Salon Entertainment | A director of "Character"

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Mike van Diem
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FEDJA VAN HUET IN "CHARACTER."
A_.D I R E C T O R_.O F "character"
An interview with Academy Award-_______________
winning director Mike van Diem.____

BY CYNTHIA JOYCE | Last Monday night, when Sharon Stone announced the Academy Award winner for best foreign language film, Mike van Diem, the Dutch director of "Character," did a little victory dance in the aisle before charging the stage to make his acceptance speech, a breathless promise to American audiences that "the subtitles are great."
Three days later, van Diem is seated proudly next to the award in a San Francisco hotel room, and although he is visibly tired, his excitement has barely subsided. Based on the classic Dutch novel of the same name about a young man's lifelong struggle with his tyrannical father, "Character" is van Diem's feature film debut. Prior to this, he was the director of a popular Dutch television drama, something he describes as a cross between "L.A. Law" and "thirtysomething" ("thirtysomething lawyers with a lot of personal problems," he says with a laugh). From television drama to award-winning epic film may seem to some like a great leap, but van Diem says it was a natural one. "Directing the series was like making mini features -- the writers and cast were so great. Working with them for two years definitely gave me the confidence to direct a film of this scale."
Van Diem spoke with Salon about "Character," overdoing it at the Oscars and becoming your parents.
What does it mean to you to have won an Academy Award?
You mean, apart from this physical sensation that I am glowing in the dark, and the buzzing in my head, and I am floating, beaming, shining and I have a perpetual smile on my face -- apart from that? I don't know, the future will tell. I have to tell you that the moment when I got up there on stage, looking at Sharon Stone waiting for me there with that thing, it was like 400 kilos dropped off my back. It was utterly liberating.
I am a romantic person, so the whole romantic aspect of the Oscars was appealing to me. As I was sitting there, watching the show, I was very, very nervous. I was sitting there in row 14, watching people getting so emotional onstage, and I thought, "Aren't they overdoing this a little bit?" Then it turned out that the moment I got onstage myself, I went all out, jumping up and down -- it took me by surprise.
One aspect of winning an Oscar is that presumably people throw an enormous amount of projects at you. Have you thought about what you'd like to do next?
Nope, I'm still looking for something. I would like to do an all-out, great historical drama, a real classic film. A costume drama, maybe, something like "Dangerous Liaisons." That's one of my favorite films. Michelle Pfeiffer makes you believe that there is such a thing as death by heartbreak. That, to me, was amazing.
To what extent have other American films influenced your work?
It must have been, on a subconscious level, a really big influence on my work, because I started out as an avid film-goer as a kid. I am a kind of nerd -- the nerd on the movie quiz-show, that was me. I was actually on one of those shows, in 1978.
If someone put a gun to my head and told me I had to assemble my top 100 favorite films, the top 25 would probably be dominated by European films, but the top 100 would probably be an overwhelming victory for American films. I am more of a storytelling filmmaker, and that has been the tradition in American cinema from very early on. If you compare great Russian films with early American films, from say the 1920s, Russian films have stunning, poetic visuals, but the story isn't really gripping you. The American films, from the very start, know how to suck you into the story.
Is there a distinctly Dutch filmmaking style that you admire?
There have been some great Dutch films around. I still think that the 1979 film by Paul Verhoeven, "Soldier of Orange," which starred Rutger Hauer, was his best work. The original "The Vanishing" -- I thought that was a great film.
But the Dutch film that won the Oscar two years ago, "Antonia's Line," is not a very popular one back home. The Oscar came as a shock to us. We thought it was a good film, but nobody thought it was that good. There was a cultural difference that made the English-language audience appreciate that film so much more than we did.
Probably the reason why "Character" is so incredibly big is because, this time, the film already had a good reputation at home. Right after the nominations, Variety had put the front-runner stamp on it, and the people at home smelled victory -- they went all out. Now the media craze in Holland is unimaginable. There are journalists tracking down people I went to film school with, to interview them about me. I am like Monica Lewinsky (laughs). At home, I am bigger than Monica Lewinsky.
How loose was your interpretation of the novel "Character"?
I changed it a lot. I have always been an original screenplay writer, so that probably gave me the tools to go so freely with it. This book was obligatory reading for every high school student throughout the '40s, '50s, up through the '70s. It became a classic because it had these great characters -- these monumental, silent, characters. But it had virtually no story. So I had to come up with the whole superstructure of the murder mystery -- that wasn't there. What makes it, perhaps, into an interesting film is something that was very much between the lines, but we tried very hard to visualize: the darker side of the father's character, his whole death-defying demeanor, his flirtation with the darkest stuff imaginable.
Even as I hear myself talking about them in this interview, I realize I cannot verbalize those things. I visualize them -- those are all visual scenes in the film, and they were not there in the book. They are, in fact, my favorite part of the film.
N E X T_P A G E _| Becoming your parents