DOCTOR TO THE HUMAN CONDITION
us, Claudia Dreif
VIEWS REVIEWS DOCTOR TO THE HUMAN CONDITION BY CLAUDIA DREIFUS Last March, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voted Mephisto the best foreign feature film of the year, American...
...In Woody Allen's films, I always see myself...
...They can protect human vaules and help people see human values within themselves...
...SZABO: Twenty million...
...Chaplin was more...
...Unfortunately, in our century, there were many such moments...
...Some were able to survive, hidden...
...SZABO: Well, / don't need $20 million to make a film...
...There's a beautiful lady in Sweden, Liv Ullman, who has similiar problems—although she's a woman...
...Set in the Germany of the 1920s and 1930s, the film traces the political and personal changes of "Hendrik Hofgen," a talented left-leaning actor who ends up a Nazi...
...They are actually married to other people...
...Do you agree...
...I am always fighting for understanding—especially at this moment...
...It breaks you...
...The movie is a little more sophisticated than the way I told it...
...They were not clowns or crazies...
...Who knows...
...By the time the movie closes, Hofgen is directing a Nazi-style Hamlet...
...We have such gifted people on our side...
...So that was the beginning...
...There was no man in the family...
...Actually, right now, I am between projects...
...I want to be loved, accepted, supported—just like everyone else...
...Clean laundry tells nothing...
...I was seven...
...It is precise...
...During a screening, I want to try to give the audience something that means something in their lives...
...To be truly free of this human curse, you have to think about it, experience it...
...They should be read...
...Humans are small...
...He starts out left-wing...
...I'm only an actor...
...I become lighter during the viewing...
...But they can upset people...
...Well, okay...
...Woody Allen talks about small intellectuals...
...Every janitor, every small shopkeeper, every greengrocer, can be a Nazi...
...I do, too...
...Why Woody Allen...
...But, if they insisted on giving me such an amount, I would give at least $15 million to the people who need it...
...From history...
...SZABO: Mickey Mouse...
...Q: Yourfilms, not just Mephisto, try to treat Middle European history, your own personal history, with a great deal of humanity...
...An early film, Father, made in 1966, had great success...
...Later, I met with Manfred Durniok and told him that the book was really fascinating, that I wanted to play around with it, that maybe we could make a movie out of the idea...
...But always, with a good Woody Allen film, with Annie Hall, with Manhattan, I have the feeling he has created something funny and ironic...
...Q: Perhaps we should change the subject...
...But they are not...
...What was intriguing was this "Hendrik Hofgen," the central character to the novel...
...While I've had great success as a filmmaker, a doctor's life is much more concrete...
...A film helps experience...
...Q: Why...
...Some of my family died, unfortunately, in various concentration camps...
...Indirectly, artists can change things...
...SZABO: No...
...Or rather, a Nazi tool...
...I don't have problems with women...
...But at certain moments in history, he can be very dangerous...
...He divorced Erika Mann and married a German actress, who, I've heard, was also a lesbian...
...Q: A film director who tells truthful stories, universal stories, can be as much a doctor to the human condition as a physician...
...Regardless of the side...
...But I'm wondering: In what ways are you like him...
...It was somewhat autobiographical...
...Q: But actors and politicians are often the same personality types...
...Not just politicians...
...But the point that Hofgen forgets is that there are just some parts that are unacceptable...
...This is in almost all my films...
...Mann's sister, Erika Mann, had a lesbian relationship with an actress, Pamela Wedekind...
...What's your family's history...
...Also Woody Allen...
...The Third Reich was one of them...
...The novel, based on the real-life family history of the Manns, just was not very good...
...I myself experienced half of it...
...They have a sense of responsibility and they tell us something...
...Just an ordinary Middle European background...
...The dancer was Istvan Szabo, forty-four, Hungary's foremost film director and maker of Mephisto—the man who is called the Magyar answer to Francois Truffaut...
...All the neo-realistic films of Italy...
...Q: But your Hendrik Hofgen doesn't start out a Nazi...
...I encounter myself...
...The real Istvan Szabo is someone who kills with a smile...
...I tried to find all the similarities between him and me...
...They have this false passport that enables them to hide...
...My parents experienced World War I, a bourgeois revolution, an economic crisis, fascism, World War II, the Nazi regime, reconstruction, the Stalin era...
...Mephisto looks at why some artists put their gifts at the service oftotalitarians...
...He's a funny, playful man, dead-serious at the core...
...Q: In one scene in Mephisto, you have Hofgen face his Nazi benefactors and ask of them: "What do you want from me...
...Enough of that kind of thing has been done by others...
...People like Hofgen were easily used by the Nazis...
...But he is made into a showcase for the Nazis...
...The real story of the family, as I heard it, was a little strange...
...VIEWS REVIEWS DOCTOR TO THE HUMAN CONDITION BY CLAUDIA DREIFUS Last March, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voted Mephisto the best foreign feature film of the year, American television audiences saw a small, cheerful man leap to the Oscar stage and do a dance of joy...
...Sometimes it seems a greater success to meet with ten, twenty people every day, and through your own efforts, to make them well...
...Take Europe in the Twentieth Century...
...By 1964, by the time I was twenty-four, I was making my own feature films...
...Q: A friend of mine who is a film critic told me that he found the film so strong that he was almost embarrassed by it...
...The story of millions...
...SZABO: Well, I was born into a family of doctors...
...Father is an imagination, a creed...
...Then, with what's left, I would try to make a really rich film...
...Q: Mickey Mouse...
...Q: Getting back to Istvan Szabo, I'm wondering how it was that you became a filmmaker...
...I wanted to show how the most normal person can be a Nazi...
...Not a unique story in Middle Europe...
...My wish is that my films work as mental therapy with audiences...
...Odds-makers had all been laying their bets on Andrzej Wadja's Man of Iron...
...Dirty laundry tells a personal story...
...People...
...Take my parents...
...People try to play roles...
...Actually, that didn't bother me...
...I think, "Okay, you're not alone...
...Sometimes we're identical to the role...
...Q: Really...
...For instance, the Nazi part that he plays in order to win acceptance...
...SZABO: No...
...Or a husband who helps us live right...
...Not less...
...I wasn't so much interested in the homosexual aspect of this story, but rather the psychological and political meaning of why a gifted artist would cooperate with the Nazis in such a strong way...
...He hides a young Jewish friend...
...They were not ridiculous at all...
...Q: Why did you say that...
...Q: Some critics say that Woody Allen is this generation's Chaplin...
...He wants applause...
...My themes came from these experiences...
...Q: Do you have the same kinds of problems with women that he has...
...But the award should not have come as such a great surprise...
...During the Weimar period in Germany, Klaus Mann lived in a sexual relationship with the actor Gustav Grundgens...
...American films...
...Everyone wants to be loved...
...I have things in the works—though not in Hollywood...
...SZABO: Three years ago, I made a film with a German producer, Manfred Durniok, and when the movie was finished, Durniok gave me a book as a gift...
...His insecurities are expressed in terms of his problems with women...
...Q: What was it that struck you so strongly about this Klaus Mann novel...
...Miracle in Milan...
...SZABO: Nothing special...
...I've only heard that—the story may not be true...
...SZABO: I don't know why...
...Nowadays, I wonder whether I did the right thing with my life...
...Orahead of state...
...He said it was one of the best non-romantic films he'd ever seen on the Hitler period...
...SZABO: Well, I don't know whether you read the book or not, but it is, unfortunately, as a literary work, no masterpiece...
...But it costs a lot...
...Since this kind of thing was forbidden, the four of them lived together...
...Szabo was dancing, no doubt, because the last thing on Earth he had expected was to win the Oscar...
...He said he felt as he watched Klaus Maria Brandauer play Hofgen that he was watching somebody expose his dirty laundry...
...I want to be popular, loved by everyone...
...The Bicycle Thief...
...The implication of that scene is that actors, indeed all artists, have more power than they know...
...SZABO: No...
...What Hofgen wants is the great success that every artist craves, and to "make it," he strikes a series of Faustian deals...
...I tried to think like him, to understand the man...
...From society...
...These people are not so much professional film directors as they are philosophers...
...SZABO: People are actors...
...In North America, the type of person who becomes a politician is often the type of person who becomes an actor—someone who wants a lot of public attention...
...Sometimes, we fit into the part...
...He is ambitious and he needs help to fulfill his ambitions...
...Directly—that's the domain of the politicians...
...With the great success of Mephisto, with Academy Awards and prizes at Cannes, do you see yourself making a film for Hollywood...
...But then, I fell in love with the movies...
...I lived with Hendrik Hofgen for a whole year...
...What did you see later on...
...SZABO: Because if you show someone who is cooperating with the Nazis, who is also a homosexual, then people can say, "I can't be a Nazi because I am not a homosexual...
...Gustav Grundgens married Erika Mann...
...You say, "I'll give you a medication and you will be well again tomorrow...
...You can't work any other way...
...SZABO: Because they are gifted...
...Later on, I liked very much the French New Wave films—Truffaut, Goddard...
...All-he wants is applause...
...SZABO: Yes...
...The movie would be about how really gifted poeple—and this Hofgen really was gifted—can easily be seduced by those with power...
...This state makes me as hesitant as Hamlet, as jealous as Othello, and as evil as Richard III...
...Not more...
...I don't think literary masterpieces should be put on the screen...
...Sometimes, we believe, as Hendrik Hofgen does, that others will accept us if we act the part...
...We'll do it together...
...But you know [laughs], it would be hard for me to make a romantic movie about the Third Reich...
...He depicted the Nazis as ridiculous stupid characters...
...Do you believe that the artists of this world can make a political difference...
...But Gustav Grundgens, the actor, remained in Germany...
...Why that much...
...Two people, a man and a woman, are forced to live together in hiding as man and wife...
...Q: And why, in your opinion, are the gifted so easily seduced...
...Woody Allen talks about insecurity, human insecurity...
...He wants to be loved by every woman, every man...
...With people such as him, the Nazis could demonstrate, "Look, we have culture...
...What interests me is a dialogue with the viewer who has problems...
...He talks about human fears...
...And now, I'm hoping that all this experience will prove a vaccine...
...That's a little less...
...This book, by Klaus Mann, eldest son of Thomas Mann, was Mephisto...
...I'm honored...
...He knows that he has something in hand and he doesn't want to lose it...
...The second false picture of the Nazis in cinema is as magicians: Hitler was a giant magician with two apprentices, Goebbels and Goring, and they created this magic with the poor German nation running after them...
...Right...
...With you, too...
...Q: Why did you eliminate Hofgen's homosexuality from the movie...
...For centuries, members of my family became doctors...
...But in high school, I got seduced by the theater...
...Q: Are you sometimes afraid that you might sell your soul out in the same way Hofgen did...
...From family...
...When I see a Bergman film, it gives me strength to live for the coming month...
...SZABO: No one has offered...
...You make movies about people caught in the grip of crisis situations...
...SZABO: They can't change anything...
...Using the character of Hofgen, I thought I could rework the story and make a really beautiful and strong film about how the powerful seduce the gifted...
...Szabo's other films, Twenty-Five Fireman Street, Confidence, Budapest Tales, and Father are all sweet, sorrowful tales of Middle European existence...
...Q: In the film, you have Hendrik Hofgen kiss his own reflection in a mirror...
...SZABO: Marcel Ophuls said that...
...SZABO: I want success...
...If I made Hofgen a homosexual, then I'd give those in the audience a chance to dismiss their own possibilities...
...He said, "Yes...
...Even Shakespeare said that...
...But there are limits...
...Like a god...
...Nothing...
...Unfortunately, Woody Allen's circle is small...
...But you can never know...
...He's not a monster...
...But I can't make up my mind which direction to take next...
...Humans are small...
...Thus being romantic about the Nazi period would be to paint a very dangerous picture...
...The important thing about Grundgens is that he became a premier actor during the Nazi period...
...The point of the film is that someone like Hofgen is no danger in a peaceful time, in a democratic society...
...He's just ambitious...
...It takes place in a small room during the Battle of Budapest during World War II...
...Q: Your last answer probably eliminates this question, but let me ask it anyway...
...Chaplin talks about small people...
...Woody Allen's films are not about people who have problems with women...
...It wasn't dull...
...Q: Because that seems to be the amount they're spending on a movie this year...
...They can help collect human strengths...
...SZABO: The films of Vittorio De Sica...
...I think there have been two kinds of very dangerous movies about the Nazi period...
...I acted a bit and I did some theatrical directing...
...SZABO: Just because...
...Q: How did you come to make Mephisto...
...SZABO: I have a theme: "How do you live when you have certain experiences with history...
...Mephisto, distributed in the United States by Analysis Films, is a fabulous movie...
...My own father had died in 1945—right after World War II...
...SZABO: Nothing...
...SZABO: I'm hoping that with this work on Mephisto, I will have gotten a protective remedy, a vaccine, from such effects...
...SZABO: And that's what I hope for in my work...
...That doesn't interest me...
...The audience has to feel, all of them, homosexual and not, that they are identical with the character...
...Everybody gets a part, right...
...We must remember that Hamlet is a man of the North," Hofgen tells his actors...
...I mean, he helps friends...
...Well, that's the way it was—right...
...Fel-lini has incredible life-strength...
...That's Hendrik Hofgen...
...He's almost a good human being...
...For me, it's not enough to be a good professional film director...
...I read the book and I knew, after fifty pages, that this was a fantastic story...
...For their technique and entertainment, I love Hitchcock and John Ford...
...The first was a film by Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator...
...He wants to be accepted by all political directions and supported by everyone...
...John Casavettes is sometimes good for me...
...SZABO: Well, he's not a Nazi...
...He kills...
...Someone comes to you and they are sick...
...go and make your dream movie," what would you create...
...Then, when Hitler took over, the Mann family fled Germany—the entire family...
...Do you understand...
...I first went to see Mephisto at Marcel Ophuls's suggestion...
...One of my other movies is called Confidence, and it is, in a sense, a sibling of Mephisto...
...Q: And is such a thing possible...
...So this movie was about a boy who feels lonely, who is afraid, who fears he's not strong enough—so with his fantasy, he creates a father...
...Szabo, who lives and works in Budapest, talked about the roots of his work with interviewer Claudia Dreifus on a recent New York afternoon...
...But there's more to it...
...Today, I like Bergman, Fellini, Bunuel...
...SZABO: Well, maybe this person saw his own personal laundry there during the screening...
...Everyone has something of the actor Hofgen in them...
...In this story, they face all the dilemmas that we've been speaking of...
...Hofgen wants to be the center of attention, in the limelight, loved by everyone...
...Q: As a child growing up in Budapest, what movies did you see...
...Klaus Mann wrote this as a hate-novel against his brother-in-law, the German actor Gustav Grundgens...
...Early on, Hofgen, as played by Klaus Maria Brandauer, rationalizes his Nazi affiliations by insisting that art is neutral and by pledging to protect human values...
...A really gifted person always wants to push himself forward, show himself...
...Q: If a group of Hollywood producers came to you and said, "Okay, Szabo, here's $20 million...
...Q: When you speak, I hear in Istvan Szabo a man who seems very different from Hendrik Hofgen...
...I saw in the character of Hofgen—who I suppose is based on Grundgens—almost a symbolic figure for our century...
...And if he gets that applause, he will immediately be on your side...
...Was this meant to be symbolic...
...But often we're not...
...It was very well received...
...What I wanted to show was that fascism is a perversion of the soul, a disease of the soul...
...Q: Did you say, "Humans are small...
Vol. 46 • August 1982 • No. 8
