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The Book Thief director Brian Percival returned to his hometown for a special pre-release screening of his film at FACT in Liverpool.
He watched the film with the audience and afterwards took to the microphone for an open Q&A session.
Brian revealed that even though the casting process was straight forward, finding the perfect actor for the main character Liesel Meminger, proved a difficult task.
“We looked all over the world for Liesel. We were in Britain, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria and so on. We saw over a 1000 children for the part,” the award-winning director told the audience.
Eventually he turned to The Book Thief’s writer Markus Zusak for help. He had seen the young Sophie Nélisse in the French-Canadian film Monsieur Lazhar earlier and recommended her.
“We received Sophie’s audition tape and loved her. She was doing gymnastics at the time, training to go to the Olympics two years later. She trained five hours a day, five days a week.
As soon as we cast her, she quit. She now wants to become an actor and puts the same effort into that as she did gymnastics.”
The character Liesel Meminger is certainly a challenging role to play. We first meet her is in 1939, as she and her baby brother are to be given up to foster parents Hans and Rosa Hubermann (Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson).
Liesel’s brother dies on the way there and it is in the small, short funeral on a train stop that she steals her first book “The Grave Digger’s Handbook.”
This sparks a love affair between Liesel and literature, though she cannot read. Through the help of her foster father and the young Jewish man they hide in the cellar, she learns to read and create stories.
The film is a story of childhood during World War II, of how her upbringing is surrounded by death, uncertainty and hatred – but also love, imagination and excitement.
It is ingeniously told through the personification of Death, though this serves more as plot glue in the film. While it makes for some powerful scenes, the ominous idea of lurking fate seems to have been lost in the adaptation.
As a whole the feature feels quite polished and gentle. Even the shots of post-bombed streets or dirtied children seem slightly too organised. As an audience member I struggle to be drawn in and forget the fictitious surroundings.
It certainly is haunting, but without the heart break. There are some very powerful and well directed scenes like the one where a choir of children sing a beautiful song about murdering Jews in their Hitler Youth uniforms, which glides seamlessly into a violent depiction of Kristallnacht.
Though the polished look of the film will most probably disappoint a lot of the book fans, Brian Percival explained this with trying to not scare off a younger audience.
“There are so many great films about World War II out there, that are all quite brutal. I could have made it more violent and graphic, but what would that achieve?”
He continued by saying that he wanted it to be a positive tale about a gruesome time that would speak to viewers Liesel’s age and make them want to research the events surrounding the story.
“During the casting I was just so shocked to learn how many 12-year olds don’t actually know what the Holocaust was.”
Though the casting process may have been hard, it seems to have been worth it, for almost all of the parts. Sophie Nélisse is wonderful and truthful as Lieseil, accompanied by the equally talented child actor Nico Liersch.
Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson share a wonderful on screen chemistry, with him giving perhaps the strongest performance.
The one who slightly disappoints is the unknown Ben Schnetzer in the role as the Jewish refugee Max, whose relationship with Liesel is written to pull our heart strings – but sadly doesn’t.
Like a lot of the film, it is slightly too clinical, and the movie doesn’t delve deeply enough into the world evoked in the book to be completely believable.
The Book Thief is on in UK cinemas from February 26.