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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
John Cusack talks about his new movie, "Max," which is sparking a firestorm even before its opening.
Sep 9, 2002 | Was Hitler human? And if so, how did he become a monster? These are among the questions raised by a provocative new movie that, against all odds, is premiering Monday at the Toronto Film Festival. The film project, which became the obsession of three men -- director/writer Menno Meyjes, actor John Cusack and producer Andras Hamori -- scared off movie financiers throughout the Western world. Despite having one of the most popular actors of his generation as its star and a well-connected director and producer (the Dutch-born Meyjes wrote the screenplays for "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" and "The Color Purple" for Steven Spielberg and the Hungarian-born Hamori produced "Sunshine" and "The Sweet Hereafter"), the film deeply unnerved prospective investors from the U.S. to Canada to Germany and France.
"Everyone turned us down for financing, especially the Europeans," recalls Hamori. "Some investors pretended to be somebody else, or that they were not in their office, so they wouldn't have to meet with us. We met with one who started the meeting by saying, 'This movie should not be made.' Nobody wanted to touch the subject."
The film, "Max," breaks with cinematic precedent by depicting the young Hitler as an emotionally poisoned man, but nonetheless human, and even sympathetic in his longing for recognition as a struggling and impoverished artist in the postwar Munich of 1918. While scores of biographies and history books have presented fully dimensional portraits of Hitler, no major movie until now has offered anything more than a cartoon picture of the 20th century's apogee of evil: we have seen him on the screen only as a ranting and wild-eyed hysteric.
"Max" traces the transformation of Hitler (played by Australian actor Noah Taylor) from a scruffy war veteran and frustrated painter to a rising propagandist for German nationalism and anti-Semitism. We see the future leader of the Third Reich through the eyes of another scarred survivor of World War I, Max Rothman (Cusack), a prosperous Jewish dealer in avant-garde art who believes that only brutally honest art can restore sanity to the world. Rothman is repelled by Hitler's political ideas, but enters into an odd friendship with the bitter young corporal, out of a kinship born of the First World War trenches and a desire to save his comrade through the healing power of art. We know it will end tragically, but "Max" pulls along the viewer by asking the haunting question, "What if?" -- and by showing us that evil does not simply crawl from the shadows, but emerges through circumstances and choices.
After 18 months of Herculean struggle, producer Hamori and his colleagues were able to scratch together the $10 million in financing, when the London-based Pathé International finally invested the first chunk -- thanks in part to the unwavering commitment of Cusack, who took no salary for his work on the film. After its debut this week in Toronto, "Max" will open Dec. 27 in New York and Los Angeles and then nationwide in February.
Even before it has been seen, the film has set off an angry reaction among people who are offended by the very idea of a movie presenting a figure of such profound evil in human terms. To do so, they charge, renders the monstrous sympathetic and reduces the enormity of his crimes. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd branded "Max" a cynical exploitation, and the Jewish Defense League is campaigning to block Lions Gate, the film's U.S. distributor, from releasing it. On the group's Web site, JDL official Brett Stone declares that "not only is the film in bad taste, it is also a psychic assault on Holocaust survivors and the entire Jewish community. There is no moral justification for making such a movie. To glorify or humanize Hitler makes a mockery of the 12 million -- 6 million of them Jewish - victims of Hitler's tyranny ... This is not art! This is obscenity!"
Cusack -- the product of a passionately liberal Irish Catholic family (the Berrigan brothers were visitors to his Chicago home when he was growing up, and, like them, his mother still gets arrested for her anti-militarism and pro-human rights protests) -- is astonished that "such a humanist and progressive movie" is eliciting such a heated response. "And I love that this response is coming from people who have not seen one frame of the film," he observes.
On the eve of "Max's" Toronto premiere, Cusack, Meyjes and Hamori sat down with Salon in a nondescript Italian restaurant in Santa Monica to defend the film against its preemptive critics. They were later joined over the phone from Washington, D.C., by the film's associate producer, Sidney Blumenthal, the journalist and former Clinton White House official who helped brainstorm the project with his old friend Meyjes while Blumenthal was weathering the storm of the Clinton impeachment wars.
Cusack: I actually called Maureen Dowd after she took a swipe at the movie and I asked her how she could do that without even seeing it. And she said, "Oh, I like your work" -- she was very complimentary and so on. But I thought it was a tad lazy on her part to go after a movie she'd never seen. Her attitude was that even a serious, adult examination of this subject had to be exploitative, simply because of the subject matter.
Even talking to my father, who's a writer and a very smart, progressive, open-minded guy, he told me, "I don't know, it disturbs me -- I don't want to think of Hitler as a human." Because what the film asks of you is very painful. It's not a truth you want to face.
To those who say, "How dare you give Hitler a set of human characteristics?" -- I say, "How dare we not?" It's easy to portray him as a monster, it's harder and more disturbing to show his humanity and how it became poisoned.
Hamori: We shot the film in Budapest, where I'm from. But while we were working there, I couldn't tell my own mother what I was working on. Because she lived through it all. We're Jewish, and when she was 18, she was taken away by the Germans to a collection camp at a brick factory outside Budapest. But my grandmother was a genius. Before the train arrived to take her to Auschwitz, she showed up at the factory and convinced the young Hungarian soldier standing guard that her daughter should not spend the night there because there were men in there, too. She told him, "She's a virgin, she's not going to stay here overnight with these men -- so let me take her and I'll bring her back tomorrow." The guard said OK, and she took her away and they locked themselves up in a neighbor's apartment.
So I grew up in a country and a family where Hitler's name was never even mentioned --half my family was taken away during the war. My grandmother would never let me put a human face on a monster. But what Menno does in these two hours of film is explain to me that human dimension I never knew existed.
