that shocks people. There's a Hollywood
element to the ending, which is not in the book, but it misguides
the audience, which I like, and then the rug is pulled from under
their feet immediately after that. I like what that does to an
audience.
idea when his agent passed him a pre-publication copy of The Boy
in the Striped Pajamas, a young-adult novel written by one of the
years writing and directing a romantic comedy, Herman wanted his
next project to have some dramatic weight to it. "So when this
arrived," he explains, "I just thought, 'This is the one.' It
blew me away."
Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is a 1930s German schoolboy who's proud
to learn that his military-officer father (David Thewlis) has
received a very important promotion, but not as happy to learn it
means moving away to a new home outside the city. Much to the
young boy's surprise, his family's new home is near a farm that
his father is in charge of, one protected by high fences where
the workers wear their black-and-white striped Pajamas all the
time. Despite many warnings from his mother (Vera Farmiga), Bruno
eventually wanders out to see the farm and meets Shmuel (Jack
Scanlon), a Jewish boy his own age who isn't quite sure why he's
inside the barrier. As the summer rolls on, Bruno brings balls,
checkerboards, and sandwiches out to the fence to share with his
new friend, a friend everyone tells him he should hate.
On the film's press day, Herman took a break between roundtable
interviews and photo sessions to sit down with CS Weekly to talk
about adaptations, trying to be lighthearted with a Holocaust
film, and tripping up his audiences.
Considering how it came to you, did John Boyne work with you at
all on this?
This is the fourth adaptation I've done. On all the previous
three, I've hardly ever met the original author or playwright.
But just for this one...I did a film called Brassed Off, which
was then transferred from film onto the stage, so I knew how it
felt to hand over your baby to someone you don't know [chuckles].
I bought the film rights to Striped Pajamas myself, because I
wanted to be my own boss for a few months and simply be on my
own. I was buying my own freedom. John had sold the rights to me
personally, and contractually that's normally goodbye. But in
this case I was very keen to have his approval and support
throughout. I'd send him every draft just to get his notes. There
were many discussions. Like I say, it wasn't contractual, just a
desire on my part to have his approval. That carried on through
the filmmaking process. We invited him to set, and to have an
author still aboard a film doing publicity, that's quite a rarity.
How faithful an adaptation is this?
Well, one of the most rewarding things is everybody says it's
very, very faithful, but in fact, when you analyze it, it's very
different. I mean, John thinks it's incredibly faithful. I think
that's because it's faithful in spirit. There are a lot of very
good scenes that I've cut out that were in the book, they worked
very well in the book, but they just wouldn't work on screen. I
suppose a major part of the screenwriter's job is to know what
not to write.
Do you think of yourself as a director who writes his own
material or as a writer who gets to direct?
[laughs] It's hard to answer this question because I've never
known anything different. I often find it very useful, and I
think actors find it useful, that the writer's there on set. One
of the fears I have of directing somebody else's writing is that
I don't fully understand a certain aspect of it. At least when
it's your own writing, you know absolutely everything about it.
Sometimes you've invented these characters. I think the actors
find that useful, that they can not only talk to the director,
but they're actually talking to the person who wrote it.
Is the process of writing different for you when you adapt, as
opposed to creating from scratch?
It is a different process with a book. The first thing I did on
this was simply to lift all the dialogue onto the computer and
then realize immediately that 80% of the book is the two kids at
the fence. This won't work, because people are going to be
irritated by the kids if they're on screen that long. So you hone
it down and that creates a space for something else, which is the
development of the family life. At least you have a first step
that isn't your own; it's simply words on screen from the book.
Then you hack away at that and swap it around. One of the first
changes I made was to make it chronological, because the book
goes back and forth with flashbacks.
With an original I spend so long plotting. If I use Brassed Off
as an example, I spent a long time plotting it but then from
writing page one of the screenplay it was probably just two days.
It just whistled off. As long as you've got the whole plot in
your head.
Would you ever write something for someone else to direct?
I might. I would actually write in a very, very different way.
There have been projects where I've written the same draft
number, but in two different ways, an A and a B. One to get a
certain cast aboard and another one to get the studio interested.
It's the same version of the script, just doctored towards
different things.
Striped Pajamas is told almost entirely from Bruno's perspective,
so a huge amount of it depends on the audience's understanding.
Were there a lot of challenges writing a screenplay with so much
subtlety to it?
Well, you're walking a very dangerous line, especially with this
subject matter. Even down to long discussions with the designer
of the film. You've got the fence and the camp in the distance.
Things like that, it's dangerous, because people might say, "That
doesn't look like a concentration camp," and you don't want to
upset anyone through not being authentic or realistic. But the
trouble is, we're having to tell a story where the child thinks
this is a farm, so it's got to look like a farm, through the eyes
of a child. I suppose, like most good horror movies, the monster
is hidden until the last few minutes. That's when it's revealed
in all its gory horror.
Now, this is a fictional story that's grounded in reality -- did
you do a lot of research for this past what was in the book?
Yeah, when I was writing the screenplay I did a lot of research.
I mean, most research these days is on the internet. You get into
some pretty dark places. You find yourself on a website you
really shouldn't be on, you shouldn't be at. Then you click a
link and then you're at one you really shouldn't be at. I think
what was scariest is there are a lot of these sites that are
present-day movements, which is scarier than anything.
Also, at 50-whatever-I-am, you think you know about the
Holocaust. But you know so little. To find out more and more
about what happened, instances that happened at the time, is
actually pretty disturbing. I think we'd all been to those dark
places. Me as a screenwriter, the actors, the designer, the
costumer. We'd all done our own research and been to some of
these horrible places, so by the time we started shooting the
film, we were very keen to put all that behind us and have a good
time making the film. It sounds ridiculous to have a laugh making
a Holocaust film, but it was very important with the kids there
that we didn't all walk around being suicidal.
That's an interesting point. Because it's Bruno's view, a lot of
the Nazis are seen in a very humanized light, especially Father.
Was this a hard selling point?
Well, it's not a sympathetic light. I'm not sure humanizing is
the right word. I suppose I was keen to avoid cliché Nazis. One
of the terrifying things about that time was they were human
beings who had families and kids and loved their families and
kids. In the film he can play chess with his son one night and
the next day go out and kill several hundred people. Again,
through the research, looking at Rudolph Hoess' family life.
There's a picture of his garden swings, and just beyond it is
Auschwitz. The closest you get to cliché is Rupert Friend's
character, Lieutenant Kotler. But then there are moments, like at
the dinner party, when he starts talking about his father. Again,
it's a family thing and they are human beings. One of the reasons
we shot it with a straight English accent is that it opens out.
It's not just about Nazis and Germans, it's about human beings.
Not that you need to have an English accent to be a human being.
[laughs]
In the book the camp actually is Auschwitz, isn't it?
Yeah. It's such a sensitive subject. Again, it works in the book
because you can imagine certain things, but on screen if you're
saying this is Auschwitz, people say, "That house wasn't there,"
and "Which commandant is David Thewlis playing?" That muddles it
all up. It's not very good for the movie, really. My favorite
scene in the book was a scene when Hitler comes to dinner to give
him the job in the first place. Fantastic scene. I started to
write it in the first draft and then just thought, "I can't get
away with that." You can't put a real person in this fictional
story. That's very dangerous. It could almost be comedic. So I
took that out. I thought to be non-specific would be better.
The propaganda film that father makes was your addition, yes?
Yeah. One of the things that worried me -- again, works very well
in the book, but on the screen -- the naiveté of Bruno. I worried
that on screen it might look like stupidity rather than naiveté,
because he's on screen so long. To combat that, I felt he needed
to ask more questions, which he does in the film. Also, just to
underline at that time the German people were being fed that kind
of propaganda. But it serves a dual purpose in the screenplay.
It's at a time when he's most doubting his father. He catches a
glimpse of this propaganda, falls for it, and it confirms his
trust in his father, ironically.
Bruno's family seems to represent all the different faces Germans
could wear during the war. His father's a devout Nazi officer.
His mother's horrified at what's going on but makes no attempt to
stop it. His sister (Amber Beattie) doesn't know what's going on
but embraces the ideology. How much of this was deliberate
construction?
And the grandfather, who is, I think, the worst character in the
lot of them, David Thewlis's father. Yes, that is design. Again,
not really in the book, because the book is so entirely about
Bruno and inside Bruno's head. There are no scenes that he
doesn't see or hear. That's one of the things I put in the
screenplay, was more to do with the family life. Certainly,
Mother's thread is born out of the screenplay. I felt you needed
a character that was a mild conscience in a way, somebody who
knew it was a camp but didn't know the extent of it until she has
an awful discovery. What isn't symbolized, I think, is that
portion of the population that knew the extent of it but didn't
want to know, or pretended they didn't.
Very early on, once the tone is set, it's apparent there's only a
few ways this story can end -- none of them good. It has sort of
an awful finality to it. Is it hard to write a film that has such
a sense of impending, predetermined doom?
I think people know it's not going to be a happy ending, but I
don't think they know the extent of the unhappiness. What was the
best part of the screenwriting process was to maintain a sense of
dread throughout. There's a sense of dread, you think it's not
going to turn out great. Without giving away the ending, it is
really the final minute that shocks people. There's a Hollywood
element to the ending, which is not in the book, but it misguides
the audience, which I like, and then the rug is pulled from under
their feet immediately after that. I like what that does to an
audience.
| Both the review and the interview were written by Peter Clines for CS Magazine |
The film was given four stars by the magazine.
| Copyright © 2007 | www.booksandwands.com | All Rights Reserved No copyright infringement intended of any and all source material. Harry Potter belongs to JK Rowling, Bloomsbury, Scholastic and Warner Brothers Entertainment. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas belongs to the writers and filmmakers. |
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