THE DEBT interview with JOHN MADDEN

COVERED BY: BRENDA MEYER

LISTEN TO INTERVIEW

On how he got involved with the film:
The film came to me by Matthew Vaughn. Matthew was running a company at the time with Kris Thykier, who's the other producer, and Ari Emmanuel, and he was aware of the film because of somebody connected with the (original) Israeli film and they were looking for project to develop. So Matthew and Jane Goldman, his writing partner, did an adaptation of the original movie, I think with the idea that Matthew possibly was going to direct it, but they were also developing and getting ready to make Kick-Ass. So [Matthew] sent the script to me, and I thought it was very interesting material and he said, so the question is, do you want to see the original movie, so I did, because I needed to sort of take it apart and put it back together again, and I can't do that without knowing what the underlying material is. So you sort of look at it out of the corner of your eye, but it was a completely engrossing experience, I found. It was none the worse for being a chamber piece because they didn't have a budget, and they had a spectacular bit of casting in it, the Helen Mirren and Jessica Chastain parts were played by two fantastic actresses.

On getting the cast assembled:
Helen was always the starting point, casting wise. I knew her and I thought, if I can get the coil of that woman right at that point in her life, which I knew Helen would get, then we could make it work. And I started thinking, well, how can I cast that [the younger Rachel] and I wanted to cast somebody who was not well known and had no baggage at all. Of course, I had no idea the movie was going to take a year and a half to come out or longer, and that Jessica's profile would be much, much higher. She's still not carrying a lot of baggage, though.

Because I didn't want the movie to become about, how does actor A turn into Helen Mirren - that's an agenda that I didn't think that the film would need or want - so I cast somebody unknown. And a mutual friend made me aware of Jessica...so I met her and thought she was a really intelligent, interesting, charismatic girl. And I also called Terrance Malick about her because I had met him when Shakespeare in Love and The Thin Red Line were out at the same time. So I talked to him and he could not praise her highly enough.

So anyway, I thought there was enough of a likeness there for that to play, but the funny thing about the film is that you couldn't really say that Tom Wilkinson is Marton Csokas all grown up or that Ciarán Hinds is Sam Worthington grown up. But the point is, I embraced that in the movie, that it asks the audience to do some of that work, rather than my trying to pass these people off as replicas of one another. Because, to some extent - and this may sound obvious - but it's about people looking back at their younger selves and trying to figure out how that person became this person, and this massive event in their lives and how it has affected who they are and what they've become as a result. So I think, if you present that convention open-handedly, an audience, as they always do in any other circumstance, particularly a theatre circumstance, simply engages with the story at that level. But in the case of Rachel, I felt you did need a symbiosis between those two actors and I think we got there and actually, I think, that's one of the things that's remarkable about the Israeli film, too.

On Sam telling the story of John flying to Albuquerque to sell him on The Debt:
It suits him very well to tell that story (laughs), but it's true, it's true, though. You have to remember, Avatar had not come out, Terminator: Salvation had not come out...I'd seen him in a little Australian movie he did called Somersault and he popped into my head when I read [The Debt] script. I think he's got this unusual quality which you don't see very often in the movies he's made since, because he's just developed one side - and that's not entirely his choice, I don't think - which is he's very masculine, he's got a very powerful presence which is quite heroic, but he's also got this hidden sort of emotional fragility about him, which he's not noted for particularly, but it's definitely there. And that was the thing I noticed immediately in that film. And I thought, you need both sides of that for that character - you can't just have a sensitive soul as a Mossad agent, that simply doesn't work, not in the circumstances we were looking for.

So he just seemed like a good, really accurate piece of casting. So I found out what he was doing and, as it turned out, he was shooting Terminator in Albuquerque, so I flew down to see him because it was the only way I could get to see him, and I pitched the movie to him. We didn't have a script at that point because we'd gone back and reworked it, because Matthew and Jane had moved on to Kick-Ass, so I just pitched it to him, and he said, okay, I'm in. And he was a great audience and he just liked the idea, as he seems to like anyway, of just going into places that he doesn't necessarily know a huge amount about. I think he'd actually been online to see a couple of clips of the original movie, and he was fantastic.

And by that point, I think I'd already cast Marton Csokas, who's a brilliant actor and really not well-known. He's fantastic, I think, really an undiscovered talent, but he's also got antennae that lead him to very, very obscure material. There are some actors who are like that.

But it's all about the casting. You've got to get that exactly right, and you've got to get the weight and distribution right, and if you've got that, then things can start to work. Directing's not about pointing and giving orders, it's about creating an environment where you can let things happen and let sparks fly. But you've got to do that within a scripted environment that you're shooting, in that you know where you're going and you know what you're doing with it. There's no value to be had in sort of giving people instructions and having them enacted. What you're hoping to see is what you haven't foreseen, what they might discover.

On recreating 1963 East Germany:
That was a challenge, but not once I'd found Budapest. I'd thought we would make the film in Berlin, that's what I wanted to do, but two or three days' visit in East Berlin told me that we wouldn't remotely have the budget to do that. I mean, we probably could've done it if we'd had enough VFX and construction to get around it, but it didn't seem to be the point, and we didn't have budget anyway, God knows. So we went to Budapest, and parts of Budapest are still really the way they looked in post-1956. Other parts don't - it's the most extraordinary city that can pass for Paris and London and all kinds of places, but certainly the parts that we found...there's literally shrapnel damage on the walls of the buildings and a general sense of decay and of time having stopped, which is really what East Berlin was in the '60s. Aside from the big Soviet boulevards where the parades took place, the rest of the infrastructure of the place is completely frozen. So the atmosphere, I think, that was fairly easy - you could really, really soak the actors in the atmosphere they were already in.

The challenge was just knowing whether you were striking the balance correctly between the genres, because it is a genre film, it's a thriller and it has an obligation to that, and at the same time, telling a psychologically and morally complex story, and keeping those ideas and that kind of dialectic and keeping those at the front of the story rather than pushing those aside when it was inconvenient to what was happening. So I think the script was the key, to be honest. We developed the script around the environment.

On having such a diverse body of work:
Well, obviously, it's very stimulating to go someplace you've never been before and it's probably good for the adrenal gland to stimulate them with a little bit of fear. Obviously, the consistent thing about the films I've done is character and everything is driven by character and not plot, and I hope (The Debt) is no exception to that. And I suppose I'm sort of drawn to material that's slightly bursts out of its generic boundaries.

On how The Debt bursts out of its thriller boundaries:
It doesn't in an old-fashioned sense, because thrillers used to be psychologically complex and morally complex. But there's been a sort of divergence, because the commercial pressure of it is to give the best possible fairground ride you can, and therefore those kinds of ideas have been compartmentalized into dramas, you know, the famous ghetto of modern movie-making. But in the '70s, that was not the case. The modern thriller has become really, really sophisticated just in relation to the chase and very powerful, but to see both the drama and thriller in one, that's a good throwback to me.





				THE DEBT Interviews John Madden COVERED BY: BRENDA MEYER LISTEN TO INTERVIEW On how he got involved with the film: The film came to me by Matthew Vaughn. Matthew was running a company at the time with Kris Thykier, who's the other producer, and Ari Emmanuel, and he was aware of the film because of somebody connected with the (original) Israeli film and they were looking for project to develop. So Matthew and Jane Goldman, his writing partner, did an adaptation of the original movie, I think with the idea that Matthew possibly was going to direct it, but they were also developing and getting ready to make Kick-Ass. So [Matthew] sent the script to me, and I thought it was very interesting material and he said, so the question is, do you want to see the original movie, so I did, because I needed to sort of take it apart and put it back together again, and I can't do that without knowing what the underlying material is. So you sort of look at it out of the corner of your eye, but it was a completely engrossing experience, I found. It was none the worse for being a chamber piece because they didn't have a budget, and they had a spectacular bit of casting in it, the Helen Mirren and Jessica Chastain parts were played by two fantastic actresses. On getting the cast assembled: Helen was always the starting point, casting wise. I knew her and I thought, if I can get the coil of that woman right at that point in her life, which I knew Helen would get, then we could make it work. And I started thinking, well, how can I cast that [the younger Rachel] and I wanted to cast somebody who was not well known and had no baggage at all. Of course, I had no idea the movie was going to take a year and a half to come out or longer, and that Jessica's profile would be much, much higher. She's still not carrying a lot of baggage, though. Because I didn't want the movie to become about, how does actor A turn into Helen Mirren - that's an agenda that I didn't think that the film would need or want - so I cast somebody unknown. And a mutual friend made me aware of Jessica...so I met her and thought she was a really intelligent, interesting, charismatic girl. And I also called Terrance Malick about her because I had met him when Shakespeare in Love and The Thin Red Line were out at the same time. So I talked to him and he could not praise her highly enough. So anyway, I thought there was enough of a likeness there for that to play, but the funny thing about the film is that you couldn't really say that Tom Wilkinson is Marton Csokas all grown up or that Ciarán Hinds is Sam Worthington grown up. But the point is, I embraced that in the movie, that it asks the audience to do some of that work, rather than my trying to pass these people off as replicas of one another. Because, to some extent - and this may sound obvious - but it's about people looking back at their younger selves and trying to figure out how that person became this person, and this massive event in their lives and how it has affected who they are and what they've become as a result. So I think, if you present that convention open-handedly, an audience, as they always do in any other circumstance, particularly a theatre circumstance, simply engages with the story at that level. But in the case of Rachel, I felt you did need a symbiosis between those two actors and I think we got there and actually, I think, that's one of the things that's remarkable about the Israeli film, too. *On Sam telling the story of John flying to Albuquerque to sell him on The Debt:* It suits him very well to tell that story (laughs), but it's true, it's true, though. You have to remember, Avatar had not come out, Terminator: Salvation had not come out...I'd seen him in a little Australian movie he did called Somersault and he popped into my head when I read [The Debt] script. I think he's got this unusual quality which you don't see very often in the movies he's made since, because he's just developed one side - and that's not entirely his choice, I don't think - which is he's very masculine, he's got a very powerful presence which is quite heroic, but he's also got this hidden sort of emotional fragility about him, which he's not noted for particularly, but it's definitely there. And that was the thing I noticed immediately in that film. And I thought, you need both sides of that for that character - you can't just have a sensitive soul as a Mossad agent, that simply doesn't work, not in the circumstances we were looking for. So he just seemed like a good, really accurate piece of casting. So I found out what he was doing and, as it turned out, he was shooting Terminator in Albuquerque, so I flew down to see him because it was the only way I could get to see him, and I pitched the movie to him. We didn't have a script at that point because we'd gone back and reworked it, because Matthew and Jane had moved on to Kick-Ass, so I just pitched it to him, and he said, okay, I'm in. And he was a great audience and he just liked the idea, as he seems to like anyway, of just going into places that he doesn't necessarily know a huge amount about. I think he'd actually been online to see a couple of clips of the original movie, and he was fantastic. And by that point, I think I'd already cast Marton Csokas, who's a brilliant actor and really not well-known. He's fantastic, I think, really an undiscovered talent, but he's also got antennae that lead him to very, very obscure material. There are some actors who are like that. But it's all about the casting. You've got to get that exactly right, and you've got to get the weight and distribution right, and if you've got that, then things can start to work. Directing's not about pointing and giving orders, it's about creating an environment where you can let things happen and let sparks fly. But you've got to do that within a scripted environment that you're shooting, in that you know where you're going and you know what you're doing with it. There's no value to be had in sort of giving people instructions and having them enacted. What you're hoping to see is what you haven't foreseen, what they might discover. On recreating 1963 East Germany: That was a challenge, but not once I'd found Budapest. I'd thought we would make the film in Berlin, that's what I wanted to do, but two or three days' visit in East Berlin told me that we wouldn't remotely have the budget to do that. I mean, we probably could've done it if we'd had enough VFX and construction to get around it, but it didn't seem to be the point, and we didn't have budget anyway, God knows. So we went to Budapest, and parts of Budapest are still really the way they looked in post-1956. Other parts don't - it's the most extraordinary city that can pass for Paris and London and all kinds of places, but certainly the parts that we found...there's literally shrapnel damage on the walls of the buildings and a general sense of decay and of time having stopped, which is really what East Berlin was in the '60s. Aside from the big Soviet boulevards where the parades took place, the rest of the infrastructure of the place is completely frozen. So the atmosphere, I think, that was fairly easy - you could really, really soak the actors in the atmosphere they were already in. The challenge was just knowing whether you were striking the balance correctly between the genres, because it is a genre film, it's a thriller and it has an obligation to that, and at the same time, telling a psychologically and morally complex story, and keeping those ideas and that kind of dialectic and keeping those at the front of the story rather than pushing those aside when it was inconvenient to what was happening. So I think the script was the key, to be honest. We developed the script around the environment. On having such a diverse body of work: Well, obviously, it's very stimulating to go someplace you've never been before and it's probably good for the adrenal gland to stimulate them with a little bit of fear. Obviously, the consistent thing about the films I've done is character and everything is driven by character and not plot, and I hope (The Debt) is no exception to that. And I suppose I'm sort of drawn to material that's slightly bursts out of its generic boundaries. *On how The Debt* bursts out of its thriller boundaries:** It doesn't in an old-fashioned sense, because thrillers used to be psychologically complex and morally complex. But there's been a sort of divergence, because the commercial pressure of it is to give the best possible fairground ride you can, and therefore those kinds of ideas have been compartmentalized into dramas, you know, the famous ghetto of modern movie-making. But in the '70s, that was not the case. The modern thriller has become really, really sophisticated just in relation to the chase and very powerful, but to see both the drama and thriller in one, that's a good throwback to me.


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