Casting of boy in Nazi camp crucial
And the $ 15 million budget was daunting for a European film, especially one in which the characters speak Hungarian. The Nobel Prize helped persuade the Hungarian government to invest heavily in the film. But getting money from co- production partners in Germany and the United Kingdom proved much more difficult. One of the big challenges was finding the right boy to play the story’s young hero, who by the end of the film has more wisdom than any of the adults around him, with their stale and conventional ideas of what the Holocaust was really about.
It had to be someone with a certain kind of face, one that the audience would fall in love with, that was contemporary enough for teenagers to accept as someone like them. The role needed someone who draws you in and makes you care about what’s going on inside him.
Koltai looked at 4,000 photos and interviewed 1,000 boys before he picked Marcell Nagy — a 14- year- old first- year high school student in Budapest who was only 12 when he was cast in the film. During the shoot, he grew several inches, and his voice changed.
“ Before I made the movie, the only things I knew about the Holocaust were what I saw in movies like Schindler’s List and The Pianist,” Nagy explained yesterday, speaking with the help of a translator. “ We hadn’t learned anything about it at school. Now I know too much about it.”
Early on in the shoot, the financing fell apart, and filming was suspended for four months. It resumed only after Andras Hamori — a Hungarian-born Jew who began his film career in Toronto in the 1980s before moving to Los Angeles — stepped in as producer to save the project. The first part of the movie quietly builds a shocking answer to the question of why Hungarian Jews stepped into crowded wagons taking them to death camps. And it offers a marvellous glimpse of the Hungarian Jewish community in the last days when there was anything resembling normal life, including the final hours before the boy’s father is taken away. Hungary and Germany were allies in the war, and vicious laws targeting Jews had been passed in Hungary as early as 1938. But it was not until Hitler occupied Hungary in 1944 that the noose really closed on the Jews. They were then forced to wear yellow stars and live in the Jewish ghetto. In 1944, hundreds of thousands were transported to concentration camps, primarily Auschwitz, where most died in gas chambers.
Fateless is the story of a boy who lived through all that — and came back to discover that the life he used to have no longer existed.
This is a movie without emotion, without hysteria. It is told through a series of small details, from an ironic distance. And the most horrifying thing is how one event logically leads to another, until we have arrived at the unimaginably horrific. We begin to see the daily routine of the camp as somehow normal, just as the hero does. But the greatest impact of the movie — which will be released in early 2006, and should be a clear favourite for an Oscar in the foreign-film category — comes after the camps have been liberated. The boy’s return to Budapest is anything but joyful. His home is gone, he can’t even ride a streetcar, and somehow, feeling different from the way he knows he is supposed to feel, he has a strong longing for the camaraderie of the camp. In its amazing conclusion, Fateless shatters just about every cliché about the Holocaust we’ve ever had. Fateless screens tomorrow at 10 a.m. at the Cumberland. mknelman@thestar.ca