Michael Haneke
The director of Competition entry Funny Games maintains an air of secrecy about the film with Nick Roddick
Michael Haneke looks really worried for the first time. This is surprising, not so much because of his previous trilogy of Cannes films - Der 7. Kontinent (The Seventh Continent), Benny's Video (the title was always in English) and 71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls (71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance), all shown in the Directors' Fortnight. Their cool portrayal of a world of alienation and random violence suggested, at the very least, a director who occasionally wakes up in the middle of the night and worries about things.
No, what's surprising is that Haneke hasn't looked worried before. Our conversation has been circling around the subject of his new film Funny Games for some 20 minutes, since he politely but firmly refuses to tell the story. Conversations with directors who don't want to reveal plots in advance are of-ten a trifle forced, relying on carefully nuanced generalities.
That option, however, isn't really open to us, since we keep switching languages. Basically, my questions have been in English and Haneke's answers have been in German, with him making every effort to reduce the sing-song rhythms of his Austrian accent and me talking rather too loud. Occasionally, picking up on a glimmer of concern amid the calmness of her husband's answers, Haneke's wife Susi translates the more intensely abstract of her husband's answers into English, or the more syntactically convoluted of my questions into German.
What's surprising is that he hasn't thrown in the towel before. For a director whose point of departure as a film-maker is that "it is not possible to work in film and television these days without being aware of the relationship between what you are saying and the medium in which you're saying it," this form of hybrid communication must surely be a little worrying. Godard even made a film about it. It was called Le mepris. But, as we keep agreeing, this is Cannes.
What really seems to get Haneke worried, however, is a casual remark I make, as I get up to leave, about hoping the Cannes audience will like his film. Haneke at first responds to this conversational gambit in like manner, saying he hopes so too. But then he starts to look worried. "Um," he corrects himself hurriedly, "I'm not sure I want them to like it. It isn't supposed to be a film you like. What I hope is that they find it disturbing."
There seems every chance of that. The first film since Reservoir Dogs to be shown in Cannes with a warning about violent content, Funny Games reportedly - I have to say that, because Haneke has not only acceded to Gilles Jacob's request that he should not show the film to anyone before its unveiling tomorrow; he has also decided not to give away anything about the plot - confronts the question of violence uncompromisingly and head on.
The link with Reservoir Dogs is perhaps unfortunate: like Benny's Video (shown here in 1992 and a multiple prize-winner around Europe), Funny Games is about violence rather than a violent film. But it is different from the three earlier films in one important respect. "In the trilogy," he says, "you see the violence outside as it happens and, as a result, are able to have a moral relationship with it. In Funny Games, the role of the spectator is quite different: the audience is brought right into the violence and switches backwards and forwards between an emotional involvement with the violence and a definite standing back from it."
"So would I be wrong if I used the word 'Brechtian'?" I ask.
If Michael Haneke were Oliver Stone, this is the moment he would throw something at me. But he isn't. He's Michael Haneke, and he smiles. "I am always scared of categories," he says, "and that's one that is often used about my work. There's a certain similarity, but I have no political agenda. As an artist, you cannot work in any field these days without thinking about the medium you are using. All media have become essentially self-reflexive."
What about the possibility that all the advance warnings will put the audience in a strange frame of mind when they finally see the film? Does that bother him. "Yes and no," he says, "because that's really what the film is about: about the spectator being confronted with the film.
"Also," he says, making the first of several surprising sideways slips into the world of marketing, "I think this is not too bad a way of creating some interest in the film. But of course we're not doing it as a promotional trick. We're doing it because the festival asked us to."
Funny Games is the first Austrian film in Competition at Cannes for 35 years - "the last one was directed by Fred Zinnemann," says Haneke, "which gives you some idea of just how long ago that was" - and the director pays tribute to his producer, Veit Heiduschka, for letting him do it.
Giving the film an original English title is, as with Benny's Video, Haneke's way of showing that he is saying something about mainstream cinema, "because that is always in English, being American".
An unreconstructed European auteur, Haneke "would love" to be given a lot of studio money to make a film, but accepts that he would never be able to work with the constraints that that would bring.
"All kinds of European cinema - not just mine, but the films of Angelopoulos and Tarkovsky - could not have existed without the subsidy systems. They just wouldn't have happened. But when we have the next round of GATT negotiations in five or 10 years and film is reclassified as a product, I think that will be the end of all that. The Americans will be the only winners."
