Oscar stares at me all through lunch. He's been brought along by Mike van Diem, the chipper director of "Character," which won this year's Best Foreign Language Academy Award. Van Diem is almost as excitable as he was when he accepted the award, funny, confident, glib. His movie is a sumptuous period piece, set in 1920s Rotterdam. An aspiring young lawyer, Katadreuffe (Fedja van Hueit), is accused of murdering Dreverhaven (Jan Decleir), scourge of the poor, the city's cruelest bailiff. During an all-night police interrogation, Katadreuffe tells the story of his life, starting with his conception as Dreverhaven's illegitimate son. "Character," based on a much-taught Dutch novel, is filled with Dickens-dark sin, criss-crossing a relentless urban landscape of smudge and mire, damp and soak. (And as with Dickens' work, van Diem's free adaptation is resoundingly sentimental.) The 39-year-old van Diem, who established himself with a Dutch television series he describes as a cross between "L.A. Law" and "thirtysomething," directs in a fever, his camera given to relentless swooping through his invented Rotterdam. It's a crowd-pleaser, a breathless compression of novelistic incident leading toward an inevitable happy ending that is still black as soot.
"Character," the novel, was an unlikely movie. "Most people consider it a rather boring book because the story, truly, isn't very engaging," van Diem says. "But it has these incredible characters. It was obligatory reading for every Dutch high-school student into the 1970s." The Oscar, he jokes, means "it might actually be back to hound future high-school students!" Van Diem says was fascinated by the "moralistic, stubborn, silent characters. And of course it had this theme of the struggle between the father and son." But the book had no ending. "It ends after this thirty-year struggle when the father says to the son, 'Hey! I only did it to give you a tough education," then he walks away. So we came up with a murder-mystery superstructure to make it into a story. And then we took a closer look at Dreverhaven. His darker side was very much between the lines in the novel. All of those things made it seem like, well, a possibly interesting film."
The philosophy of the story, he says, "worked certainly in the fifties and sixties. But nowadays the most common person has a basic knowledge of psychology that would show that such a harsh education can ultimately be very, very destructive." Van Diem says that he took other 1990s liberties in making the movie, particularly in shooting more of a storybook idea of Europe early in the century than a literal reconstruction. "We really took that to the next level," he laughs of the lengthy, twelve-city shoot, necessary since most of old Rotterdam had been destroyed in World War II. "We had someone going into a building in Hamburg, going up a staircase in Poland and ending up in an attic in Rotterdam. We did research, of course, but the old Rotterdam looked just like part of the center of Amsterdam. We thought, 'If we reconstruct that, no one is going to believe us. That is not what you think of when you think of the old Rotterdam.' So we just created our own make-believe city."
Van Diem believes he never could have made the movie in that fashion anywhere else. "We did something that would be absolutely impossible in the States. Make no mistake, we had non-union crews that were very happy, after a strenuous hoot in Germany, to return to their families for two weeks while we were pre-producing in another country. We would start in Holland, shut down, pre-produce in Belgium, shoot, shut down to pre-produce in Germany and so on. Hollywood crews, no way. You have to keep paying these people. Certainly with stars and all, I mean, their schedules would not allow it. A Hollywood actor is supposed to be making money on a day-to-day basis. There are so many things that are simpler in Europe."
But that doesn't mean "Character" was simple to make. "Since we were a low-budget film, the locations had to be perfect. there was simply no money for set alterations. Not computer effects, and not even simple things like matte paintings. We were looking for the perfect location. I made it harder on my production manager, telling him I wouldn't allow any trees to be seen in the first forty-five minutes. Sometimes we would find the perfect square or perfect backyard and there would a be a tree standing there. That was the end of it!"
Yet the look of the movie remained secondary to character, he insists. "I had a great continuity person to keep it together. I had rehearsals, and I had great actors who were more than willing to share the responsibility of maintaining a level of emotional continuity, which is really the only continuity in a film that counts. It's not about your wine glass being half full or full or being on your left side or right. It's about your emotion in a scene. That's the only thing we watch in the cinema, truly."
We pause for a moment, both looking toward his shiny new friend.
by Ray Pride
"Character" opens Friday at the Music Box.
copyright 1998 New City Communications, Inc.