Otherwise, we’re smacking the same kind of redemptive films that have been made before and that does not further any dialogue or any discussion about totalitarianism or even what 1945 was. What I really felt with this film was there had to be a shadow narrative that the audience can inhabit, and there’s room for the audience to think and to make up their own minds. Otherwise, we’re condescending to the audience and we’re trying to tell the audience how to feel. What Saskia (Rosendahl) and I tried to do very early on was to play those scenes in exactly the same way and to pull judgment out of it. Look at how she suffers.” And then, the next minute, the audience is confronted with hideous doctrine spewing from her mouth. At some stages, the audience can think “Oh, the poor child. We were dealing with children, and especially a child of that age, 14, who’s on the cusp of being able to make decisions for herself, but she’s not quite there yet. How did you go about striking the right balance between your characters to give them a sense of humanity without labeling them either good or bad so that the audience can draw its own conclusions? Berlin has the fastest growing German population in the world. There is also the transparency with which Germany now deals with the Holocaust. We have African kids and they have been shown acceptance and love in that community. One of the beautiful things about making the film is I’ve had to throw out a lot of the preconceived ideas I had about Germany and about German people, especially living in Berlin with my kids. The other thing that really upsets you is denial. For a couple of years, I was sometimes alone in Berlin doing the research, and I would cry the same way any human being, Jewish or non-Jewish, would who is perplexed and hurt and angry when you see gross injustice. I went through immense anger and grief during the researching process. It’s her family photographs that are in Thomas’s wallet. That relationship was really important to me the whole time I was shooting. Shortland: I have a strong relationship with my husband’s grandmother who left Berlin in 1937. How did portraying this historical era and the plight of these characters affect you personally? The film became a lot more sexual and quite a bit more violent than the original story. And so, what we did was, I was unafraid and I looked at the scene between Thomas and Laura or the scene with the fisherman when they kill the fisherman, and I would think okay, what would really happen? What did they really do? What did they want to do? And I’d just go there. In some ways, Rachel would touch on sexuality or violence, but I think she tried to protect her mother. Rachel Seiffert wrote the book, but it is her mother’s story. Shortland: The story is based on a true story. What were some of the challenges of adapting the book to film? How do the book and the film differ? It was a perfect fit for this film because he was looking at what people do outside of a retrospective idea of history. He’s got a lot of experience and he’s a real anarchist. He had run the Binger Institute in Amsterdam and he also runs the Locarno Film Lab, two very well-known script workshops in Europe. I worked with a fantastic script editor in Berlin called Franz Rodenkirchen. And then, I wanted the film to be far more internal and from Laura’s perspective, so I wrote two drafts on my own. Shortland: Robin wrote the first two drafts and I would give notes. What was your collaborative process like with screenwriter Robin Mukherjee?
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