I often include sounds in the script you can either try to get them while shooting, or leave it until you’re mixing in the studio. But with sound, you can improve things in all sorts of ways: you can change the tone, even the actual words used, and of course all the other sounds. When you’re editing the footage, your choice is limited to the shots you did, so the possibilities are also limited. Your use of subtly heightened sound is especially effective in the film. Though I myself did auditions only with the 25 or so who’d been pre-selected, I did look at photos and videos of 7000. People look different now and it took a lot of work finding people with the right sort of face. But Sander’s are by far the best photos of that time, and were especially helpful when it came to the faces, especially of the children. We looked at many photographs of the period to get things like the costumes right. I felt that this way of thinking about one’s responsibilities to a superior was closely linked to the Protestantism of Luther.ĭid you by any chance have August Sander’s photos in mind when casting? When I was first thinking about the project, I kept asking myself why so many Nazis, in explaining their actions, would reply – like Eichmann, with no apparent sense of guilt or conscience – that it had been their duty as loyal servants of the Reich. Why did you set the film so precisely in that region?īecause of a particular form of Lutheran Protestantism that’s there in northern Germany. And just because a child won’t let itself take revenge – because it knows it’s dependent on adults – that doesn’t mean it doesn’t want to take revenge.
Well, maybe a baby… but as soon as it begins to reflect a little, a child sees and understands everything.
Even if a couple try to conceal any hostility they may feel towards one another from their child, the child will know it’s there, just by noticing little gestures and other things the adults no longer notice. Children understand so much – often better than adults, because they’ve better instincts, and we lose that intuition as we get older. When I was about 11 or so, I might not have been able to explain what I saw, but I noticed everything. Maybe the idea of the difference between a child’s appearance and that child’s interior life. What was your prime purpose in making this film? What was the idea that drove you? So that was my model after that it’s a question of using invention for the characters. At that time, of course, most of the population lived in villages, and there was the classic feudal hierarchy: the landowner – the baron – representing the state then the church then the school then the workers, the peasants. I also read a lot about rural life in the 19th and early 20th centuries. I read plenty of books written at that time about education – on how, for example, parents would deal with certain problems – and quite a lot of the events in the film are taken from those books: the white ribbon itself, for example. I did, especially into educational ideas and methods up until the early years of the 20th century. So for ten minutes or so, the film may feel a little fast and confusing as you try to work out who’s who, but after that – hopefully – you get used to it. What I wanted to do was to make a film that was both long and fast – I recall Bresson saying he wanted to make films that were simple and fast. But I myself like doing that I prefer being invited to engage with a film rather than have it wash over me. With so many characters, were you worried it might be too densely informative for audiences? It’s the same with using black and white rather than colour – it reminds you it’s not reality you’re seeing but something artificial. I felt that was necessary because this was a film set in the past. At the beginning he says something like, ‘I’m not sure as to the truth of everything I’m about to tell you some of it I just heard about and didn’t witness myself.’ So the viewer knows the story is not ‘reality’ but a memory, an artefact created by someone. As in my other films, I wanted to nourish a certain sense of distrust regarding the veracity of the film’s story, and having a narrator allowed for distanciation. Did you always envisage having a narrator?
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