I've blogged before about how curious I am about the new Michael Haneke film - an English-language remake of Funny Games.
The NYT has this weekend published an in-depth interview with Haneke about Funny Games and much more. I still have absolutely no idea whether the remake of Funny Games will be brilliant or is a horrible lapse in judgment by Haneke.
The decision to remake his signature work in America with an A-list cast caused considerable controversy among hardcore cinephiles, not least because of Haneke’s reputation as one of Hollywood’s most outspoken critics. Haneke was quick to defend himself. “Of course I’m a critic of the studio system,” he said, as if it were unthinkable not to be. “But that doesn’t mean that one can’t work within that system. ‘Funny Games’ was always made with American audiences in mind, since its subject is Hollywood’s attitude toward violence.
When I asked whether the average American moviegoer was likely to appreciate having his attitude adjusted, Haneke-style, the director thought for a moment, then threw up his hands in mock surrender. “I’ve been accused of ‘raping’ the audience in my films, and I admit to that freely — all movies assault the viewer in one way or another. What’s different about my films is this: I’m trying to rape the viewer into independence.”
“Funny Games” occupies a unique place in Haneke’s body of work, not least because of his decision to shoot it twice. “Originally, I approached Michael about optioning ‘Funny Games’ for some other director,” Chris Coen, the film’s producer, told me. “And Michael’s reply was that he’d do it himself, but only if I could get Naomi Watts for the lead. I hadn’t thought about him wanting to do it, to be honest. But he said very clearly that ‘Funny Games’ was the one film of his that he’d allow no one else to direct.” Hollywood has a long and hallowed tradition of buying the rights to art-house hits and refashioning them to suit its own ends — in fact, the director Ron Howard recently acquired the rights to Haneke’s “Caché” — but Haneke’s decision to remake his own film surprised fans and colleagues alike. The peculiarity of the project seems to have been part of its appeal. “To my knowledge, no one has ever remade his own film so precisely,” the director told me in Vienna, with an unmistakable trace of boyish pride. “The new version is the same film superficially, of course, but it’s also very different: a different atmosphere, different performances, a different end result. That in and of itself is interesting.”
Watching both versions of “Funny Games” back to back is especially revealing of Haneke’s skill. Though the dialogue, framing and sequence of shots are identical, the end result is remarkably different: Michael Pitt, the other of the family’s tormentors, brings a disconcerting sweetness to his role; Tim Roth emotes where Ulrich Mahe endured stoically; and Watts herself infuses her character’s suffering with a sexuality that Susanne Lothar, perhaps intentionally, kept at a definite remove.
Haneke’s sudden prominence, and the unfailingly extreme subject matter of his films, has led to comparisons with Quentin Tarantino, with John Woo and with the directors of the so-called Asian Extreme movement, but Haneke himself sees little common ground. “I saw ‘Pulp Fiction,’ of course, and it’s a very well done film,” he said. “The problem, as I see it, is with its comedy — there’s a danger there, because the humor makes the violence consumable. Humor of that kind is all right, even useful, as long as the viewer is made to think about why he’s laughing. But that’s something ‘Pulp Fiction’ fails to do.” When I mentioned Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers,” another film that “Funny Games” has been compared with, Haneke shrugged. “Stone made the same mistake that Kubrick made. I use that film to illustrate a principle to my students — you can’t make an antifascist statement using fascist methods.”
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