There are directors who like to keep their actors in the dark. And then there are directors who literally commit to trapping their company of players in… the… dark.
On Tuesday night, Agnieszka Holland told the crowd at TheWrap’s Awards Series Screening of “In Darkness” how she overcame the challenge of shooting the Holocaust epic in extremely low light.
The vast majority of the film takes place in sewers where a group of Jewish refugees take shelter for months at the height of World War II. The result more than lives up to its name, being almost literally a film noir.
“It was challenging,” Holland told Sharon Waxman, TheWrap’s Editor-in-Chief and the evening’s moderator, “but for me, as a filmmaker, it was a positive challenge. It was one of the reasons I finally said I cannot not make this movie, because how many times in a lifetime do you have the opportunity to shoot your entire movie, or 80 percent of the movie, in the darkness? Probably once.”
And not everybody gets that offer, she pointed out to the Landmark crowd. Children and grandchildren of the real-life Jews who survived the ordeal were on hand for The Wrap’s screening, taking their own trip into that visceral dimness for the first time.
This is Holland's third Holocaust drama, following her breakout arthouse hit “Europa Europa” and the lesser known “Angry Harvest.” Testing her ability to make a film rich in characters, emotion, and action helped counter-balance any feeling of been-there-done-that, or emotional exhaustion on the topic.
“When the script was sent to me, I was moved by the story, but I passed on it,” Holland said. “I said to myself, ‘I cannot go there any more.’ But the writer was persistent (and told me) that I’m the person who can tell this story.”
If anyone else tries to suggest that three Holocaust films is too many, she understandably bristles. “There’s a lot of people who are asking, ‘Why another Holocaust story?’ Which I don’t understand, because nobody’s asking, ‘Why another romantic comedy?’ ”
The director knew what prettifying traps she wanted to avoid. “When you see movies like ‘The Third Man’ with Orson Welles,” Holland explained, “the sewers of Vienna look beautiful. The cinematographer put the lights in the bottom of these tunnels, and it gives you the counter-light and it looks like a Gothic cathedral or something. I didn’t want that. I wanted it to be as it is, which means dark and dull and wet and unbearable.
"But at the same time, of course, we wanted you to see what’s important -- to see the action, to see the expressions on the faces of the people, to be with them.”
Holland said that each of her three films about the Holocaust grapple with the intersection of the Jewish experience and Jewish victimization in the war and the gentile world around them.
