Michael Haneke: interview

Michael Haneke‘s American remake of his horrifying ’Funny Games‘ will premiere at the London Film Festival this weekend. Dave Calhoun meets the Austrian director who loves nothing better than to cause a scandal

Watching a film by the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke is like staring at the drama and the aftermath of a road accident: the real horror belongs to someone else, but the sense of discomfort is very much your own.

So it was ten years ago with ‘Funny Games’, Haneke’s fourth feature for the cinema and the first that drew wide attention to his work. The film managed to bemuse, terrify and anger many who witnessed the ritual torture of a middle-class Austrian family – mum, dad and young son – soon after they arrive at their lakeside summer house. The couple have barely unpacked their clothes when they encounter two young men who are wearing tennis gear and creepy white gloves and proceed to hold them hostage in their own home. The film’s violence, which is ample but largely off-camera, is pointless, terrifying and hard to stomach – not least as Haneke has his perpetrators occasionally stare into our eyes and address us directly, forcing us to share in their process and pleasure. The film’s style and pace is of a thriller – but one with all the acceptable and distancing conventions of the genre thrown out of the window. It’s a move that Haneke embraced also with his last film, ‘Hidden’ : a subversion of the thriller and a refusal to adhere to the unspoken ‘rules’ of the formula by answering the questions that hang so vividly over the film’s close. ‘I always say that a film has to be like the ramp for ski-jumping,’ Haneke says. ‘The film is the ramp. After that, you’re on your own.’

Now, in a surprising move, 65-year-old Haneke has remade ‘Funny Games’ in America, with upstate New York substituting for rural Austria and Naomi Watts and Tim Roth assuming the roles of the married couple, while Michael Pitt (‘Last Days’ ) and Brady Corbet (‘Mysterious Skin’ ) play the tormentors. The new version is virtually identical to the first, even down to individual shots and the disquieting heavy-metal track that interrupts a soothing classical number during the film’s opening minutes. There are small differences – a phone handset becomes a mobile, some dialogue is altered – but largely it’s a shot-by-shot, word-by-word remake. It’s a curious experience for anyone who knows the original, yet it’s gratifying that Haneke has preserved the essence of the Austrian version. It’s definitely as bleak as ever.

I meet Haneke in Paris at the beginning of the summer, just as he is finishing the film’s edit. I ask him the obvious question: why remake ‘Funny Games’? Was it that he always thought of the film as best suited to an American audience? He’s said before that it was the violence in American cinema that inspired him to make it.

‘Yes, exactly,’ Haneke nods. ‘The title was an English title. If you look closely at the inside of the house in the original, there’s no house like this anywhere in Austria! The idea of the original was to address the American viewer of violent films a little bit, but unfortunately and because of the German-speaking cast, the original film worked only on the arthouse circuit. When they gave me the opportunity to make it again and in a new language, I said, “Okay, let’s do it". I hope it works. We’ll see. I’m very curious.’

Behind his stark white beard, he’s a markedly jovial interviewee as we talk in the living-room of his Paris apartment. Home is still Vienna, but Haneke spends much time in Paris, not least as his last three films have been set in France. Last year he directed a version of the opera ‘Don Giovanni’ in the city. The new ‘Funny Games’ will surely cause a fuss with those unfamiliar with his work. Haneke has always faced criticism from those who dislike his films. The most frequent, perhaps, is that he doesn’t like, or indeed ‘hates’, his characters. ‘I think the opposite,’ he says. It’s true that terrible things befall so many of the folk that find themselves in front of Haneke’s camera. There’s the family who decide to kill themselves systematically in his first film, ‘The Seventh Continent’ (1989); there’s the camera-obsessed, murderous young boy in ‘Benny’s Video’ (1992); there’s Isabelle Huppert, first as a self-abusing musician in ‘The Piano Teacher’ (2001) and later lost in an apocalyptic wilderness in ‘The Time of the Wolf’ (2003); and there’s the couple played by Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil in ‘Hidden’ (2005), who have their comfortable lives disturbed by threatening tapes and drawings that land on their doormat. Things are never rosy for the cast of Haneke’s cinema.

‘But that’s a bit like life!’ he laughs. ‘I think this is a little bit stupid, this idea that I don’t like my characters. If you push your characters into hard situations, you have to love them. When you write a situation, you have to feel yourself in it. It’s a very stupid misunderstanding because I always put characters into tough situations. But it doesn’t mean I don’t like them.’

He’s genuinely amused when talking of the severity of his films, he laughs that his staging of ‘Don Giovanni’ (set in a modern corporation) was a ‘real scandal’, and he enjoys the memory of his various provocations.

‘People don’t like to be confronted with reality. They like to be confronted with a consumable reality. Even the most brutal violence is shown in a way that you can consume it so that you are thrilled, not touched. I always try to find a way so that people are touched too.’

Does this mean that his films are an attempt to re-educate cinema-goers? Does he want to alert viewers to what he sees as thoughtless cinema?

‘Re-educate is a hard word! But, I think, yes: to make him aware, to help him be aware of what’s going on everyday when you are looking at the media. I try to plant some mistrust of the media and how it works. But I’m not a teacher.

‘It’s a question of the responsibility of a director. You have a lot of power over the viewer. You can manipulate him. But if film is to be an art form,you have a responsibility to your partner – the viewer – and if you think he’s a stupid arsehole, you can make films and make a lot of money but I don’t think that’s very respectful.’ There are plans afoot to remake ‘Hidden’ in America, but Haneke will have nothing to do with it. ‘They asked me to do it, but I said no. “Funny Games” was a special case.’

His next film will be set in a village in the north of Germany in 1913. ‘There are lots of different families, from the farmer to the baron.’ After that, he wants to make a film about the internet, which after the film-within-a-film antics and debates on the violence of films like ‘Benny’s Video’, ‘Funny Games’ and ‘Hidden’ is surely a perfect subject for him in the modern era. ‘It’s the theme that interests me the most,’ he says. ‘All my films wouldn’t be possible or even necessary if today’s cinema was different. All my films are reactions to the cinema we know.’

‘Funny Games’ screens at the LFF on Oct 20 and 22 and the film opens next February. See www.timeout.com/lff for full
coverage of the LFF.

---