CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 11/07/08

Looking Past the Lines:
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas's
Mark Herman

By peter clines

The writer-director of Brassed Off and Little Voice takes a more serious turn with a Holocaust film that's uplifting and dark at the same time.

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 agency's other clients, John Boyne. Having just spent several 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.

Peter Clines has had a lifelong love affair with the movies. He grew up in New England, where he studied English literature and education, and now lives and writes somewhere in Southern California. If anyone knows exactly where, he would appreciate a few hints.



The Boy in the Striped Pajamas courtesy Miramax Films

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