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Michael Haneke Plays Funny Games With Naomi Watts
Writer-director returns to the scene(s) of an earlier crime
(Page 3)
MM: You’ve essentially taken something that’s a critique of Hollywood’s blithe attitude toward screen violence and sold it back to them using their money and their actors. Could you have done something more subversive?
MH: No, I think that would be impossible. (laughs)
MM: The original film felt like an antidote to the sort of “screen violence is fun and cool” ideology of Quentin Tarantino that was everywhere in the 1990s.
MH: That’s true. Tarantino sold violence as an amusement—as consumable. He was very much part of the system that Funny Games is asking viewers to dismantle, in a way.
MM: So I wonder if, in remaking this movie 10 years later, the new version is an antidote to something else in the culture?
MH: Unfortunately, the situations that the movie took on in the late 1990s have not changed very much. If anything, they’ve grown far worse; look at the Saw movies if you don’t believe me. The notion of extreme violence being produced and sold as entertainment has increased tenfold, so in a way, Funny Games seems all the more to up-to-date and apropos.
MM: There was a quote you had after the release of the original that said anyone who left in the middle of the movie didn’t need to see it, and anyone sick enough to stay until the end did.
MH: That is even more true now! Specifically, American audiences need this film more than they did then. Go ahead and enjoy your violence, but in my movies, you will enjoy it with a bad conscience!
MM: Do you remember the first time you saw an example of screen violence that made you think, hey, this shouldn’t be treated as a lark?
MH: Hmm… I do remember seeing Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet as a boy with my grandmother, and the film begins with this dark, foreboding intro involving the ghost of his father. I apparently ran out of the theater, incredibly scared. So you could trace it back to that, really. As an adult, you’re exposed—directly or indirectly—to more real instances of violence, so you start to catch on that the atrocities you see in the movies aren’t representative of the real thing. But your complicity starts the moment the lights go down in a theater.
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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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