Tangled Magazine

Remake, retake, reviolate

By Brendan Murphy
 
Michael Pitt talks about walking the well-trod path of Michael Haneke’s thinking man’s horror film, Funny Games

The 2008 version of Funny Games is director Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of the movie he directed over 10 years ago in German about two young men who kidnap and torture a family. Through a twisting of conventions and expectations, it skewers the violent films some audiences will mistake it for being among. Michael Pitt plays one of the young psychos, and, on the phone from New York, admits that working through the nearly shot-for-shot recreation was challenging.

“It’s easy to put your take on a character when there’s no boundaries; it’s much harder when there’s a lot of restrictions. I knew that going in, so I took it as an exercise - like, ‘Look, if you can’t do what you do within that restriction, then you’re not very good.’”

Pitt watched the movie once before meeting with Haneke, an Austrian director whose resumé includes intelligent, challenging films like Caché, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance and Benny’s Video, but doesn’t pretend to know the director’s catalogue inside and out.

“I didn’t know him that well - I never went to film school so a lot of the art house films, directors, I’m pretty uneducated. But when I saw the film and when I met Michael, it was obvious there was quality in what he makes and how much work he puts into it.”

A great deal of the film’s power comes from the interplay between Pitt and Brady Corbet, whose duo of disturbed young characters exude a spit-shined WASPy creepiness that deliberately masks their motives.  

“There were times it was like we were shooting two movies - you shoot one side of the coverage on me and Brady and it’s very light and almost comic and polite, and then you turn around and do the coverage on the family and they’re tortured and crying and gasping for air.”

Like its predecessor, this instalment of Funny Games isn’t exactly the violent film it at first appears to be - the audience is pulled into the movie through a couple of crumblings of the fourth wall, a flat lack of morality and a fistful of loose plot threads.

“A lot of the film is build-up, and even then, the violence is anti-climatic. It makes a comment on all these violent films we make in America, where all the violence is shown in a very entertaining way, with little or no consequence, and the audience doesn’t really go through anything.”

The obvious question seems to be: Will the people who love the torture porn of Saw or Tarantino’s funky violence go see this movie, let alone understand it?

“Probably only a select few will get out of it what the filmmaker intends, which is usually the way it goes, but I think it’s set up in a really good way that anyone who wouldn’t will probably get bored and leave.”

As for Pitt, he’s equally (if not more) content talking about his band Pagoda than he is about filmmaking. Though, having now worked with directors that include Gus Van Sant and Bernardo Bertolucci, it would appear that, like it or not, he’s one of the more interesting young actors working today.

Source: Hour.ca