Xixax Film Forum

Trio to redo Haneke's 'Games'

CANNES -- Halcyon Pictures, Tartan Films and Celluloid Dreams Prods. announced Thursday that they have teamed to co-produce the English-language remake of the Michael Haneke thriller "Funny Games." Haneke ("Cache," "The Piano Teacher") will again direct the project, which will be jointly produced by Chris Coen of Halcyon, Hamish McAlpine of Tartan and exec-produced by Hengameh Panahi of Celluloid Dreams, which will handle international sales. Naomi Watts ("King Kong," "Mulholland Drive") is in negotiations to play the lead role. She next stars in "The Painted Veil" opposite Ed Norton.

First Look: Funny Games

Source: ShockTillYouDropJune 15, 2007

Leave it to German director Michael Haneke to swoop into our current atmosphere of no-nonsense, gory, torture-steeped horror and throw something back in our face that challenges it all with a deliberately-paced, equally no-nonsense revisit to his 1997 shocker called Funny Games. Warner Independent is scheduled to drop it on audiences January 18, 2008 (!), but Shock got in on a super-advance screening of the film in Hollywood. A more thorough review will come closer to its release, in the meantime this writer wants to scratch down some initial thoughts here...

The premise plays out familiar enough to those who have seen the original: A mother, father and their son swing out to their lake house and are visited by two clean-cut young men who infiltrate their archetypal happy family unit and shred it to pieces beyond any chance of healing. Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and Devon Gearhart are the targets of Michael Pitt and Brady Corbett's vicious, frustrating "games."

Haneke has delivered what's essentially an anti-Hostel; an answer to our current yearning for over-the-top violence and excessive, stylistic entertainment. The catch is, it's total art house fare and it will not play to everyone's tastes. But not since seeing the French thriller Ils earlier this year has a film made my palms sweat, my knee flinch in dreaded anticipation of the degradation to come, my tastes in entertainment truly called into question.

Was I entertained? You f**kin' bet - but not without the presence of that creeping guilt I get whenever I toss on Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left. This isn't a fun film. It's not an audience participation film although it reminds you several times that you're very much participating in the events as Pitt breaks the fourth wall and questions your allegiance to his prey or speaks of "plausible plot movement." Haneke relishes and establishes the banalities of life then snuffs them out in a surprisingly reserved yet unflinching fashion that's no less nerve-racking than any of the on-screen torture we've seen of the last two years. Most of Funny Games' atrocities occur off camera, but he captures the raw, dirty impact of the situation through sound effects and, more startling, the complete absence of a score. It's tough to shake off this one's sadistic streak.

Haneke's pacing - as welcome and stressful as some of the film's lingering single-shot takes can be - works to a fault. If anything, a "nip and tuck" pass at the film would do it wonders. Watts, Roth and Gearhart turn in brave performances; Pitt and Corbett, meanwhile, turn on the charm but keep us on constant alert.

This is a film that can't come any sooner to turn the torture sub-genre on its head and serve as a crucial, poignant exclamation mark to its run. Brutal and altogether brilliant, I'm looking forward to seeing this again.

Quote from: children with angels on June 18, 2007, 11:43:48 AM
Michael Pitt

uuuughhh..... i haaaaaaaaaaate pitt!!!!

Quote from: children with angels on June 18, 2007, 11:43:48 AM
creeping guilt I get whenever I toss on Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left.

i know it's horror fan blasphemy, but am i the only one who thought that movie was really lame?


i'm still not convinced this movie should've gotten a remake. the original is just so perfect.

agreed on all 3 counts!  i hate pitt, last house is lame, and the original funny games is completely un-improvable!

Quote from: bonanzataz on June 18, 2007, 06:48:04 PM
i'm still not convinced this movie should've gotten a remake. the original is just so perfect.

Quote from: modage on June 18, 2007, 08:40:01 PM
the original funny games is completely un-improvable!

not saying either of u guys are wrong about the original, but since american cinema is responsible for bringing gore to mainstream attention, i think an american remake makes perfect sense.

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Naomi Watts on Funny Games and The Birds
Source: ComingSoon

Aussie actress Naomi Watts stars with Viggo Mortensen in the upcoming crime-drama Eastern Promises from former master of horror David Cronenberg, and since Cronenberg's horror classic Scanners is in the process of being remade, we decided to ask Naomi Watts about her own upcoming horror remakes, one coming out this year and one still in development. First, she stars in Michael Haneke's English language remake of his horror-thriller Funny Games, which she told us about.

"It was interesting. I saw the original and it was intense, but Michael Haneke is a great filmmaker. I think his films will be remembered in 100 years to come. He's really trying to do something. We remade the film and what was interesting was that he wanted to do the exact same shots, so it was a great experience. He works from a very disciplined place. Everything's very worked-out, very structured, and that makes it a lot harder to be organic, because you've got so many notes in your head. Completely different style from the way David Cronenberg works."

And what about the remake of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds that Naomi has been rumored to star in? "It's happening," she replied, "but I haven't read the script yet, but we're in talks, and I hope it works out. They're still working on it and making sure it's just right."

Quote from: bonanzataz on June 18, 2007, 06:48:04 PM

Quote from: children with angels on June 18, 2007, 11:43:48 AM
Michael Pitt

uuuughhh..... i haaaaaaaaaaate pitt!!!!

Quote from: children with angels on June 18, 2007, 11:43:48 AM
creeping guilt I get whenever I toss on Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left.

i know it's horror fan blasphemy, but am i the only one who thought that movie was really lame?


i'm still not convinced this movie should've gotten a remake. the original is just so perfect.

Geez, you guys hate Pitt? I think he's one of the most interesting young male actors we have today.

The original was close to perfect, but the more I think about it the more I realize the tiny little personal things that I didn't love about it will be nullified in this new version, not to mention the fact that I hope so so soooo much that people will go see it thinking it will be new Eli Roth trash and come out really pissed off. On one hand it is hard to accept a director who pretty much makes it his singular goal to put audiences through the ringer (me included), it is kinda comforting to know at least ONE guy is making a visible international career out of it.

** p.s. - mod and bon - what exactly do you not like about Pitt? **

Quote from: SoNowThen on September 09, 2007, 04:57:03 AM
** p.s. - mod and bon - what exactly do you not like about Pitt? **

Fuck, I'll say. At first he started out as the poor man's Leonardo DiCaprio which wasn't saying much because DiCaprio wasn't really an actor. DiCaprio was a good face who become affiliated with a blockbuster movie. He went onto starring roles that tested his bankability instead of his acting. So the only credibility Pitt had is that he shared the facial similarities with DiCaprio.

Then Pitt became the poster child for art movies. It's funny because he exhibits a whininess and unlikability in Finding Forrestor and The Dreamers. It doesn't feel like he is performing a role per say but that is his default performance for a "depth" role. It is also him trying to look cool and trendy. He plays two very different characters but my unlikability for him was for the same reasons. His performance in Last Days is a make up job. He has little to do but moap around a room and look depressed. The make up, coincidentally, makes up most of his character.

Then there is his identity as an advertiser for art movies. I remember reading an interview with him for Last Days. He was proclaiming Gus Van Sant's work as the most interesting work in cinema today. He wasn't giving any reasons, but being hip and cool to what he thought art was. I wanted to puke for how pedestrian his words were.

But actors like him aren't new. Other actors in the 60s were less known for their acting skills than their trendy popularity and would go from film to film essentially playing characters the same way. They did so to exhibit the qualities that made them hip and cool.

Trailer here. (http://video.msn.com/v/us/v.htm???f=msnmovies/64&g=c85ab50d-6ed1-4ea4-9e72-f281e8d11864&)

that looks almost shot for shot.  even looks like the same house.  other than the 'psycho remake' curiosity i'm really not sure i'd want to sit through that again.  and the trailer looks SO masochistic i can't imagine that anyone who hasn't seen the original would want to either. 

yep it looks exactly the same.

the room next to the kitchen where the husband gets his leg smashed looks bigger. that's about it.

i'm still gonna see it. cos it's easier than cutting myself.

The new trailer is practically the same as the original (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzpzpe_8gHQ).

haven't seen the original and i'm going to make a point of not seeing it before this one.  it'll be fun to see how my reaction differs from those  who have seen it. 

and i think it looks perfectly masochistic.  people will be into this.  my barometer for whether or not your not average man wants to see a movie is my brother, and he definitely would see this. 

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Minister of Fear
By JOHN WRAY; New York Times

One evening last November at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn, Michael Haneke was struggling with the realities of working in America. It was the second-to-last day of shooting on "Funny Games," Haneke's first English-language feature, and the mood on set was approaching mutiny. A seemingly straightforward sequence of shots had become bogged down in technical concerns, and the word was that no additional studio time would be forthcoming. After 12 hours of nearly continuous work, the crew looked glassy-eyed and resentful, especially those among them — hair and makeup, production assistants and grips — whose job at that moment consisted mainly of standing around. Adding to the frustration were the multiple language barriers on set: the crew was American, the cameraman French and the director himself, with his elegant black suit and air of patrician reserve, as Austrian as Austrian can be. Only the children, the actor Devon Gearhart and his stand-in, Gregory Clifton, seemed motivated and eager to please. But by law, the child actors couldn't work past 10 that night, and 10 was getting closer all the time.

The shot in question was relatively simple, if working with child actors can ever be considered simple: Gearhart, in the role of Georgie, a terrified 8-year-old hiding in an empty house, hears a noise behind him, turns and crosses a dimly lighted room. Once the not-inconsiderable lighting issues were resolved, however, a new problem emerged. Gearhart, who had repeatedly impressed with his ability to call forth strong emotion at will, seemed incapable of looking frightened. Haneke — a tall, owlish man whose neatly trimmed white beard makes him look a little like an haute couture Gandalf — took a grandfatherly approach with Gearhart, speaking to him with sympathy and patience, but his English often failed him. As it grew clear that his actor was running out of gas, the strain on the director became obvious. Then suddenly, Haneke sat bolt upright, stepped quickly over to the boy and began jumping up and down in front of him like a bewildered chimpanzee. In a few seconds the two of them were bobbing up and down together, giggling and panting. Wide awake now, out of breath and not a little startled, Gearhart nailed his performance on the very next take. Returning to the director's chair, Haneke shot me a mischievous grin.

It's not a little disconcerting, given the remorselessness of Haneke's films, to come face to face with the director's goofy side. Neither he nor Gearhart, who turned 12 in May, seemed the tiniest bit bothered by the presence on a nearby set of a perfect facsimile of the boy's headless body, artfully arranged against a blood-spattered living-room wall. Later, when I mentioned the tense atmosphere during that day's shoot, Haneke sighed and brought a finger to his lips. "We have a saying in Austria," he said, his smile not entirely hidden behind his snowy beard. "The sewage is up to our necks already — whatever you do, don't make waves."

Making waves, however, is what Haneke has become famous for. Over the last two decades, the director has developed a reputation for stark, often brutal films that place the viewer — sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly — in the uncomfortable role of accomplice to the crimes playing out on-screen. This approach has made Haneke one of contemporary cinema's most reviled and revered figures, earning him everything from accusations of obscenity to a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art next month. "Funny Games," the movie Haneke was shooting in New York and Long Island, is the American remake of a highly controversial film by the same name that he directed in 1997. It was from its beginnings targeted at the American moviegoing public — and no other word but "targeted" will do. "Funny Games" is a direct assault on the conventions of cinematic violence in the United States, and the new version of the film, with its English-speaking cast and unmistakably American production design, makes this excruciatingly clear. More surprising still, Haneke remade this attack on the Hollywood thriller for a major Hollywood studio, Warner Independent Pictures, and refused to alter the original film's story in the slightest.

The premise of "Funny Games" is simple: a likable, prosperous, well-adjusted family — played, in the version to be released early next year, by Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and Devon Gearhart — is visited at the family summer house by two well-dressed young men claiming to be guests of the neighbors. Over the course of the next hour, these two polite, articulate strangers force the family to take part in progressively more sadistic contests, periodically stepping outside the film's action to speak to the viewer directly. The technique of the "dramatic aside" is nothing new — Brecht made great use of it, Shakespeare built whole plays around it and the ancient Greek chorus served no other purpose — but in the context of an otherwise straightforward thriller, it's profoundly disturbing. The young men make no secret of their disdain for their victims; but the bulk of their contempt is reserved for the audience. The experience of watching "Funny Games" is not unlike watching snuff-porn clips late at night in your bedroom, only to have your mother or Jacques Lacan switch the light on periodically without the slightest warning. That was my own experience, at least, and Haneke seemed delighted to hear it.

" 'Funny Games' is an anti-genre film," Haneke told me over lunch on his last day in New York. "It moves like a thriller, it has a thriller's structure, but at the same time it comments on itself. A movie is always a manipulation, regardless of whether it's a biopic or a romantic comedy, and 'Funny Games' takes this manipulation as its primary subject. So you were perfectly right to feel uncomfortable." This last statement was punctuated by Haneke's trademark goofy laugh. Shooting wrapped on "Funny Games" the day before, and any traces of the stress I'd seen on set had vanished. "People in the film industry underestimate their audience," he continued. "I believe the viewer is fundamentally more intelligent than most films give him credit for, but only if you give him the opportunity to use his brain."

From the very start of his career, Haneke's films have been calculated to shatter the viewer's complacency to a degree rarely seen since the early work of Mike Leigh or perhaps since the politicized days of the French New Wave. Haneke's characters are adrift in a profoundly dysfunctional world, one in which consolation and insight are equally hard to come by. One of Haneke's greatest successes, both critically and commercially, was "The Piano Teacher," adapted from a novel by Elfriede Jelinek. The film, released in 2001, stars Isabelle Huppert as Erika Kohut, an aging, severely repressed classical pianist who begins a disastrous, sadomasochistic affair with her most promising student. The film won the grand jury prize at Cannes and best acting awards for both of its leads, and it drew packed crowds at art-house theaters across Europe and the United States. As Haneke's prominence grew, however, so too did resistance to his methods. He has repeatedly been criticized as a purveyor of shock cinema, not so much for the violence in his films (little of which is explicit) as for the often brutal way in which the meaning of that violence is explored. "Violence in my films is shown as it really is," Haneke has said. "The suffering of a victim. The viewer comes to see what it means to act violently — that's why the films are often experienced as painful."

At times, "painful" seems almost an understatement. In an infamous scene from "Benny's Video," Haneke's second feature, a teenage son plays his parents the videotape of a murder he committed while they were away on vacation. The audience has witnessed the murder once already, but this second viewing, with the parents themselves now a de facto part of the audience, is vastly more affecting. Why, I asked Haneke, was the experience so different the second time? "When you see the killing first, you're too shocked and bewildered to let the fact of it sink in," he replied. "But the moment that the parents, with whom one naturally identifies, sit down to watch the video, one begins to see the murder in its social context: the discrepancy between the act we are witnessing and normal social behavior becomes clear." He smiled. "It's always important to keep in mind who's watching."

This question of who's watching — both within the film and outside of it — is one of Haneke's chief obsessions. For most successful directors, whether in Europe or America, the audience exists to be entertained; for Haneke it seems to exist to be confronted. Where another director might cut tactfully away, Haneke's camera lingers. His screenplays, which he always writes himself, have a sense of purpose about them that only polemic works of art can have. The ideology that underlies Haneke's filmmaking is a deeply personal, idiosyncratic one, but it's an ideology nonetheless. Haneke is a man very much at odds with the accepted values of the industry he works in, and if you ask him, he'll be happy to tell you why.

"Political manipulation is rampant in the American media," Haneke told me over lunch in downtown Manhattan last winter. "It's present in the movies too, of course. It's everywhere. I teach filmmaking in Vienna, and I like to show my students 'Triumph of the Will,' by Leni Riefenstahl, then something by Sergei Eisenstein — 'Battleship Potemkin,' for example — and then 'Air Force One,' the movie in which Harrison Ford plays the U.S. president. Each of these films has a distinct political agenda, but all make use of exactly the same techniques, all have a common goal — the total manipulation of the viewer. What's terrible about the Harrison Ford film, though, especially terrible, is that it represents itself as simple entertainment. The audience doesn't realize there's a message hidden there." Haneke sat back and shook his head gravely.

The difference between Haneke's agenda and that of films like "Air Force One" was cast into sharp relief at the premiere of the original "Funny Games" in Cannes. "It was funny — funny for me, at least — how the theater reacted to Anna's shooting of Dickie," Haneke told me, referring to a scene late in the film when the heroine turns the tables on her captors. "There was actual applause at first — then, when the scene is rewound, making the audience conscious of what it's cheering for, the theater went absolutely silent. There was a general realization, even though the victim in this case was a villain in the film, that they'd been applauding an act of murder." Haneke frowned slightly at the memory, but the frown appeared to be one of satisfaction. "I'm hoping for something similar when 'Funny Games' shows here."

The decision to remake his signature work in America with an A-list cast caused considerable controversy among hardcore cinephiles, not least because of Haneke's reputation as one of Hollywood's most outspoken critics. Haneke was quick to defend himself. "Of course I'm a critic of the studio system," he said, as if it were unthinkable not to be. "But that doesn't mean that one can't work within that system. 'Funny Games' was always made with American audiences in mind, since its subject is Hollywood's attitude toward violence. And nothing has changed about that attitude since the first version of my film was released — just the opposite, in fact." When I asked whether the average American moviegoer was likely to appreciate having his attitude adjusted, Haneke-style, the director thought for a moment, then threw up his hands in mock surrender. "I've been accused of 'raping' the audience in my films, and I admit to that freely — all movies assault the viewer in one way or another. What's different about my films is this: I'm trying to rape the viewer into independence."

Haneke was born on March 23, 1942, in Munich, to a genteel theatrical family — his father, Fritz Haneke, was a respected actor and director, and his mother, Beatrix von Degenschild, was an actress in her own right and a daughter of the local aristocracy. After the war, his family moved to Wiener Neustadt in Lower Austria, a half-hour's train ride from Vienna. As soon as he graduated from high school, Haneke lost no time in moving to the capital, where he studied psychology, philosophy and — naturally enough — theater at the University of Vienna; if the teenage Haneke had had his way, however, he might never have directed a film.

"Originally, I wanted to be a pianist," Haneke told me. "But luckily for me, my stepfather was a professional musician, and he took me aside one day and said, 'Look, Michael, it's very nice that you're playing piano all the time, but I have to tell you that you're never going to make it.' " When I expressed sympathy for this setback, Haneke frowned and shook his head. "No, no," he said quickly. "I'm grateful to my stepfather for his honesty. There's nothing worse than a moderately talented musician."

Well meant or not, his stepfather's intercession freed the young Haneke to pursue his other great passion, one that arrived like a thunderbolt in the winter of 1948. "I must have been 6 years old when I saw my first film," Haneke told me when I visited the spacious apartment in Vienna's eighth district that he shares with his wife, Suzie, a dealer in antique jewelry and silver. "It was Laurence Olivier's 'Hamlet.' I remember the gradual darkening of the theater, the slow, somber opening of the curtain, the first bleak images of the sea-locked castle and the even bleaker music that accompanied them. My grandmother, who was sitting next to me in the theater, told me years later that she had to take me out almost at once, because I began screaming in terror. From that moment on I was hooked." I felt obliged to ask Haneke whether it struck him as odd that a child so easily disturbed by images on-screen would grow up to make movies often described as unbearable to watch. After a moment's silence, he answered, "Not at all."

Haneke's second pivotal moviegoing experience came more than a decade later, when he saw Tony Richardson's "Tom Jones" as a student. "Suddenly, about a third of the way through the film," Haneke told me, "the hero, played by Albert Finney, stops in the middle of a chase scene, turns to face the camera — in other words, the viewer — and addresses a few offhand remarks to the audience. Nothing especially racy, but by that simple gesture he shocks the viewer into self-awareness." Though he didn't know it at the time, that moment marked a loss of cinematic innocence that would indelibly mark every film he went on to direct. "After 'Tom Jones,' I began to look behind the mirror, so to speak — to see the cinema with different eyes, and to distrust the storytellers, who claimed to be serving up real life. But my hunger for stories was stronger than ever — I wasn't sure what I was looking for from cinema, but I knew it would have to offer the magic of my first moviegoing experiences without turning me into a passive, voiceless victim of the story — which is to say, of the people behind the story. I wanted movies that enchanted me without exploiting me."

At certain moments, a conversation with Haneke can feel like a clandestine meeting with the leader of the Cinematic Liberation Front, and this was one of them. Even the word "exploitation" has taken on a kind of lurid appeal — blaxploitation, sexploitation — in the current cultural landscape, and his argument struck me as both romantic and dated. When I said as much — tactfully, of course — to Haneke, he simply nodded. Then I realized that was exactly his point.

Haneke may have become serious about movies early on, but decades would pass before he would direct his first feature. After attending the University of Vienna, he returned to Germany in 1967, where he spent the next four years working for Bavaria's equivalent of the BBC as a producer before becoming a freelance screenwriter and director. His first theatrical feature film, "The Seventh Continent," made at the age of 47, was released on the big screen only after having been rejected by a German television station. It's not hard to guess why the network passed. The film follows the final days and hours of an archetypal middle-class family who have decided, for no apparent reason, to destroy all their possessions and commit suicide. Many of the hallmarks of Haneke's style are already in evidence: the deliberate pacing, the static, unflinching camera, the dominance of blue tones over red, and the placement, à la Hitchcock, of the most grisly violence tantalizingly out of view. Two equally stark studies in violence and alienation — "Benny's Video" and "71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance" — followed "The Seventh Continent," and the three films together, which have since come to be known as "The Glaciation Trilogy," earned him a measure of admiration outside the German-speaking world. It was his next film, however, that made cinephiles the world over take notice. That film was "Funny Games."

"Funny Games" occupies a unique place in Haneke's body of work, not least because of his decision to shoot it twice. "Originally, I approached Michael about optioning 'Funny Games' for some other director," Chris Coen, the film's producer, told me. "And Michael's reply was that he'd do it himself, but only if I could get Naomi Watts for the lead. I hadn't thought about him wanting to do it, to be honest. But he said very clearly that 'Funny Games' was the one film of his that he'd allow no one else to direct." Hollywood has a long and hallowed tradition of buying the rights to art-house hits and refashioning them to suit its own ends — in fact, the director Ron Howard recently acquired the rights to Haneke's "Caché" — but Haneke's decision to remake his own film surprised fans and colleagues alike. The peculiarity of the project seems to have been part of its appeal. "To my knowledge, no one has ever remade his own film so precisely," the director told me in Vienna, with an unmistakable trace of boyish pride. "The new version is the same film superficially, of course, but it's also very different: a different atmosphere, different performances, a different end result. That in and of itself is interesting."

Interesting and potentially nightmarish. Having Haneke at the helm seems to have led, perhaps inevitably, to conflict with Warner Independent, the studio that is distributing "Funny Games": the film's release date was repeatedly delayed, possibly a result of disagreement over whether the film should be positioned for the horror market or for a wider audience. "He had panic attacks about how the film was going to be received and problems with the crew, and language problems," said Brady Corbet, who plays Peter, one of the two wisecracking, self-reflective killers in the remake. "It was a nightmare for him, and I doubt he'll ever try to work here again."

When I asked Haneke if he would return to work in the U.S., he took an uncharacteristically long time to reply. "I enjoyed many things about the shoot," he said, clearly choosing his words with great care. "I enjoyed working with the actors especially. The actors were wonderful."

Haneke has always had a gift for eliciting extraordinary performances from his actors, an absolute necessity in films that otherwise refuse to cater to the audience. "The Piano Teacher" seems to have been unthinkable for him without Isabelle Huppert; "Code Unknown" was written specifically for Juliette Binoche; and without Naomi Watts, it seems very likely that "Funny Games" would never have been remade. Watching both versions of "Funny Games" back to back is especially revealing of Haneke's skill. Though the dialogue, framing and sequence of shots are identical, the end result is remarkably different: Michael Pitt, the other of the family's tormentors, brings a disconcerting sweetness to his role; Tim Roth emotes where Ulrich Mahe endured stoically; and Watts herself infuses her character's suffering with a sexuality that Susanne Lothar, perhaps intentionally, kept at a definite remove.

"What makes Michael different from other directors," Corbet told me, "is his absolute specificity — there's one way to make this movie, period. He's a total dictator. Before this shoot started, I spoke to a number of actors who'd worked with him, and all of them told me the same thing: 'Brace yourself.' "

There's an element of paradox in the task Haneke has set himself: in order to make films that confront the use of violence as titillation, it's necessary to make violent films and even, to some extent, titillating ones. In the course of each of his productions, Haneke has had to navigate these ethically and conceptually fraught waters anew, with varying degrees of success. His films have by no means earned him unanimous praise: moviegoers and critics alike have often resented the missionary quality in his work, and accusations of self-righteousness have dogged him throughout his career. Reviewing the original version of "Funny Games," the critic J. Hoberman wrote: "His movies are founded on the denial of catharsis and, to compound the creepiness, Haneke insists he is occupying the moral high ground. . . . The wheel is rigged so only Haneke can win." One of the great paradoxes of Haneke's position is that the methods he despises are the only methods at his disposal, and the criticisms his own films garner are often not so very different — on the surface, at least — from comments he himself has made about films that he hates.

His most widely seen film in the U.S., "Caché," released in 2005, won Haneke his second major prize at Cannes and is perhaps the director's most delicate balancing act. By turns both Hitchcockian thriller and cool morality play, "Caché" follows a Parisian haute-bourgeois family as it unravels in the face of a harassment campaign that is chilling in its simplicity: each morning a videocassette containing footage of the family's house is mysteriously dropped off on its doorstep, showing the comings and goings of each family member but giving no clue as to the maker of the tape. No overt threats are made, and no explanations given, but the family — Daniel Auteuil, Lester Makedonsky and Juliette Binoche, in her second starring role for Haneke — do the rest of the harasser's work for him. By the end of the film, a devastating secret has come to light, a man has been killed and the family is damaged beyond repair.

"Caché" is simultaneously the most conventional and the most opaque of Haneke's films, and arguably the most effective. While one of the central mysteries of the film — the question of who is making the tapes — is never resolved, why the tapes are being made soon becomes clear. The father of the family, to all appearances a model left-leaning intellectual, is a man with a crime in his past: as a boy, during the time of the Algerian conflict, he betrayed a young Algerian ward of his family, resulting in the ward's abandonment and eventual suicide. Though Haneke resists being represented as a political filmmaker, it's hard to avoid seeing a message here: namely, that the comforts of the bourgeoisie have been paid for in blood, and in the case of France, that blood was largely North African. In our talks, Haneke repeatedly criticized films that summarize or explain themselves to the viewer — that do the audience's work for it, in other words — but "Caché" comes dangerously close to doing just that. Yet, just as "Caché" seems about to supply the viewer with any number of conventionally satisfying solutions, it slyly — some would say maddeningly — refuses to choose between them, closing with an intriguing final shot that may or may not hold the answer. The fact that the film ultimately succeeds is no small tribute to the director's considerable talent as a juggler of audience expectations.

Largely because of its preoccupation with violence as entertainment, "Funny Games" has been compared with Stanley Kubrick's "Clockwork Orange." Haneke himself, however, views "A Clockwork Orange" as a noble failure. "I'm a huge Kubrick fan, but I find 'A Clockwork Orange' a kind of miscalculation, because he makes the brutality so spectacular — so stylized, with dance numbers and so on — that you almost have to admire it," he told me. "I read somewhere — I'm not sure if it's true — that Kubrick was completely shocked when he saw how the public reacted to 'A Clockwork Orange,' and that he even tried to have the film recalled. It became a cult hit because people found its hyperstylized violence somehow cool, and that was certainly not what Kubrick had intended." Haneke shook his head slowly. "It's incredibly difficult to present violence on-screen in a responsible manner. I would never claim to be cleverer than Kubrick, but I have the advantage of making my films after he made his. I've been able to learn a tremendous amount from his mistakes." Whether one of those mistakes was to make a film that actually had popular appeal was a question that Haneke left unanswered.

Haneke's sudden prominence, and the unfailingly extreme subject matter of his films, has led to comparisons with Quentin Tarantino, with John Woo and with the directors of the so-called Asian Extreme movement, but Haneke himself sees little common ground. "I saw 'Pulp Fiction,' of course, and it's a very well done film," he said. "The problem, as I see it, is with its comedy — there's a danger there, because the humor makes the violence consumable. Humor of that kind is all right, even useful, as long as the viewer is made to think about why he's laughing. But that's something 'Pulp Fiction' fails to do." When I mentioned Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers," another film that "Funny Games" has been compared with, Haneke shrugged. "Stone made the same mistake that Kubrick made. I use that film to illustrate a principle to my students — you can't make an antifascist statement using fascist methods."

Haneke has his own theory for the divergent routes taken by Hollywood and Europe, one in which, perhaps not surprisingly, the darker side of German and Austrian history plays a central role. "At the beginning of the 20th century," he told me, "when film began in Europe, storytelling of the kind still popular in Hollywood was every bit as popular here. Then the Nazis came, and the intellectuals — a great number of whom were Jewish — were either murdered or managed to escape to America and elsewhere. There were no intellectuals anymore — most of them were dead. Those who escaped to America were able to continue the storytelling approach to film — really a 19th-century tradition — with a clear conscience, since it hadn't been tainted by fascism. But in the German-speaking world, and in most of the rest of Europe, that type of straightforward storytelling, which the Nazis had made such good use of, came to be viewed with distrust. The danger hidden in storytelling became clear — how easy it was to manipulate the crowd. As a result, film, and especially literature, began to examine itself. Storytelling, with all the tricks and ruses it requires, became gradually suspect. This was not the case in Hollywood." At this point, Haneke asked politely whether I was following him, and I told him that I was. "I'm glad," he said, apparently with genuine relief. "For Americans, this can sometimes be hard to accept."

Over the last decade, a new group of Francophone filmmakers has come to prominence in Europe, one less bedazzled by the Hollywood genre films that so influenced the New Wave directors than by the work of French auteurs like Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson. The Belgian-born Dardenne brothers, for example, favor dark, naturalistic studies of working-class life, while Bruno Dumont, a former professor of philosophy, makes violent and sexually explicit films that tend toward parable. But both share a preference for long, intricately composed shots, a resolutely anti-Hollywood aesthetic and a Bressonian aversion for spelling things out. Haneke feels at home in their company: "I wait for each new film by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Abbas Kiarostami, Claire Denis and Bruno Dumont. I enjoy all sorts of films, but those are the people that really interest me. I admire the Dardenne brothers tremendously, but I feel closest, in my work, to Dumont. Dumont's films are basically existential works, philosophical films, not political ones. I think of my own films that way." There are other notable similarities between Haneke and Dumont: both directors make violent films that focus on the consequences of the act of violence, rather than on the act itself; both have won the coveted grand jury prize at Cannes; and both were booed there when their awards were announced. When I mentioned this to Haneke, he grinned. "Some of my fondest professional memories are of upsetting the audience at Cannes."

"I had a dream last night," Haneke told me toward the end of our lunch in New York. "A nightmare, to be exact. Maybe you'll find it useful for your piece." For a moment he was uncharacteristically quiet. He finally said: "I was sitting in a bus, and suddenly it went out of control. For some reason I was responsible for everybody's safety, but I couldn't get the steering wheel to work: perhaps it was broken, perhaps someone else was preventing me. People were wandering up and down the street, and the bus ran them over, unavoidably, one after another. Somehow I was responsible for this, but I was helpless to prevent it." He took a slow, thoughtful sip of his coffee. "A pretty terrible dream, but to me it seems representative of our current situation in the world. All of us are responsible but unable to change the direction of the bus — everyone in Europe, everyone in the so-called first world, is in that same position. A horrible predicament, almost unbearable if you think about it, but the bus keeps right on rolling." He laughed again. "Maybe I'll use that in one of my films."

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in response to the tagline:

i don't want to watch this cos it will make me feel like shit (again). but naomi watts is really hot. that's all.

good poster.

for anyone in Boston, this Friday at the Harvard Film Archive, Haneke will be present to screen his new film (four months before it hits theatres) and then discuss it afterwards.  starts at 7:30pm, costs $15.

that really sucks b/c i'm leaving boston thursday night. they're showing his movies all week i think. yesterday they played benny's video, but i got that from netflix two weeks ago and didn't go on principle.

Love, Hate and Michael Haneke
By S.T. VanAirsdale, The Reeler

I should preface this item with a couple of advisories: First, it contains major spoilers for readers who haven't seen Michael Haneke's 1997 film Funny Games; and second, despite that film's irredeemably offensive stupidity, I have huge respect for Haneke as a filmmaker. I often assume Funny Games was Haneke's Faustian bargain for the decade of terrific work that followed. Or, more realistically, the 1997 version bought him the masterpieces Code Unknown and Cache, while his upcoming American remake paid off the merely excellent Time of the Wolf and The Piano Teacher. (I have yet to see the Naomi Watts/Tim Roth updating, but as a shot-for-shot retelling Haneke gleefully claims to be only eight seconds off the pace of his original, its own bankruptcy is almost certainly assured.)

To my regret, my fandom did not compel visits to the Museum of Modern Art's recent Haneke retrospective, among the most comprehensive of the filmmaker's 30-year film and TV career. I did, however, escape the Reeler HQ rubble long enough to catch Haneke screening and discussing Funny Games, the kick-off event of MoMA's nifty new Modern Mondays program. Rewatching reminded me of the genuine creepiness Haneke sustains over a good 80 or 90 minutes, during which a pair of white-gloved youths (Arno Frisch and Frank Giering) torment, torture and kill an upper-middle class family in their summer cottage. Amorality will always be tension's bitch (someone tell Eli Roth, whose films are pillow fights compared to Haneke's), and Funny Games applies its sadism in the most dynamic of ways: by teasing viewers with their own smugness. What we call "evil" can and often does win in this world, Haneke says unblinkingly; bad guys can and often do wear white.

In this way, Haneke loves to think of himself as a master manipulator. (His recent Times Magazine profile crystallized this for the ages.) But adherence to convention is not the same thing as smugness, which is why Funny Games' climactic upshot -- wife Anna (Susanne Lothar) steals a gun and blows one of her assailants away, only to have the survivor grab the VCR remote control, rewind the film, anticipate the coup and wrest the firearm away -- is such a gross betrayal. Almost to the end of his grueling psychological horror film, Haneke introduces a time machine.

In fairness, the MoMA audience clapped in support of her attack, and the filmmaker got the sense of deflation he wanted after its sudden reversal. (More on this later.) But this isn't exactly a spiritual precedent to the paralyzing movie-within-a-movie in Code Unknown, or the surveillance-cum-class war propelling Cache. Instead it's the cheapest, most embarrassing technical stunt of Haneke's career. Worse yet, it epitomized his own smugness Monday night while in conversation with MoMA curator Josh Siegel, who asked Haneke to explain the difference between obscenity and pornography.

"Cheating is not very nice": Funny Games director Michael Haneke "I think 'obscene' is something that breaks the rules," Haneke replied. "So from that point of view, I hope all of my films are obscene. Pornography, to me, is a consumer article." The comment drew an uncomfortable laugh from the MoMA audience, no dummies they, who deduced more overlap than separation between the qualities in Funny Games. But whatever; that ambiguity isn't the point as much the one guiding Haneke's differentiation between rule-breaking and bald-faced cheating. Code Unknown is a rule-breaker -- open-ended, impenetrable, cold to the touch. Funny Games is a cheat -- subverting its own well-established terms for the sake of its director's gratification.

"How do you mean cheating?" Haneke replied through his translator when I asked about the distinction.

"Rewinding the film isn't really manipulating the audience, is it?" I said. "It's a technical device you're using to change the story."

"I'm trying to show that you can manipulate an audience, and how you can manipulate," he said.

"Well, there's a big difference between Hitchcock and that, for example," I said, bringing up Siegel's own comparison from minutes before. "It's narrative versus technical." (More accurately, it's visual narrative as opposed to technical narrative, but such is l'esprit d'escalier.)

"Maybe you think it's cheating," he said.

"Yeah, I do," I said. "But what's the difference for you between someone who cheats and someone who breaks the rules? Or is there a difference?"

"I think cheating is not very nice," he said, smiling. "Actually, [my translator] happened to come in 10 minutes before the end, just at the moment the tape was being rewound. [She] heard the audience applaud, and [she] told me that reaction. And I said the same thing happened at Cannes when the film played for the first time. It was exactly the same reaction: People applauded, the tape was rewound and there was the most horrified silence. And that was the reaction that I wanted. People fell into the trap of applauding a murder -- someone being killed."

Hats off, I guess, for the rousing deconstruction of cinematic violence, but really: What does it prove? That audiences crave catharsis? That's a new one. That moralists are hypocrites? Shocking! That Haneke is a cynic's cynic? Did it really take a time-travel implement to convince you? Maybe the contrivance will be more at home in the American remake, itself a stunt whose very existence blots the accrued nuance of Haneke's complex, classic 10-year run. I wouldn't dream of second-guessing the man, but I can't say I'll miss this kind of bullshit when he's gone -- if he isn't already. I told you there were spoilers.

non spoilerful quote that sums up my feelings perfectly for this BAD BAD BAD well made BAD movie.

Quote from: MacGuffin on October 17, 2007, 03:12:16 PM
Hats off, I guess, for the rousing deconstruction of cinematic violence, but really: What does it prove? That audiences crave catharsis? That's a new one. That moralists are hypocrites? Shocking! That Haneke is a cynic's cynic? Did it really take a [gimmick] to convince you? Maybe the contrivance will be more at home in the American remake, itself a stunt whose very existence blots the accrued nuance of Haneke's complex, classic 10-year run. I wouldn't dream of second-guessing the man, but I can't say I'll miss this kind of bullshit when he's gone -- if he isn't already. I told you there were spoilers.

Maybe the only thing it proves it that somebody has to keep doing it; keep reminding people over and over and over again every age cos we keep forgetting (wilfully or ingorantly, it doesn't matter).

And I think that's reason enough.

That being said, of course Funny Games is his weakest movie. But anybody who values Code Unknown over Piano Teacher and Time Of The Wolf has no fuckin' balls...

Quote from: SoNowThen on October 18, 2007, 06:15:03 AM
Maybe the only thing it proves it that somebody has to keep doing it; keep reminding people over and over and over again every age cos we keep forgetting (wilfully or ingorantly, it doesn't matter).

forgetting what? you don't need to be reminded of something that's obvious and hardly any more insightful with each new reminder.

i'll make a career out of reminding ppl that we need air to breathe. and that we all want love. and how clever i am for pointing that out.

A new generation of commercial film goers (who will have not seen the original), having grown up with a kind of senseless, glamorized film violence, will hopefully be a little shocked or shaken by this.

It's a chance for a master director to take a relatively unknown work and present it in an interesting (and immediate) manner to a new audience. Just because the idea is obvious to US does not mean it is obvious or even recognized by the vast viewing majority. If the vast viewing majority remained so ignorant as to not breath, then, yes, we would have to keep reminding (the few we wanted to survive) to breath. Plus, the film never was about the utterance of an idea, but about the gruelling experience itself.

Nabakov came to America and did his own translating/re-writing of his earlier book Despair.

You can't see the merit in this? Seems that maybe you are perhaps dismissive of the tack that journalists will take with it, having to "describe" a film as an idea, then over-praising Haneke along those lines. But that's certainly not his fault...

I'm with SoNowThen on this one. Funny Games is about living this excruciating experience as if you were one of the victims. And Haneke does achieve his manipulation, cause the audience response is usually to internally beg for these guys to get off. When he does the remote control thing, if you're involved, it is truly frustrating . I don't see it as a gimmick at all. A gimmick tries to hide itself, it tries to slip right underneath you. What happens in Funny Games is completely in your face.

yeah, i guess you're right. it's like when a junkie dad knows he's a piece of shit and you're like, "Dad, why you gotta be like that?" and he just leans back with blood spouting out of his arm and his eyes rolling back in his head and he just goes "Aw, go fuck yourself" and passes out.

After a number of years on the board, I can now take a non-response joke/taunt/insinuating-an-insult-but-not-really-an-insult response from P as almost the same as another person's positive agreement.

Moral victory points, all around.

;)

Naomi Watts Q&A
The King Kong star discusses Funny Games and The Birds.
by Leigh Singer, IGN UK

Naomi Watts has become the go-to actress for tortured roles, from David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. to a giant ape's plaything in Peter Jackson's King Kong. Next up, more on-screen abuse in the LFF-featured US remake of Michael Haneke's Funny Games - and just maybe the upcoming remake of Hitchcock's The Birds

Q: Funny Games is a notorious shocker. What did you make of the Austrian original?

Watts: I saw the film at home with a girlfriend and was utterly shocked by it. I found myself having to talk a lot through it just because it was so damn creepy and difficult. It's not like you can say 'I loved the film' but you can have a really extreme reaction. What makes it worthy to me is that you think and talk about it for days afterwards.

Q: What's Michael Haneke's point about violence on film?

Watts: I felt he's speaking to us as an audience, saying we have blood on our hands. And he really messes with you - he sets everything up in that genre way and then never gives it to you. I think he's making you feel guilty for all the films you've bought into before and cheered on those violent moments.

Q: You've made a few remakes recently - The Ring, King Kong - why this one too?

Watts: Michael said that he originally made the film to reach American audiences and the fact that it didn't was a shame. So when he was offered this second opportunity to do it with English-speaking actors...

Q: Did a shot-for-shot remake make sense?

Watts: I did think it was odd but the whole point of this is it's an intellectual exercise. As an actor it's very hard because I knew his shots were the same and everything was blocked to work within those shots. So for lack of a better term I felt I was acting blindfolded and tied up, there wasn't anything organic about it.

Q: Isn't that very frustrating?

Watts: It's fun working with a director who really knows what they want, even if it's slightly annoying and difficult. There are many directors you work with who want to shoot something twenty different ways and you're like, 'Wait a second what am I doing here?' So it's nice to have someone that confident.

Q: Mullholland Dr., 21 Grams, Funny Games, even King Kong, you do seem to suffer a lot on screen...

Watts: It's actually fun to me. I'm not this dark twisted person. Yes. I have my demons and this is my way of exorcising them, it gets them out and better out than in. Actually I think that it's the comedians who are the darkest people on the planet, because they think life's just bloody hilarious!

Q: What's next, The Birds? Because that's more abuse and suffering.

Watts: It's under discussion - and another remake! Sorry!

Q: Did you not hear about Tippi Hedren almost losing an eye making the original?

Watts: Yeah, they threw birds at her across the lens, right? Hopefully things will be a little more sophisticated today!

New Trailer here. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7R9W5W2YbU)

what i hate most is that ppl will watch this for the first time and start THE SAME MEANINGLESS debate all over again about the bullshit "point" that haneke was making when he first took this dump ten years ago. the point is such bullshit that the whole time, even now, the debate has been about whether it has a point or not. whether it's worth discussing or not.

either position leads to a two-second insight.. if NOT, then the response is "great lets get on with our lives." if YES, then it's ". isn't he clever! haha, uh,,..." *awkward silence*

this movie can be summarized as a giant fucking wink at the camera, while offscreen haneke is MASTURBATING FURIOUSLY. this is gonna be a lowpoint in what would otherwise be a great year for groundbreaking movies by real visionaries (speed racer, WALL• E, where the wild things are.. etc).

I hate what Haneke has to say about the film and hate hearing him talk about it, because it makes him come accross as so arrogant, blind and small-minded about horror and Hollywood in general. But I still think the film itself is a great, fascinating, terrifying work. The thing is, it doesn't just exist outside the horror genre and point at it accusingly - it goes to show how interesting, fluid and broad the category of horror can be. The goodness of the film itself disproves the point he claims to be making.

I've seen the remake. It is identical - even closer to the original than Van Sant's Psycho is to Hitchcock's, the closest remake ever. This raises all kinds of interesting questions, but the most immediate thing for me (as a non-German speaker) was just how cool it was to not have to be reading subtitles. It really is that similar that it feels like watching the original but understanding the language. Overall, it's a bizarre and bold experiment. I liked it a lot.

Warner Independent Pictures' Funny Games believes March is now a good time for the "fun" to commence. The company will now release Michael Haneke's remake in theaters March 14, 2008, a month later than its original bow.

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Quote from: Pubrick on December 06, 2007, 12:59:17 AM
this movie can be summarized as a giant fucking wink at the camera

isn't this sort of the whole idea behind the film? one of the characters even winks directly at the camera, out into the audience. i'm not sure why everyone is hating on this so much.. i was really intrigued by it and even genuinely surprised by some of his decisions. (i'm talking about the old version. haven't seen the new one yet). it's not every day you see a film like this. and even in light of all his other great films, i still think this one stands out as one of his best.

Exclusive Interview: Michael Pitt & Brady Corbet
Source: ShockTillYouDrop

They're perhaps the most polite thrill-killers this side of the chopping block. Meet Peter and Paul. Or is it Tom and Jerry? Or try Beavis and Butthead... Whatever names they're going by, this moppy-haired pair adorned in shorts, starched white collared shirts and gloves make Naomi Watts and Tim Roth's lives a living hell in Warner Independent's Funny Games - but they do it with such courteous panache Hannibal Lecter would raise a glass of Chianti in toast to their methods.

For the remake of his 1997 film of the same name, writer-director Michael Haneke cast acerbic young actors Brady Corbet ("Thunderbirds") and Michael Pitt ("Last Days") as the Peter and Paul, respectively (roles previously essayed by Arno Frisch and Frank Giering). Together, they are fine young home-hopping and home-wrecking wackos whose charms and boyish good looks are offset by a devious desire to push their prey through terrifying trials.

Peter and Paul's presence serves a multitude of reasons, one being to break the cinematic fourth wall and draw the individual movie-goer into the action closer than he or she may care to go through a wry wink at the camera or, more overtly, tossing a question or two at the audience. As for the motivation behind their malicious games, Haneke wants you to figure that out for yourself.

By the indoor pool - which served as a humid hub for press interviews - of the Marriot Hotel in Park City, Utah, Shock joined Corbet and Pitt for a brief discussion about "Games" and its place in the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Corbet met us with fervent interest, as you'll read below, to reflect on the remake not only from the viewpoint of an actor but as an aspiring filmmaker.

ShockTillYouDrop.com: Did Haneke fill you guys in on why he was remaking the film?
Brady Corbet: Haneke's pretty practical and he doesn't speak about his decisions or his work that much. I have my theories. He said to me, 'I've directed the same play in different countries and different languages. The blocking stays the same, the text stays the same. The changes that were made were in the performance. It's amazing that if you keep something exactly the same, how different the tone of that piece can be.' It actually emphasizes the differences between the two. He always intended this to be an American film for American audiences. The original film had an English title - it was made for us.

Michael Pitt: I can't speak for Haneke but I've heard him say things in the effect of the film 'getting off on American violence.'

Corbet: He felt the themes of the original film were not very clear in that version because it wasn't the right setting. Plus he wanted to play with "celebrity." He thinks it's very funny how far we push Naomi Watts and also likes performances that are naturalistic. The first film is really great, but this is very different and succeeds on levels the original didn't. It's just so interesting. I think because it's a movie about movies, he could simply justify it by saying, 'Yeah, I made a movie about movies,' but only further putting you at arm's length. He wants you to be aware of what you are thinking and feeling. "Funny Games" is the most on-the-nose movie he's ever made. The original "Funny Games" and the new one - they're not even my favorite Haneke films - but I still love them.

Shock: What is your favorite then?
Corbet: "Code Unknown." But I really love what he's doing here because it was an experiment with something that was so on-the-nose. It's so brave and so well made that even the schtick of glancing at the camera is something he can get away with because it's done so tastefully.

Shock: Brady's obviously schooled in Haneke's work - for you, Michael, what made you want to do the film, was it Haneke's rep or the material?
Pitt: We had a work session and I could tell during that - just from my background in theater and the time I spent with [Bernardo] Bertolucci [for "The Dreamers"] - I knew if I listened to Haneke, I knew he'd make me a better actor.

Shock: How so?
Pitt: He's just intelligent. He's old school and a lot of the newer filmmakers...the actors are seen more as just puppets, they'll figure it out in the editing. It's just a quality level that he brings to the table.

Shock: So for you there was no worry about the stigma that often comes with remakes.
Pitt: I didn't really care. I knew my take would be different. If it was a remake by a different director maybe I would've been more reluctant to get on board.

Shock: Naomi Watts serves as executive producer on this film - did she exert any creative control?
Corbet: No, she was 100% an actress as she sorta should be. I didn't even know she was an executive producer until I saw the credit. She was pretty much involved since day one. Haneke wouldn't do the movie without her - that was his one stipulation. He said, 'You get me Naomi Watts and I'll remake the movie.'

Shock: How did Haneke help you maintain such a sense of calm during the violence and mental torture you enact on the family?
Corbet: Haneke actually told us that we were in a comedy and the family was in a tragedy. When we shoot our close-ups and stuff, he went out of his way to make sure our eye line on Naomi, Tim or Devon [Gearhart], they were not acting too much. He told us, 'Every time we shoot your characters we're shooting a different movie' so we have to play those scenes differently. There's a scene in the movie - probably my favorite movie that was an accident - where I ask Naomi if she could make us something to eat. Michael then says, "Tubby, this is embarrassing..." and then he tickles me. It was a mistake, Michael wasn't supposed to do that. I tried to stay in character. We thought it was a f**k up. We lost it. If he Haneke hadn't cut to Naomi and Tim during that scene, it was just Michael and I laughing for two minutes. Haneke came out from behind the monitor and was like, 'That's amazing. It's so perverted and sick.' We were hard on them, we were really aggressive.

Pitt: Sometimes during those moments we left Devon out of the room.

Shock: Was finding your character a solo journey or one you shared with your co-star Michael?
Corbet: I never think too much about bonding with other actors. First of all, I think it's bullshit - method acting is bullshit. It's very "practical thinking" making a movie - the art comes in when you're writing it and when you're cutting it. But production is artless. It's a job. If you love the craft of acting, then go to the West End in London, you're not serving a filmmaker there. I'm very happy to be a part of the movie, but I don't have a sense of pride in my work. I'm just happy I got to work with one of the five greatest filmmakers in the world. This festival is very lucky to have him. It's not to say it's an honor, but it's in a festival with all of these films like "Juno" and "Garden State" - it's interesting "Funny Games" is in that mix.

Shock: Are you prepared for the fact that this film is going to polarize so many people?
Corbet: The first film is already so divisive and now you have an extra element of people who are just pissed that Haneke made this film. The people who love this film really love it and they have interesting things to say about it.

Pitt: I understand the purists who wonder why Haneke remade this, but he did it so people can see it. There are so many people who don't know of his work. And this works, I think we did a great job. It's different but the same. Anyone who's like, 'Oh why?!' is just a film nerd. All the films that I make, are controversial - "Bully," "The Dreamers," "Last Days" - I just try to do my job to the best of my abilities and not worry about it.

Corbet: Of course, people have been speaking about Gus [Van Sant's] "Psycho." You know, Gus' work can be campy sometimes. I think "To Die For" is a campy film and weirdly dated. "Psycho," I don't think, is quite as awful as people make it out to be. It's really interesting, it's not a good movie, but it's interesting - if it had been a video installation, it would've been the coolest shit ever. Unfortunately, it's ultra kitschy, but what's strange and what's hard for people to imagine is...people assume if he's trying to replicate something there's no soul in it. And if it's soul-less then it's probably pretty kitschy, too. Kitsch just doesn't exist in "Psycho" and it was a straight arrow in a way people didn't expect it to be. Or, the "The Vanishing." The first film is a masterpiece, the remake is a joke.

Shock: It's got Sandra Bullock in it...
Corbet: [laughs] Exactly, it's that kind've thing. But you're [the "Games" remake] for five seconds and you've got silent credits that roll seemingly forever. Haneke's taking his time. Then he opens with an improvement on the first shot of the original film. [Cinematographer] Darius Khondji's work is so subtle and so brilliant. Some idiot reviewer criticized Darius' work, and really...what a f**kin' moron. I don't know what movie this guy is watching. Darius took a step back here, because he can really put a stamp on films, for this he really chose to serve Michael's intent.

Shock: There's a moment where you and Tim are sitting in the house. You're looking out the door and suddenly the daylight dims a bit and you say something to the effect like, "It looks like it's going to rain." And it's that subtle shift in light that hints at a cloud passing overhead - was that a happy mistake and improvisation?
Corbet: We were shooting in a soundstage, actually.

Shock: No kidding, so that was intentional.
Corbet: Yeah, we had to shoot in a stage for all of the interior house stuff.

Shock: Because Haneke utilized the same blueprints for the house from the original film.
Corbet: Right, he re-built the same house. The light in the film is interesting and the only thing I think is "true Darius" are the inky blacks. Sometimes people think something is wrong with the projection because some of the nighttime establishing shots are just black in this film. Like, what the f**k? I'm directing a series of films for a video installation and Darius shot my first film. When we were doing the digital grading, he was just going blacker, blacker, darker and darker. My movie, you need f**kin' night vision to see it.

Shock: Where will people be able to find this video installation you're working on?
Corbet: I'm hoping to do it in a particular spot in Paris in a year because I have two films left to finish. We'll see what happens. In the meantime, I'm going to take the first film to festivals and...we'll see.

Funny Games opens in theaters March 14th.

I just saw the original for the first time this past weekend, my first exposure to Haneke.  Well-executed but I didn't ask for or need the lesson.

I can't wait to see the reaction to the remake.  It's safe to say that anyone who recognizes the name Michael Haneke will have already seen the original but anyone else will have no idea what they're in for.  I can't tell if the torture porn crowd or the middle-aged domestic drama crowd will be more inclined to see this but in either case, they're gonna want the heads of the people responsible.  And it'll be hilarious.  I may just see this to see the audience reaction alone.  People were pissed at the end of Cloverfield; imagine what they're going to do after this.

Wow, Brady Corbet is an asshole, and Michael Pitt seems at least somewhat thoughtful. I would've guessed the other way around.

I hope people aren't merely pissed off by this movie; if that's the outcome, it will have failed. I do hope people are provoked and disturbed by it. I would never, ever suggest it as anyone's first Haneke, as the only way it's really all that typical of his work is that it's masterfully done. I'd start with The Piano Teacher (essential viewing) and then Caché.

Am I the only person who thought that the trailer is a HUGE ripoff of the Clockwork Orange trailer? That's all I thought of when I saw it in the theatre.

I saw the original for the first time last night. I have a complete lack of interest in seeing the remake now. i have a hard time ascribing any value to the project other than a "conceptual piece of art" where the viewer is attacked for enjoying escapist horror films. I wouldn't have a huge problem with it, except that I am almost positive Haneke believes he's some kind of fucking genius for doing it.

Quote from: jonas on February 12, 2008, 03:36:00 PM
Am I the only person who thought that the trailer is a HUGE ripoff of the Clockwork Orange trailer? That's all I thought of when I saw it in the theatre.

One person's "ripoff" is another's "homage," but yes. See also the Rules of Attraction teaser trailer:

http://www.movietome.com/movie/283337/the-rules-of-attraction/videos/index.html?tag=fs_nav;videos&om_act=convert&om_clk=fstabs

Michael Haneke casts viewers as accomplices in 'Funny Games'
By Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times

AUSTRIAN writer-director Michael Haneke's "Funny Games," which opens Friday, is a painstakingly exacting remake of his own 1997 film of the same title. The story begins when a pair of young men, dressed in immaculate tennis whites, arrives at the summer cottage of a pleasantly bourgeois couple, who are on holiday with their young son. After a seemingly innocuous misunderstanding -- something about borrowing eggs -- the boys take the family captive, subjecting them to brutal psychological humiliations and severe physical torments.

One of the world's most respected filmmakers, Haneke, who turns 66 this month, is a winner of multiple prizes at the Cannes Film Festival and a subject of a recent retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art. So there is something disconcertingly downmarket about such an upscale filmmaker doing an English-language remake of his own work. Yet in Haneke's world things are rarely as they seem.

Despite Haneke's use of formal devices of increasing audacity to break down the fourth wall and repeatedly remind audiences that they are only watching a film, "Funny Games" can feel at times like a dirty trick being played on viewers. The original sharply divided critics, many of whom could not stomach the cruel dispassion with which Haneke portrayed the sordid goings-on.

Which is precisely as it should be, according to Haneke. As in many of his previous films ("Benny's Video," "The Piano Teacher" and "Cache"), Haneke wants audiences to think hard about what they are watching rather than passively accepting the ideological implications of what flows from the screen.

"The film was always intended for an English-language audience because the subject matter -- the consumption of violence -- is most prevalent in English-language filmmaking," Haneke said via translator recently on the phone from Austria when asked why he chose to revisit his prior work. "Because the [original] film was in German it just didn't reach the audience for which it was intended."

The new iteration came about when producer Chris Coen approached Haneke for the remake rights to "Funny Games," and the director said he would prefer to do it himself. Having worked with such European stars as Juliette Binoche and Isabelle Huppert, Haneke insisted on casting Naomi Watts -- he said he would likely have not made the new film if she had said no -- rounding out the family with Tim Roth and Devon Gearhart and casting Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet as their captors.

For the shot-for-shot production, Haneke's original script was translated into English with a few minor changes to accommodate cultural differences, and he used his original storyboards to plan the new shoot. Where Haneke's shooting script during the production of the initial film was dotted with drawings, for the remake his script was augmented with screen captures from the original.

Where previous shot-by-shot remakes such as Gus Van Sant's "Psycho" often felt like cold exercises, Haneke's remake adds additional layers of discomfort to the experience. Even when you know what's coming, it still stings.

The cast members all watched the first version before shooting, in part to know what they were in for, but once the production started Haneke instructed them not to revisit it. Haneke's precise instructions made the performers feel at times as if they were working within a straitjacket, but they nevertheless manage to imbue the story with a dark humor that is largely unmined in the original, transforming the material at times into an unlikely comedy of manners.

"He's a pretty easy guy to have faith in," said Corbet, "and he was tough on everybody. He was very precise, like 'after this line, wipe your forehead here and place your right hand on the counter here and then take four steps forward.' It's not exactly organic."

"Sometimes he would get fixated on a certain thing and how he wanted it to be the same," explained Watts, "but he was careful to help us make sure that the first film was something separate. He didn't want to just repeat."

Close to the original

THE re-creation was so detailed that those changes that do exist -- the way Pitt glances at the camera or an alarming alteration in costume for Watts -- take on the feeling of enormous, seismic shifts. Even Haneke was shocked by how precisely the films match up.

"The film, as it happens, is really only 15 or 20 seconds different from the original," he explained. "If you look at the film as a whole, it's a few minutes, but that is simply because the credits in the United States are so much longer.

"And I didn't even do this intentionally. We shot about half the film and cut it, and when I asked my editor to compare it to the original it was just a few seconds' difference. We found this really quite amazing as we hadn't intended it to be that close on purpose."

One key moment of the film is an excruciatingly long take in which Watts, bound, struggles to make her way across a room. The raw physical effort involved, as well as the emotional dread her action underscores, reads as all too real. Haneke does not rupture the reality of the moment, taking an almost sadistic glee in what his star endured as the shot plays on and on.

"He doesn't believe in stage binding, he wants everything to be 100% real," Watts said of the scene, which she recalled as the most difficult of the shoot. "At times, it was like torture."

The hard-core gorehound action junkies -- those movie-goers whose lids could be most thoroughly flipped by Haneke's inside-out convolutions -- will likely never turn up for something this heady. For Haneke, forcing viewers to examine their own expectations and responses is exactly the point.

"That is precisely why I made the film," he said, "the viewer pays for it, as you say, with having to think about it, his role as a viewer and as an accomplice in the action. I often say those who watch the film to the end, they obviously needed it, and those who leave early did not need it."

To reveal the ways in which Haneke continually throws viewers outside the action, only to reel them back into his false reality, would go beyond conventional spoilers.

"This is the method of the film, to show the viewer how manipulatable he or she is," said Haneke, "because, after all, I show that it is a film and five minutes later [the viewer] is back completely with it. I show this again and again, so the viewer realizes his role in this whole process."

"He messes with you as an audience," is how Watts explained Haneke's motives. "You're taken by surprise. And I'm not preaching or saying I'll never do another violent film, but I am quite proud to be involved in something that makes us as an audience question what we're cheering for when brains are splattered on the wall."

Quote from: The Gold Trumpet on September 09, 2007, 01:49:58 PM

Quote from: SoNowThen on September 09, 2007, 04:57:03 AM
** p.s. - mod and bon - what exactly do you not like about Pitt? **

Fuck, I'll say. At first he started out as the poor man's Leonardo DiCaprio which wasn't saying much because DiCaprio wasn't really an actor. DiCaprio was a good face who become affiliated with a blockbuster movie. He went onto starring roles that tested his bankability instead of his acting. So the only credibility Pitt had is that he shared the facial similarities with DiCaprio.

Then Pitt became the poster child for art movies. It's funny because he exhibits a whininess and unlikability in Finding Forrestor and The Dreamers. It doesn't feel like he is performing a role per say but that is his default performance for a "depth" role. It is also him trying to look cool and trendy. He plays two very different characters but my unlikability for him was for the same reasons. His performance in Last Days is a make up job. He has little to do but moap around a room and look depressed. The make up, coincidentally, makes up most of his character.

Then there is his identity as an advertiser for art movies. I remember reading an interview with him for Last Days. He was proclaiming Gus Van Sant's work as the most interesting work in cinema today. He wasn't giving any reasons, but being hip and cool to what he thought art was. I wanted to puke for how pedestrian his words were.

But actors like him aren't new. Other actors in the 60s were less known for their acting skills than their trendy popularity and would go from film to film essentially playing characters the same way. They did so to exhibit the qualities that made them hip and cool.

this is so funny to me.
i don't like him either for some reason.
my first exposure was when he was on Dawson's Creek.
when i first became aware of this project i was like,
"he better not get to do it with Naomi in the film or i'm going to get really pissed."
(maybe i'm jealous that he got to do it with Eva Green).
but even in his role in Dawson's Creek he exhibited "a whininess and unlikability."

Quote from: SoNowThen on September 09, 2007, 04:57:03 AM
** p.s. - mod and bon - what exactly do you not like about Pitt? **

you didnt ask me, but i hate his face.

Michael Pitt receives all the hate a pretty boy usually gets--and by "pretty" I mean "at least somewhat androgynous" (I have a friend who DESPISES Cillian Murphy and J. Rhys-Myers for this reason)--but I don't see that he's done all that much to deserve it. I don't know that he's been called upon to do anything dramatically astonishing, but I also don't think he's been bad in any of the roles I've seen him in (The Dreamers, Last Days--again, not too demanding, but he was up to them). Like I said earlier, the shock is that Brady Corbet comes off like a self-important jerk in his interviews. I imagine it's because he's an aspiring auteur, but news flash for young Master Corbet: The Kubrick/Morrissey-level disdainful asshole-ism is a privilege you EARN by doing great work, not a prerequisite to same!

according to wiki he was living on the street near NYU when sometime after a casting agent he mistook to be a policemen wanted him for Dawson's Creek.
it's not like he's made anyone choose him or made Bertoculli, Van Sant or even Thurston Moore like him.
but i don't know.
from what i've read about Funny Games, it seems like perfect casting for him.


and if you didn't know he has a band. Pitchfork even reviewed their album:
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/41730-pagoda

Not So Funny Games with Naomi Watts
Source: ShockTillYouDrop

One of Hollywood's brightest imports may arguably be one of the industry's greatest emotional masochists. Genre and horror fans have purred over Naomi Watts since David Lynch's Mulholland Drive and Gore Verbinski's The Ring; or, if you want to swing back further, you can find her beaming by a lively grocery cart in a faux trailer playing in Joe Dante's Matinee or paying her dues in Children of the Corn IV. She was later rewarded higher-caliber turns in 21 Grams and King Kong, offering her a reprieve from her tussle with "He who walks behind the rows." And with each successive effort, the Aussie native has raised the stakes, stretching range and risk. This couldn't be more evident than in her latest film Funny Games (opening in limited release March 14th), a remake of Michael Haneke's '97 shocker directed by...Michael Haneke.

I had just missed the actress two months ago while up at Sundance where I spoke to her co-stars Michael Pitt and Brady Corbett. The untimely passing of former boyfriend Heath Ledger understandably forced her to cancel all scheduled interviews. Today, hands dug into the pockets of her tight black jeans, eyes scanning the room, Watts is sitting before me at a table, which dwarfs her petite frame, at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills for a press conference-style discussion about "Games." She tells the group of journalists before her that she's been up since the crack of dawn, which may account somewhat for her reserved, quiet tone. However, palpable signs of sleep deprivation are mowed down by genuine enthusiasm when she speaks of her Haneke experience and the "beast" of a remake she was involved in.

To get right down to it: There would be no Funny Games without Watts. Haneke has stated before that he would have never moved on a nearly shot-for-shot American remake had the actress expressed disinterest in the project. Watts nevertheless found this "slightly seductive in a way, because he's someone whose work I admire greatly. He's worked with fantastic actresses before - Juliette Binoche and Isabelle Huppert, I'm major fans of them. [It] felt like a huge amount of pressure, it was also very flattering. I wouldn't make this film with just anyone. It's by no means a no-brainer. To do this film was terrifying and that always interests me. It's nice to think you can combat your fears."

Watts explains she was called by "Games" casting director Johanna Ray - an instrumental player in scoring the actress for Mulholland Drive - and offered to play Ann, a wife who, with her son (Devon Gearhart) and husband (Tim Roth), is psychologically and physically tortured in an idyllic lakeside vacation home by two young white gloved-wearing lunatics. She accepted ("This script screamed at me. It's so powerful in its effect."), jumping into the project as victim and executive producer, but her duties wearing that latter hat didn't extend far into principal photography. "Haneke and I talked about some of the casting and the crew members but once we were on the set it became very clear very quickly that he was attached to every detail and knew exactly what he wanted. I just sat back and said 'This is your beast, I trust you.' I went with his flow, even though I struggled with it at times, I liked that he had such a defined and clear vision of my story and everything. When someone is so sure, you trust them."

And that trust was put to the test during the film's most rigorous and demanding sequences of remorseless violence. Watts describes the on-set vibe as "tense" as Haneke struggled to evoke an air of menace and realism. Shooting roughly adhered to a chronological order and authenticity was crucial to Haneke's vision which often includes excruciating single-shot scenes dripping with atmosphere or sweating brazen cruelty. "The first time I was bound and gagged [by actor Michael Pitt], Haneke was like, 'Oh, that looks like shit, let me do it!' and he'd bind me up," Watts says wide-eyed. " I'd be laughing, but it was a nervous laughter. [I did get] bruises, it's training. I've done a few films that require emotional and physical commitment. I'm kind of used to it."

She confesses, also, that the role posed a challenge in that it was hard to turn off her emotions at the end of the shooting day. "Working in the style Michael Haneke likes to work in is going to be challenging for any actor. The fact this was a remake is...it's always hard because you feel you're going to be compared to the original's actors, but the fact that he was designing each shot the exact same way as the original film meant that you had to do the exact same blocking and tread the same steps as the other actors. And then you suddenly feel like, 'Wow, how can I invent this character, how can I find this theme in my own organic way?' It became such a heady thing and that's so not the way I like to work, I like to intuit it, feel it, surprise myself.

The pressure put upon her was felt amongst her co-stars, too, especially the fresh-faced Pitt and Corbett. Watts easily related to Pitt's method of working and understood the uphill battle he faced as he careened through each scene with "endless amounts of dialogue. Haneke wanted to shoot long takes and he doesn't do a huge amount of angles which means more of the long takes," she says. "[Pitt and Corbett] had to be very much on their game, I was so impressed with the two of them. Very fine actors. Although they struggled with it, playing this horrible, psychotic people, I think there was some fun in it too, weirdly."

Since bowing at Sundance, Funny Games U.S.A. has been labeled as a divisive film, some heralding it as a poignant statement on American violence. Watts agrees with that sentiment but would like to add, and point out she isn't standing on any soapbox, when she says, "I don't think it's supposed to be enjoyed, it's supposed to be work for you, you're supposed to participate and walk away feeling richer for the experience. For knowing and understanding your place as an audience member better, so therefore the next violent film you see, you're more mindful and conscience of those violent moments where ordinarily you'd go 'Yeah!' as brains are splattering everywhere. [People who like those films] might feel very angry, but it definitely makes you more conscious and to me, that's the success. It's provocative and thought-worthy."

Quote from: godardian on March 12, 2008, 04:52:18 PM
Michael Pitt receives all the hate a pretty boy usually gets--and by "pretty" I mean "at least somewhat androgynous" (I have a friend who DESPISES Cillian Murphy and J. Rhys-Myers for this reason)--but I don't see that he's done all that much to deserve it. I don't know that he's been called upon to do anything dramatically astonishing, but I also don't think he's been bad in any of the roles I've seen him in (The Dreamers, Last Days--again, not too demanding, but he was up to them). Like I said earlier, the shock is that Brady Corbet comes off like a self-important jerk in his interviews. I imagine it's because he's an aspiring auteur, but news flash for young Master Corbet: The Kubrick/Morrissey-level disdainful asshole-ism is a privilege you EARN by doing great work, not a prerequisite to same!

please give me a little more credit. i don't dislike michael pitt b/c he's attractive. i dislike him b/c he's not.

FUNNY GAMES
Source: Premiere.com

GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 3/11/07)
One and a half stars

Funny Games is a practically shot-by-shot English-language remake of the 1997 German-language film by the Austrian writer/director Michael Haneke. The picture, remade by the maestro Haneke himself, is every bit as gripping, suspenseful and upsetting as the original. And it's even more of a crock.

Haneke is a very accomplished filmmaker and, more importantly in this case, an extremely intelligent man. He is not quite so intelligent, though, that he's able to recognize a really bad idea when one occurs to him. Funny Games purports to condemn mass media and cinematic violence by positing two extremely polite young psychos — products of our media culture, supposedly —against a decent bourgeois family of three, vacationing at their isolated lake house. The two white-clad preppies (Corbet and Pitt) take the trio (Roth, Watts, and little Gearhart, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the young Nikolai Burlyayev of Tarkovsky's 1962 Ivan's Childhood) hostage, subjecting them to a series of increasingly sadistic games, meant to culminate in the family's extermination. Every now and then Pitt's character, the smarter of the two psychos, turns to the camera and addresses the audience: "You're on their side, aren't you?" he asks early on; later, he says, "You want a real ending, with plausible plot development."

Well, that would have been nice, actually. Haneke was particularly eager to remake the picture in English, in an American setting, because the film, you see, is about America. Never mind that the conceit of a married couple playing "guess the classical music piece" with their car's CD player (in the opening scene) strikes one as slightly, you know, European.

Throughout the picture, Haneke demonstrates an imperial hauteur that completely undercuts his already dubious point. After having his characters establish the unreality of the piece by addressing the camera, he then depicts, as realistically as contemporary cinematic technology will allow, the very real pain and humiliation suffered by victims of actual violence. He employs, with great deliberation, some hoary genre tropes, such as a dog that is the only sentient being to immediately sense the true evil of the home invaders. Haneke's deck-stacking turns truly egregious during a scene in which the family's kid, Georgie, escapes from the psychos and takes shelter in a nearby house; followed by Pitt's character, he tries to resist. In a normal genre film the kid could conceivably be expected to score some kind of triumph, staving off the bad guy. But of course that doesn't happen: little Georgie behaves just like a real kid, and gives the game away. But where Haneke's victims are all too human — they cry, they bleed, they puke, they soil themselves, just as any of us would do in their situation — his villains are as even more superhumanly undefeatable as your average Michael Myers or Freddie Krueger, to the point where they never even stain their white gloves. Aha! The fact that they don't stain their white gloves must be deliberate, then. Indeed, but to what end? Haneke's finally the one playing an insulting game with his audience, whoever he hopes his audience to be. I imagine he thinks he's going to teach a lesson to all the kids who lap up the likes of Hostel, but I've got news for him: those people don't go see Michael Haneke films, no matter how cleverly they're marketed. Haneke here is only preaching to the suggestible — people who are likely to think that his final twist, in which he offers the viewers catharsis and then snatches it back in the most meretricious, not to mention inane, method possible, is a stroke of genius. And yes, there are people out there who will buy it. I know some of them — folks who keen like banshees about civil liberties every time Hillary Clinton or Joe Lieberman open their yaps about Hollywood or video game excess, but who are perfectly willing to genuflect at Haneke's deeply dishonest vision before heading to the fainting couch to snurfily condemn America's deeply deplorable taste for violence.

Some random thoughts I experience while watching the film, if you're interested: "Leopold and Loeb existed many years before Beavis and Butthead. Also, Beavis and Butthead references are really dated. Sadism is named for a French writer, dude. Yes, that piece of John Zorn music certainly seems violent, but given the formalist context in which it was created and in which it resides, it's actually only 'violent.' TV remote controls don't actually work that way with TV content, and never have, jackass."

"There's a lot of blood in Pierrot le Fou," an interviewer noted to Jean Luc Godard back in 1965. "Not blood, red," Godard shrugged. Haneke, on the other hand, insists that if it's depicted, it's as good as real, and underscores that point by giving his killers some philosophical dialogue about simulated worlds at the very end. Not terribly convincing stuff, as it happens, and a bit too-little-too-late after Haneke's high-handed deck-stacking. Funny Games is an accomplished film — the actors in particular do absolutely first-rate work all around (if I ever see Michael Pitt in person again, for instance, I'm really gonna have to restrain myself) — but my ultimate advice to movie lovers is to spare yourselves some needless abuse and not bother to play at all.

— Glenn Kenny

dear Pubrick (wherever you are),

thank you for making me not throw away 2 hours of my life in a theater.  sadly, i did so last night in the comfort of my home with this dreadful bullshit.

i was fadin out a bit (as i do so nowadays when watching movies in the eve in the comfort of my home), but tell me spoiler the dude didnt pick up the remote control and rewind the actual movie. end spoiler. . . ah, it doesnt matter.  same bullshit either way.

In a way, I like the fact that there's some real scepticism about this film: it proves that just because a director has proved himself great, we shouldn't assume he is infallible, and it it shows that people don't like to be condescended to about 'mainstream' filmmaking. However, I still think that both Funny Games are really interesting and worthwhile films, and that the negative resonse to them also points to a less cheering trend: the desire to take filmmakers at their word when they talk about their work, rather than responding to the movie in front of us for ourselves. I've written a piece on the remake that I thought I'd reprint here for anyone interested. Basically, I argue that Haneke doesn't know how good a film he has made (now twice)...


Because it is quite so similar to its original, to talk about Funny Games U.S. is really to talk about two films. As such, this response to it will be divided into two parts; firstly I want to discuss the film that both versions essentially are at their core: the self-conscious interpretation of the horror genre. Secondly, I'll talk a little about the film that only the second version is: the 'shot by shot' remake.

Although there will certainly be differences between the two that are the result of the changes in actors, and the slight changes in staging, camera set-ups, and so on, we could only truly be able to discuss the potential meanings of these differences by closely analysing both films in detail side by side. After only two viewings of both films, this isn't really possible for me, so in this first half I'll (somewhat problematically, but nonetheless unavoidably) be treating the execution of the two versions as if they were essentially identical, since this is, importantly, how they ostensibly seem.

As I've said before, I have some problems with how Haneke describes the project of Funny Games. In interviews, he has time and again said that it is intended to educate its viewers into being conscious of the moral problems inherent in watching horror films. He sees it essentially as a didactic lesson - a commentary on movie violence that will shock complacent horror spectators out of their passive relationship to cinema, restoring their endangered conscience by daring them to keep watching; as he says: "Anyone who leaves the cinema doesn't need the film, anyone who stays does".

This seems to me a hugely pious, arrogant, and unintelligent argument, and one that reveals that Haneke doesn't know very much about horror films or their audiences at all (and he has indeed admitted that he doesn't watch very much horror cinema).

Firstly, it assumes that viewers of cinema in general are mostly passive, uncritical, and easily manipulated - that they are blind consumers, completely at the mercy of the films they watch, rather than conscious beings who don't simply turn off their brains and moral compasses when entering a movie theatre. This is an argument that has been put forward since the beginning of cinema by many elitist critics of mainstream film (and popular culture in general), who see themselves as being far above the 'average' audience member, and it also unfortunately formed the basis for much insensitive film theory in the 1970s. It reveals an innately snobbish and condescending attitude towards 'the masses', and to popular cinema, and has actually been repeatedly disproved by audience research that has shown that the real responses of individual viewers are far more individual, complex, and critical than those of the mindless automatons Haneke implies. Even if studies hadn't been undertaken that disproved the theory, however, simple common sense - and our own experiences of film-viewing - should be enough to dispel the myth of the wholly uncritical spectator.

Secondly, Haneke's conception of Funny Games reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the horror genre in particular. From at least Psycho (1960) onwards, horror has consistently engaged with issues of voyeurism and audience involvement, and by no means always assumes it is addressing a passive, guileless viewer. From the shots from killers' points of view found in countless slasher films, to the 'found footage' horror of Cannibal Holocaust (1980) or The Blair Witch Project (1999), to the self-reflexive postmodern horror films of the 80s and 90s, horror movies have continually played with the question of what it means to watch onscreen violence. Indeed, the very basis of horror's persistent aim to shock lies in the fact that it is aware that the violence that it portrays is morally troubling, that it is something to be withstood and endured, and is thus implicitly asking us to question our relationship to it.

So, given these objections to Haneke's explanation of his film, why do I still value and enjoy it? Basically, because I see it as a fascinating and very effective piece of horror cinema itself, and not as somehow standing outside the genre and hurling righteous criticism at it.

SPOILERS
For a start, many of the pleasures that it offers are those often found in horror cinema. In particular, it repeats the always-interesting mainstay horror trope of 'normality' (read: predominantly white, middle-class, heterosexual, etc.) being violently attacked by forces that it doesn't want to acknowledge, and is ill-equipped to defend itself against. In particular, here we have the bourgeois family under threat, as is the case in so many horror films - a situation that brings with it all the issues of family values and parental fears that the genre often plays on. In both Funny Games this predicament is treated in an agonizingly believable fashion, with the dialogue and performances ringing troublingly true. The sexual politics of this scenario are especially cuttingly dealt with, as when the intruders disable the father first, then mockingly keep referring to him as the "ship's captain", whilst forcing him to watch as they threaten his boy (who is named after him), and sexually objectify his wife.

Both films also use intelligently the familiar genre template of the threat to 'normality' actually being a perverted version of 'normality' itself - in this case, in the form of two clean-cut white, middle-class, young men. This is, again, something that can be dated back at least to Psycho's depiction of its danger coming from the American family, and has been given many effective treatments since, not least of course in the terrifying cannibalistic family of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). These common horror film elements are revisited affectingly, carrying all the weight of social meaning and disturbing psychological undertones that are so often stirred up by the genre. The fact that they are being employed in a slightly self-conscious way (that is: they are used so boldly and uncomplicatedly as to seem distilled and paradigmatic) is interesting in itself (since it contributes to the distance that the film on one level creates), but it also testifies to the fact that these are in fact powerful and resonant tropes, and that Funny Games wouldn't have access to them at all were it not for the work put in by the decades of horror filmmaking that preceded it.

Secondly, the film is interesting because, while it does tell a very effective horror story, it also simultaneously encourages a sense of distance from the agonising events it depicts, both through one of the intruders repeatedly turning to the camera and addressing the audience directly, and through the infamous 'rewind' moment. The result of these Brechtian devices is more complex than it might at first appear, since it doesn't only draw attention overtly to the fact of our watching, but also to the fact that what we are watching is of course fictional, and thus not truly rationally deserving of the intense involvement we have likely been experiencing.

This creates an interestingly doubled kind of viewing experience: on the one hand we have been getting very emotionally involved in the story of this family's suffering ('Tom' is right when he says, "You're on their side, aren't you?"), but, on the other, this emotional engagement threatens to disappear at these moments when the 'fourth wall' is broken so overtly. This is a familiar potential problem for works of art using Brechtian alienation techniques, and not necessarily one that Haneke has fully taken into account. This is because the morally troubling experience of watching the psychological and physical torture of the family (which it is surely Haneke's aim that we should feel) rests to a great extent on our caring about the characters, and this empathy is severely compromised, not heightened (as seems to be Haneke's plan), by these asides that tell us: "You're watching a film, you're watching a film..." On the other hand, these acknowledgments of the make-believe status of the scenario are also fascinating precisely because they periodically drain the believability out of the otherwise extremely realistically and painfully realised drama.

As such, these devices, rather than complicating our moral relationship to the action (i.e.: making us feel uncomfortable to be watching the violence, or threat of violence), can in fact act to relieve us of our sense of responsibility towards the events on screen to a greater extent than the less self-conscious kind of horror film that Haneke is supposedly criticising. While the sense of watching something that perhaps we shouldn't be is routinely created through the point of view shots of a film such as, say, Halloween (1978), if the illusion of its fictional world was forcefully broken - as happens in Funny Games - this kind of film wouldn't have nearly as much scope for creating this sense of morally-troubling voyeurism as it in fact does. Although it might not do that which its director seems to think it does, however, I would nevertheless argue that this empathy/alienation effect is still interesting and valuable for the way in which it forces us to continually navigate a viewing experience that exists somewhere between intense involvement and complete detachment. This is a position that few other horror films place us in, and one that it is continually fascinating to try to get to grips with.

This complex experience of the film as something that is simultaneously highly involving and coolly disconnected is only complicated further by the 'shot by shot' remake concept of Funny Games U.S. If (but only if) we have seen the original film, watching this version becomes a doubly challenging exercise in attempting to keep up our involvement with something that we are constantly reminded is staged and fake. For a viewer with a knowledge of the previous film, every single shot, every set, every line of dialogue, every plot point tells us that we have seen this before. If we keep this in mind - as it is difficult not to - then this has the potential to drain any narrative tension and sense of empathy from the drama entirely: for one thing, not only do we, after all, know exactly how the story will end, but also exactly what will happen along the way to get us to this ending.

This is a different experience to that created by a more conventional (read: less exact) remake because, while there is certainly always a familiarity present in watching a reworking, there are usually nevertheless many elements that make this particular retelling unique, and thus always a greater possibility that we will be able to lose ourselves in the world and story it presents us with. Watching Funny Games U.S. (or, to a lesser extent, Van Sant's Psycho [1998]) is in a sense actually more like watching the original film again after already being familiar with it. The big difference, however, is that when we watch a film for the second or third or one hundredth time, although we are conscious of this fact, the film itself certainly isn't - that is, it itself doesn't openly proclaim its already-seen-ness to us in any way. Because of the lack of this kind of barrier, we are thus often able to become caught up in it anew despite being familiar with it - perhaps never to the extent that we were upon first viewing, but still certainly to some degree - since the film still offers itself to us unselfconsciously.

Although it will never be identical, a 'shot by shot' remake, on the other hand, has its already-seen-ness (apologies for the turgid turn of phrase) inscribed into its every frame, and its decision to replicate its original as closely as possible thus forms a bold challenge to our involvement in its action. Rather than having the innocence of a film merely being watched for the umpteenth time, the self-consciousness of a 'shot by shot' remake is endemic and inescapable, and the world, story and characters it depicts thus suddenly has the capability to be seen as entirely artificial, false, and unconvincing, since we know it all to be mere replica.

Although many might argue that this then makes the film as a whole pointless, I would argue that while - yes - it can cause it to significantly lose its ability to work as narrative cinema (this happens, I would say, almost completely for Psycho '98), it also means it gains a very interesting element too: something akin to the uncanny - the familiar made unfamiliar.

This process feels similar to me to a few different strategies of visual art, such as when an artist places a 'readymade' object in a gallery, or paints a painting of a photograph that is virtually indistinguishable from its original, or replicates everyday objects but makes them from (say) plastic. Though they all have different meanings and purposes, part of the effect of each of these practices is that we are forced to look again at something that we think we understand, only to realise that it has been transformed in some way - either through context, through medium, or through its very substance. This sense of the uncanny - of something being the same, and yet not - can essentially force us to question what exactly makes something something in the first place, and can thus create an almost philosophical affront to our ways of perceiving the world; in short, it can be a truly invigorating aesthetic experience, as the art world has acknowledged for a long time.

One of the main potential differences of this effect for cinema though, and one of the reasons why I think a 'shot by shot' remake is such a fascinating concept, is that the replicated object is one that is not just overtly making demands on our eyes and intellects, but also our emotions. What happens to the way we emotionally relate to events on screen when we are aware of their status as a copy - particularly when those events are of an extreme emotive nature? The answer can be that, for whatever reason, the characters' plights become entirely emotionally uninvolving - as with Van Sant's Psycho. With Funny Games U.S., however, I would argue that the 'shot by shot' remake has managed to at least partially side-step this outcome - a fact that makes it a particularly interesting example of the trend.

As I said earlier, the strength of execution of both versions of Funny Games is such that its emotional affect is able to withstand, for the most part, the assaults made on it by the initial alienation tactics. Though we are occasionally shocked out of our engagement, we are continually pulled back in. And the same is - amazingly - also largely true for Funny Games U.S., despite the added level of self-consciousness created by the uncanny 'shot by shot' strategy. Speaking personally, while I certainly know that I am being invited to be more detached from it than ever, and while this detachment occasionally comes to the fore, when watching the remake I am nevertheless often still drawn into an intense involvement with the family and their terrifying ordeal. This is a testament to the quality of the screenplay and the way it intelligently uses its horror tropes, and to the effective way the action is staged and shot, as well as to the performances of the lead actors - especially Watts and Roth.

At moments such as when Roth is trying fruitlessly to dry out the mobile phone and finds that he is too sick to eat the morsel of bread he tries to force down, or when Watts grabs him by his face and, sobbing uncontrollably, chokes out the words "I love you", the sheer force of the characters' situations hits home to me despite all the distancing tactics of the Brechtian asides and the 'shot by shot' concept. That this should happen is strange and wonderful, and the reasons for it are various and complicated, but the fact of this alone is enough to tell me that this is a highly complex film that manages to work both on the levels of its predecessor, and on a few of its own. It thus somehow manages to succeed as a horror film, as a meta-horror film, and even, as it were, as a meta-meta horror film.

Haneke has said that he remade his film in English purely so that he could educate more of us poor horror-watching fools than he was able to first time around. That may be. However, I've said it before and I'll say it again: in my opinion he has now twice made a much better and more interesting film than he believes he has.

this was my current netflix movie.

fucking garbage.

i made it 1 hour, 3 minutes, and 17 seconds into. that's enough. i'm turning it off. i've never not finished a netfilx movie until now.

i'm guessing everyone innocent dies in the end, and it's supposed to be some kind of commentary on violence in todays society, but i just don't care.

poorly poorly handled.

 I really like this movie. I was just wondering if there is any purpose to going and watching the original version. It's impossible to find, so I figure no. Plus everybody on here is basically saying this was done shot for shot. I love the actors in this one, especially the accomplice to Michael Pitt oddly. He just seemed convincing as a confused teen who would fall into this dude's trap and end up doing some fucked up shit.

I'm fairly certain you can watch the original on Netflix Instant. 

...But I haven't seen either of them, so I can't really answer your question.

I finally saw it, took about 5 years though. Am I mistaken, or did people here not really like the movie? I guess you gotta give the original some credit, but even the remake is a waaaay better home invasion movie than The fucking Strangers. I love Haneke's take on plain, out in the open serial killers. No hidden motives, fancy killing techniques, or stupid masks makes for a much suspenseful and interesting kind of story. The only reason it hasn't been done more is probably because people just don't think about their characters enough with this kind of thing. It's just such a miserable, cringe inducing, feel bad movie. Haneke manages to take that initial feeling of shock and repulsion from the first scene of A Clockwork Orange and stretch it out into two hours. Okay, so I don't like what happens here, but I can really respect and appreciate how it was done. Certainly one of the most humane horror movies out, you just feel so awful watching it..

anyways is there any other good Haneke some people can recommend that isn't either A. boring ( Time of the wolf, Cache )  B. Confusing ( Code Unkown ) or C. The Piano Teacher, that was great and fucking devastating so you can leave that one out.

hmmm, you might try Benny's Video. If you liked funny games. I personally loved Time of the Wolf and Cache, but whatevs.

That's like his whole filmography.

reelist you really seem to enjoy shitting on the imaginary faces who don't love a film the same way as you do.

my sister called me a fag cos i was scared of this movie.

Finally saw this. I remember seeing the original (a long time ago) and not being particularly moved or affected, but this was different. I think part of it was the language barrier, since the language is so important. The acting is also much better.

I guess as a huge fan of confrontational movies, I'm predisposed to give this a fair shot. It doesn't surprise me how much negative reaction there was to this, but what does surprise me is the anti-intellectual tone of the criticisms. If you disagree, that's fine, but it's as if people were annoyed that he even tried. If you think the meaning of the film is not particularly well articulated in the director's interviews, or that he's obnoxious in interviews... who cares? I'm not even interested in reading these interviews; the film speaks for itself just fine. It's so simple... stop trying to create more layers to be aggravated with.

For whatever reason, I find myself completely unable to be annoyed with this movie.

i'm glad you finally saw it. i think i prefer this one over the original, too. haneke remaking his film for an american audience is appropriate, and the presence of naomi watts certainly doesn't hurt either. i always found him to be very candid and articulate in interviews (not pompous or pretentious like he has been accused of). funny games is so relentless and uncompromising that i find it almost unwatchable (something i'm sure haneke would be pleased to hear). certainly one of his most powerful films, but i think my favorite is still the white ribbon.