"The Tin Drum": Volker Schlndorff's "Dream of Childhood" Author(s): John Hughes Reviewed work(s): Source: Film Quarterly,

Vol. 34, No. 3 (Spring, 1981), pp. 2-10 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1212032 . Accessed: 02/05/2012 16:35
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JOHN HUGHES

The

Tin

"Dream

Druni of

Schlondorff's Childhood"
in the late seventies, Oskar also represented the most vitriolic and rage-ridden currents of the post1968 protest movements. Schlondorff understood that Oskar could represent all of these things only if the demonic excesses of the Grass novel were curbed. Oskar had to embody a certain heroism: for he is somehow aware that the milk of human kindness is the only buffer against the psychotic potential of frustration and rage. This realization was paralleled, on a number of stylistic levels, by Schlondorff's desire to move away from the occasionally mechanistic cerebralityof his earlier work. In order to probe the "irrational outbursts" of the thirties, he had to reach into irrationallayerswithin both himself and the cinema. The necessary form for this turbulent content became the traditional German realism that Schlondorff had long admired: the earthy, precise yet fantastical, populist yet mystical, quintessentially German style of Brueghel, Faust, Max Beckmann, Fritz Lang, Pabst, and many others. An attempt to forge a link between reality and fantasy, the style of Schlondorff's film is also a tribute to his first master, the Jean Renoir whose "poetic realism" Schlondorff discovered during the early part of his scholarly exile in France. VOLKER SCHLONDORFF
HUGHES: Are there any roots of The Tin Drum in your early experience in Germany during the
war?

Volker

The idea for these interviewsgrew out of a meeting with Schlondorff shortly after his film shared the Golden Palm with Apocalypse Now at Cannes. He is a shy and reserved person-though the reserve conceals an almost Prussian tenacity-and the fact that we were invited to lunch by a mutual close friend gave me the chance to get an unusually revealing glimpse of Schlondorff's mind and imagination. The mind is unexpectedly subtle and philosophical: while a student, Schlondorff won a nation-wide French lycee award for an essay on Descartes (which may be why the "pagan-Catholic" Gunter Grass refers to Schlondorff as a "cartesian Protestant"). The imagination flashes in many directions at once: literary, political, psychological, cinematic. During that first conversation, as I remember it, there were two words which seemed touchstones for him: "humane" and "dialectical." It is, perhaps, the unusual ability to combine humane sympathy with an awareness of dialectical perspectives that gives The Tin Drum a special power. This is especiallyobvious in Schlondorff's complex grappling with the nature of the novel's deformed boy-hero, Oskar Matzerath-a central concern in the interviews which follow. To see the film as "literary" or "anti-formalist" or "mainstream"-as many have done-is to miss the point of Schlondorff'sprolonged and fruitful wrestling with his literary Angel, Gunter Grass. Unlike Coppola, he did not project himself-or historyonto a series of literary metaphors. He discovered the meaning of these metaphors-and particularly of Oskar-within his own personality and subconscious. Having discovered a less pernicious and more benign Oskar within himself, he reversed the dialectic and saw Oskar in a historical light. He knew that, for Grass, Oskar represented the destructive infantilism of the Nazis as well as the "scepticism" of the fifties generation. For Schlondorff, finally coming to terms with the 1959 epic

SCHL6NDORF: That's difficult to answer. I was born in 1939 in Wiesbaden. My mother was killed during a bombing raid in '43 or '44. My father, a doctor, didn't fight in the war. A World War I veteran, he was too old for military service. I don't have many memories from the Nazi era, except for the swastika flags flapping on the streets. And

SCHLONDORFF'S DRUM TIN

also a vague sense of horror. There is one memory, of three men hanged on a gymnastic bar in a schoolyardbehind our house. This schoolyard was a Gestapo headquartersduring the last days of the war. But I saw this from a distance, from the balcony outside our apartment. In fact, I can't remember if I really saw it or was just told about

What was your reaction to the Grass novel when it was published in the latefifties? I wasn't at all interested and didn't read it. At that time I was living in France. My main goal, apart from the cinema, was to forget that I was German. Even at fifteen I had decided to be a film director. That came out of my early fantasies it . . . of being a circus performer. There was also the I also remember, at around eight or ten, a kind postwaratmosphere. Wiesbaden was like an Amerof mass guilt tendency-we were all accusing our ican colony. I remember the black American solfathers and asking them how the Hitler thing could diers who gave me pieces of chocolate and taught have happened, what they were doing during the me my first English words. I soon learned English war, etc. And of course none of them admitted any and began seeing a lot of foreign films-German responsibility. It was always somebody else who films were not being shown. My first favorites were had been the evil one. The schools added to this Rear Window, Odd Man Out, and On the Waterconfusion by teaching us about the war in a dry, front. The last influenced me the most. It seemed statistical manner. All you had to know was that a to bring out some innate tendency to be outraged nasty Santa Claus, Hitler, had seduced everyone by injustice. I was carrying around a Budd Schulinto doing horrible things. The emphasis was on berg novel, The Disenchanted, like some kind of rebuilding the country, for which moral scrutiny sacred text. was definitely not a necessity. That was the spirit Anyhow, in order to cure me of my artistic tenof the fifties. So that is why the view of Nazism dencies my good Protestant father sent me to a as a sinister populist phenomenon in the Grass Catholic lycee in France. I was a good student novel seemed to me an important theme. Which but I remained a devoted cinephile. Fortunately, is diametrically opposed to the diabolical cosmos the priests at the lycee encouraged me to attend of Syberberg, of course . . . the Cinematheque. Soon afterwards-this was in

The Germans arrest.. Oskar's mother's lover

4 the mid-fifties-I was living in Paris and working at the Cinematheque in order to see films free. I had enrolled at another lycee which, as I was to discover 25 years later, was located in the exact same district of Paris where Gtinter Grass was furiously completing the final draft of The Tin Drum! Later on, I remember hearing about the controversy generated by the novel's appearance. There were right-wing and Catholic groups demollstrating against it. But all of that seemed very far away. After all, I was living out my dream in Paris -sitting in on the birth of the New Wave and discovering that there was once such a thing as
German cinema . . .

SCHLONDORFF'S DRUM TIN

German. I went to Munich with a script based on1 Musil and met Werner Herzog, who advised me on how to shoot it. That's how it all began . . . And then it took anotherfifteen years for you to take on Grass and The Tin Drum . . . You know, it's no accident that I did that Descartes essay. I'm a kind of traditional European

How did your discovery of German cinema take place? The most powerful memory for me is my first meeting with Fritz Lang. I was working at the Cinematheque as a voice-over translator of German subtitles. Lang showed up for a screening, and I went over to ask him to autograph a book about his films. The book fell open to a page with a photo of Peter Lorre in M, which Lang autographed . . . At the time, I was beginning to get

rationalist. I see things in terms of the traditional European rational categories: historical, aesthetic, political, etc. That was why I was so fascinlatedby Apocalypse Now when I competed against it at Cannes. Although obviously confused and out of focus, the story goes from one extrenle to the other in a way that is totally non-Europeatn. It's that American fusion of mythic vitality combinledwith a computer personality-the technocratic ethos
gone nlad. Which fascinates an old-fashioned rationalist like myself. So you can image h1ow frightened I was when I first had to come to terms with the vitality of Guinter Grass. I was nmore at home with purely intellectual things like Musil's writings. So I had to stop being the civilized and respectable person

powerfully involved in the movies of Lang and Pabst, which is why this meeting with Lang captured my imagination. But it took a while for the Lang-Pabst influence to take hold. For a long time, my major frame of reference was French. I began to get jobs as an assistant to French directors. I met a lot of them in the Cinenmath&queas you know, Truffaut and many others could be seen there almost every day. Louis Malle's Zazie was the first film I worked on. Twenty years afterward, I showed up with my dwarfs to shoot that
scene in front of the Eiffel Tower from The Tin

I had become in France. To grapple with Grass, I had to become spontaneous and go back to the child. Then I realized that I was recovering the original energy that made me want to go into the
circus and the cinema when I was a little boy.

Drum, and the whole scene became a tribute to

Zazie and the Tower in Malle's film . . . Then I

Which had nothing to do with saving humanity or things like that-it was for the showmanship of it. I had never dared to live out my fantasies in any filnl before The Tin Drum. After all, it's much safer to stick to ideas. But now I had to go into the unconscious and the spontaneous levels. I didn't really know what was happening unltil we got David Benlnentfor the role of Oscar. He blended
into the role so perfectly-iin an almost terrifying

way. I just let him do all of the things I never dared

to do as a kid. Fortunately, Grass had more confidence in me thanl I had in myself. He would encourage me to do things I didn't know I could do. After all, he's an artist, very naive in a way . . . He encouraged me to find my owIl frame of refereince.

worked o011 a few of Jean-Pielre Melville's filnlshe was really the father-figure for that French
generation. Eventually my French daydream ended -as it had to. I remenlbel a rude awakelling that

came in 1965. I discovered that my French friends looked upon nmeas an archetypal German. Me, who had tried to totally efface my Germalnliess!
If I showed up early for an appointmenllt, they

would say, "There's a perfect Gernman youfor

always on0 tinme . . ." So I decided to return to

Germany and discover what it really meant to be

What did thisframe of reference involve? I'll go back to the beginning. Franz Seitz, the producer, was passionate about filming the novel. This had seemed to be a doonled idea. Many projects had fallen by the wayside. Even directors like

SCHLONDORFF'S DRUM TIN

Wajda and Fellini-who, by the way, is very influenced by Grass, as you can see from the fish at the end of La Doice Vita-hadn't been able to tie all the loose ends together. Then Seitz wrote a treatment that Grass liked, and he finally gave his long-withheld permission. As I said, I was at first knocked over by the turbulent, epic scope of the book. Then I began to connect Grass to the realist tradition of Pabst and Lang. Grass may be allegorical and mythic, but he is always obsessed with facts, he's always an excellent observer. I like to contrast Grass and Syberberg. Syberberg is completely mythic and abstract. This is, of course, the polarity in German films: the Expressionist, with its interest in hazy generalities, and the precise viewpoints of the Realists like Pabst and Lang. Grass starts from precise childhood memories of a small town on the Baltic, of a fanlily of shopkeepers. He shows how everything that happened had roots in the way these people lived. While Syberberg places the responsibility on Machiavellian, demonic minds which abused an innocent population, Grass shows Nazism deriving from the banality of middle-class life aspiring to become something else. For Grass, these people aren't very innocent. They wanted to feel important, to feel like generals in control of history. And this is a very dangerous energy because it has a certain legitimacy. That's what fascism is built on: making everybody in the street feel important. And of course these people are infantile in a far more dangerous way than Oskar in the novel. After all, it's infantile to believe in the illusion that the man in the street can run the world. They claimed to be controlling history while in reality they left all decisions in the hands of their Leader. Which is the most infantile of traits-even children don't like their parents to make all the decisions for them. This kind of thing is handled brilliantly by Fellini in Amarcord. Fellini shows the way the adolescent dependencies of Italian men provided fuel for the growth of fascism. How did you come to terms with the infantile nature of Oskar? That was what first hooked me into th.e book. Even before I started working with Jean-Claude Carriere, long before we came up with the idea of making Oskar like a Chaplin character, I was

Oskarclings to his infernal instrument. . .

especially interested in the character of the boy. Far more than the historical background. Finally, inevitably, I began to see Oskar as a very wideranging metaphor. I saw him as a prophetic image of the entire post-1968 youth. His most important trait is his regressive attitude towards women. He wants to be everythingwith a woman, to be a lover, to be coddled like a baby, to dominate-only he cannot accept the grown-up male's responsibility towards women. This kind of attitude was prevalent in the thirties and is also widespread in the modern world. Oskar is obviously an ancestor of the post-'68 drop-out generation. The screaming of protests combined with the refusal to provide a realistic frameworkfor change . . . Nevertheless, I did identify with this monster in the most intense way. I was aware of the fact that Oskar was anathema to the puritan mind-a dwarflike, immoral, abnormal child. I was convinced that I had to show how very normal he isneither good nor bad, and certainly not more monstrousthan the so-called normal people around him. I didn't want to emphasize his abnormality. I wanted to show the monstrous things hiding inside "normal" ones. The things that he lets out,
that he has not forgotten . . . In a sense, I dis-

covered the reality of Oskar by becoming aware of my own dream-life. As I explained, Glinter Grass encouraged me to get involved in this way. We both decided that the film should make the monstrous and irrational aspects of reality seem commonplace and not exotic. You can see similar themes in other directors of the German New Wave:Herzog's dwarfs and Fassbinder'sfreaks, for example. Herzog's dwarfs are far removed from what I

6 was trying to do. Herzog does try to show the common humanity that can be found amidst dwarfsbut it's a long way from Oskar, at least for me. As for Fassbinder, it seems to me that his approach is very limited. I, for one, could never throw out the window all of my experience and education in order to act "spontaneous" like Fassbinder. Like the films of Visconti, my aim is to bring together all of my knowledge and background into a certain form, a carefully shaped matrix. I try to dominate all of the elements whose contradictions I'm perfectly aware of. There are certain elements in Fassbinder that I like, such as the greedy lust for life that many of his characters display. But his melodramatic approach to stories is remote from my realist, observing attitude. It's really quite difficult to give credence to the action in a Fassbinder film. He's really very unimaginative. The excessive melodrama tries to conceal the failure of imagination. Maria Braun is more like Tosca than anything cinematic-it might be easier to swallow if you saw it in an opera house. Everything in Maria Braun is hard to believe-that scene in the train, for example. How do you think Herzog and Fassbinder would answeryour comparisons? They are such egomaniacs that they would have no interest in comparing themselves to me or anyone else! So you are really closer to the Old German Cinema than to the New German Cinema? For me, Fritz Lang is the inevitable and continuing jumping-off point. His expressionistic, stylized images of concrete things. His merciless view of power relationships. His firm determination not to believe in true feeling. His refusal to allow spontaneity as the motive force of action . . . Of course, I don't think much of these things when I'm working-not since my first film. At this point I'm far more interested in what's happening in the world than in the realm of screen events. I was fascinated to discover in both Lang and Grass the same kind of inexorable fatality. In both, there's a peasant-like, rueful sense of the unpredictable, yet cyclical, course of war, nature, history. It all goes back to the peasant in his fields looking up at the sky, and only knowing that he cannot know how nature will deal with his efforts. It's what the grandmother represents

SCHLONDORFF'S DRUM TIN

at the end of the film: despite the wheel of history, despite the waves of Russian and Swedish and Polish conquerors that have swept over her Kashubian fields, she still remains there amidst her potato crop. For me, this grandmother is a total life principle. That's why I removed the "Black Witch" references at the end of the novel. Grass thinks this was because I am Protestant while he is Catholic, but it's more than that. I cannot follow Grass in his fear of the Black Witch. The grandmother was a woman I could love more than fear. She is opposed to the other extreme, Oskar, the child-man who is a perfect portrait of human regression. That is almost reminiscent of some classic heavyweights: the "Mothers" in Faust and the Slavic earth-principle in Karamazov. Do those ring any kind of a bell? Yes, it's there in the film. I told Maurice Jarre that I wanted to hear the earthmother-principle in the music-so you can hear it as well as see it. But you shouldn't talk about this kind of thing to the Germans. Then they want to conquer Eastern Europe! Some people felt that there wasn't enough of this in the film: that I left out too much of Grass's Kashubian-peasant atmosphere. But it's there if you look for it. For example, the people who are seen eating during the mother's funeral scene are the members of the Kashubian side of the Grass family. We were shooting in Poland, near Danzig, and I asked Grass to invite his relatives to take part. After I saw these people I decided to model the shots after Brueghel's paintings of peasants. After meeting these people, I had a better understanding of Grass's exuberant style. During the meal, they were drinking bottles of 97% peasant schnapps. The old woman who came with them was gulping this stuff as if it were water. I tried some of it and almost vomited-it was that strong. I also tried to capture that "once upon a time" simplicity of the fairy tale and folk ballad traditions. Grass, of course, continually uses this kind of thing in the novel. That's the tone of the shots at the beginning: there was once a peasant woman sitting on her four skirts in the middle of a potato field; then someone came running . . . I was also influenced by Bruno Bettelheim's analysis of the

TIN SCHLONDORFF'S DRUM

German fairy-tale tradition. The whole problem of why children need to relate to the cruel aspects of such stories as you find in Grimm and elsewhere. You talked about Oskar's destructive behavior as a metaphor for a certain side of the post- '68 counterculture. Does that apply to the German terrorists-the Baader-Meinhof Group? Oskar is not really a terrorist. And it's a fact that the Baader-Meinhof people did not start out to become terrorists. They ended up as enfants terrible for the Germans, but they started out from very moral, almost religious origins. Grass intended Oskar as a portrait of the "sceptical generation" of the fifties. It was a generation without any real sense of political involvement. Even the most marginal of the post-'68 drop-outs represented some form of protest. The film attempts to give a new life to the novel by bringing Oskar up to date. The best analysis of the film's treatment of Oskar was given by Ludwig Marcuse. After the film came out in Germany, Marcuse happened to be in Munich. It was two weeks before he died. We had dinner at a restaurant at a lake outside Munich. "This is the first film I wanted to see in a long time," Marcuse said, "and I am very glad I saw it. The reason the film is an international hit is the character of Oskar. You have taken a very contemporarytype and have inserted him into the Nazi era. The film works on both levels simultaneously: that explains its

tion. Oskar, on the other hand, enjoys destruction for the pure childish joy of destroying objects. I guess you could see this as more spontaneous and less dangerous. It is probably more dangerous to destroy things to attract attention than for the pure fun involved. I'm not a moralist when it comes to facing this issue. The Baader-Meinhof Group's destructiveness, on the other hand, was far less pernicious than the police reactions, as I tried to show in Katherina Blum. My support of the terrorists' lawyers was a response to this. That support got me branded as a terrorist sympathizer by the police (who searched my house), by the right-wing Springer press, and by a segment of the Social Democrats. How about the scene in the tower-where Oskar breaks all of the glass windows in order to attract the attention of his mother, who's in a nearby hotel room with her lover? Oskar has temporarily lost his mother, so he feels like destroying everything. But I don't think he imagines that his mother will halt her tryst to look out the window when she hears his screams. He turns his anger against the world as a whole since he can't turn against his mother-she's too close and too huge for him. His personal anger is transformed into a larger context. The BaaderMeinhof Group, contrastingly, didn't want to draw attention to themselves, but to notions about the state of Germany and the world. So the OskarThen Marcuse encouraged me to Baader connection is definitely a problematic one. appeal ..." film the second half of the novel, the parts Carriere Oskar is angry because he's unwilling to lose his and I left out. And I do take this last testament mother or to share her with anyone. At the Nazi of Marcuse seriously-I would like to film the rally, he's not protesting against Hitler. He simply second half someday. wants to be the center of attention. It's a very Grass is definitely in favor of seeing Oskar's childish protest. He's angry that someone else is infantile destructiveness as related to Baader. But on the platform, for he's anxious to exercise his I don't agree. Of course, Oskar breaks glass be- own power. Of course he does hate the artificecause he wants to destroy valuable things. In this the music and the uniforms and the Nazi flags sense he is like Baader. Baader's first action was and the platform-for he has seen the pile of the firebombing in a Frankfurt department store dogshit hidden beneath the platform! But his tin in the mid-sixties. It was an idealistic protest drum is not a specific symbol-it's an object. You against consumer society. The political amnesty might see it as the writing machine the famous granted by Brandt in 1968 applied to everyone author is tapping on. Or as a form of energy. Or except Baader. There was a certain minister under as an evocation of political protest, or of particular Brandt who could not forgive Baader for the fire- movements. But you can't limit its meaning. After bombing. So he was ostracized in a totally unnec- all, in the thirties Hitler was called "the drummer." essary way. Baader never saw destruction as an But the Communists were referred to in a similar end in itself-it was a signal, a way to attract atten- fashion. And then there was that heroic drummer-

8
martyr in Brecht's Mother Courage. In the end, however, it's just a drum. Just another object-like the eels and mushrooms that are always popping out of Grass's imagination. You can't reduce these physical things to a single meaning. Is there some direct link to Mother Courage in yourfilm ? Brecht was my key to the meaning of German history until the late Valeska Gert, whose sensual acting and dancing have influenced me greatly, compared him to Shakespeare. She said that Brecht was like a square block of wood, while Shakespeare was both round and full of angles. From Brecht we learned that it is necessary to start from facts instead of ideas. But reality cannot be depicted truthfully without poetry. And I hope there is a certain poetry conveyed by Oskar's desire to hold on to his dream of childhood in the face of the deadly order and symmetry of the Nazis. The Tin Drum demonstrates that imagination is a part of reality. I wanted to show that the cinema must always be both realistic and dreamlike. Realism in the cinema is what makes one dream.*

SCHLONDORFF'S DRUM TIN

Wajda was a warning for us. Wajda had planned a film on the book-which, after all, takes place in his native Poland. But the project hadn't gotten past the planning stage. We knew that Wajda had spent a lot of time looking for a dwarf to play the part of Oskar. Volker seemed to be following in the footsteps of Wajda. But I told him at our very first meeting that he should forget about his search for the ideal dwarf. I had this intuition that Oskar had to convey a childlike quality that could not be found in a dwarf. Schlondorff also mentioned some kind of Chaplin influence. What was that all about? That was the crucial insight that came to me during that first meeting with Volker. Perhaps not so much an insight as an association: I suddenly thought of Chaplin's The Kid. That dreamy, sweet quality of Jackie Coogan was exactly what could make a cinematic character out of Oskar. This was one of those "ah-ha" experiences for the both of us. You don't know why it fits, but there's no doubt in your mind. We suddenly knew that, thanks to Chaplin, we were going to make this film. That the film was possible-technically possible. But Schlondorff had already agreed to make thefilm, hadn't he? At first when he spoke to Seitz, the producer, his answer was no. He thought that it would be too difficult. But then he went home and began to think about it. For some time Schl6ndorff had the idea of making a "barbaric" film: a mixture of strict realism and fantasy. I think he became especially caught up in the scenes in the book where Oscar breaks the glass. These scenes had something of traditional German realism in them, while they also represented the middle-class world of ordinary Nazism which was exploding before the glance of this strange child. There was what they call a "black light" in scenes like that. Schlondorff also began to get interested in the child's refusal to grow up because of the sinister forces which he senses are gathering about him. By the time of our first meeting, he had agreed to do it. But this problem of a dwarf actor had undermined his confidence. Then, thanks to Chaplin, he got this new vision. Then he was fortunate enough to find David Bennent. Wheredid hefind Bennent?

JEAN-CLAUDE CARRIERE
Schlondorff mentioned that you became involved at a veryearly stage . . . Yes, very early. He was still trying to get a grip on the book. We've known each other for a long time, and he came to see me in Paris one day. He came right out with it: "Would you like to write a script based on The Tin Drum?" I hadn't read the book in almost twenty years-it had been published in Paris in 1960-but I still had a powerful impression of Grass's achievement. So I immediately said yes. I remembered how Grass's voice, that sweetly strong voice that seemed to be shedding a definitive light on the Nazi era, had overwhelmed me at the time. So we plunged right into the project. We started talking about the central problem: what kind of actor would be right for the role of Oskar? The experience of
*For the opportunity to conduct this interview, as well as for a few important questions, thanks are due to Ken Emerson of The New York Times Magazine.)

SCHLONDORFF'S DRUM TIN

He found him in the midst of the Oktoberfest in Munich. Actually, David was right under his nose-the son of his friend, the actor Heinz Bennent-but Volker didn't know that. He went at it from another direction. He began asking Munich doctors if they knew any children with underdeveloped bodies and overdeveloped intellects. One doctor gave him the Bennents' address, and Volker set up an appointment with them. It was during the Oktoberfest, and the streets were full of people in costume. In front of the Bennent house, as Volker was crossing the street, there was this strange little blond boy with enormous eyes watching him. Volker knew right away that it was David, and that he would make a perfect Oskar. And in fact he was more than perfect. Volker came to see David as a kind of medium. It sometimes seemed that he was directing some of the scenes in an almost telepathic way. He had encouraged his parents to read the entire book to him several times, so he always knew what was going on. And it was very important for us that he was bilingual so that he could perform both my French version and Volker's German translation of the script. When did you decide to cut out the final third of the novel? That was also a very early decision. After our second or third meeting I had convinced Volker that the final part, which extends from 1945 to 1959, would have to go. Otherwise, since Oskar grows up physically during that part of the book, another actor would have had to replace David. That would have destroyed the unity of the thing. Our next step was to make a rather determined effort to convince Grass. That wasn't too difficult, since Grass was intelligent enough to see the inevitability of the cut. Then we made some other cuts-things that were not germane to the development of Oskar's character. Then we had to write a lot of dialogue, since Oskar's narration allows for little of this in the book. We wrote the dialogue in French, and Volker immediately translated it into German. Certain characters were reshapedsuch as the grandmother, and the Jewish toy merchant. Charles Aznavour took the latter role even further than we had planned-for example, the kaddish which the merchant recites at the funeral is Aznavour's idea. Aznavour is Armenian, of course, but he identified with Markus so much

Oskar's motherin Marcus's shop

that the idea of the kaddish suddenly came to him. Another sudden inspiration was our decision to put the old peasant woman at the end of the film. She's not the same woman as at the beginning of the film. She's just some other peasant woman picking potatoes in a lonely field. We wanted to round it off, to end it as it began. There were many other subtle changes. We wanted to find ways to preserve the mysterious symbols in the book. For example, the fish with which Oskar's mother, Agnes, stuffs herself to death. These fish have some hidden meaning in the unconscious of Gunter Grass, but that wasn't what concerned us. We simply wanted to make the scene believable. The first thing was to delineate the isolation of her existence, which is emphasized in the scene where the lover has to come into the room to masturbate her. When she comes back to the dinner table and her husband, and begins to stuff herself with fish, you sense that a drastic change has taken place inside her. Then we had to decide how she would eat the fish, what kind of fish she would eat, what kind of lighting would be on her-I try to be very precise about these things in my scripts. We also decided to have her die alone in the bathroom, instead of in the hospital as occurs in the book. Thesceneremindsme of a Beckmannpainting .. At first that kind of garish Germanic atmosphere was new for me. But I had a little bit of preparation for it. When working with Buiiuel on one of his scripts I would often talk with him about the German directors of the twenties and thirties whom he loves more than anyone else: Lang, Mur-

10 inau, Von Sternberg and others. When Bufiuel was a student in Paris he would go to see Germnian films all of the time, aind he still talks about them a lot. So that helped a lot. Then, when we were preparing to do the script, we begai looking at old iiewspapers from both Danzig aind Gerillany during the war years, as well as documents and photographs. This was a very precious experience for us. It enabled us to reconstruct the whole period, and to understand the kinds of people we were dealing with. It was great to see these old photographs of weddings and first conmmuiiolns and other things. It was like meeting the old
German cinema.

SCHLONDORFF'S DRUM TIN

What is it like when you work with Buhiuel? It's a very surrealistic ambiance, in that we are coming up with all kinds of fantasies. The trick is to select the fantasies that can work on paper, and discard the others. It's hard to explain why certain fantasies work. It's probably because they correspond directly to a very subterranean reality. We never ask, "What does that meani?"For example, in That Obscure Object of Desire, we were putting together that scene with the gypsy woman. Bufiuel said, "What if she carries a little pig in her arms?" I don't know how he got the idea, but it immediately seemed right. Humorous as well as realistic in a certain sense. So I said yes. We each have a veto power. If one doesn't like an idea, the idea is discarded. The process could be described as dreaming together and then writing down our dreams. Of course, there is always the professional requirements-the technical insights, etc. But we also try to have fun. We try to avoid getting bored. Sometimes we're laughing all the time. Bufuel claims that when we haven't laughed during an entire workday, then the day should be considered as lost. It is the precise yet unpredictable quality of my work with Bufiuel that I try to bring into my involvementwith films such as TheTin Drum. *

So this whole confrontation with the German

world became something new and unexpectedly

interesting. After all, I have a very Latin temlperamenit. My cultural ties are all Spanish, French and Italian. So I now see The Tin Drum as having opened me to Northerlnand Slavic influences. In fact, my next project is with Wajda and is based on a play written by a young Polish writer about the French revolution. The writer was a woman who killed herself in the thirties and the play is The Danton Case: it's about the last weeks in the life of Danton.

DENIS WOOD

The

Empire's

New

Clothes
Watching the film through Lucas-prescribed lenses, most critics indeed saw a more "human," more romantic, and more serious film, one in which the "cardboard characters" of Star Wars had been given three dimensions and in which its "comic-book verve" had been supplanted (though some said "enriched") by an overt and portentous philosophizing reminiscent of Carlos
*For persuading Jean-Claude Carri&reto agree to an unusual transatlantic telephone interview, an expression of gratitude is extended to Anatole Daumian of Argos Films, the French coproducer of The Tin Drum.

During the summers of 1977 and 1978, reviewers for the slicker film journals, the national newsweeklies, and the urban dailies prostrated themselves apotheosizing Star Wars as mindless entertainment. In the summer of 1980, the same reviewers intoned a rather different chorus in paean to The Empire Strikes Back, taking their cue from George Lucas, the film's author, sometime scenarist and executive producer, who frequently stated "It's going to be different and I think some people are going to say: 'I want it to be like the first one.' I couldn't do that. I just can't do the same formula over and over again. It would bore me silly."'