Senior Theatrical Editor
www.moviefreak.com
About a Boy
Mark Herman and John Boyne on Sewing Striped Pajamas
When I got the news that I’d get the chance to meet with screenwriter/director Mark Herman and author John Boyne about their Holocaust drama The Boy in the Striped Pajamas before a Cinema Seattle sponsored screening I never guessed it would be just moments after they’d stepped off their plane. But that’s exactly what happened, the three of us sitting down in the bar at the downtown Fairmont Olympic Hotel, the pair’s bags not even up in their rooms, the publicist still checking them in as we all sipped tea and Diet Cokes.
Novelist John Boyne and screenwriter/director Mark Herman on the set of Miramax Films' The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
I wanted to speak with the twosome about the film because, for whatever reason, I just couldn’t get their drama out of my head. While there was never any question where the story was ultimately heading (a young eight-year-old boy named Bruno – beautifully played by Asa Butterfield – moves to the countryside with his father, a Nazi officer, and his mother and secretly makes friends with a fellow child residing at what he thinks is a Jewish work camp, startling realizations about the true nature of the war ensue, threatening to tear his family apart), the fact so much of it has stuck with me so long after is really quite something. Here are some of the highlights from our 20-plus minute conversation.
Sara Michelle Fetters: Why did you want to write this book? Where did the idea come from?
John Boyne: I started writing the book in April of 2004 and it wasn’t the book I intended writing at all. I was a student of the Holocaust for a number of years but I never expected to write about it, but I ended up having this idea, the idea of two boys at a fence talking to each other, and I thought to tell the story from the point of view of the German child. I thought the image of him walking to the fence everyday and asking questions would be a fresh take on the subject matter. The idea just seemed too interesting to ignore.
Fetters: Conversely, what was it that struck you about the book that made you realize you had to make this film?
Mark Herman: As a writer/director every project [I do] takes like three or four years and I’d just done a romantic comedy [Hope Springs] and I was keen for the next three or four years to be dedicated to something a little more weighty. I spent a few months trying to think of ideas myself and then John’s book – we share the same agency so I got an early copy – came into my hands. Like he said, this [story] was a fresh take, and it was that fresh take on looking at the Holocaust that interested me. I thought it was a very unique angle and I discovered that film rights hadn’t gone yet.
So, in order to make that happen and to get the rights I thought a studio would be more keen to see a film through a screenplay then they would through the book, and the only way to do that was to write the screenplay myself and also buy the film rights myself and hope to get paid back after they [a studio] has read it. I worked on my own for a few months and then delivered it [the script] to Miramax and it was greenlit very quickly. I guess you could say the gamble paid off.
Fetters: It had to help that, thanks to the success of Little Voice, you’d had a pretty strong relationship with Miramax already?
Herman: Yes, I guess so, although it really was a new Miramax and not the same studio I made that earlier picture with. But I had worked with [them] before and I also knew that they really needed to be the first port of call. There just weren’t going to be too many studios interested in making this sort of a movie but I did know that Miramax might be one of them. Thankfully I was right.
Fetters: I admit, I have not read the novel, but one of the nice things about the movie is that it does make me want to read it which I think speaks to the level of quality in the storytelling here. When I say that, what I’m talking about the subtle way in which the piece’s subject matter almost s sneaks up on you which, to my way of thinking at least, is exceedingly impressive.
Boyne: If you did read the novel you would notice that it opens up without telling you where, or when, you are, and when it was first published it came with a blurb on the cover saying, “We can’t tell you anything about this story.” It meant the reader came to it knowing nothing and it forced them to take the same journey as the little boy and they would be with him, standing there, looking out his window seeing something without really knowing what he was looking at, the reader asking the same questions as he is. It’s only as the story develops that you realize what it is that’s going on, so rather being thrust into the horrors of the camps you’re thrust into them the same way a kid who knows nothing about them would be.
Fetters: And the movie, almost surprisingly, works really well in that regard, too.
Herman: What I felt when I first starting the screenplay I thought that by the time this movie comes out, hopefully comes out, most people would know what it was about and possibly know the ending as well. John’s book has a lot of flashbacks, a lot of revelatory flashbacks, and as I thought everyone would know the story I took those out and put things in a chronological order. At the same time, I did want to have the same sense of things, wanted to create the same sense of juvenile dread throughout, and hopefully if I did that right it would keep audiences wondering about what was going to happen next.
And, I also think even the people who have read the book and know the story are still not quite prepared for that ending, still not ready to see it acted out. When you’re reading a book you can put it down and catch your breath, pause for a moment. When you’re watching a movie you don’t have that option.
Boyne: I think it is interesting people who have not read the book and come into the movie not knowing [the ending]. It’s an interesting response. But, even for those who had read [it] it can still be rather shocking. They want it to go a different direction even if they know it can’t, I think that’s very interesting.
Fetters: When you’re researching a project like this one, how important is it to stay historically accurate and yet still find ways to craft emotionally compelling narratives and three-dimensional characters a reader or an audience member can relate to and feel for?
Boyne: I think there is a big difference between the book and the film in that sense because thanks to my own historical research I knew just about as much as I thought I could possibly know while writing, yet even then I also already knew that I would have to make some changes in order to serve the story. I had to decide which ones [changes] were important to make and which ones were impossible to make.
For example, moving the commandant’s house outside of the camp I needed to do so Bruno could walk to the fence even though I knew in real life [their] house would have been inside the fence, but I felt that change was justifiable in order to serve the story. At the same time, I knew there were things I couldn’t change, and that’s the way the stories of so many of the people who were actually there came to an end.
There will be those people who say you shouldn’t change anything, but as a novelist it is very important – even with a subject matter like the Holocaust – there are still major decisions you have to make in that regard. I think overall the ones I chose to make can easily be justified.
Asa Butterfield and Vera Farmiga in Miramax Films' The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Fetters: And in regards to the movie?
Herman: I think in movie terms, there are things you can get away with in novels a little more then you can get away with in films. Every department, especially on a film of this subject matter, you have to get everything right. Design, costume, everyone, they have to go out of their way to be authentic and accurate.
Having said that, the book does indicate that [the camp] is Auschwitz and there is also this great scene with Hitler and I took those real life names out because you were putting real people in a fictional story and it could almost sadly be comedic if you didn’t get it absolutely right. I didn’t want to potentially take people out of the story in that manner so scenes like those unfortunately just had to go.
Fetters: But what about the children? While this meeting between the two of them works dramatically, in real life it is doubtful it would have ever happened, plausible, maybe, but also unlikely. I mean, most of these children who went into these camps…
Boyne: …didn’t last a day. No, you’re right. I think plausible but unlikely is actually a really good way to put it. There were children who were kept, of course. They were kept for medical experimentation, of course, and there is also documentation of younger kids who if they could possibly get away with looking older than ten to say that they were. So there were younger kids that were there pretending to be older than they actually were.
So, that’s one answer to your question. The other is that it [the age issue] didn’t really matter to me. It’s not crucial to me whether or not it could happen; what matters to me is that it does happen. Those sorts of issues don’t really seam that crucial to me. I sort of think that you can either intellectualize the story or you can come at it from a strictly emotional standpoint and allow it to play itself out before you.
Herman: The same thing goes for the movie. I think it is something you have to enter into with your heart and not with your head. If you really do analyze it then you can pick holes in a lot of things about it. But then, at the same time, you can also research just about any aspect of it and find some historical note or anomaly that backs you up.
Sure it is highly, highly unlikely that two boys like this would meet, but then again, there is the story of a nice little girl, about the same age [as Bruno], on the other side of the fence who gave food to a [boy] on the opposite side. She fed him for about a year, and they would have these meetings everyday with no guards around and she would ask him questions and they became good friends before he got moved to another camp.
The day before he was supposed to go to the gas chamber [the camp] was liberated. Twenty years later they [the boy and the girl] met in New York and got married, and that sounds like the cheesiest fictional story and yet that’s absolutely true. Our story is fictional and yet it feels real, you just don’t question it.
Fetters: What was it like adapting this book into a screenplay?
Herman: I’ve done four adaptations now, a couple of them from stage plays, and I didn’t think it was going to be tricky when I started it but then I got working and realized the subject matter is so dense and complicated it was going to take a lot of work to get it the sensitivity of it right. There’s also the fact you’ve got these millions of people, the book being so very popular, who all have the film composed in their heads already and you’ve got to try and make one better than that, not exactly an easy thing to accomplish.
But, like anything, you just sit down and you do it. You read. You take notes. You figure out the way to make it work, staying true to the characters and the emotion while you do.
Fetters: On the flip side of things, this book is your baby, your pride and joy. Was there trepidation in letting someone else have their way with it, with letting them transform your writing into their version of a best possible screenplay?
Boyne: No, because I wouldn’t have just sold the rights [to the novel] to just anybody. I needed to know they’d do a proper job. After we met I felt like it would be a good match. I trusted Mark, had the thought he would be the one to get it right. After that, once I signed those contracts part of me just decided to step away a little bit and not worry about it. I always felt that even if the movie is a masterpiece or if it is terrible that doesn’t change the book, in that regards at least my job was done.
Fortunately, in this case, I really do feel that the film is every bit as powerful as the book. This has ended up being a really terrific experience for me, and I hope as many people read or see it as humanly possible. [The movie] is something parents, grandparents and children all can go see. There is no violence depicted in it, and what there is all off-screen. It is not a disposable product and it is something they can come out of and have some really nice, important conversations about. I don’t think there’s enough of that right now.
Butterfield in Miramax Films' The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Herman: I agree with that completely. I see people talking after the movie and if [this] does as well in America as it has in Europe so far it would be terrific, but even if it doesn’t if those who do [see it] have those types of discussions it would all have been more than worthwhile. I’m proud of this film. I think we made a good one.
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