FILM

Based on an Israeli film, ‘The Debt’ tells the story behind a Mossad mission to catch a Nazi war criminal in East Berlin. Robin Askew tracks down its director and cast.

There's one thing Dame Helen Mirren is particularly eager to correct. The suggestion that she underwent self-defence training for her role in 'The Debt' is, she insists, untrue. "I do have a fight in it," smiles the scarily well-preserved Mirren. "We call it the geriatric fight, between a 60-year-old woman and an 80-year-old man. It's really hard to get up once you're down."

A remake of a 2007 film that was little seen even in Israel, its country of origin, 'The Debt' is a work of fiction – even though, as Mirren points out, "it has that feeling of 'this could have happened'." Two stories unfold in parallel. In 1997, retired Mossad agent Rachel Singer and her two male accomplices are national heroes for having tracked down a notorious Nazi war criminal known as the Surgeon of Birkenau in East Berlin three decades earlier. History records that they shot him dead while he tried to escape. But information has now emerged to contradict this official version of events. Back in 1966, we find out what really happened.

"It's an extraordinary opportunity to tell a story that is both a very pure cinematic genre – the genre thriller – but also one that actually allows a very complex emotional and psychological drama to unfold at the same time," enthuses director John Madden, who's best known for the multiple Oscar-winning 'Shakespeare In Love'. "Usually those things pull against each other in a project and you have to stop the thriller for a moment in order to fill in character and catch up on who they really are. This film is very different. You understand who these people are through the story that's unfolding. It's an amazing challenge in terms of the material, but a great opportunity as well."

There is also, he acknowledges, a responsibility on the part of the film-maker to be aware of the political ramifications of such a story. "It's a big responsibility," he nods. "This is the biggest theme in terms of recent modern history. You owe a debt to take that seriously, particularly when you're dealing with a story in a genre that is not famous for moral complexity. We were very, very concerned and vigilant about not reducing things to simple dimensions and not using the holocaust or its aftermath, and the pain engendered by it, as a useful hook. The chief way, I think, in which you can honour that material is by making the people real and making what they do truthful. We booted out any idea that was led by narrative requirements but didn't feel true."

With Mirren on board as the more mature Rachel, Jessica Chastain was cast as her younger self. Jessica who? Well, if you haven't come across this versatile 30-year-old daughter of a Californian firefighter and a vegan chef, you will do soon, because she's in virtually everything over the next few months. You'll see her as a southern sexpot in 'The Help', a smalltown cop in 'Texas Killing Fields', Virgilia in Ralph Fiennes's version of 'Coriolanus' and the supportive wife of bonkers Michael Shannon in 'Take Shelter'. Terrence Malik, who gave Chastain her break in 'The Tree of Life', was so impressed that he's already cast her in his next film. "It really is feast or famine in this business, which I've learned recently," she laughs. "I've made 11 films over the past four-and-a-half years. It's a very strange experience to learn the other side of the profession – the press side of it. In fact, I had never done a press junket before this year. And all of a sudden over the last six months it's like every day. So I'm still finding my footing. But my normal personal life is exactly the same. I never get stopped. I think I've been recognised twice. Sometimes I get mistaken for Bryce Dallas Howard."

As written by Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman, 'The Debt' boasts a very different structure to that of the original Israeli film, 'Ha Hov'. "Because the movie is suspended between two time zones and it's about how history is made and transmitted and so forth, it suggested itself naturally as a non-chronological structure; in particular, because the movie begins with a very big question mark, which is this pretty shattering event," argues Madden. "Explaining and understanding how and why that happened and what it means is the structural principle of the film. I really like films that demand that your brain works at the same time as your heart and, in this case, your guts are working too. Obviously one of the pleasures in a film, though not in life perhaps, is having the rug pulled out from underneath you."

'THE DEBT' OPENED ON FRI 30 SEPT. SEE REVIEW.

Copyright Robin Askew 2011