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DCP BlogrollFade to Black: Stefan Ruzowitzky, Director
Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer
Although Austria has Given Us Many Great Filmmakers Billy — Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Otto Preminger — Stefan Ruzowitzky is the first to pick up an Academy Award as an Austrian filmmaker. Interestingly, while the three aforementioned directors all fled Nazi Germany, Ruzowitzky has partially been their beneficiary in making a morally challenging film, The Counterfeiters, which is set in a concentration camp.
“When I grew up in the '70s and '80s, the society in both Austria and Germany had the people involved still around, like Waldheim and others,” Ruzowitzky says. “At that time, it sure was necessary to confront this society with the crimes. … I think nowadays, the big difference is that my audience, who are mainly the grand- and great-grandchildren of the people involved — it's not about accusing anybody of anything, but it's rather inviting people to be interested in these issues. This is why I tried to make an accessible movie.”
The Counterfeiters, which won Ruzowitzky the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar,is the story of Jewish artisans forced by the Nazis to forge the English pound and American dollar while in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. The lines of morality are drawn around Europe's greatest forger, Salomon “Sally” Sorowitsch,and the implications of aiding the Nazis to save oneself and one's comrades. The film very much belongs to lead actor Karl Markovics, with a strong, visceral POV. There is also an ensemble feel to the film, and Ruzowitzky achieved both of these through a month of rehearsals and no storyboards.
“At the end of this rehearsal process, we sort of did the whole movie like a stage play,” Ruzowitzky says. “We brought in the cinematographer, and he and an assistant would film it. We edited this material, and this became the basis of my staging — because here, we saw one scene works better in wide shot, one scene has to be very dynamic, and things like that. This turned out to be the basis of the staging concept.”
Almost the entire film is shot handheld by DP Benedict Neuenfels with an Arriflex 16 SR3. “Benedict's biggest achievement, in a way, is when he does handheld camera, he doesn't go for beautiful shots,”Ruzowitzky says. “He just pans where everybody would look. He's not going from nice composition to nice composition. It's all very organic, very natural. There is no showing off — ‘Hey, wow, look what I can do.’ In doing so, beautiful compositions happen somehow, but it's not what you often find.”
Ruzowitzky only gave his DP one rule: “One of the characters says, ‘I would never be in the place of an SS criminal,’ and we said that's going to be our rule as well. We're having all these over-the-shoulder shots, but we are only looking over the shoulder of Sally and the inmates. … The camera and the audience are never at a safe distance. They are never seeing things from an objective point of view; we're always with him. This is just one way to make the audience feel like Sally — always to be in his position.”
The look of the film is fairly exquisite, from the colorless camp to the gilt of Monte Carlo. Surprisingly, it was all shot on 16mm. Ruzowitzky and Neuenfels had wanted a rough and grainy look, so they took the path of least resistance. They would depend on the digital intermediate to even things out.
“The problem was often people said, ‘Well, you took out all the color’ — which is not true,” Ruzowitzky says. “It's mainly that there were no colors there. For example, you don't have any green. There are no trees, no grass, anything. There are very few colors, but we tried to stay away from these concentration-camp clichés, which is always only blue and gray. Those colors we have, we rather tried to keep them and not lose them [with the DI].”
Ruzowitzky's next film is a children's story. “In terms of The Counterfeiters, it was this long rehearsal process, and in the case of the children's movie, my stars were nine and 10 years old, so I didn't want them to read the script because I was afraid they would be rehearsing with their mothers,” he says. “In this case, I made a storyboard and very detailed planning.”
