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A DIRECTOR OF "CHARACTER" | PAGE 2 OF 2 That emphasis on the visual allowed you to paint the father as a very cryptic character. There's one scene in particular, in which he goes after a boy hiding out in one of his buildings -- presumably to kill him -- and even though he's getting shot at, he keeps after the boy, as if he himself would rather die. And the whole time, the son is watching with a horrified expression on his face -- You know, reactions to this film have been virtually the same all over the planet. But it's funny -- in the States, that scene is brought up more often than any other. Is it because it's about guns, or ... what is it? Maybe it's because that's the first time that he is shown to be a morally ambiguous character, not just an evil tyrant. That is actually right, it's the first time that I tried to introduce to the audience what drives him, and suggest where he will eventually end up. But it's also a classic parent-hating moment -- Katadreuffe realizes that he can't hate his father completely without denying a part of himself. Which is actually an everyday horror for most of us (laughs). And you don't really need terrible parents for that to be true. What this film needs to tell you -- well, first of all, film doesn't need to tell you anything. I'm not that kind of a filmmaker. But at the core of the film, it's about how our characters are built, how we become what we are through our parents, by our upbringing, how we first try to escape from that. Everybody wants that. We all want to escape our parents. And there comes a moment in life that we start to realize that we can't quite escape them. We have to find a way to come to terms with them, and with the fact that, oh my God, we are becoming like them. That is what the film is really about. In a way, it's a film about people I know -- I know a lot of people who are not very well-equipped to deal with emotions or feelings, or do not have great communicative skills. In this film, we have only repressed characters that suffer from that. And it leads to their downfall, one way or another. Both on and off the screen, I have the tendency to defend those kinds of people -- in a lot of cases those people cannot help themselves, and what I'm sort of showing in this film is how these people re-create themselves from one generation to another. Does the novel share the same moral? No. The book ends where the film starts. The young man goes up to his father -- he once was a working-class boy and now he's a high-class lawyer -- and says, "I'm just here to tell you that I've reached my goals, and I'll never see you again." And the father says, "Look, son, I've never worked against you, I've only worked for you -- I've only done this to make a man out of you." Whatever that means. And his son takes a look at his father, and walks off into the horizon, and that's the end of the book. And I thought, Wait wait wait a minute! These are the '90s. That sort of educational philosophy may have gone over well in the '40s and '50s, but now, even the guy that sweeps the street has a basic concept of psychology and knows that this kind of one-sided education is ultimately very destructive. So what I did was have the guy walk out -- then literally turn around and go back in. I wanted to sort of surprise the connoisseurs of the novel right in the first minute by showing the famous last scene and then turning things around. I thought that would be kind of funny. But what drives the characters is basically true to the book. It's only the father's character that we enhanced with this dark shadow. How were you able to infuse a contemporary sensibility into such an epic tale? All I did was try not to be very intimidated by the huge sets, and costumes. I talked my producer into giving me a steady-cam, so I could move freely around the set. I wanted to keep the camera moving to sort of counterpoint the photography, which is sometimes really breathtaking, but I didn't want to create a perfect picture-book. I wanted a "motion" picture, in the true meaning of the word. And I went for atmosphere. I actually had some fights with the costume director about historical accuracy. Sometimes I would want things that weren't very historically accurate, but to me they felt exactly right for the scene. I convinced them to let me use that stuff. Because in a really good film, you do not tend to take notice of the collars. SALON | April 3, 1998