- Notes provided by Sony Pictures Classics. -

Director'S Statement

I never thought I'd dare make a concentration camp movie.

So why make one now?

Nowadays you no longer have to disseminate the basic facts about concentration camps. Since Life is Beautiful one can, may and indeed must narrate individual fates which don`t claim to represent all victims. One can tell universal stories and limit oneself to small but relevant fragments of the overall truth.

Our hero Spiranoff closes his eyes to what is happening. So do we as the viewers joining him: we have to see only in very small details what could not be shown anyway. But we do have to listen with him to the horror behind the fence. This can generate a much larger and thus more authentic sense of horror in the head of the viewer.

What's particularly interesting is the grotesquely privileged situation of our characters: this allows us to approach this horror by virtue of its absence. We learn what an unimaginable luxury it is not to be beaten or to eat one's watery soup in peace and quiet; we see grown men weeping because they have a name and purposeful occupation again -- all this builds up to form a picture of the kind of hell they have come from.

THE COUNTERFEITERS allows one to look into one of the most interesting aspects of the concentration camp phenomenon: the moral plight of the prisoners. They were often forced to steal from their fellow-inmates in order to avoid starvation -- the worst aspects of human nature were brought out in them, contrary to idealizing notions of self-sacrifice. These people had to adapt to an inhumane system with all the consequences in order to survive. Right down to what is known as "survivor's guilt", the question: Why was I allowed to survive, while so many others had to die?

Being the grandchild of grandparents who were -- some more some less -- attached to the Nazi-party and living in a country that still has big problems dealing with its Nazi past, I always felt that I have to comment on this issue as a filmmaker. When I heard about the counterfeiters for the first time I knew right away that this might be the perfect topic for me.

These days people in Germany and Austria are succumbing to a prurient fascination with evil and its villainous protagonists. They're also discovering their role as "victims".

My greatest concern was to avoid making a clumsy and politically correct film about

coming to terms with history which would become compulsory viewing for school

history lessons.

I aimed for immediacy, avoiding the slickness that characterizes mainstream

entertainment cinema: every shot perfectly lit, every emotion emphasized by the

score. I wanted to underscore the timelessness of the subject, pointing its relevance

for a contemporary audience. I tried to get the liveliness of a "documentary" camera

style with a very mobile camera that gave the actors a lot of freedom. We wanted the

camera to always stay close to their faces to allow us to feel we're there with them

instead of being a distant observer.

In the movie one character says: "I never would be in the position of a Nazi!"

This was the only rule my DP, Benedict Neuenfels, and I set up: the camera must

never show the Nazi's P.O.V., always over shoulder of the inmates, never over

shoulder of a Nazi.

We tried very hard to avoid the cliché of "typical" Jews. In the first draft of the

screenplay all the Jewish concentration camp inmates were sensitive intellectuals

with melancholy features. But more intensive study of the sources made me realize

I'd fallen for a cliché. The real counterfeiters were manual laborers from the suburbs

with the typically blunt Berlin dialect, over-correct Prussian bank officials, smart

commercial photographers. Well-intentioned positive clichés are dangerous as well:

they strengthen the prejudice that Jews are somehow different, a different race.

Many of the scenes in the counterfeiting workshop are scored -- a historically correct

detail -- with light operetta music, a wonderful cipher for the absurdity of the situation.

For Spiranoff, my main character, I chose the tango rather than Jewish folk music.

Tango is melancholy but full of life and passion, pain and love; it is both dissonant

and melodious, the music of the underdog and the petty criminal underworld in the

thirties. It was in keeping with our hero, who, before the war, never felt he was part of

the Jewish world.

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