Director MARK HERMAN On His New Feature "THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS"

by Terry Keefe

A family-friendly film. Based on a children's book. Set during the Holocaust. There's a filmmaking challenge of tone and taste inherent in such an endeavor, and the potential for a major disaster looms, a la the infamous, never-released The Day the Clown Cried, a Jerry Lewis-directed feature about a circus clown entertaining children on a train ride to the concentration camps. Shot back in the early 70s, that film has never seen the light of day and is still spoken about sort of as a cinematic urban legend, and a cautionary tale for filmmakers. British film director Mark Herman (Little Voice, Brassed Off) was wading into potentially dicey waters of a similar sort with his new feature, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which he adapted from the internationally best-selling children's novel by John Boyne. The film centers around the friendship of two young boys, one the son of a top Nazi officer, and the other a Jewish prisoner in the concentration camp only a few hundred feet from the free boy's home. Herman can breathe easy, though, with the knowledge that he has successfully found the right balance of just about everything in telling this particular story. He allows his young characters to be somewhat naïve to the horrible specifics of the history transpiring around them. Those specifics are never explained to the audience directly either, and that is why Herman has created a film that all ages can relate to and which works regardless of one's historical knowledge. The younger audience will see it initially as a story of an unlikely friendship, which faces unique challenges, and a viewing of the film will also cause the younger viewer to ask their elders the more specific questions of what was going on historically to make certain characters behave the way they did. The older portion of the audience can obviously fill in the blanks of that history for themselves, which will accentuate the darker beats of the narrative, particularly the uncompromising, bleak ending.

Elaborates Herman, "I think this is a family film in the truest sense, in that kids and their parents can watch it together and both understand it. The first time we screened it was amazing, there was just this silence from everyone at the end." And he has indeed found that the film raises interest in its young viewers to want to learn more about the Holocaust. Says Herman, "It's a good first step [in terms of education]. It's not an easy ride, for kids, to learn more about the story. It's quite a shock."In regards to that aforementioned ending - the specifics of which we won't reveal other than to say it as dark as anything which has appeared in a family-targeted film, well, probably ever – Herman inevitably must have experienced some pressure from financiers to change or tone it down. "I never would have gone down this long road without that ending," explains Herman. "I said to Miramax at the beginning that we shouldn't start this if we weren't going to keep the ending."

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas will be released by Miramax on November 7th.