‘Fade’ into darkness
Kruger pours heart into role of mother grieving after terrorist attack
NEW YORK — Diane Kruger won acclaim as Marie Antoinette in “Farewell, My Queen” and for playing a glamorous anti-Nazi spy in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds.”
But to portray “In the Fade’s” Katja, a woman consumed by grief and rage when her young son and husband are murdered in a terrorist attack, meant going to a different level.
“Honestly, when I first read it,” Kruger, 41, began during a oneon-one interview at the Crosby Street Hotel, “I thought, ‘Why is he (German-Turkish writer-director Fatih Akin) thinking about me for this?’ This is something I’ve never been offered. Not even remotely!
“And then I was, ‘Am I ready for this?’ And the worst was, he wasn’t 100 percent sure either at first. That’s great! Fatih took a risk. I will never forget that.”
His faith proved correct: Last May, Kruger won Cannes’ best actress award and now “In the Fade” is shortlisted as an Oscar best foreign language film nominee.
The German language film is inspired by a notorious real-life Hamburg attack on its GermanTurkish immigrant community. Kruger’s Katja struggles to cope in the aftermath of her loss and a subsequent trial.
She prepared intensely. “I don’t have children. I was desperately trying to find the truth, the depths of grief these people endure that I can’t imagine.
“For over six months I sat in with these groups. It’s something I will never forget. It’s hard to even describe, this sense when you look a mother in her face it’s the complete emptiness.
“Like something was ripped apart and will never be filled. And the rage that I felt in those families when murder happens. Through no fault of your own, somebody rips someone from your life and you will never be the same. The injustice of that! That I really felt.”
“Fade” deserves to be seen, Kruger said, because
“it connects people. It raises awareness of something that we start to get numb to because people are frustrated being reduced to numbers: ‘500 people died.’
‘50 people got killed. Who was the killer? What were his motivations?’
“All this does is we forget what this does to people who stay. I feel like people who watch this film, whether they like it or not, it doesn’t leave you indifferent.” (“In the Fade” opens Friday.)