With both Revolutionary Road and The Reader
coming into theaters around the world, this has been quite a
creative year for 33-year-old British actress Kate Winslet. There's
Oscar®-talk for each film, with Winslet in line for best actress,
best supporting actress or both. And ironically, these two films
complement each other in that they're both partially set during the
same period – the post-World War Two-era of the mid-1950s.
Winslet already has five Oscar nominations to her credit,
two of which made her the youngest actress ever to be nominated
twice. She's also regarded as a champion of showing women's bodies
as they naturally are and has always refused to conform to anyone
else's template for female nudity.
As a novel by Bernhard Schlink, The Reader offered a
forceful look at the seductive effect of the Third Reich as it
gained power and the effect it had on the first post-war generation.
Once World War II was over, the generation that followed had to
reconcile how their parents, uncles and aunts had allowed Hitler and
the original Nazis to gain power and draw the nation into its
insidious system. As this country begins to cope with this post-Bush
era, a slew of Nazi-related films like The Reader, Valkyrie, Good
and The Boy In The Striped Pajamas are examining the slippery
slope that led to total compliance with a Fascist dictatorship.
Virginal 15 year-old Michael Berg (played by German actor
David Kross; the older version is played by Ralph Fiennes) is
similarly seduced by Hannah Schmitz (Winslet) and then the
relationship is discarded. As he grapples with its effect on him, he
also grapples with building a life afterwards – a life that includes
becoming a lawyer and dealing with an untested legal system
established in the wake of the Nazi regime. As part of his legal
studies, Berg witnesses the trial of four female work camp guards
who sent countless people to their deaths. When he recognizes one as
his former lover, the ever deepening gyre of emotions and ideas
spins.
During screenings, this film has produced polarizing
responses. When the opportunity arose to speak with Winslet in a
near-exclusive interview setting, it produced equally strong
emotional reactions on both sides of the table.
I saw both
Revolutionary Road and The
Reader on the same day. You played two very different people. Was
it a different process for each film to adapt or adopt these
people?
It's an extremely different process with any character;
every character is different. I would hate to use the old
regurgitated emotions of another character and layer them into a new
character with a different wig on, or a different costume and a
different accent. These two projects were wildly different in terms
of how I had to approach them. But both were unbelievably
complicated, the most challenging experiences of my working life. I
find myself saying again and again: the fact that I got to play both
of these characters in my lifetime, let alone in the space of a year
– it doesn't even add up; that doesn't happen to people. To say that
creatively, it's been the most rewarding two years of my life, would
be a massive understatement. I've learned so much about myself as an
actress. I've just honestly learned so much.
Approaching someone like Hannah Schmitz is so different
from somebody like April Wheeler [of Revolutionary Road]. The
one thing that they both do have in common is that they're based on
novels, and the source material is so rich in each case that they
really became my bible in both instances, which doesn't happen all
the time. My copy of The Reader is on my shelf right next to
Revolutionary Road and they both don't really resemble books
anymore; they both [look], sort of, like a dog has had a go at them.
They're practically falling apart. [With] Hannah I was very much
playing a character, and I remember staring down the barrel of the
gun and thinking, "Shit. I really have nothing I can relate to here.
There's nothing of my own experience I can put into this character,
at all. So let's just start right there and hope for the goddamn
best."
It's such a terrifying position to be in, especially when
it's such an extraordinary book; the material's so rich. It's a much
loved piece of German literature and so important to Germans. I
wanted to get it right. I was the person asked to play Hannah
Schmitz. It was an enormous pressure [on me]. "Jesus Christ! Don't
fuck it up, girl." The thing about playing Hannah that, quite
honestly, was the hardest – aside from all the obvious things: the
dialect and so on, and the aging, and the illiteracy and the moral
illiteracy – the hardest thing was to hold on to my instincts as to
who you are.
With something like this – a very, very intricate and
difficult love film that is set up against a Holocaust backdrop
(though I don't feel it's a Holocaust movie at all) – [is that]
everyone had an opinion about Hannah Schmitz. She meant something
different for everybody. People were alarmingly vocal about that,
and everyone would assume you shared the same opinion: "Well
obviously she was a Nazi; obviously, she was in control of her
action; well, obviously..." The list goes on. I would sometimes
think, "Oh my god, that's not what I thought. Oh shit. Am I wrong?
Hang on. No, wait a second. I might not be wrong. I actually might
be right, maybe they're wrong. Does it matter who's right or
wrong?"
All that mattered at the end of the day was that I made her
my own, hung on to that, and played the honesty and truthfulness of
that, the vulnerability of her and that I understood her. That's the
most important job, I think. I'm really learning more about this,
actually. As an actor it's so key that you get inside the character
and you understand them – the good bits and the bad bits. You don't
have to forgive it; you don't have to sympathize with it. You just
have to just have to understand why those things [happen] to that
person and why they behave the way that they do. That's what I was
able to do, somehow, with April and with Hannah. And that's why I'm
absolutely not good right now, because of having gone through these
two extraordinary experiences. It's literally blown my mind.
Why do you think
Hannah had an affair with this high school boy and why did she keep
calling him "kid?"
You'd have to ask Bernhard Schlink why she called him
"kid," quite honestly. You really would. That's what she calls him
the book and I don't know why that was. That was a little nickname,
an affectionate term she had for him. I don't think she was calling
him "kid" and really meaning a child, or baby, or anything like
that. Also, Hannah thought he was 17; he's a 15 year-old boy, but he
let her believe he was 17 years old. I just don't think she really
thought about the age. She's a woman who – because of her illiteracy
– has probably never had a close, intimate relationship of this
nature. She's never been able to let anyone in for fear of being
found out, and being exposed, and the shame of that she carried in
her day-to-day life. Her illiteracy informed everything about her
existence.
For her, to feel these things, be touched in that way, be
overwhelmed at how much she ended up, ultimately, [made her]
emotionally need this boy. I would say that in many ways, she ended
up emotionally needing him almost more than he needed her. You don't
expect that to happen. I think she genuinely loved this boy, this
young man. And that's how it always felt to me: he was a young man.
It didn't feel inappropriate even – it didn't feel salacious, or
uncomfortable, or wrong. It somehow always seemed so real, and so
pure, and so tender. That's what it was for me. That's why I think
it didn't feel uncomfortable or unnatural to do those love scenes
with David [Kross], because I always understood them – we both did
as characters. It doesn't matter how nervous you get before shooting
scenes like that. At the end of the day as long as you believe in
the reason that they're there and present in the story, then you can
embrace it, and really play those moments out and fill them with as
much honesty as possible.
What was that
process for you to get into her mind? Didn't you have to do a lot of
research since you didn't have much of a frame of reference for her
to begin with?
It was really hard. It was incredibly helpful, and so
interesting. But it was a long process, and I felt like I had to
cram quite a lot in. I really only had about two months and there
was a lot to do with the general preparation of Hannah: the dialect,
who she was, her backstory, where she came from. I came at it and
thought, "Where do I begin?" "Okay," I thought, "I could do this
thing, I could do this thing, or I could do all of these things.
Okay, let's start with that. I'll just do all of these things and
I'm just going to see which one helps me the most." Ultimately,
everything I did was beneficial.
I had to educate myself a little more about the Holocaust;
and I had to educate myself a lot about the role of an SS guard,
about which I actually knew very little. And I'm not embarrassed to
say that, because I think that's the case for many people of my
generation. Once you see documentary footage of the camp, you read
anything on the Holocaust, you can never un-see those things, you
can never un-hear, un-read them. I'm still absolutely haunted and
traumatized by so much of what I saw during the preparation process.
At a certain point I just had to stop, because I thought, "I have
what I need now; I get it. I really get it."
Then what became most beneficial to me was the book. I
practically memorized it. Understanding the mind of an illiterate
person: that was crucial to me. Have I said this already or am I
having déjà vu? Have I talked about the literacy part in it yet? I
spent a lot of time with a group in New York City, the Literacy
Partners, and they teach men and women to read and write; that was
really the most helpful stuff I could possibly have done because I
had to understand the level of shame. I had to understand how you
live with that lie, how it affects every single area of your life.
I literally sat in on classes with people that were
learning how to spell cat, bat, sat and mat. And some of the younger
people in that group were 22, 23, and some of the older people were
72 and 73 years old. And they had spent a life being so ashamed that
they can't turn around to anybody and say, can you help me? There
was one woman in particular who spent a lot of time with me – she's
in her early 60s and had learned to read and write two years ago –
she's just so proud of herself, I can't tell you [how much!]. And
she was happy to talk about how she survived. So I would say to her,
"Hold on a second. How did you get jobs? What kinds of jobs did you
do?" "Well Sugar, let me tell you. I was a telephone operator and
when you can't read or write...I have the gift of the gab – you
become a good talker. You talk with people a lot. You try to escape
from it." But I would say, "Yes. But how did you get the job in the
first place? How did you fill in forms?" "Oh honey, did you ever
hear of Ace bandage?" "Yeah" "Well, I would go to the store and I
would buy myself an Ace bandage and I would go to my girlfriend and
say, “Oh my hand; I can't hold a pen. Could you fill in that form
for me?” And I would tell her what to put, “Yeah, you put that.”
That is what I did, for years and years of my life." "But how many
jobs are we talking about?" "We're talking a lot of jobs and a lot
of Ace bandages," is what she said. She had a son, so I would say,
"How would you help him with his homework?"
[She said,] "No. I did not help him with his homework. I
employed somebody to do that, because his life and his education was
so important to me, but I knew I couldn't do it. I couldn't let him
know that I couldn't read and write." I said, "What about bedtime
stories?" "No ma'am. I would sing to him songs that I would make
up." I was blown away. And then, [I asked,] "Okay, what would you do
in a restaurant?" "I would sit with my menu and my beautiful suit
that I had made for myself – which I had perfectly pressed that day
myself – and I would look at that menu and say, 'I'll take the
chicken.'" And I would say, "How did you know they had chicken." "Oh
honey, everybody has chicken." But I would say, okay, "Salads,
whatever...?" "I would say to the gentleman, 'What vegetables come
with that today? Oh, that sounds good. Let me take some of those."
So my understanding of how good you get at hiding that, the
lies that you live through, and the level of control you have to
exert on your day-to-day life just to simply understand what happens
next is a level of protection. That was the most valuable,
eye-opening stuff. You cannot imagine how fascinating that whole
process was for me. It literally blew my mind. Walking down the
street, I just think, pretend that you can't read that sign. Could
you imagine that, all of those things? Also being told that
illiterate people can count, so that when we were putting the
process together of how Hannah was actually able to teach herself to
read and write, we realized the counting element was quite
important. The-lady-with-the-little-dog -- one-two-three-four
[syncopated]. You see her doing it on her fingers. It helped a lot
with how [director] Stephen [Daldry] put this together.
Even when you're
doing these interviews, you seem to be learning something about
yourself; about what you did to get there. It sounds like this was a
pivotal experience for you.
It was huge. I full-on broke down and thought, "I'm going
to have to leave the room." Don't get me started on the trial. I am
still coming to terms with the whole experience of having played
Hannah, I really genuinely am. We wrapped on July 12th, and I sort
of walked away like some car crash victim who somehow hadn't been
hurt on the outside, but I felt like I couldn't speak [about it]. It
was truly overwhelming. I really went somewhere. I was in some kind
of a trance. And I'm still coming to terms with all of it. I'm so
blown away by the movie. There are moments in the film when I
actually make a noise. The moment when he goes to the camp, and the
camera is on the inside of that barn, and I go [makes guttural
sound]. I just can't watch – and we're not seeing any bloodshed.
It's just the emptiness and the power of the imagery and the memory
and the fact that that was a real camp.
Is Hannah naïve
when she's telling the truth, telling it the way it is? When the
Judge and prosecutor ask her questions, she's the only one saying,
"What did you expect me to do? This was my job." Does Hannah
realize she's taking the brunt of it while the other three female
concentration camp guards are lying through their teeth?
No, no... It's both. She's naïve; she's vulnerable; she
doesn't have the intellectual capacity to articulate what's
happened. She doesn't know about lying on that level. Someone's
asking the question – she's giving them the answer. So when she says
to [the judge], "Well, what would you have done?" she really wants
to know. She just thought she was doing her job. In those moments
she sitting there, she's realizing, for the first time, "Oh, so I
had a choice then? Okay, so doing my job meant I was committing a
crime, is that what it is?" She didn't know. That is because she was
illiterate. When those other women realized very quickly that they
can pin this thing on her, you just feel her spiraling out of
control. Because all she can do is speak faster, say what she said
already and say more of it, again and again. You just see her losing
control in this catastrophic way. Of course [there's] that moment
when, "I need to see a sample of your handwriting," she will take
that life sentence [rather than] admit she's illiterate. God, it's
devastating.
Everything is
left up to the audience; no judgment is made in this film. It asks
more questions than it even tries to answer. How important is that
in the telling of the story to you?
I think it's crucial. I think it's absolutely crucial. We
didn't want to give answers. We wanted to ask questions and have an
audience walk away questioning everything, and possibly questioning
their own morals if at any second they felt sympathy for Hannah
Schmitz. I knew it wasn't my job to make an audience sympathize with
her, humanize her or warm her up. I had to make her a person; I had
to make her real; and I had to be 100% committed to conveying the
honesty of every single emotion in order to give the audience the
opportunity to understand her if they wanted to, feel any level of
sympathy if they wanted to. The most exciting thing for me,
personally, is if the audience feels morally impure, if they feel
any degree of sympathy towards her, that's what is interesting. That
means that it is getting some kind of new perspective; it is raising
questions for people. I think your observation is absolutely right,
and it's absolutely what we hoped people would feel about the film.
