The Debt (2010) - full transcript

So this opening image

is obviously about a contrast
of darkness and light.

You can't see these people at this point.

We'll come back to that
at the other end of the film,

when it'll make more sense.

We were very lucky here...
Kris can maybe talk about this.

Kris Thykier, the producer, who's with me.

Breathe.

...in finding this particular aircraft.

Well, more than that, this is obviously set

in the blazing sun of Israel,



and the plane itself was on
a very snowy airfield in Hungary.

In Take! airport.
I remember the name very well.

Yeah, it was 10 degrees below zero, so...

The poor actors, in T-shirts, were having
to be hustled backwards and forwards

-with that BacoFoil anorak, weren't they?
- Yeah.

And we were able to take advantage

of the heat dispersion
from the engines of the plane,

which actually gave us that heat haze,
that shiver.

A man whose sadistic experiments
left thousands...

As a first point, you're obviously introduced

to the younger and older Rachels

side by side,

and a crucial character.

"The long fuse of the film," I call her,
is the daughter,



who is the person
who is speaking at the book launch,

the biography of her mother and the tale

of the mission that
forms the centerpiece of the film.

...her greatest pain.

Played by Romi Aboulafia,

who's one of the great rising stars
of Israeli film,

and our sole, I think, Israeli star.

Yes. Many Israeli actors, but...

...my inspiration,

my mother, Rachel Singer.

I mean, this scene,

you're obviously beginning to sense,
at this point, that this is fraught,

that both versions of Rachel

are carrying a weight

which, obviously, at this point in the film,
you both assume,

and correctly assume, has to do with

their confrontation of this man,
this Josef Mengele figure,

the Surgeon of Birkenau.

And this scene, where she bursts out
of what should have been

the most proud moment, I guess,
in a mother's life,

where she watches her daughter's moment
of professional self-realization,

writing this book which commemorates
her mother's heroism,

and actually she's suffocating
with claustrophobia

and somehow disconnected
from her daughter, her grandchild,

in ways that we can't understand.

But it sets a general tone of unease.

- David Peretz?
- Yes.

Whether an audience has any idea
who is who at this point, one doesn't know,

but this is the older version
of the character that Sam Worthington plays,

played by Ciarén Hinds.

An amazing actor with a...

So much soul in his face,

which the camera now concentrates on
for a long time.

I think, initially, you don't pay
much attention to this shot

because you're starting to
get credits and information

in the titles,

but the fact that it holds for a very long time

and you don't know exactly why this man
is being picked up or where he's going,

merely that he was expecting this visit.

It's also worth pointing out, I think,
that this is where we start hearing

Thomas Newman's music,
now, that's playing.

One of the great strengths of the film, I think,

is the work that Tom did.

I remember us trying to work out this groove

that would sit underneath
this long tracking shot.

Yes, that's right.

Which has an exciting

tone to it musically,
but also slightly off-kilter

and faintly ominous.

This particular bit of road we had to
take over and control, obviously,

since there was not just the actors,
but a camera crew walking across it

with traffic going in both directions.

We also had to remove a sleeping policeman,
I remember,

from the road to allow the event

that is about to occur.

It was some kind of a festival,

which is why there were
so many Star of David flags,

Israeli flags on the street.
They were not our dressing.

Sorry, I think I...

So we've now established
the three principals of the story,

and clearly this event, this suicide,

which shocks us and
shocks the other people on the street

who witness it, most particularly
the Tom Wilkinson character,

who is the third Mossad operative.

Good. Thank you.

This event underlies the whole movie

and casts a shadow
right the way through the movie,

and it's trying to
understand the circumstances

that led David Peretz to do that
at that moment.

It is really one of the structural principles
of the film.

My father was the talker.

I'm the only journalist in Israel
she won't speak to.

Also, we're very aware that...

Well, we're not aware, but we might be aware
that Rachel, the Helen Mirren character,

has not understood,

does not know about
what it is we've just seen.

- Rachel.
- Stephan.

Okay. So, you're the expert.
Maybe you...

The audience is being asked to
do a lot of work here, of course,

just in terms of figuring out
who everybody is.

That's good. Good, good. That's very good.

But, obviously, you can intuit that...

...to thank you all

for coming to celebrate
the launch of this wonderful book.

...there's a tension, shall we say.

...we are all particularly thrilled

to have two of the heroes of the story
here with us tonight.

And even more thrilled that one of them
has agreed to read for us.

Miss Rachel Singer.

"On the evening of the 31st of December,

"it began to rain more heavily."

So, this place, New Year's Eve, 1965,

is a very significant

date in the story, the story of the film,

where the event

that is celebrated in the book happens,

and this is obviously a moment that
we see more than once in the film.

Assuming anybody listening to
this commentary has already seen it.

Otherwise, I'm disabling the film completely.

And so this idea that it was raining
very heavily, as she's just described,

that the weather had closed in completely

this dilapidated rooftop apartment,
which is the safe house

that they'd been working from
to plan the kidnap

and eventually are forced to bring

Dieter Vogel, their prey,

back to hold him here, until they can
figure out how to get him out of East Berlin.

This place leaks significantly,

and they've developed
a system of catching the water.

And this is the first time you'll...
I was trying very hard

to educate the audience

to listen carefully,
because the movie works in an alternation

of near silence, I suppose.

And she's noticed the fact that
there were three drips a moment ago

and now there are only two.

The general sense
that something is going to happen,

but not that. Maybe...

It's worth pointing out here,
as Kris will remember,

that these fights were performed,
in all cases, by the actors.

All of whom have been studying krav mega
and various...

Krav maga is the Israeli martial art

particular to the Mossad,
and we'll see more of it later.

They all got very excited
about their New maga.

- Yes.
- Spent weeks and weeks

kicking and fighting and punching.

And the choreography of these sequences
was something

that we did in a very site-specific way

because we had to work out
how it would work in that environment

and figure all of that
into the design of the place.

We are on a set in Ealing inside the flat,

and outside we are in a courtyard
in Budapest.

She's just easing herself out of the set now
and onto a balcony

with copious amounts of rain falling on her.

A place

that actually was crumbling so badly.
When we went there, we found that it was not

safe to film on and we had to
erect scaffolding to keep it up

and to carry the equipment.

It's worth pointing out that we did try
and find East Berlin in East Berlin.

- That's absolutely right.
- But Berlin is now so regenerated

that we had to travel to Budapest to
try and find a suitable site

that was reminiscent of...

Exactly, and an environment that we didn't
have to spend huge amounts of money

undoing the regeneration to take it back

to mid-'60s East Berlin, which looked,
to all intents and purposes,

like mid-'40s East Berlin,

since no money had been put into
the infrastructure of the place by the Soviets,

except to build big boulevards to
hold military parades on.

So a lot of the residential areas were still
pockmarked with bullet holes and so forth,

a situation, strangely, that was completely
replicated in the area of Budapest

that we shot in,

though the bullet holes were from 1956
rather than 1945, as it were.

So this is the apartment that David Peretz

has returned to, some kind of hole in the wall

that he's rented, but is a vivid metaphor

for the aimlessness of his life.
Half-open suitcases...

Or apparent aimlessness, of course.
He has had a single aim

for the last 20 years or so, which is
to find the man that they allowed to escape.

There's an interesting moment here

where she looks at a bed
that she might have occupied,

but never did, or at least shared.

And she's thrown back to the moment
where she first sees David,

and also the moment where
she last sees David. Those two images.

Because she meets him for the first time
at the Berlin checkpoint,

when she arrives to join the mission,

and she last sees him the night before
this day we're looking at now,

where he suddenly reappears in her life
after a 20-year absence

at a Q and A she's giving.
One of thousands, countless, she's given

explaining her exploits to
inspire future generations.

Why did he do it?

It's about the country's need for heroes,

and perhaps Israel
needs them more than most.

It was such a joy to have Tom Wilkinson
and Helen Mirren.

They're two actors at the top of their game,
so it's a rather fabulous moment in the film.

This is another set of images
that we see again

in the story without totally understanding
their significance.

This idea of the blinding light

of the world that they've been in
and Rachel's need to,

I suppose, shelter from that, hide from it.
And this image comes back several times

of the daughter at some distance,

unable to understand what the dumb show
that she's watching means.

And this wave good-bye, of course.

I think even at this point,
partly with the aid of Tom's...

Tom Newman's emphasis
is somehow disturbing

because, of course,
she will never see her mother again

because of the mission
she's embarked on at this point.

It's amazing, actually, how little of the story
we've been able to tell up until this point.

It's all the beginning of a journey.

It's worth pointing out that
we shot this on location in Israel,

and, obviously, the film is based on
an original Israeli film called Ha-Hov,

which we came across a few years ago,

and then thanks to, first, a script from
Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman,

and then Peter Straughan,
we expanded this small film

and gave it a bigger scope and scale.

But what was lovely about going
and shooting in Israel

was being able to use and work with

a lot of the original crew
on the original movie,

who then contributed to this.

Yes. The original film was made in Hebrew,

which is chiefly the reason
why it didn't get a larger exposure.

This, now we're back in Budapest.

This is a square we turned into
a border checkpoint,

Checkpoint Charlie, I guess.

We built the Wall,
which, actually, for most people...

Most people remember
an older version of the Wall,

that's to say what the Wall looked like
30 years later with that familiar rounded top.

But at this point,
it was simply breeze blocks and cement

and these Y-framed things
holding up barbed wire.

We actually built this for real.
The Wall behind them here

is not scenery. It's actually built.
It turned out to be cheaper to do that.

So we're back in this courtyard that
we've already seen, of course,

the courtyard that Vogel gets shot in,
or has just got shot in,

or not got shot in,
as it subsequently turns out.

And we're back now in the set
that we built in Ealing Studios, in London,

which is where we started the film,
in terms of its shooting.

This was the very first scene we shot,
as a matter of fact.

Where do I sleep?

Marton's piano playing.

Yes, Marten Csokas,
sort of typical of the degree

of conscientiousness,
actually learned the piano.

He played no piano before this film.

Very pretty.

You didn't notice.

You know what I've noticed?
You don't notice women. I've noticed that.

It's very interesting thinking back to
when we cast Sam and Jessica,

both of whom had the weight of expectation
of films to come,

but this was prior to Avatar being released.

- And prior to Tree of Life.
- And prior to Tree of Life, yeah.

So they were two young actors
who clearly had big films coming,

-but it was a rather lovely, innocent time.
- Yeah, it certainly was.

Where they were not yet
the global stars they are now.

In Jessica's case, particularly,
I was very, very disposed

to cast an unknown actress, or let's say...

That always seems like a rather rude term.
An actress who was not known to the public,

and therefore didn't carry much baggage.

We'll come back to that in a less active
moment of the film, but this is the scene

where their training
the krav mega combat techniques.

Krev mega is basically a form of defense
that is based on pre-emptive attack,

lethal pre-emptive attack, quite often.

- Yes, it's quite nasty.
- Yeah.

It's a particularly violent type of martial art,

where you really are going for the eyes

and trying to disable your opponent
as quickly and effectively as possible.

There's no mercy.

It's a nice little scene that's emblematic

of the tensions and conflicts
that develop between these three.

The slightly cynical view
of the Stephan character,

the more silent, observational thing
that comes from David,

and you sense somehow
just the beginnings of a connection here.

It's also important to establish that
it's Rachel's first mission.

- And that she's not...
- Yes. That's the essential bit.

There's a double language going on
even in that scene

because, actually, what is being rehearsed
in that scene is not just krav mega,

but the cover story of the character.

That she's married to a chemist who is...

In terms of their cover story,
is the David Peretz cover story,

and that they've come from Hungary

and that they are trying to conceive a child,

which is what will give her
access to the clinic.

The fertility clinic that Vogel
is thought to work at.

We were quite careful.
We obviously needed to establish

the crimes against humanity that
the doctor had performed,

but we needed to find a balance where

we weren't reveling in it,
but needed to set it up.

I remember we spent quite a lot of time
looking for appropriate images

and how best to communicate
the doctor's past.

And it's perhaps

a moment to reflect on something
that we took pretty seriously.

Certainly Peter and I,
in the version of the script that

forms the basis of this film, or is this film,

were really anxious to make sure that
we weren't exploiting the backdrop

as a hook to hang a good thriller on,

because I think the themes of...

That the thing is dealing with, which is
about guilt and retribution and justice

and human frailty, and so forth,

were not bent out of shape to make the story

accommodate itself to the thriller.

There's a huge amount of information
coming at you all the time.

It's one of the pleasures of the film.

I found, and Peter and I felt,
at a certain point,

very happy that the story was just...

There was such a lot of stuff coming at you.

You know, why is she now undressing?
What is this place?

Some people may have spotted the baby
photos and got some idea of what that is,

but it's not, perhaps, until the shot
that's just about to come up,

where she sheds her underpants,

that the penny may drop about where she is.

For some people, it doesn't drop until

the stirrups come into shot.

It was one of
the most audacious inventions, I think,

of Assaf Bernstein
and I do Rosenblum's screenplay,

was the notion that this man was working

as a gynecologist.

Which may seem like
a big ask of an audience,

but, strangely, as we were shooting this...

Not this sequence, because this was
a set we built in Budapest, actually, but

while we were shooting in the safe house at
the beginning of the shooting of the movie,

an article came to light,
it was printed in The New York Times,

which revealed the presence of

another Mengele character,
whose nickname was Dr. Death,

who had been living in Cairo
under an assumed name,

and, in fact, died in Cairo.
But his papers came to light,

and they were able to trace the fact that
he had lived there for a long time.

And this man,

also an experimental surgeon
of an unimaginable kind

during the Holocaust years,

had been working for 15 years after the war
in Baden-Baden, in Germany,

as a gynecologist.

Never had a chance to ask Assaf and Ida
whether they knew that,

but it was an extraordinary thing to realize.

So this is...

It's easy to forget, while we're watching
what's going on here,

that this is the most excruciatingly...

-intrusive and intimate...
- Intimate and intrusive violation of this girl,

and however motivated she may be,

she's obviously not battle-hardened,

in terms of... Since it's her first mission.

And it's hard to think of what must be
going through her head at this moment.

The character's head,
rather than the actress' head.

...we went to the opera house.

And here we meet Jesper Christensen,
who's a brilliant Danish actor

that we came across. In fact, he was
a recommendation of Stellan Skarsgård...

He was. He was.

...who had worked with him previously
and said that we needed to seek him out.

So I think it's worth
you talking a little bit, John, about the...

1 think we wanted to be very careful, also,
not to create

a picture-postcard Nazi.
We needed to find that balance.

Yeah, I mean, any Nazi
in a movie that is a thriller

is obviously going to be

the apotheosis of villainy,
and even more so if he's a doctor.

You run into the danger immediately
of two-dimensionality

and the impossibility of believing
such a person simply because their own...

The evil overwhelms them and
it's impossible to see a human being there.

So, again, the bias was not to cast
somebody who was well-known,

but to try and get under the radar
with that casting,

so that the character had no associations.

Because one of the agendas that one hoped

might be in the audience's mind
at some point

was whether or not they had the right guy.

The West Berlin Transit System.

And so, here's an interesting thing now.

This is, again, tough for an audience
to follow, but their proposal

for how they were going to get him out
of West Berlin was via the transit system,

which obviously predated the war

and predated the division of Berlin
after the war. It meant that

a train line that,

as it were, started in West Berlin
and ended in West Berlin would,

at certain points, have stations
that ended up on the wrong side of the Wall

because the Wall was not built
with consideration to that.

And so those stations were
known as "ghost stations,"

and trains did not stop going through them,

and they were heavily guarded to
make sure that people from the East

did not jump onto the trains to
escape to the West.

It's worth remembering that,
that East Germany

was a place where people
were constantly trying to escape

into the enclave of West Berlin,

which, for those who are not so sure
of the geography of this, was...

West Berlin was an enclave itself
in the middle of the DDR,

and the only way in and out of West Berlin
was via

Tempelhof air base,

which Sam Worthington
just referred to there,

which is the way they'd proposed
to get him out, on a charter plane.

But they had to get him into West Berlin first.

This little sequence here
was a potential casualty.

We were under pressure
to reduce the schedule, Kris,

I remember, not from you, but from
the studio, to make the film shootable.

- It was an incredibly compressed schedule.
- Yeah.

And that nightmare sequence
dropped out of the script,

but came back in when I suddenly figured

a way we could shoot it
when we were at the station,

which was the way you just saw it.

I seem to remember you doing it
in a lunch break, without telling me.

I think I did.

I think I did. We got a fourth camera
for the day and set it up

so I could shoot real trains
going through that station,

and then I grabbed Jessica and Jesper
and put them into costumes according to...

Jesper in from his day off, I think,
to turn up at the set at 4:00 in the morning,

to grab that moment.

One of the very few laughs in the movie
comes at this moment.

- It doesn't have a name.
- Shit.

It's important. I remember we spent
a lot of time trying to work out...

We needed to give them some...

These are young agents. I mean,
one forgets, the Mossad that we now

know and have the reputation as being
one of the great secret services, at this time,

in the early '603, was nascent.
These were kids,

and, actually, they were just finding
their way, and I think we needed to...

It's one of the... Not problems with the film,

but 1 think people bring a lot of baggage
to the notion of Mossad.

Yeah.

And we wanted to make sure
people realize that these...

They're not these super-slick operatives.

They're kids fighting for a new country
and a new cause.

Yes.

And actually, it's just an opportunity
to hang outwith them,

to start to see a very, very rare moment
of relaxation.

Though David never really relaxes,
as you can see.

This is it? This is all you want?

They're talking about what their aspirations
are and where they expect to go.

Stephan, of course, establishing himself
immediately as a career politician,

which is what he becomes.

His ambition is to beat his father by 10 years
to being Director of Collections,

which is a rather obscurely named post
in the secret service.

And I want another drink.

I think Sam's
a very, very good physical actor.

Actually, they all are
very good physical actors,

but Sam's obviously well-known
for action movies.

But he's very expressive with his body.

Nobody knows him.

And this moment here,
where they're talking about him,

where Rachel's curious about him
and learns for the first time

that he has no family at all, that they've
all been wiped out in the Holocaust.

This shot of his back, I think,

is expressive of the kind of torment
that somehow never leaves that character,

either in this timeframe or the later one,

when Ciarén Hinds plays him.

He's never relaxed.

How did you find me?

Excuse me...?

Who told you about me?

In language terms, we were always keen
to make sure that

we had a level of authenticity.

Obviously, when they speak English,

the assumption is that
they're speaking in Hebrew.

But we wanted to try and find the balance
with, they speak German in Germany,

they speak Hebrew to each other, and then
ultimately, when we get to the Ukraine later,

we hear some Russian.

Yeah. Yeah.

I think something about the fact
that we're reading subtitles

in some obscure way
authenticates what we're watching.

You feel, "That must be happening,"

in a strange way, the rather Anglocentric way

that English-speaking nations
look at the film.

This is a very crucial moment,
obviously, where she is

put in a circumstance where it's hard for her

to refuse this treatment

that the doctor has offered
to increase her fertility,

because she feels she simply can't do that.

Never mind the obvious associations
with even more significant intrusion

at the hands of this man,
who she believes now to be

a man with an unimaginable past.

And he particularly starts to press on

her chief vulnerability, which is...

He discovers that she's an only child,

but the reason she's an only child is

because her mother never had a chance
to have more children,

because she was killed in the war,
in a concentration camp.

And that undoes her, starts to unravel her.
And so, this moment,

when the pretense of husband and wife
can be dropped,

'cause they're around the corner and
David can't cope with the intimacy anyway.

This begins the story of their hands,
I suppose, which is a leitmotif

that I tried to develop through the film,

about these two belonging to one another.

And that plays itself out in various ways
throughout the story.

We're back on the tram now.

And here we are back at...
It's an example of the way the movie's

constantly looping back on itself.

His identity's confirmed.

That's probably one of the first times
that they figured out that they can

stop the water spreading everywhere
by putting pots under it.

But obviously we know, in the strange way
the chronology of the film works,

that we're seeing something
for the second time

which actually predates the time
we saw it the first time.

This is good standard espionage stuff.

- Spy stuff.
- Spy stuff.

We are obviously now,
significantly, the night before

the plan unfolds,

which we've hinted at.

We know involves a railway station,

or a subway station, as it were.

We know involves a van that they've
just stolen. We don't know what that is.

We know it involves a white coat,
but we don't know what that is.

But an incredibly keyed up moment
for them all, I think.

It's a brave thing you're doing.

I'm not brave.

Trying to look at, but not look at,
what they're about to have to do tomorrow,

particularly for her.

...because you know how important it is.

A very crucial swerve happens
in the story at this point,

where, I think,
she finds herself being so desperate

for support,
and also so drawn towards David,

who is her moral compass, really.

She senses the integrity of his motives,

and is crushed when he rejects

her very, very, very tentative advance,
I suppose.

And here we see Stephan
take advantage of that.

Yeah.

This is a little cinematic triangulation
here, obviously,

where the audience is certainly invested,
is very much inside the heads

of Rachel and David,

with Stephan as a prowling,

slightly manipulative presence.

And I always had the feeling here,

I was talking Sam through this
while we were shooting it,

that he knows his life is
going irreparably wrong at this point.

There's some weakness here
that he can't control or overcome

that shuts him off from his own emotions.

And, of course, his own emotional responses
are catastrophic in their effect

later on in the film.

This drink, also, that she takes,
I always used to think of with Jessica

as the first drink she takes.

And earlier on in the film, Rachel,

played by Helen, has referred to the fact
that she gave up alcohol.

But she obviously descends
into a kind of alcoholism

to cope with the wrongness of her life.

And we suddenly elide
into the following morning,

and realize that
she's slept with the wrong man,

while, of course,
in a period of heightened fertility.

It's a very rich irony
that this is the point where

the daughter is conceived.

And here they are assuming the role
of husband and wife,

which unfortunately they never seem to be
able to be in the real life of the film.

This Is My Hand, I remember: we pondered
for a while as the title of the film,

when people were trying to persuade us

that The Debt might not be the best title.

All you have to have is faith...

...that's what I tell all my patients.

What about those in Birkenau?

Krav maga.

It's also a pretty shocking moment
for the audience.

And interestingly, a moment where you...

Because this man is not yet guilty for us,
he's simply presumed guilty,

you still have a complicated response to this.

And perhaps even more so when you realize,
in a moment, that the nurse...

Help!

...who comes in to deal with this crisis
turns out to be the man's wife.

My God...what happened?

Something many of us have in our lives,
speaking for the male of the species.

And therefore, somehow he's automatically

-humanized by that.
- Yeah, that's right.

Again, this is a sequence that was very much
suggested by the locations we found.

We are at the back of the building
they're actually in.

Is he breathing? -Yes.

Though even I keep forgetting this is a set.
But this part isn't.

And the idea here was actually to follow him
all the way out of this courtyard,

up the steps, out of the lobby, into the street
and around the corner,

to the front of the clinic,
which actually does happen,

but I've decided to intercut it
with the real ambulance,

which has just been called.

I like the rather cool way
that the ambulance is going hell for leather,

but Stephan is just walking very slowly,

but still, obviously, on a ticking clock.

But the audience still doesn't understand
what's going on here,

and it's only at this point,
where you see him take off his coat

and see them arrive, in a moment,
outside the clinic,

wearing the coats
that we saw Rachel sewing for them earlier.

It's enjoyable, I think, just watching all of
these things falling into place all the time.

There's almost always information
coming at you

that fills in something from behind,
chronologically speaking, in the film,

and anticipates something that's coming up.

So you get this double effect,
because the story's told partly in retrospect.

Certain things you already know
about how things will end up

have not yet happened within this timeframe.

We have to take him to hospital.

For those who are really looking
at the film in a certain way,

for example, we know, because we've seen
a sequence in the safe house

where Vogel is tied to the radiator,

that he doesn't, in fact, get out.
They don't succeed in getting him out.

...new regulations.

But in the strange rules of suspense,
we don't know how they failed to get him out.

And that's actually what we're watching now.

You should get your things
and go to the hospital.

Thank you.

I always enjoyed this moment,

where Rachel has to walk out. This shot
that joins the three of them together,

and Rachel walks out cool as a cucumber,

as if none of the foregoing
has just happened.

So now they're into the DDR Post van.
They've swapped the two vehicles over.

It's worth just observing
Alexander Berner's editing,

which I think is fantastically good
in this film.

I don't think I've ever watched an assembly
of a film that was so sophisticated.

This moment is a nice little moment
of contact between them.

And so, we're now back at the station
that we saw in their recce.

This was a real, working station, which was,
in fact, like most things in Budapest,

covered with graffiti,
which we had to paint out.

I think this building was a gym,

but we made it, obviously,
into a postal depot.

And it's interesting to point out that this
entire sequence here was developed

by Peter Straughan and I on the basis
of the location that we found.

We had originally come up with a sequence

where their attempt to get Vogel out was...

I don't know if you remember this, Kris,
was stymied because they collided

-with another escape attempt.
- That's right.

Which actually happened on
more than one occasion in West Berlin.

In our case, we'd written a scenario
where somebody tried to ram the barriers,

before they really built the barriers up,
and just barrel through in a car.

Their attempts to get him out suddenly were
derailed because of this event flaring up.

But we felt we couldn't push
a coincidence of that dimension through.

I seem to remember that was Kris' first
comment when he read the first 50 pages.

Which, of course,
he was entirely correct about.

So we found this station. I remember calling

Peter on the phone and saying,
"Okay, I've found this place,

"and it offers us one thing
which seems to me to be interesting,

"which is, when the train
is going through the station,

"which would, by definition,
be heavily guarded,

"you cannot see what's happening
on the other side of the track."

in other words, it allowed the possibility
of unseen activity

that would have to happen in spurts.

In other words, the duration of the time
that they were invisible

was when they had to perform the act
of positioning themselves

and cutting their way through the fence
in order to have access to the train

that was going to stop,
which actually turned out to be

fantastically useful in terms of building
suspense, because you're now working

with the deafening roar of the train.

And you've educated the audience
to know that, that will stop,

that they have to get back into place before.

Now the third train has come through and...

I beg your pardon.
The second train has come through.

And here's the complication.

She's been put in a position
where she has a view that they don't have.

She can see up onto the bridge
and she can see that building.

And they've thought ahead of this,
and she's actually wearing the costume,

or the uniform, rather, of a postal worker,

which she now is about to present herself as.

And, again, the pleasure of the audience
is in catching up with us

and realizing that all of this
has been thought through,

even though we haven't completely
understood its significance.

And here's complication number two,

which is, as it proves, that she didn't manage
to get enough serum into his neck

before he started to strangle her

and managed to rip the syringe
out of her hand.

This actor, Alexander Fennon,
so fabulously sleazy.

- Yes.
- He can't quite believe his luck.

Very, very good performance.

That this beautiful postal worker
is asking him out for a drink.

Move on, comrade...

And so, this is their plan,
that this driver is in the pay of...

I finish in half an hour...

...a sympathetic person, another operative,

just giving you some intimation
that there are...

There is a wider circle,

but you are insulated from one another,
as they would be in this kind of procedure.

- And here it all goes wrong.
- Yes.

Which van was it?

I think it came from over here?

And, again, the geography of this place,
where the guards were coming from.

It's interesting because East Berlin,
of course, still was functioning as a country,

with postal depots and letter deliveries,

but it felt like a war zone.

There is nothing there...

And the East Germany-Soviet determination

to maintain its belief in its own system
by stopping people

trying to escape to the West
was ruthlessly pursued,

to the point of shooting to kill, simply.

And obviously, here is an event that
comes up later, where Rachel is very aware

that, actually, she should be the decoy
and they should be getting him out,

but it's David's refusal to leave her behind
that is the second moment of frailty

that begins to push the story
into a different direction.

This is a very tricky sequence to get right

because we only just had a turning circle
for that vehicle there.

Jump!

It's also cleverly shot and cut.

- The vehicle itself does not travel very fast.
- No.

About 30 mph is pretty good going for it.

But it was, again, a great location.
It offered us all kinds of things.

This was, I remember, the end of night seven,
with a very nervous studio executive

thinking we're never gonna finish it.

That last shot completely wrecked the van.
We couldn't drive it anymore after that.

The guard. The one who saw your face.

And now we're actually in the interior
of a van on a soundstage in Budapest,

one of our carefully managed visual effects.

We didn't have a large visual effects budget,
but we used them where we could.

We failed our mission.

"We failed our mission. We failed
our country. We failed our families,"

is a very important line

because it makes you aware, I think,
particularly from Stephan's point of view,

the kind of political weight
that they felt they were carrying.

- And the stakes.
- Yeah.

And here's the third View now, again,
of this courtyard.

And indeed the third view
of the pot that's catching the leaks.

So there's a good moment here, where
I think the audience starts to look forwards

and backwards in the story,

or ideally should,

where we've seen her in connection
with these pots in exactly this circumstance.

This is one of the trickiest shots of the film,
this, where...

They need to open up...

We were working with a very small
Technocrane in order to complete this.

This shot that develops right into
the devil's eyeballs, as it were...

We feed him at the end of each shift.

We take him back alive.

You've been seen. You don't leave the house.

...whose eyes open

and usher us into the nightmare
that then ensues.

- They're trapped with a monster.
- Yeah.

It's a very good set, this.
Jim Clay, our production designer,

is obviously
someone you've worked with before,

is really rather... The atmosphere on set,

it felt enclosed.
We felt we were in that apartment.

Yes. And indeed it was built out of...

So here's her nightmare beginning.
All of their nightmares beginning.

Anyway, it was built out of materials, largely,
that we salvaged

from demolition that was going on in the
quarter of Budapest that we were working in.

So window frames and doors and tiles
and radiators and so forth,

all salvaged from the country itself,

which gave an incredibly real feeling
to the place.

The sense of corridors, rooms off corridors,

and the three of them crossing over.

Yeah. It was very cunningly designed.

I mean, Jim and I spent
a long time talking about this.

We had to try and foresee how this
whole sequence that now ensues in the film

was going to be blocked, what the
mise-en-scéne was going to be and

how the sight lines would work, how she,
in particular, would discover

what had happened

and he jumped by Vogel in the sequence
that we saw at the beginning of the film.

And so the idea of placing him
on this corner,

which would allow me
a bunch of camera angles around him,

'cause obviously it's not too terrific to
shoot into a corner.

You can't, by definition, get behind the actor.

You can't vary the shots.

And here's an interesting symmetry
in the film,

where we now have a complete reversal,
one of many reversals in the story.

We've had three scenes

where Rachel is the patient, as it were,

and the doctor is ministering to her,
and now the situation is completely reversed,

in a kind of weird echo of that.

Three scenes now which increase
in intensity, as the earlier three had,

and actually completely realign
their relationship with one another.

Again, Vogel constantly manipulating,
allowing himself to be fed by Rachel,

allowing that...

Yes, sensing that that's possibly the line of...

The weakness that he might be able
to exploit in the first instance,

because he has somehow had a relationship
with her, that he knows he's enough of a...

Is she alright?

He's psychologically acute enough to
know that there was some part of her

that is sincere,
that he might be able to reach.

Also, this is interesting,

that the first time we hear from him here,
he's simply concerned about his wife,

which is totally sincere, I think,
and, in fact, is an echo of what happened

when Eichmann was kidnapped.

He was obsessed with his family
and what would happen to his family

and had they been hurt,

when he was famously abducted
by Mossad agents in Buenos Aires in 1960.

We've been given a date.

And they've set themselves rules, here,
which, of course, are their undoing,

which is that they don't talk to him.

But they have to take the tape off his mouth
to feed him,

which allows him, crucially, to talk to them,

which turns out to be
the means of his escape.

No interest to anybody,
but that's my shaving brush.

We couldn't get a foam going,

and I said, "I can do it.
I've got a brush that works fine,

"and a particularly fine brand
of shaving cream."

So we sent off to get it.

Eaiing, where we were shooting,
is not far from my home.

We stopped filming for about 20 minutes
to send somebody to get it.

You want to hand me over to the others...

We were often shooting in this situation,

with two cameras with a very unstable feel.

They were either, when this kind of shot,

where we're so close,
we were actually on a camera rig that was...

Where the camera was suspended
on bungee cord, so it was free-floating,

not completely stable. It responded to
the adjustments of the operators.

And there's a mathematical approach
that I started to use, where,

working with extreme profile shots
like this one,

or depending on
which shoulder you were over,

or whether you were on just a clean single,

and map them out in terms of...

'Cause these sequences
repeat themselves, obviously.

And here's another example
of the way the sound works,

where you can hear the flick of his bristles,

that lethal weapon.

I'd forgotten.

You Jews never knew how to kill.

And, again, you can't tell,
this repugnant comment here,

whether that is an expression
of the man's beliefs

or whether it's a provocative remark
so he can see what reaction he can generate.

And here's an interesting one.

The cockroaches make a certain half
of the audience flinch, unquestionably,

and explain what's going on here,

but usually in movies,
when somebody throws up, if it's a woman,

just as if, in period movies,
somebody starts coughing,

you know they've got tuberculosis...

- Consumption.
Consumption.

In this case,
it would usually betoken something

which we might not yet have spotted,
and I think is,

I know for a lot of people
who've seen the film, a very...

A moment where everything falls open,

which is the moment that just comes up,

where Vogel has spotted
that she is pregnant.

You know, a man practiced in
those sort of observations, obviously,

even to the point
where we might conceivably...

And the man who was
working on her fertility.

Yes, the man was working on her fertility,
and it's conceivable,

though that would be up to
a woman to decide

that it's not something she's even
necessarily aware of herself at this point.

Because everything he says is...

You should try lemons.

And also, interestingly, the moment
where he switches to English,

which a lot of people...
We", in the convention of the film,

English, as it were, for Hebrew.

What's your name?

Which goes by without people noticing it,
because it happens under the shadow,

as it were, of another revelation
that's much more startling,

which is that she's pregnant.

Very good.

And, again, to state the obvious, pregnant
with the girl that the movie starts with,

the first voice... We", almost the first voice
we hear in the film.

- And with Stephan's child.
- With Stephen's child.

About her death?

And he undoes her again, here, as it were.

She's completely thrown by this.

Despite being the victim,

he's ultimately controlling everything
that goes on in the house.

Beginning to, I think.

And, again, I kept emphasizing
with the other actors,

and particularly with Jesper,
that he must only think of these sequences

as a man trying to save his own life.

Not that that's sympathetic,
but it's understandable and human.

And all of these people are
on the edge of panic, of course,

trying to behave in a way that...

And not let their emotions overwhelm them.

But, obviously, that's beginning to happen,
for a bunch of different reasons, here.

What did they say?

This is where the panic certainly
begins to grip, here, when they...

This little comfort blanket they've had
of thinking the Americans

are gonna help them
suddenly evaporates and goes up in smoke,

because it's become
highly sensitized, politically,

because they've killed somebody.
And so nobody wants to be seen

to be helping the Israelis at his point.

Answer the fucking question!
Did you feed him?

Yes, I fed him.

There's no plan.

And this is the point where you start to,
obviously, see the triangle begin to unravel.

We killed a man,
and now the Americans want to pull out.

They won't have anything to do with us.

It's a fucking mess and they're backing away
from it as quickly as they can.

- No. They can't leave us.
- Yes, they can.

Because we fucked it up.

We fucked it all up,
and now we're on our own!

No.

I remember getting
very, very, very sore knuckles

in this sequence because I kept

cueing these people every time we shot it
with that knock on the door.

And ended up with blisters all over my hand.

- Move!
- You're not doing this.

He's not getting away from me. Move.

Again, this is an interesting point,

where you just sense
the polarity of these two.

David only cares to get the man back
and in front of a tribunal,

and Stephan wants the glory

and wants the revenge.

It was the lady from the basement apartment.

She invited us to a New Year's Eve party.

It's sort of reducflo ad absurdum, this.

Obviously, they've been invited to a party,
the last thing...

The furthest thing from their minds.

But, again, if anybody has remembered,

it's the night of the New Year's Eve party

that actually he escapes.

that actually he escapes.

Quite sure I will find out,
or we will find out, Kris,

in two or three weeks
when we go to Germany,

what has happened with this passage

because this is...
This anthem is forbidden in Germany,

and I suspect has probably been edited out
of the German version of the film.

So, I don't quite know
what he would be playing there.

Sort of projects you into this next moment.
I love this cut.

This one here.

They're just trying to
put themselves back together,

and this is obviously a startling image,

which is very loaded for a modern audience.

It's your shift.

Kept on trying to keep these shots,

trim them back so that you're constantly

projected in this sequence
into the next scene,

before you've had a chance
to resolve the emotions or the...

Just trying to break down timelines
in this sequence altogether.

So now the movie is
just jumping forward all the time,

and the only continuum is a jangling,

emotional timbre of the characters.

You remember what we are.

And the panic passes from one to the other.

This is all about detonating the next scene,
where she is desperate,

as her mother was, to get out of the room.

Sorry, "As her mother was."
As the older version of her was.

- You can't go out.
- I just want some air!

A lot of correspondences like this.

Getting out into the light.

The sense of being
sucked into this nightmare

that the Jewish people have been
trying to climb out of ever since

the world closed in on them in the late '30s.

Thank you, David.

Horribly ironic line.

So now we're seeing David
feeding him for the first time.

If I had a choice,
I would prefer Rachel to feed me.

This guy's really in his stride now.

So gentle.

In another life,
the makings of a nurse, I think.

In Another Life was another alternative title.

At one point, I liked the idea that

these people all end up
in lives they shouldn't have had.

That they're staring out at the world

where the world imagines them to be
somebody that they're not.

And the hideous trap of being inside a lie,

just as they're trapped inside
this physical environment, here.

Because of what happens to them,

they build some version
of these walls around them.

That must be hard.

Afterwards, it just seemed...

I wouldn't have taken Stephan
as a family man.

The whole idea of
where you end up in the world

is a consequence of the choices
you make at critical moments.

I see you with children.

Shut up.

I'm expressing my sympathy for...

So, obviously, he's spotted that
she's with the wrong man.

What does a monster like you
know about suffering?

And a man we've heard nothing from, really.

David had not divulged himself at all,

except in the most generic terms...

You inject people with petrol.

...and was leaning very heavily on

what Sam is capable of conveying,

locked up inside him.
I think he's not been called upon

to show that so much.

It was something I could see very strongly
in a performance of a movie he did

with Abbie Cornish, I guess the movie
that launched them both, called Somersault,

where he plays a very damaged character,
an emotionally repressed, shy man,

but with a very, very powerful
physical presence.

I think you're the one that is afraid, David.

Afraid of the monster.

And, of course, he's telling the truth here.

That sort of embarrassed laugh
was very telling, I thought.

Why do you think it was so easy
to exterminate you people?

And this is a man, now,
who knows exactly what he's saying,

and probably exactly...

I saw it. Every day...

If not exactly what will happen,

that he will start to open up a weakness
and exploit it.

...or kicked or killed.

Every one thinking only of themselves.

This is hard for an audience to hear, I think.

...to lead a thousand people
to the gas chambers?

It's such a repugnant, repellent statement.

Not one would sacrifice himself.

Not even when we took their children away.

So I knew then
that you people had no right to live.

You had no right...

I remember when I saw
the original film, Ha-Hov,

a version of this scene happens like this,

and it's very... I remember distinctly being...

- Are you going to be all right?
- Yeah.

...profoundly shocked by that.

It's, again, another long fuse.

Out!

So now musically and

in terms of the mise-en-scene,
you start to steer the audience back to...

- The start of the movie.
-...the start of the movie,

or the start of this part of the movie,
where they see...

And the observant amongst the audience
will have noticed, in the opening sequence,

that she has a cut lip
and she has blood on her shirt.

It's the little touches.

The makings of a nurse.

There's something just innately feminine
about Rachel at some level,

which is in complete contradiction
to the job she's expected to perform.

This shot, in particular, is the one
that suddenly makes you aware of

where the movie started,

or where this part
of the story started, anyway.

With him tethered to the radiator.

And now we're starting to tell a story
that's not immediately obvious.

This is the first shot you see,

when Rachel reads from her daughter's book
at the beginning of the film.

The Helen Mirren Rachel, as it were.

And this little finger on the place
where she's been cut,

which you don't understand what that is.

And this is cut slightly differently.
It's compressed from the narrative

we first see.

But certain key shots, obviously,
are identical.

I certainly had planned to keep,
and indeed did shoot these sequences

as continuous shots,
so that I could stay in the entire sequence

and work all the way through it,

which felt like a really cool thing to do
on paper.

And then, as soon as I started to
work with the film,

it felt pedantic and indulgent.

I found I wanted to cut it because the...

Where you cut, you involve the audience

in a speculation about
what's happening in between.

It seemed a much better way to...

I don't like things
that draw attention to themselves,

to what the director is doing,
if you see what I mean.

It gets in the way

and is not about the story,
but about the execution of something.

So this is now, again, slightly different.

Now we're much more aware
of what it is he has in his hand,

which we see very clearly
in the next shot here,

as she tries to disarm him.

We didn't understand what that was
the first time we saw it.

This is the same, she hits the radiator.

There's slightly more violence
to the radiator hit, isn't there?

Yeah, yeah.

We see it from a different angle,
but that shot's the same.

And, again, much more violent,
as he kicks her brutally.

Not just the once,
but in this case three times.

And that's the knockout hit, as it turns out.

And musically, obviously,
there's a connection here.

This kind of winding groove
that's going on underneath,

with the strings which spring to
very energetic life in the first cue

are somehow not managing to do that,
not getting up off the ground.

And you've got an audience
now willing her to get up,

-and suddenly realizing the...
- Exactly.

That's the New Year's Eve
fireworks reflected,

and this is the moment
where I think the audience

has to reassemble its assumptions.

And then the next scene
obviously answers that.

Nothing at all.

He might go to the house,
try and get a message...

He's not going to the house!

He's gone!

Just a good example of the way
the space works physically

and the kind of angles one's able to get.

Keep these people connected,

but still leave a lot of movement
around a space.

I was just terribly aware of
how long we were going to be here,

and not wanting the piece
to lose visual dynamic.

He's kicking the pot of water out of the way.

- It was my shift.
- This happened because of me.

I let him go.

Remember, I started out shooting this scene
in the kitchen. Do you remember this?

An uncomfortable moment.
I suddenly thought,

"I'm in the wrong room here."

And we spent about two or three hours
setting it up in the kitchen,

and it just would not...

I could not get the thing to
play out in a way that would allow me

to do what I wanted to do with the camera,

so we stopped and restaged it completely.

It's also very difficult
to separate them, though.

They'd have had to
have been around the table,

which is a different dynamic, isn't it?

Yeah, I put them on the edges of the room,

but then it became very hard to shoot them.

But that doesn't have to be
the truth we take home.

The truth can be anything we want it to be.

Okay, so this is where the truth...

"it doesn't have to be... It is the truth,

"but it doesn't have to be
the truth we take home with us."

The truth is Rachel shot him.

There's a way in which I think
the notion of the truth

can get completely confused
with what will play politically,

which, I think, is as modern an idea,

as contemporary an idea
about the intersection between

what actually occurs
and what politically is deemed viable,

perhaps in a nation
that considers itself to be at war...

Maybe that's. ..
The important thing is justice.

Justice is seen to be done.

...or to be at least using political arguments.

It makes no difference.
No difference!

This is a man convincing himself

that the truth can be
anything he wants it to be.

The truth stays in this room, between us.
Agreed?

Which, I think, is something
that everybody does at some level,

and it always struck me, this scene.

That point of maximum vulnerability,

where also your mind
is completely open, at this point,

because you have just been rebooted

in terms of all your assumptions
about what's going on in this film.

David.

That this fatal agreement
that they enter into at this point

is obviously the center point of the film.

Here's a man who just wants
more shit heaped on top of him

because his self-loathing
knows no bounds, at this point.

And she's lost her moral compass.

Say it.

And the moment where we wait to
see whether she's going to agree,

on the eve of the new year of 1966,

we bounce back into the present-day story.

- Oh, God.
- If you read it, you'll see that...

He's alive! He's in the Ukraine!
What else is there to read?

It's a little Internet story.

Psychiatric patient claiming
to be the Surgeon of Birkenau!

Some crazy old man.

It's interesting to point out that, obviously,
in terms of the making of the film,

there were two different movies
going on here,

the one that involved the younger versions
of these characters

and the one that involved
the three veteran actors,

if that's the right word.

Rachel, did he say anything?

Why did he kill himself?

And I remember we moved, Kris,
didn't we, from Budapest?

We started in Ealing,
shot for three weeks there,

moved to Budapest and shot East Berlin.

Yeah, we shot out the young story.

We shot out the young story,
and then a partition came down

and we started shooting the outer story,
the framing story,

with three new actors.

Which felt extraordinarily strange,

not least because the physical environment
of the film suddenly went

from sub-zero Budapest

to bakingly hot Mediterranean
coastline of Israel.

But, of course, going back
to the point you made right at

the top of the film, I remember you were
obsessed with the notion of light and dark,

and I think we very much
wanted that hot Israeli...

- That scorching...
- Yeah, that contrast. Yeah.

This sequence was an shot
actually in an apartment

in the complex that you see David
walk out of at the beginning.

Not actually the one we used,
because we couldn't get access to it.

Very, very, very tricky scene to film.

Totally handheld. I think Ben
developed arthritis by the end of the day.

Ben Davis, the cameraman.

- We can't...
- Well, I can't do it. I can't!

Look at me. I'm not capable.

I haven't been an agent for 30 years.

You're insane. No, I can't do it!

You have to do it, Rachel.

Because for 30 years
you've been taking the credit for it.

"For 30 years you've been
taking the credit for it."

it's the moment where you get
a glimpse of how complicit

she has become in this lie.

It's easy to think of her in the story
as a victim of it,

but, of course, she has embraced it.

And Helen was very, very, very anxious

that we didn't soft-pedal that idea.

That she's become a monster herself

because she has lived and dined out

on this false heroism.

And this idea of trying to
put her life back into order, here,

when it's clearly not going to happen.

This is Helen at her absolute best, I think.

I always thought of this film
as a group of characters

who are always on the verge of panic, except
for perhaps the two in that picture there,

who are innocent,
though, of course, framed by

and contaminated by a lie
that they've had no part of.

To the extent that the daughter's only way

of building a relationship
with her distant mother

is through writing of her exploits.

Exactly, and, of course, perpetuating
the lie for generations that follow.

I wasn't referring to the wheelchair.

Again, this is obviously
a scene we've already seen,

which is now prized open to

reveal more of what's happening.

Obviously, this is a cinematic manipulation,

in the sense that
if I'd been totally open-handed,

I would have shown
the whole of this scene before.

But there's a way in which
the film is partly about

telling a story in which things are edited,
the truth is edited out.

Where the salient points are left,

and there was a sense in which...

Obviously, a film is a fiction,

and you're telling a story,
or apparently telling one story,

when you may be telling another.
This is all the stuff of

thrillers and espionage thrillers particularly.

It's interesting that the film,
I always felt, had the potential

to engage three modes simultaneously,

as if the film is... I wanted it to speak
simultaneously to the head and the heart

and the guts.

So that you are viscerally involved
in a story that is simply about

fear and surprise and jeopardy,

and all of that set of emotions

that you have an involuntary response to.

That you're emotionally engaged

in the story because it's about three people

in an incredibly pressurized circumstance,

and particularly a romantic configuration

that involves you in conflicting emotional
engagements, as it were.

And finally the head, because you're trying
to piece your way through a story,

trying to put the bits of
the jigsaw puzzle together,

until the figure finally leaps out at you,
the meaning of the whole thing.

I was thinking about my mother.

So this is one of the early Q and A's
that presumably these three people were...

Part of the process by which
a country mythologizes itself.

They're talking to
a bunch of military recruits here,

for whom their selfless act

represents something that
young Israelis should aspire to.

And we're beginning to see the cost of...

How their lives are unraveling
under the pressure of it.

Not Rachel's first drink anymore.

Brilliant little...

it was interesting casting Jessica,
who has a remarkable resemblance

to Helen which, when we first started,
before the casting process was in place,

we obviously knew that
the scar was going to help us,

as being the way to clearly identify
young Rachel and old Rachel. But, actually,

by happenstance, we cast Jessica, who does
bear a remarkable physical resemblance.

- Exactly, exactly.
Regardless.

So this is now a scene that's taking place
some five years after their return,

when the fault lines of this falsehood
are beginning to...

My own party.

Beginning to embed themselves.

You and Peter rewrote this scene
literally the day before, didn't you?

We did. We did.

You'd rehearsed it through with the actors,
and they just didn't feel that they...

No, it was a scene that bears a lot of weight

because it's the scene where the possible

romantic union that we, I suppose, hope for

and look for in the story, because we know
these two people belong together,

is finally smashed apart

because she's taken one route,
the conventional route,

marrying the father of her child

and being sucked into
the role assigned to them.

And so they're now mixing with
high-level politicians and people of influence

in the country,
and David is backing away from it because...

Where are you going?

- Because it's tearing up his soul.
- It's tearing up his soul

and making him, frankly, suicidal.

...and then I don't know.

- When?
- Tonight.

Yeah, and this scene was interesting

because we leant on the scene too heavily
in its original draft

to try and explain to ourselves and to the
audience why they weren't staying together.

And, actually, it took, I have to say,
Jessica to point out that she was uttering

thoughts and emotions that
belonged to Helen, belonged to

a character looking back at her life.

It was a good example of why you should
never try and include footnotes in a scene.

Here's the last scene of

the story of their hands playing itself out.

Come with me.

I can't.

Ending in this rather eloquent moment,

where the two people who belong together
are suddenly

parting. She's pulling her hands
away from his,

but not in any way connected with him
or his needs.

And knows it. And can feel him...

Feel him walking out of her life, behind her.

Yeah, this is the moment she chooses.

Yup. She says she'll come and
have that conversation with David.

With Michael, rather.

Whoever Michael may be,
but presumably a person worth knowing.

It's a good moment, where I was
just able to juxtapose those two faces,

and it seems very believable
that one turns into the other.

So now we start to pick up another story.

The story of...

- Yuri.
- Yuri Tltov. who is

the Ukrainian investigative journalist
who somehow stumbled on the existence of

a man believed to be Dieter Vogel.

Here you are.

And it's this piece of information
that has come to David,

for those who might not be able to
pick their way through the story.

It's the existence of this story
that's come to light

because David has spent the last 20 years
of his life neurotically searching

for Vogel, under the idea that
he must have survived, somewhere.

In order, even if it's very late in the day,
to bring the man to justice.

But, of course, before he can
bring Vogel to justice, he has to

seek Rachel's permission,
the only person he really cares about.

And that's the purpose of his visit to her

at the Q and A that we see her at again,
in a moment,

where she is talking to a group of students,
as presumably she's done regularly

for the last 20 years of her life.
And suddenly she's confronted by him,

a man she hasn't seen for 20 years,
and he's come to try and ascertain,

in a coded form,
whether she would ever countenance

joining him in the bid to

undo this terrible untruth.

This shaming untruth.

And, in fact, the answer he gets
is that she wouldn't join him

because she knows it would ruin
her daughter's life, and it's unthinkable,

and she might have done it five years ago,
but not now, she's lived with it too long.

This notion of whether moral considerations

evolve over time, or lessen over time.

Is it fair to punish somebody 40 years
after the event, or whatever it may be?

It's one of the subjects of the film.

I've always liked this sequence.

This is a notion that Matthew
and Jane Goldman came up with.

- Although she was under the table, 1 think...
- She was. That's true.

But there's something desperately poignant
about the fact that

this sudden eruption of

-adolescent or...
- Young lovers.

Young lovers, and in sudden physical need
for one another.

And the picture is that she's split
between her and the other side of her,

and forced to witness something
that she has never

had in her own emotional life, or sexual life,

which seemed particularly ironic
and cruel almost.

And it plunges her back into
her obsessive attempt to rerun

this encounter with David in her head,
to see if it will yield any illumination

because she realizes she didn't understand
why he came to see her.

That's the image we saw earlier.

I expect so.

Again, she's having to
keep up one kind of front.

Her life is a constant lie
of one sort or another.

"What are you doing here, David?"

is the key question. We thought, actually,
this scene was originally written...

The scene we've just left
with David and Rachel

was originally written as a stand-alone scene
and it's the one area where,

when we came to put the film together,

it seemed to want to
reveal itself impressionistically

in the story,
as if the pieces are dropping into place.

She can't drop what she's doing here,

which is working against the clock to get to

this man they think to be Vogel

at the hospital, before Yuri Titov does,

before the whole thing blows wide open.

But in the moments she has

where she's got time to think about it,
she's just constantly

rerunning a scene in her head

to see what truth it will yield up,
which, of course, is a reflection of

the way the movie works.

We shot this somewhere outside Budapest,

out in the Hungarian countryside.
Sort of feels like a helicopter shot, that.

It's actually just a track
on the top of a very high hill.

I never heard from him again.

- I wrote you letters.
- But you never sent them.

- Rachel...
- What is it, 25 years?

- I wanted to see you.
- All that time and not a word.

I was ill for a long time, Rachel.
I was in a...

This is the illness that we've already seen her

slap Stephan in a fit of fury about.

When she realizes that he knew,
that Stephan knew that

David had been iii,
and still required David to go and...

And when we say in,
we mean he had a breakdown.

Had a breakdown, yes.

Yes, and he's already

put himself back together in terms
of just a monomaniacal obsession.

I would have gone to a newspaper...

And this is key.
That is, what he wants to do is to...

I could finally have seen him face trial.

To tell the truth of what happened.

Whatever happened to us,
it seemed to me we would be free.

Yeah, so that's obviously
a very strong concept, "We'd be free."

-"What would happen to us..."
- Free of the lie.

Exactly, and the notion of freedom is such

an aspirational word

in movies, I suppose, generally,

anything about a world
of political repression or

prison movies or whatever it may be.

Though it has a particular resonance
in this case

because they've imprisoned
themselves, really,

and brought shame on themselves,
and their country, I suppose, implicitly.

It's important to say that's... Part of the task
of the film is to bring an audience into

an emotional understanding of
how such a thing could happen,

but not stress to judge them for it.
There's no attempt in my mind to demonize

anybody or anything,

save perhaps the character they're pursuing.

Could you come? I don't know if Stephan...

What if we could go back?

If I had waited for you. If you had come.

Would it be different?

We can't go back.

It's an interesting notion about

how many of us look back
at something we've done

that we wish we hadn't done.

To rerun something so that

the outcome is different in some way.

And, obviously, the darkness that
David's plunged into at that point.

Here's the last time we see him.

And, of course, we know his fate.

No, no...

...I'm Mr. Schevchuk's niece, Anna Baranova.

Here's the point
where Helen's Russian lineage and ancestry

helped us out quite a bit
because she sure sounds like she can

speak that language,
which she was very quick to

assure me she absolutely couldn't.

She, of course, grew up hearing it.
Her father was Russian,

and, in fact, didn't speak English.
Sorry, her grandfather.

Again, we were very fortunate
with this location, it was a...

- Amazing place.
-...fabulous, disused hospital.

A psychiatric hospital, in fact.

- Yeah, yeah.
- That's exactly what this was. There's some...

- It was spooky as he".
- Spooky as hell, some sort of

obviously optimistic notion
that it could be turned into a hotel.

It's a huge building that has stood...

You know, time has stopped. It's got
a Mary Celeste feeling. It's very sinister:

You still somehow see
stains on the walls and

bars on the windows, reminding you of...

- You know, bits of old equipment and...
- Yeah, and whoever was incarcerated

in that sort of place.

A place designed not so much to
keep people out as keep people in.

That was a real plan of the building, there.

Again, it is great when you can
find places that

literally do the job of the film for you.
I didn't have to

make extensive adjustments or alterations
to this place.

It just conveys
a very, very potent sense of what it is.

Room 414. Significantly,
a double occupancy, which I never,

perhaps, found the way
of making completely clear.

You always quite liked that shot from...

- Through the stairs, didn't you?
- Yes, I did.

To suggest whether, in fact,
she was being watched at this point.

Yes.

And this is the mysterious

glasses case that Stephan was
pushing across the table at her.

We'll see the echo of another injection
earlier in the movie.

Some great Ukrainian actors here.

This man who plays Yuri Titov is

a formidable Beckett performer.

Okay, so this is an interesting moment,

which I suppose recalls
the clinical environment

that these two people first met in,

who we assume to be the same two people.

This is actually a British actor
who spoke fluent Russian.

And, again, this points you at this notion of

what it means to kill somebody
at the point where

they're clearly not far away
from death claiming them, anyway.

And is the point where Rachel, by now,
has understood what it was

that David was asking of her.

And I think

this is another key moment,
where she either perpetuates a lie

or can draw back from it and

change the course of history, as it were.

- Where, in fact, she might be free.
- Yes.

And so there are two beds in that room,
or three beds, actually.

And one of the other ones of that is
occupied by the man she is looking for.

Are you the journalist?

Because until this moment we've assumed
that this was Vogel, and now we realize that,

in fact, it's not even him.

No...

"Have you heard of me?" he says.

My name is Dieter Vogel.

I am the Surgeon of Birkenau.

It's a very nice writing touch.

"Have you heard of me?"
"Yes, yes, I've heard of you," she says.

Yes. I've heard of you.

Putting the syringe she might have used to
kill him back in her pocket,

as this man rambles on in his deranged

fantasy of world domination.

...of the Surgeon of Birkenau.

This pathetic Nazi salute,
which is almost ludicrous.

And she ponders, I suppose,
the fact that she might have just killed

an innocent man

in order to preserve her own...
What? Her own...

Status.
-...utterly contaminated life.

And she turns over a medical sheet and
starts to write something, but, obviously,

at this point we don't know
what that something is.

And here's the man
she was trying to beat to the door.

And somehow they never
quite connect with one another.

- Yes'?
- It isn't him.

Wait a second.

This is a family matter, if you'd give me
a moment, please. Thank you.

- You're sure?
- It isn't him.

It's some old man who's heard about him.

"It isn't him,
it's some old man who's heard of him."

Thank God, this is wonderful. This is...

And you're okay, Rachel?

- You were wrong.
- Well, thank God I was...

About David.

You were wrong about him.

So this is what I would say is the long fuse of

the daughter, who began the story,
who we're about to

see again and has really been the only

purpose of Rachel's life,
the only thing that she can look at and...

- In positive, yeah.
- Yeah, and not see her own shame

reflected back at her.

...let him tell the truth...

Stephan, in one of the more memorable lines
of the film,

says, "Truth is a luxury."

Some people have to put other things first...

"Some people have to put other things first,
their country, their people, their children,"

which is a classic political dilemma.

Do you sacrifice

integrity and a moral truth

for an expedient political purpose?

Vogel must have been here, Stephan.

- Rachel...
- People have to know the truth, Stephan.

- Rachel, listen to me.
- Goodbye.

Not the first time she's hung up on him,
presumably. Certainly not in the film, even.

But the notion that she wants her daughter
to be proud of her

and she wants to do something
to make her daughter proud of her,

1 think, is the most human utterance
in the film.

And that very, very basic human right,

that a relationship between
a mother and a daughter, in particular,

is inviolable,
and it is completely violated in her case.

She is embedding and enmeshing

her daughter in a lie
that shames both of them.

Excuse me.

Now, of course, she's spotted someone.

She's spotted someone
and may yet have the chance to,

as it were,

make up for David's
otherwise pointless suicide

by bringing the man to justice herself.

And I think just out of sheer curiosity,
that she needs to see whether

her hunch that he must have been there
somewhere is true.

This is a room, again,

we simply built the basins.

I dare say it was...

The original purpose was not a million miles
away from what we made it, this room.

Why did you have to come?

Jesper, of course,
the only actor that actually ages

-and remains in character.
- Yes.

Yes, who somehow

transcends the convention
we're using for the others

because he remains
the same person throughout.

Again, another sequence
which the actors performed,

and we rehearsed this pretty carefully.

I was very...

Peter Straughan and I
both thought it very interesting to

see a fight performed by somebody who is

so old that the effort of

stabbing someone results in his needing
to sit down to get his breath back.

It's not something you always see, I guess,

in this era of
ever-more-accelerated combat sequences.

- It's the anti-Bourne, isn't it?
- It is.

Now here's a place where

it's worth, and you can only point this out
on a DVD commentary,

where we are playing fair with the audience,

because if you look at the left-hand side
of the frame, you can see her

putting the syringe into his back.

And we choreographed that
in such a way that,

that was possible to do

given the way they were moving,

and, in fact, she only had
one hand she could use.

That's a slightly unnerving floor
to be in contact with,

this floor in this building.

We had it cleaned by so many disinfectants
before we shot there.

It's a pretty amazing prosthetic

he's wearing at this point
on his face and chest and hands.

It's worth noting that

there was a sequence that succeeded

the one we're looking at now in the film,

where Rachel got outside the hospital and
attempted to walk back towards her car,

but never made it.

Though the architecture of the film
had always been

predicated on the idea that we would return

to this moment that the film begins with,
the moment where

they walk into their own lie.

Well, yes, until they hit the ground,
the lie doesn't exist.

Exactly, until they hit the ground,
they could always...

One or other of them could undo it.

But the moment they walk off
and shake the hands of

their political masters and admirers,

they've done the deal with the devil,
essentially.

The Faustian moment,
the Faustian bargain has been sealed.

As she now acknowledges
the moral damage that, that has done

and could do for a generation that follows.

But this was a lie.

The door opens up again and we see
these people from the front for the first time.

There's a very potent moment where
she looks out at the future that awaits her,

that we, of course, now know
and she doesn't.

And the somehow accusative quality
of these vehicles

coming out of the whiteness towards them.

And the look to David, which isn't returned.

- There you have it. The Debt.
- The Debt.

And a very, very lengthy list of credits
because the movie was shot

in three countries by three different crews.

It's worth nothing that Eitan Evan,
who's one of the producers on the film,

produced the original movie
and also provided

our production services in Israel,

so there is a real connection.

Yes, a nice circle closed.