Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke's "Funny Games," which opens Friday, is a painstakingly exacting remake of his own 1997 film of the same title. The story begins when a pair of young men, dressed in immaculate tennis whites, arrives at the summer cottage of a pleasantly bourgeois couple, who are on holiday with their young son. After a seemingly innocuous misunderstanding -- something about borrowing eggs -- the boys take the family captive, subjecting them to brutal psychological humiliations and severe physical torments.
One of the world's most respected filmmakers, Haneke, who turns 66 this month, is a winner of multiple prizes at the Cannes Film Festival and a subject of a recent retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art. So there is something disconcertingly downmarket about such an upscale filmmaker doing an English-language remake of his own work. Yet in Haneke's world things are rarely as they seem.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday, March 09, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 38 words Type of Material: Correction
'Funny Games': The caption for a photograph with a story in today's Calendar section about the film "Funny Games" misidentifies one of the actors as Michael Pitt. The actor in the scene with Tim Roth is Brady Corbet.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday, March 16, 2008 Home Edition Sunday Calendar Part E Page 2 Calendar Desk 1 inches; 36 words Type of Material: Correction
'Funny Games': A March 9 photo caption with a Sunday Calendar article about the film "Funny Games" misidentified one of the actors as Michael Pitt. Brady Corbett was the actor in the scene with Tim Roth.
Despite Haneke's use of formal devices of increasing audacity to break down the fourth wall and repeatedly remind audiences that they are only watching a film, "Funny Games" can feel at times like a dirty trick being played on viewers. The original sharply divided critics, many of whom could not stomach the cruel dispassion with which Haneke portrayed the sordid goings-on.
Which is precisely as it should be, according to Haneke. As in many of his previous films ("Benny's Video," "The Piano Teacher" and "Cache"), Haneke wants audiences to think hard about what they are watching rather than passively accepting the ideological implications of what flows from the screen.
"The film was always intended for an English-language audience because the subject matter -- the consumption of violence -- is most prevalent in English-language filmmaking," Haneke said via translator recently on the phone from Austria when asked why he chose to revisit his prior work. "Because the [original] film was in German it just didn't reach the audience for which it was intended."
The new iteration came about when producer Chris Coen approached Haneke for the remake rights to "Funny Games," and the director said he would prefer to do it himself. Having worked with such European stars as Juliette Binoche and Isabelle Huppert, Haneke insisted on casting Naomi Watts -- he said he would likely have not made the new film if she had said no -- rounding out the family with Tim Roth and Devon Gearhart and casting Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet as their captors.
For the shot-for-shot production, Haneke's original script was translated into English with a few minor changes to accommodate cultural differences, and he used his original storyboards to plan the new shoot. Where Haneke's shooting script during the production of the initial film was dotted with drawings, for the remake his script was augmented with screen captures from the original.
Where previous shot-by-shot remakes such as Gus Van Sant's "Psycho" often felt like cold exercises, Haneke's remake adds additional layers of discomfort to the experience. Even when you know what's coming, it still stings.
The cast members all watched the first version before shooting, in part to know what they were in for, but once the production started Haneke instructed them not to revisit it. Haneke's precise instructions made the performers feel at times as if they were working within a straitjacket, but they nevertheless manage to imbue the story with a dark humor that is largely unmined in the original, transforming the material at times into an unlikely comedy of manners.
"He's a pretty easy guy to have faith in," said Corbet, "and he was tough on everybody. He was very precise, like 'after this line, wipe your forehead here and place your right hand on the counter here and then take four steps forward.' It's not exactly organic."
"Sometimes he would get fixated on a certain thing and how he wanted it to be the same," explained Watts, "but he was careful to help us make sure that the first film was something separate. He didn't want to just repeat."
Close to the original
The re-creation was so detailed that those changes that do exist -- the way Pitt glances at the camera or an alarming alteration in costume for Watts -- take on the feeling of enormous, seismic shifts. Even Haneke was shocked by how precisely the films match up.
"The film, as it happens, is really only 15 or 20 seconds different from the original," he explained. "If you look at the film as a whole, it's a few minutes, but that is simply because the credits in the United States are so much longer.
"And I didn't even do this intentionally. We shot about half the film and cut it, and when I asked my editor to compare it to the original it was just a few seconds' difference. We found this really quite amazing as we hadn't intended it to be that close on purpose."
