Youth is not wasted on this young man

"I think for Mr. Schlink," Daldry said, "he comes from a generation that had to find a way, where you're brought up and loved by your parents and your teachers and then you discover they've been involved in one of the unspeakable crimes of the 20th century. So the question is how do you love and how can you possibly exist with this idea of being born guilty.

"I think that we worked quite hard to allow an ambiguity about the character of Hanna, and I hope that people can have a very complicated personal response to it without feeling that it's overly schematic."

After a few sips of coffee, Kross became more engaged in discussing the process of making the film.

"I remember how you told me that I had the part," Kross noted to Daldry. "You didn't tell me for a long time, and then we were talking about the part like I was playing it, and I asked you, 'Am I playing the part?' And you said, 'Oh, by the way, I didn't tell you. . . .' "

"Well, we spent a lot of time auditioning other actors," picked up Daldry, "and doing all that. I do remember I'd sort of made the decision and hadn't actually passed it on."

As Daldry tells it, the film began shooting in fall of 2007, took a break just after the holidays, picked up again in the spring, took another break to wait for Kross to turn 18 before filming his love scenes with Winslet, and finally finished production this July.

"It's very funny," noted Daldry. "I watch the movie and sometimes from one shot to the next there might be almost a year difference. But people don't notice. I notice because I was there."

For Kross, the interrupted filming schedule actually helped his creative process.

"The breaks were good, they were fantastic," he said. "I got everything into my head and then I could go home and let it settle, think about it and go over the story again. It helped for me very much."

Daldry asked Kross about a specific moment during the filming, when the actor tears up during a scene at Schmitz's trial. Perhaps inadvertently, the young German points to at least one way out of the endless cycle of guilt and shame the movie implies.

"It's hard to talk about this because it's such a long time ago," Kross responded, "and I'm in a different movie. That's probably what an actor does, but my mind is still in Cambodia."

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