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Michael Haneke Plays Funny Games With Naomi Watts
Writer-director returns to the scene(s) of an earlier crime
A family is traveling to their country vacation home. As they drive, the parents take turns playing “guess the classical composer” (Schubert? Brahms?) with the CD player. Their son laughs approvingly in the back seat. The scene couldn’t be more bucolic or benign, until Mom slips in a new musical selection—and over the soundtrack, we hear a loud, jarring skitter-metal tune from avant-garde musician John Zorn. The happy trio looks peaceful and content; viewers, meanwhile, try to recalibrate their central nervous systems.
That opening of Michael Haneke’s 1997 meta-thriller Funny Games was the first indication that the German director’s pitch-black examination of screen violence wasn’t planning on playing by the rules. It’s such an effective sneak preview of the horrors that lie on the horizon in this house invasion tale that it’s not surprising Haneke repeats the sequence in Funny Games U.S., a remake of his breakthrough movie. If it wasn’t for the fact that the original’s Austrian leads have been replaced by Tim Roth and Naomi Watts, you’d swear the projectionist had thrown on the first version by mistake: The scene is replicated with such scrupulous fidelity that it’s almost a carbon copy. As is the next scene. And the next. And the next…
For folks who’ve been following Haneke’s career since Funny Games (and dipped into his earlier back catalog), the notion that he’d decide to do a shot-for-shot remake shouldn’t really come as a surprise. Despite the fact that his cold, clipped examinations of the worst aspects of humanity often make a misanthrope like Kubrick seem warm and fuzzy in comparison, he has always appreciated a good (albeit usually sick) joke and sought to thwart expectations. So what could be more unexpected than a director reproducing one of his most notable achievements down to the last minor detail? What is odd is that this longtime critic of the American entertainment industry is doing it with Hollywood’s money: The movie is being released by Warner Independent Pictures, the indie boutique arm of Warner Bros., starring a genuine A-list female star. While the domestic arthouse crowd that made Haneke’s last film, 2005’s Caché, a success will probably appreciate the gesture, it’s hard to say whether a mainstream audience is ready to embrace such an in-your-face indictment of their own complicity in treating torture as entertainment. In any case… let the Games begin.
David Fear (MM): Let’s get this out of the way: Why a shot-for-shot remake of Funny Games ?
Michael Haneke (MH): Well, the first film was made to reach an audience that consumes violence as entertainment… and that means it was made primarily for an American audience. Even the big country house in the original, you wouldn’t find something like that in Austria; it’s supposed to represent an American vacation house, built for a family. In any case, since the first movie is in German, it didn’t reach as large an audience as it might have here in the States. The film did well in the art houses, but that wasn’t the audience that, shall we say, needed to see this. So when [producer] Chris Coen approached me in Cannes and asked if I’d be interested in doing it, I told him I’d be glad to do it—on the condition that I could get Naomi Watts to play the lead. The film really was contingent on that. Since the message of the film hadn’t changed, I didn’t see any reason to change the aesthetics or dramaturgy.
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by Kaela on 4/01/08 at 8:26 pm
I spent 16 dollars on this movie. It was boaring and predictable. Not interesting or thirlling. A waste of my time and money. I don’t know how I would get ahold of someone to get my money back but If anyone knows please contact me.
This story was published in the Winter 2008 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Match Point
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