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Emily Watson discusses arduous roles and accents


The Book Thief
26 February 2014

Based on the beloved international bestselling book, The Book Thief tells the story of Liesel, an extraordinary and courageous young girl sent to live with a foster family in World War II Germany.  She learns to read with encouragement from her new family and Max, a Jewish refugee who they are hiding under the stairs.  For Liesel and Max, the power of words and imagination become the only escape from the tumultuous events happening around them.  The Book Thief is a life-affirming story of survival and of the resilience of the human spirit.

Following on from our discussion of when a film meets history, actress Emily Watson reflected on The Book Thief and the arduous roles she has played and how age brings more complex and challenging roles. She concluded by offering her thoughts on her fellow actor Philip Seymour Hoffman’s contribution to the craft of acting.

 

 

How long did it take you to master the accent?

We were out there for two to three weeks before we started filming, and every day I worked with the dialect coach. I always think with dialect, Oh this is going to be really difficult, how am I going to get this one? But there are always rules, and if you follow the rules it will suddenly click, although I tend to keep speaking with that accent otherwise… Also we were with German cast and crew who were all speaking English with German accents, and so I was in helpful company.

 

At the centre of the film you have this battle over language. As an actress who uses words to express the emotion of a given character, how did you respond to this when you first read the script?

I remember at a read-through just thinking this is a love letter to the power of storytelling. The reason I connected with it was because it was saying how you have to keep telling stories, and you have to keep believing in literature and books because it’s what makes us human. These are what makes us civilised, and if we don’t have that then the consequences are catastrophic.

 

Did you have an interest in the Second World War?

My grandfather fought in both World Wars and both sides of the family and my grandmother saw people lost on both sides of the family. So I had a strong sense of it when I was growing up, and with this film it was interesting to tell the story from the point of view of an ordinary German family. There’s a Jewish institute that celebrates the 24,000 individuals who were known to have aided Jewish people during that period; who put themselves in grave danger. But in a way for my character Rosa it was her awakening; it was how she came alive when she starts to possibly know what it might mean to enjoy yourself.

 

From a feisty character Rosa undergoes a transformation. How do you look back on the experience of charting that transformation?

First of all I was very attracted by the idea of playing somebody horrible, unattractive, unpleasant and foul mouthed. It is really good fun as an actor. But then when you start to work somebody out you realise that nobody sets out to be unpleasant; they have a reason for it. Rosa was like many people in Europe and in Germany who were very disappointed. She was washing other people’s dirty clothes by hand to put bread on the table. They are fighting poverty and nothing in her life is as she imagined it would be. Her husband who was this wonderful romantic poetic figure – a musician and a painter – is now lazy and sits around and doesn’t do anything. So she is just angry, closed off and stressed all of the time because of that it’s perfect material for National Socialism. They come along and say “Here’s someone to blame, come with us, we’ll make it all better.” Yet she’s with this guy who’s obviously none of those things and who is very awake, and you think there’s got to be more to this than meets the eye. Then when a Jewish boy falls through their door, it starts to crack open and reveals who she used to be, and she gets back to being a more decent and very brave person.

 

You say no one starts out to be unpleasant, but do you believe in the idea of pure evil?

It’s a really hard question to answer because there is a point beyond which you lose you humanity. For the most part, at least for ordinary Germans it wasn’t a question whether they were evil. They were just saving their own skins; who were not speaking up through fear. I’m sure for the majority of people that is what it was, and it accumulated. But there were people who were directing it who had arrived at a place of depravity in serving their ideals, and that’s very difficult to fathom. I came across that in another way when I did the television miniseries about Fred and Rose West [Appropriate Adult]. You look down a hole and the more you try to understand the less you understand.

 

 

How did that affect you?

In a way I approached it as an innocent. In a way I approached it as an innocent [Emily played Janet Leach]. It was much harder for Dominic West and Monica Dolan because they had to read a lot of the books, and a lot of those books shouldn’t even be called books. So they took in an awful lot of stuff. But even so I found it dreadful as an actor because you have to employ your imagination, that’s your job, and it was about imagining the fate of these people. I couldn’t get away fast enough in the end.

The reaction from people watching it was great. It received fantastic reviews, but when you finish a project like that, is it a little bit like Michael Fassbender who for 12 Years a Slave doesn’t want any recognition for playing such an awful character.

In a way for me it was different because the character that I played was in some sense a bit of a hero. She unwittingly and in her own dogged fashion by accidentally becoming close with him, and being the only person he would confide in, she unearthed the whole depth of that crime which led to the discovery. That would never have happened without her. She was terribly damaged by that. She wasn’t just an innocent because she became involved in a way that was very questionable. It’s not that she did anything criminal, but she just got too close to him, and so in a way I felt good for her that her story was being told.

 

You seem to be drawn to these dark and heavy pieces. Oranges and Sunshine was another in which you were playing the hero but the actual case is a particularly depressing one.

That’s sort of different again, but I think it’s just that they are complicated and interesting parts of life, and when I was sent the Appropriate Adults script before I read it I said, “Really, Fred and Rose West? No way.” But when I read it I realised that it was a piece that could change the tone of the conversation because it had become such a preserve of the tabloid press in the least nice sense of the word… and this was an intelligent attempt at least to reveal something about it that seeking some understanding. In a way as you get older, and I’ve had some interesting roles in my time, but they grow more complex. Of course this is great and it is a good challenge, but it is not always fun.

 

Being a mother of two, how did that impact your perception of Rosa?

I found myself asking the question would I endanger my children who are five and eight to save the life of a complete stranger. I don’t know if I would. I hope I would, but God it would be hard. That would be a tough call, and that’s why it is so pernicious. You do have to imagine yourself in those situations and that’s how you discover the humanity of it. You have to go there; you have to imagine it and that’s where you make those interesting discoveries.

One of your esteemed colleagues reminded me of something Churchill said during the war the other day when he was asked if he would cut the budget for the arts to support the war effort. He said, “No. For what then would we be fighting for?” It’s what makes us civilised and that’s what’s so interesting about Berlin because it is a very civilised place and yet it was not.

 

Did you encounter any difficulty in filming some of the films emotional scenes?

The subject matter is very poignant. We were playing very strong emotions scenes and of course you get emotional doing those scenes anyway because it’s your job to do so.

They had to destroy the set in order to shoot the final scene. I had been back in London working and we had to shoot the final sequence, and just walking out onto that set after it had been destroyed was so shocking and upsetting. It was just the sense of lives and everything gone and thinking God if this was your street? We then watched Sophie [Liesel] rehearse the scene, and Geoffrey and I had to walk away because we couldn’t watch.

When you finish a film is there a sense of relief or sadness when saying goodbye to a piece of work that you have helped to create. Some actors talk about moving onto the next thing whilst others talk about leaving something behind.

It’s both. Often there’s a sense of relief to walk away because you’ve told the story, you’ve been through it thoroughly, it’s been exhausting and so it’s time to go. But also in a way if your world has a comparable feeling, it’s kind of like your family in a way. It’s your work family and usually you’re in some far flung corner of the globe where you are having an amazing time with all these people and probably eighty per cent of them ninety per cent of them you’ll never see again and that’s always really sad. Of course that is just the nature of the beast and it is the way it goes. 

 

Speaking of actors, your thoughts on Philip Seymour Hoffman who you had the pleasure to work with a number of times?

I wasn’t close with him and I didn’t know him that well, but I feel devastated in a way that I think a lot of actors who worked with him do. He was such a good actor and he was what everyone aspired to be as an actor – a true actor who was revealing humanity. Every time he worked he did something that was surprising, amazing and revealing. He didn’t do any of the bullshit. He wasn’t a celebrity. He wasn’t playing that game. He was doing great, great work and it is devastating. His passing is truly tragic.

 

 

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