Postcards from the edge

ALONE IN BERLIN I Brendan Gleeson and Emma Thompson prove resistance isn’t always futile…

Sometimes you choose a book to adapt; sometimes it chooses you. For director Vincent Pérez, taking on Hans Fallada’s seminal wartime novel Alone In Berlin was a bit of both. “It was as if the book was answering a load of questions I was asking myself about that time, about Germany,” he says. Inspired by the real actions of Otto and Elise Hampel, the story tells of Otto and Anna Quangel, an ordinary German couple who wage a homespun propaganda war against the Nazis after the death of their son.

Researching the project, actorturned director Pérez was struck by “similarities” between their story and his own family (his father was German, his mother Spanish). With his uncle murdered on the Russian front and a great uncle killed in a prototype gas chamber, his grandfather was also shot by Franco’s regime – with Pérez even finding “the letter he wrote to his son, my father, one hour before he was shot”. Little wonder he found solace in Fallada’s book, published in 1947 but a surprise hit when it was rediscovered and printed in English in 2009.

Pérez, who made his name as an actor in films such as Indochine and Cyrano De Bergerac, admits adapting Fallada’s hefty tome was a nervy process. “I was afraid. We sacrificed so many great stories, so many great characters, but then you have to enter

the logic of making a film.” Paring it down, he focused on the Quangels (played by Brendan Gleeson and Emma Thompson) as they set about dropping anti-Nazi postcards secretly around Berlin, and Escherich (Daniel Brühl), the police inspector hunting them.

Arguably the biggest change – one that drew criticism when the film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival last February – was making it in English, but Pérez remains adamant he made the right choice. “It changed the moral of the subject of the film. Suddenly we weren’t making a film for them – the Germans – we were making a film for us. Meaning for all of us. It’s not about the Germans, but all of us.”

ETA | 30 JUNE / ALONE IN BERLIN OPENS LATER THIS MONTH.