Diane Kruger: The Hollywood Flashback Interview

(Diane Kruger in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, above.)

Diane Kruger

The Blockbuster Beauty Goes Indie

By Terry Keefe

[This article originally appeared in 2006 in Venice Magazine. I had lunch with Diane Kruger at the Chateau Marmont, and I remember most distinctly two things: 1. I've never been around anyone in Hollywood who so many guys were trying to get the attention of. Several Hollywood agent types waved to her as they were entering and leaving with greetings like "Hi, beautiful." 2. She was also very polite, much more so than your typical American hot starlet, walking me out afterwards to the valet stand and generally displaying no star attitude whatsoever. She's had a great year with Inglorious Basterds. Nice to see.)
Heads turn when she walks into the restaurant, even in blase L.A. It's a bit redundant to say that she's beautiful, yet the reality is that beautiful might be understating the case. This is a woman who, after all, first came to prominence two years ago when Wolfgang Petersen cast her as Helen of Troy, whose legendary looks were so stunning that nations went to war over her. But once you're past the surface charms of Diane Kruger, what really becomes evident is how seriously she's taking the development of her craft as an actress. After Troy and National Treasure, the easy money would have had her choosing to do another string of Hollywood blockbusters. Not that she's sworn off big budget films by any means, but she's also taken an interesting journey into some high-quality American independents and European films which have tested and stretched her acting chops considerably. First up on these shores is Joyeux Noel, the French feature which is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars this year, in which she plays an opera singer who visits No Man's Land during World War I. She's also recently completed Frankie, a very low-budget film about the downward spiral of a model which she filmed sporadically (and co-produced) over a series of years, and which early reviews have indicated feartures a dynamic tour de force performance by Kruger. The next year will see her in Copying Beethoven, where she stars opposite Ed Harris. The film centers around the relationship between Harris' Beethoven and his assistant, Anna, played by Kruger, which developed during the writing of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. She'll also play an anarchist in Les Brigades du Tigre and will interact with a cinematic version of Nelson Mandela in Bille August's Goodbye Bafana. A linguistic dynamo who can master a new accent almost with the ease of an international spy, she already speaks English, French, and German, and even has a number of scenes in Russian in Les Brigades.
(Kruger as Helen of Troy, above.)

It's all a long way from the tiny German town of Algermissen, where Kruger grew up. An early goal of a dance career saw her move to London at a young age to study at the Royal Ballet. But an untimely injury cut short those dreams. At the same time, another door opened, in the form of a modeling career which brought her to live in Paris while still a teenager. Eventually bored with modeling, she made the rare successful segue from the catwalk to the big screen when she took up acting, inspired by time spent at the French art house cinemas where she cites the works of director Francois Truffaut and the late actress Romy Schneider has particular favorites. Kruger made her film debut in The Piano Player, which she credits co-star Dennis Hopper with mentoring her through. She next appeared in the French film Mon Idole and then Wicker Park, opposite Josh Hartnett and Rose Byrne. Troy, of course, followed, and then National Treasure, in which she was a feisty counterpart to Nicolas Cage's obsessed treasure hunter. Kruger made her mark in Treasure by showing that this ethereal European beauty could also play the prototypical strong and sharp American action film heroine, trading quips ably with Cage and dodging on-screen bullets.

Joyeux Noel, directed by Christian Carion, centers around the historical Christmas Truce of WWI, which occurred on the front lines in the No Man's Land of occupied France, where French, Scottish and German soldiers put down their weapons to celebrate Christmas and to bond with their enemies for a brief time. The Truce was reportedly initiated by a German opera tenor who began singing on Christmas, inspiring the opposing soldiers to start singing along. Songs led to handshakes and eventually a football game among the troops. The German tenor is played in the film by Benno Furmann and Diane Kruger plays his wife, a character named Anna Sorensen, who is also an opera singer who lends her voice to life the spirits of No Man's Land.

Had you heard of the Christmas Truce any time prior to being cast in Joyeux Noel?

Diane Kruger: I had heard they played football in No Man's Land, but I certainly didn't learn about the Truce in school. I didn't actually know a lot of the historical background of World War I, really. What happened, who was involved, why it ended, and so forth. So that was really interesting to me, and I think that's what makes the film especially appealing in Europe because a lot of people confuse the two World Wars. The don't really know what happened in World War I.

The film was shot in three languages -- German, French and English -- all of which you speak fluently.

I think I felt like I should have been paid for being the translator. [laughs] I was translating for people all the time, you know? It was interesting because I had never done a movie in German, so that was a little odd in the beginning. I do feel like English is the easiest language to speak and and to act in. I'm in a weird situation in that I have accents in all three languages now [laughs], so I sort of always have to work more than everyone else.

Is it a German accent you have in all three languages?

No, not really. [laughs] I definitely don't have an English accent in French, but I don't think that I have a typical German accent in English, either.

That's true. I didn't pick up on any accent in your English in National Treasure.

Oh, that's good! [laughs]

(Kruger and Nicolas Cage in NATIONAL TREASURE, above.)
Let's talk about the process of shooting the singing sequences in Joyeux Noel. I know that it's [French soprano] Nathalie Dessay's actual voice on the songs, but you really appeared to be singing them.

Well, I was singing them during the shooting. I studied with an opera singer every day for two and a half months. It was a lot of work, actually. Even learning how to hold your breath for that long is really exhausting. So I did sing everything while shooting. They recorded everything before (with Nathalie Dessay) and they played it on those big speakers. I would actually sing it, but people could hear that beautiful voice, rather than mine. [laughs] I thought it looked really good though, particularly in the close-ups.

When you worked with the opera singer, was it the songs from the film that you learned with?

We did breathing exercises [at first]. In the beginning, it would have been impossible to sing the "Ave Maria." That's one of the most difficult songs in opera.

How close do you think you came to mastering it in the end?

The "Ave Maria" I probably massacred. The other song is most close to my natural inclination, so I could actually sing it and not sound terrible. The"Ave Maria" though, that's pretty hard core.

No Man's Land looked appropriately bleak. What was it like shooting there and in the trenches?

We shot it in Romania. They really reconstructed it perfectly. For me, it's not the most inviting country in the world, and it really felt like we were in the middle of nowhere. But even though the shooting was not in the easiest circumstances, I don't think that any of us, even if we tried really hard, could imagine how it must have really been. You could hear everything the French would say, as well as the Scots, from the German trenches. You were underground and there's the feeling that somebody's going to throw a bomb at you any second, you know?

Were there little factions amongst the actors, as they were divided up by nationality in these different trenches?

In the beginning, for sure, because the French didn't speak English or German. The Scots tended to hang out together anyway and get drunk on their own. [laughs] But then, after a week or two, everyone started hanging out together.

How did you become involved with the film?

I was the first one they contacted actually, because they were originally going to shoot about a year earlier than they actually did. So I had wanted to do the project for the longest time. On a really personal level, my grandfather's father was in WWI. My grandfather was in WWII. You know, when you're German, you grow up with such a heavy history on your shoulders. And we're never portrayed as the nice guys. I'm not saying that we are in this film, but I thought that it was, for once, a movie that didn't point fingers at anyone. And it is a historical fact that a German tenor was the first one to step out into No Man's Land, which started the Truce. I thought it had more of a gray side, as opposed to the black and white way that Germans are often portrayed in movies.

I want to ask you about Frankie. You started filming it long before you broke as a star.

I was still in drama school when I started. For me, it's definitely my most accomplished film, because I've been involved with the film from the beginning to the end. I used to model, so I was very familiar with the world, even though I didn't have the same experience that Frankie had in the movie. It's a character that was kind of difficult to do, because I had such a positive experience as a model. And I didn't want to make a movie that was such a cliche about the fashion world. I've never really seen a movie about it that was accurate. Even Pret-a-Porter, that's not what it's like. Most people think of models living this glamorous life and making lots of money, and top models do, but really, 95% of the models are barely getting by. So I wanted to show that.

It was shot over a multi-year period, and despite your success in larger arenas, you kept coming back to work on this smaller project.

I felt like I had to. Not only because I loved the story, but I felt very obligated to the director (Fabienne Berthaud). She's a first-time director, and when I was auditioning for the movie, I actually auditioned for a different part. But she had producers and they really wanted this much more well-known actress to play Frankie. And she set up a meeting where she said that she couldn't do the movie with this other actress, because, first of all, she didn't look like a model, and I had so much more to bring to the table that this girl didn't have. And so, they dropped her as a director, saying that they weren't going to make the movie unless she used someone well-known. So she was the first one who said, "Who cares? We're going to make this movie anyway." I felt very obligated for her confidence in me.

Reports have it that the film was the definition of bare-bones shoot.
[We shot] with three people usually. [laughs]

A big change from something like Troy. Was it a nice change when you returned from Hollywood to keep working on it, or had you become more used to amenities like a trailer?
It wasn't really that. You know, all of the other people in Frankie are not professional actors. So the most difficult part of the movie was all on my shoulders. In a big portion of the film, I live in a mental hospital, and the people who play the patients are real patients, and you can't ask them to learn lines. You had to be ready 24 hours a day. We were living in the actual hospital. So, if they came over and talked to me, it was on me to sort of link the story, and feed them lines, and still be in character. That was really hard. So that was not one of the most pleasant times. Especially once you get used to working with great actors, where you can start over if you have to. This was a one-take situation.

How do you think it turned out?

I love it. It's my favorite movie that I've made.

You're choosing a wide range of projects, from the biggest Hollywood blockbusters to, more recently, smaller European productions such as Joyeux Noel. Is that something you intend to keep doing?

Yes, because I started my career the other way around, with blockbusters, and I've only been working for four years. So I don't have a lot of experience, and I really feel the need to show a range of the acting that I can do. I defnitely want to keep working in Europe, but I also want to do more films in America that are more challenging and can show what I can do. So I've been trying to do more independent things during the past year.

On that note, let's talk about Copying Beethoven, in which you star opposite Ed Harris, who plays Beethoven.

They just finished post-production. I think they're going to start showing it soon, but I've seen it and Ed Harris, who's always good, is very impressive. Agnieszka Holland's work is very edgy. I play a very young girl, a 21-year-old who lives in a convent, very innocent, and I've never played a part like that. Usually people cast me because I'm, you know, Helen of Troy. This is much more of a Bridget Jones type of person: innocent and very young. Then, I'm about to start this film Goodbye Bafana, about Nelson Mandela, and in that, I'm sort of the opposite of my character in Copying Beethoven. I play someone with little children. Goodbye Bafana is the true story about Mandela's years in prison. My husband in the film, played by Joe Fiennes, is Mandela's security guard. It's about how society changed during the years Mandela was in prison. How we changed our point of view towards Mandela. So I'm really pleased with the direction I feel my career is going. Even though they're smaller movies, I feel like I'm getting a lot out of it.

Have you been working on that South African accent?

Oh, man. [laughs] Yeah, I'm going to use a light one, but still, it's really different.

Let's go back a bit. Famously, you were cast in Troy from an audition video tape you made yourself while shooting Wicker Park. Did you hear back from the casting directors immediately or was it a much longer process than that?

The whole thing took a while. The process took about four and a half months. They finally said, "Okay" about three weeks before we started shooting.

And now you're Helen of Troy and the pressure is on you to be the face that launches a thousand ships.

It really wasn't though [laughs], because what am I going to do? You can't change the way you look. But no, the pressure was because I felt under-qualified to be amongst all these big movie stars. I had only done a few movies before that. So there were scenes where I had no idea how I was going to pull them off. But it was such a great opportunity to come out and have people take notice. Yet it's not my movie, you know? I play a supporting role. I felt like there was a lot of expectations all of a sudden, but it wasn't the part that was going to make you explode. I felt that was National Treasure, much more so than Troy.

And although there was a lot of action in Troy, your first big action scenes cinematically were really in National Treasure. That must have been a significant change in terms of shooting style for you.

Yeah, you don't make movies like that in Europe. I don't really enjoy action stuff. I like the acting part. I think screaming and hanging off a truck is fun for a day, but after five days, when you're still hanging off some car door, it gets a little boring to me. I actually really like the movie, though. I hope they're doing a sequel, and I think they are.

You and Nic Cage had a very sassy back-and-forth line delivery throughout the entire film that was quite engaging.
I loved him. We got along very well. He screen-tested with me and two other girls, and we hit if off immediately. I thought he was totally the type of guy I connect with. Crazy. Eccentric.

What was the sequence of events that led you from modeling to acting?

I never really watched movies or theater when I was growing up, because nobody in my family has ever done anything in that direction. So Paris really opened my horizons for discovering movies and French cinema and so forth. I had been thinking about it, because I'm not your typical model, as I'm not very tall. People always said I have a very classy face and maybe I should be an actress instead of a model But I didn't even know that you could study acting, or that it was something you could choose. I always thought you had to be born into a family or something. [laughs] Then I met some actors, and I was really bored with modeling after four years. I also had a very unhappy love story in New York, where I was living at the time. I wanted to change my whole life. So I gave up everything and left New York.

You're obviously very good at fitting into alien situations. You left Germany to model in Paris, then you went back to Paris to study acting in French.

And it was Old French, too. [laughs] Like Moliere, classical theater. It's very different than spoken French. That was kind of a nightmare. But at the school in Paris, you had to do one scene in front of the jury and they decide if they're going to take you on or not. And I did and it was really fun and I knew this is what I was going to do right then.

-