The extraordinary life of the ‘Jojo Rabbit’ writer
The New Zealand-based author behind Taika Waititi’s new film has taken a surprising route to writing.
‘‘Jojo Rabbit is beautifully filmed, with a sort of dream-like aspect... he faithfully follows the book’s structure then lays his own special touches of humour over the top. This humour is in service of something darker and Taika is a real master of that.’’
Christine Leunens
From Givenchy and Vogue to Jojo Rabbit
In my mind, bombs going off, rushing water, a mighty tearing of metal. In my hand, a halfeaten Christmas mince pie. Across from me on my Mother-In-Law’s couch sat Christine Leunens, author of the novel upon which Taika Waititi’s new Jojo Rabbit feature film is based.
Silent night. Holy night. We collided at a Christmas party on a warm summer evening in Nelson, with family and friends hollering out carols in the hallway.
Leunens was telling me about the book she was working on and, as befits a writer who’d relocated from France to Aotearoa, that book considered a pivotal dramatic incident between those two cultures. I took another mouthful of pastry, peel and dried fruit as I remembered that fateful night in 1985 when explosives sanctioned in Paris breached a ship’s hull here in the South Pacific, killing a crew member as the Rainbow Warrior sank in Auckland Harbour.
‘‘Oh, I am a little embarrassed this conversation was so long ago!’’ says Leunens from her Nelson home. ‘‘What was it – four years ago, that Christmas party? And I am still working on that same Rainbow Warrior book! But it is almost finished now.’’
On phone or in person, Leunens is unfailingly warm, thoughtful and charming. Her voice has a husky undercurrent and a pronounced French accent, though she was born in Hartford, Connecticut to an Italian mother and a Belgian father.
Brainy, beautiful, prodigiously gifted, she’s such an over-achiever, I feel like a talentless chump in her presence.
Now in her mid-50s, Leunens speaks multiple languages, has a Master’s degree from Harvard and a PhD from Victoria. She is a violinist in the Nelson Symphony Orchestra and was a Givenchy model in Paris before she discovered her vocation as a writer.
What a life she has had, and it has been lived all over, with extended periods in America, France, and for the past 13 years or so, Palmerston North and Nelson.
We first ran into one another in 2013, when we were both featured writers at a literary festival in Whanganui.
‘‘Oh, yes! When I met you at that festival, I was there to talk about my book being turned into a film. It is amazing that it took so long, right?’’
Yes, but it got there in the end, and is now very much the film of the moment. Taika Waititi’s latest film Jojo Rabbit is based upon Leunens’ novel
Caging Skies, first published in 2004, and the very day I talk to her, it scooped up the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Past winners at Toronto include The King’s Speech, 12 Years a Slave, Slumdog Millionaire and Green Book, all of which went on to win the Best Picture Oscar.
‘‘It is so fabulous!’’ says Leunens, who has just heard news of the win when I call. ‘‘Even though it got a standing ovation when it was screened, Jojo
Rabbit has been divisive. Some people praised it to the sky, and other reviewers had real issues with it. It’s been interesting, watching that all unfold.’’
Leunens notes other films that approached the horrors of war in an unexpected manner – specifically The Pianist and Life Is Beautiful – came to be much celebrated over time. ‘‘A lot of analysis is far too fast and simplistic these days. It’s not ideal when art is seen as just some passing entertainment quickly thrown out into the market, like a consumer object. You have to let things settle and think about them. That’s what I wanted to happen with this story when I wrote it, and people will need to take time digesting the film, too.’’
Set in Vienna, the story follows a zealous young Nazi boy – a member of the Hitler Youth – who discovers his mother is hiding a Jewish girl during the final weeks of World War II.
Caging Skies has now been published in more than 20 countries and, as well as the new film, gave rise to a 2017 stage play.
It must be a strange old business, when something you have meticulously researched and written over a period of many years is then refashioned by someone else.
‘‘Yes, but of course, these are someone else’s interpretations, not my own work. Watching the play in Wellington was my first experience of seeing a cast of characters right in front of me, in flesh and blood, acting out my story, but it unfolded very much as I saw things in my head.’’
Watching Jojo Rabbit was a very different experience: the scale grander, the tone substantially altered, Hollywood A-Lister Scarlett Johansson in a key role, and so on.
‘‘I feel proud to have this artistic collaboration with Taika, because his films are very special. Jojo
Rabbit is beautifully filmed, with a sort of dreamlike aspect to it, and he faithfully follows the book’s structure then lays his own special touches of humour over the top. This humour is in service of something darker, and Taika is a real master of that.’’
When Leunens watched Waititi’s early film,
Boy, she laughed along like everyone else, but sees it as a very sad story. ‘‘I was profoundly moved by it. The laughter in Boy opened you up to a deeper sadness, and he has done the same thing with Jojo
Rabbit. You are laughing at these absurd or surreal moments he’s created, which gives contrast to deeper emotions.’’
This contrast between war’s violence, desperation and tragedy and the film’s more satirical elements upset some early reviewers and not everyone was ready to embrace the spectacle of Waititi playing Hitler as a child’s buffoonish imaginary friend. ‘‘Yes, but I think the people who wrote negative reviews don’t really get Taika. He’s not taking anything lightly when he’s presenting Hitler like that. He’s trying to deflate him, showing him with the sort of raw insight a child has when they see adults the way they really are.
‘‘In old documentaries, you see him trying to show how warm he is by holding children. Stalin and Kim Jong-Il also presented themselves this way. They built a relationship with children to present themselves as empathetic, and that’s what Taika’s Hitler is trying to do. Taika is asking how does a tyrant engage the idealism of someone who’s young and innocent? How does he make them feel they should behave a certain way to help save their country?’’
Jojo Rabbit has been a real labour of love for Waititi, she says.
‘‘Taika took the option on the film eight years ago. Within a year, he had the screenplay done, but he couldn’t get the money to make it in the way he thought it should be made. And then, after he had success with Hunt for The Wilderpeople and What We Do In The Shadows ,he got offered Thor, and that changed everything.’’ Thor: Ragnarok was a huge critical and commercial success. Released in 2017, it revitalised the tired superhero franchise and hauled in around US$854 million worldwide.
Waititi was subsequently offered other hugebudget extravaganzas, including upcoming Star Wars and a further Thor sequel but he chose instead to do a smaller, more personal movie first: Jojo Rabbit.
‘‘A lot of directors would have said ‘Hey, I’m being offered Star Wars’ and made another huge blockbuster, but he really believed in this film. His commitment never wavered, even though it took him eight years to get it done.’’
Waititi had previously written to Leunens, apologising over the endless delays.
‘‘He said, Christine, this is going to be one of the most important films I ever make; will you wait 10 years if that’s what it takes? I said yes, of course. And now, by coincidence, all that waiting means that this film arrives at a time when it’s more pertinent than ever.’’
It’s true. Jojo Rabbit hits our screens against a real-world backdrop of escalating Right-wing ideology.
When Leunens was researching the original book, the rise of racism, a denial of basic facts, an unapologetic embracing of fascist ideology – these things all seemed to be largely consigned to the past. ‘‘They seemed like historical factors unlikely to ever happen again. I was born 20 years after World War II had ended, and people of my generation mostly thought of it as a terrible period portrayed in documentaries you’d seen, flickering, in black and white. But that part of history seems less distant now.’’
Leunens was a studious kid, immersing herself in books by authors from different countries and cultures and centuries, feeling a kinship with fictional characters that seemed to increase her understanding of the real world.
She moved from America to France in her teens
to study, but life veered sideways for a while: a scout saw her sunbathing on a beach and she was offered a modelling contract on the spot.
She posed for Vogue, Marie Claire and many others, became the face of fashion designers Givenchy, Pierre Balmain, Paco Rabanne and Nina Ricci, and fronted a global TV ad campaign for Mercedes-Benz. Years were spent on photographic assignments throughout Europe, Japan, Turkey, Africa and Egypt. Her travels gave her experiences that still inform her writing, but Leunens is happier sitting in a room, writing ‘‘with nobody looking at me’’, having long ago exchanged couture gowns for a T-shirt and 501s.
‘‘Looking back, I can’t say I got any real satisfaction from so many people being interested in what I looked like. I don’t feel pride when I look at a magazine spread I did for Vogue, but writing is really satisfying to me. I can go so deep into people’s interior lives, slowly and with complexity, over years and years sometimes. That’s very rewarding, in a way that modelling never was.’’
Leunens’ first novel, Primordial Soup, was published in 1999 and was added to the Essential Reading List of the Association of UK Libraries in 2004. ‘‘Kinky, grotesque and very funny’’, reckoned
Publisher’s Weekly, and ‘‘not for the faint of heart.’’ Caging Skies followed and was shortlisted for one of France’s most prestigious literary awards, the Prix Me´ dicis.
Set here in New Zealand and exploring the fraught relationship between a woman and her mother-in-law, Leunens’ third novel A Can of
Sunshine grew out of her Doctoral studies and was published in 2013.
Leunens married her French partner Axel in 1999, wearing a gown presented to her by the house of Givenchy. The couple now have three sons aged 18, 16 and 14, and have been living here since 2006.
Her fourth novel is, she insists, almost finished, but she told me this once before, at a Christmas party many years ago.
‘‘No really, it’s true! It has taken a while, because I like to think long and deeply about things, and to focus in closely on themes I think are important. For example, this Rainbow Warrior one, I really thought I was the one to write it, because I was living in France when the bombing took place and I have since moved to New Zealand. I have different angles to view this incident and to me it is a story about individual responsibility.’’
Fiction can be a great way to challenge what has become the dominant narrative about real-world events, she says.
‘‘A movie presents characters and images flowing past you in an emotionally concentrated way, like a dream. But when you read a book, it’s the only time you can go inside another human being’s mind and look out through their eyes. You care about what’s happening to them as if it’s your own life, which makes you feel more empathy for other people and the wider world. This has never been more important.’’