david kross Tagged Articles at Cinematical

After a distinguished career as a stage director, Stephen Daldry debuted as a film director with Billy Elliot; after that film's rave reviews and warm reception, his follow-up was The Hours, an ambitious adaptation of Michael Cunningham's novel that earned Daldry an Oscar nomination for Best Director. Daldry's new film The Reader, adapted from the German novel by Bernhard Schlink, tells the story of Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes), a lawyer who looks back at his youth (with David Kross playing the young Berg) and his fierce sexual affair with a much older woman, Hanna (Kate Winslet) in post-war Germany and the secrets and truths that come to light years after their affair ends.

Speaking with Cinematical in Los Angeles, Daldry talked about nudity, morality and the perils of adaptation: "We didn't want to make a film that reminded us of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader; we wanted to make a film based on Bernhard Schlink's The Reader. ..."

Cinematical: What was the prime source of appeal for you in adapting The Reader?

Stephen Daldry: The subject. I spent a lot of time, as a schoolboy, in Germany, learning German; as an adult, I spent a lot of time in Berlin when I was running the Royal Court Theater, working with a theater in Berlin. So it's a country that I know well, that for all its contradictions and shadows, always fascinates me. And Berlin has always seemed to be on the fault line of the 20th Century. And how that country has always, from generation to generation, and continues to -- (had) to struggle with the fact that they invented Auschwitz ...it's not just interesting, it's also important.

It's a common experience to read a book slated for a film adaptation and then approach the movie, if at all, with a trepidation bordering on fear. As an optimist who doesn't get too offended when his favorite stories get changed for a different medium, I generally try to minimize that reaction. Yet that is exactly how I feel about Stephen Daldry's imminent adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader. A large part of me is convinced that Schlink's lovely, challenging little novel – almost more of an essay than a novel, really – can't possibly survive Daldry's questionable prestige picture instincts. The book demands a small film, melancholy, withdrawn. Can we get that from one of the year's big Oscar hopefuls?

The logline IMDb plot summary [Ed.: corrected upon being informed that this is not the official studio "logline"] is already all wrong: "Nearly a decade after his affair with an older woman came to a mysterious end, law student Michael Burk is reunited with his former lover (Winslet) as she defends herself in a war-crime trial." No. I'm loath to give too much away, but "reunited" is not the right word. In fact, the lack of a bona fide reunion between the two is part of what makes the novel so interesting, and the reason for that lack of reunion is at the heart of the moral questions it grapples with.